Episode 1060 - Argus Hamilton
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckineers?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:Are you okay?
Marc:Is everybody alright?
Marc:I mean, are we hanging in?
Marc:As it gets hotter and hotter and hotter.
Marc:You know, again...
Marc:Don't want to sound selfish or detached or condescending or judgmental, but I could not be happier to not have children.
Marc:I had nothing against them, just never thought about it, and now...
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:They're going to have to hopefully in a couple of generations, these children could somehow evolve into cold blooded animals, perhaps with scale, something survivable in the climate as we enter the end times.
Marc:But I am sorry.
Marc:Is this too much?
Marc:How are you?
Marc:Happy Monday.
Marc:I think I'm just overcompensating in some way.
Marc:My cat, as you know, Monkey, the old asshole, that's not true.
Marc:Monkey is actually not an asshole.
Marc:Monkey is a sweetheart.
Marc:He's nervous.
Marc:Definitely not an asshole.
Marc:La Fonda is a bit of an unpredictable, I would say, borderline personality cat.
Marc:And Buster is a bit of an asshole.
Marc:But Monkey is kind of an old sweet guy that's just a little nervous.
Marc:And as some of you know who listen, he has hyperthyroid.
Marc:I'm glad I diagnosed him or I got him to the vet to find out.
Marc:No kidney disease, no kidney failure, no diabetes.
Marc:He's 15 years old and change.
Marc:And he's got hyperthyroid.
Marc:And I had a few options.
Marc:I went with the pills.
Marc:And generally, you know, most people are like, how are you going to give pills to a cat?
Marc:You know, there are these things called pill pockets, which fucking work.
Marc:I even snuck one into a piece of chicken today.
Marc:But he's on to a day, and there was a couple of days there where I was like, oh, shit, I think he's going down.
Marc:He was, like, lethargic.
Marc:He was kind of pukey, did not seem happy in any way, and he was still thin as fuck.
Marc:And I'm like, well, this is it, and I'm just going to have to deal with this.
Marc:Either he's going to die on his own or I'm going to have to do it.
Marc:And I think maybe that's how I'm overcompensating.
Marc:But my cats are getting old and my parents are getting old.
Marc:And something's got to give.
Marc:But I do know, as hard as it is to have children as they grow up, and as I talk to my peers with children, it's never a great story.
Marc:It's usually half a great story.
Marc:Yeah, the one's great, but we kind of...
Marc:The other one kind of got away from us.
Marc:And, you know, I think I've said that before.
Marc:But, you know, with the cats, they remain pretty consistent.
Marc:And if they live a long time, they can live anywhere from 15 to 25 years, I think.
Marc:But they stay pretty steady.
Marc:But as difficult as it is to have kids, the best you can hope for with a cat is that it'll get to the point where you can voluntarily say, this cat has had enough.
Marc:I'm going to put it down.
Marc:And that's a decision you have to make about something you love.
Marc:You know, I know it's hard to have kids, but like, you know, eventually not probably not not too long.
Marc:I'm going to have to put my cat down.
Marc:And I understand your kid's 17 and having some issues, but my cat is 16.
Marc:I'm going to have to kill it.
Marc:So, you know, spare me the sad story is what I'm saying.
Marc:OK, false equivalents.
Marc:But I'm just dealing with it.
Marc:I'm dealing with the fact that my cats are getting old.
Marc:I'm getting old.
Marc:My parents are getting old.
Marc:I think I might have to put my dad down.
Marc:Can you do that?
Marc:I don't think you can do that.
Marc:Yeah, you can do it in some states.
Marc:Not exactly, but wouldn't it be easier...
Marc:You know, I mean, to be able to just sort of I got to put him down.
Marc:My dad's getting he's 80 and, you know, he's still got most of his marbles and stuff.
Marc:He's not happy and he's having a hard time walking.
Marc:And I just I don't know if his quality of life is holding up.
Marc:So I'd like to put him down.
Marc:Yeah, no, I don't think he can do that.
Marc:In any state.
Marc:Maybe if I brought him to the vet.
Marc:Maybe just bring him in.
Marc:Yeah, it's my dad.
Marc:How you doing, doc?
Marc:Can I help you with anything?
Marc:I'm like, yeah, I just want to put my dad down.
Marc:My dad's like, what are we doing?
Marc:I just want you to meet my vet.
Marc:Can we put him down?
Marc:I mean, can't you tell?
Marc:He's not having great quality of life.
Marc:No, I can't.
Marc:We don't do that.
Marc:We can't put people down.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I think maybe you can make an exception.
Marc:I'll be there.
Marc:I'll hold him while you do it, and it'll be all right.
Marc:I'll hold him and pet his head, and I think we're good.
Marc:My father's like, what are we doing?
Marc:I'm like, it's over, Dad.
Marc:It's over.
Marc:Is that too dark, too cynical?
Marc:Wouldn't it be easier?
Marc:And at this point, I kind of am okay with my dad.
Marc:I'm just looking out for him.
Marc:I just think people, maybe we should look into that.
Marc:Maybe we could, you know, put our parents down when it's necessary.
Marc:You know, and sadly, some people have done that.
Marc:It's usually not like that.
Marc:It's an unplugging situation.
Marc:But, hey, happy Monday.
Marc:Did I mention Argus Hamilton is on the show?
Marc:Finally, Argus Hamilton is here.
Marc:Quick email.
Marc:This is from Eileen.
Marc:Subject line competition and conflict and shutting that shit down.
Marc:Mark, thank you for your generalization of who your people are.
Marc:I literally had to put my mascara down to laugh as you listed off all of my traits.
Marc:I say generally that I don't have a demographic.
Marc:I have a disposition, usually sensitive, aggravated, creative types.
Marc:And I assume that's what she's talking about.
Marc:She goes on to say, I've tried to explain to my buff bartender younger brother by 12 years why Mark Maron is my guy.
Marc:And please stop telling me to listen to Joe Rogan.
Marc:He acts like it's a competition.
Marc:Of course he does in parentheses.
Marc:And I'm more of the type that puts competition and conflict in the same mental bucket.
Marc:Not my jam.
Marc:That's why I like to shut it down by saying Mark got Obama.
Marc:Totally works.
Marc:Okay, back to getting ready.
Marc:Love, Eileen.
Marc:P.S.
Marc:Come to Phoenix.
Marc:Eileen, I was in Phoenix.
Marc:You're right.
Marc:I'm probably due for a trip back to Phoenix.
Marc:Thank you for the email.
Marc:I understand what you're saying.
Marc:Look, I run a show here.
Marc:I'm the same way.
Marc:I think that there's part of me that naturally competes, but I think there's something about this culture, certainly some people within it, certainly because of the kind of frenetic, compulsive...
Marc:social media landscape that people are always trying to engage people and trying to, you know, put things against one another, even if, but, you know, obviously, you know, Joe's people are going to be competitive.
Marc:I mean, he's a competitive guy.
Marc:He's a sports guy.
Marc:Everything's all right.
Marc:I'm just, I'm at a point in my life where it's like, I do what I do.
Marc:I got my people.
Marc:I make a living.
Marc:It's fine.
Marc:And I'm good.
Marc:You hear that?
Marc:I'm good.
Marc:But I appreciate the email.
Marc:Today, Argus Hamilton is here, and he's been mentioned quite a bit over the history of the show.
Marc:Before I get into that, I just want to say thank you to the people that came out to the Dynasty Typewriter last night.
Marc:It's a small, intense little room, but I'm working stuff out.
Marc:It's amazing how long I've been working this material, because I originally put it together because I took a gig at the New York Comedy Festival a year ago.
Marc:for the Beacon Theater, and then the special came later, and I've been honing and kind of crafting other pieces and different parts of it.
Marc:But it's been a long while, over a year, that I've been working this stuff, and I am ready to dump it.
Marc:And I went down and looked at the theater where I'm going to be doing the special.
Marc:It's going to be a different look for a special, really.
Marc:This is a fairly classic, large...
Marc:Black box theater.
Marc:It's not one of these proscenium theaters, one of these vaudeville houses, one of these places where you see all the special shot.
Marc:And this kind of fluke kind of might have worked in our benefit that we we have full control over how the thing is going to look and how we're going to lay it out and the vibe.
Marc:And it's pretty exciting.
Marc:And it's going to be a relatively small house in terms of crowd size, couple hundred each show.
Marc:and very intimate so i'm excited i went down to the tech meeting and the set's looking good and it's going to be it's going to be a unique show
Marc:Still considering calling it Jeremiah, which is not an upbeat title.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I think it's a pretty upbeat show.
Marc:It's an honest show about where we are in the world right now, maybe where I'm at in my life right now.
Marc:And it's definitely funny.
Marc:Some of the best funny I've generated in all my years of funny.
Marc:But I'm excited about that.
Marc:So Argus Hamilton, who is he?
Marc:Why do you know him?
Marc:Why does it ring a bell?
Marc:Argus Hamilton is a mainstay at the Comedy Store.
Marc:He's been there since the beginning of the Comedy Store, pretty much.
Marc:He was there for the strike.
Marc:He was there to get screwed up on drugs.
Marc:He was there to date Mitzi for years.
Marc:There's mythology about him.
Marc:He's mentioned by almost everybody.
Marc:He's one of the few comics of his generation, I think probably the only one
Marc:that still does spots at the store, that can still do spots at the store.
Marc:I'm going to ask him how that happened.
Marc:But most notoriously, you know, when I got to the store in the 80s, when I worked the door there and I got fucked up on drugs, he was sort of this mythic
Marc:being that you heard about i lived up in crest hill which was a house that mitzi owned behind the store she didn't live there she rented it out to comics there was a picture of him on the wall up there because he used to live there i think yeah i'm pretty sure he did i talked to him about that of him on the tonight show you know he'd done like so many tonight shows he was like an heir apparent he was the guy and was just like one of those
Marc:Cautionary tales, not even a cautionary tale, just a fucking, you know, bottom hitting mythology, a bottom hitting myth of this guy.
Marc:When I got there in the 80s, you know, he was just notorious as this insane drug person.
Marc:But this guy from Oklahoma, you know, like almost like a Will Rogers type of dude.
Marc:And he just it all went south because of coke and booze.
Marc:And he came back from rehab when I was at the store.
Marc:And I'll talk to him about that, too.
Marc:But for those of you who have been following along this show for the last decade,
Marc:The intention of this show was for me to reconnect with comics and to connect with comics and to talk honestly with comics.
Marc:And obviously, because of the place the comedy store held in my mind and in my heart and in my soul, you know, I was mildly obsessed with kind of getting the history of that place.
Marc:And Argus has always been elusive.
Marc:He's always been around.
Marc:And I was a little nervous about it.
Marc:I didn't know what was in there or what was going on or, you know, what's that guy made out of.
Marc:I just I still see him.
Marc:I follow him.
Marc:You know, most of the time when I do the comedy store, because I like doing the fourth or fifth spot, keep it early.
Marc:And he's always doing the second or third spot.
Marc:And he brings me up on stage more so than not when I work at the store.
Marc:And he's been there forever.
Marc:And I never knew.
Marc:I just didn't know what was in there.
Marc:And I remember years ago, I said, when can I talk to you?
Marc:Because I think you're an important part of it.
Marc:And he said, I can't do it while Mitzi's still alive.
Marc:I won't do it.
Marc:Out of respect.
Marc:Well, she's dead.
Marc:And he wanted to do it.
Marc:So we got to do it.
Marc:Now, one of the things we get to clear up... How you doing?
Marc:Everybody all right?
Marc:One of the things we get to clear up is, you know, for years, the story was that...
Marc:Sam Kennison, you know, the reason he got spots at the store or was able to manage the Westwood store, the comedy store in Westwood, Mitzi opened there, was because he saved Mitzi's life because Argus Hamilton, my guest today, was choking her in the parking lot of the comedy store.
Marc:And Sam Kennison pulled Argus off of her, saved her, and that sealed the deal.
Marc:with his place at the comedy store.
Marc:She owed him a life and gave him the Westwood store, and that's part of the mythology.
Marc:Now, mythology kind of happens pretty quickly at the comedy store.
Marc:I don't know if it's just the nature of the dark den of comics, just the sort of...
Marc:frenetic weird kind of competitive insecurity and darkness that the comic community has and then that place but it happens immediately even on the managerial side I mean Jesus Christ I've got this driver's license Mitzi's driver's license that I found on the floor
Marc:during the shooting of the documentary that mike binder's making and i took it and then i okayed it with mitzi's son peter and you know i have it here and it's very important to me it's me it has a lot of meaning to me and i'm looking at it right now and once i talked about it the manager over there eric at the just for last festival started saying that i stole mitzi's driver's license from her purse
Marc:And all of a sudden someone comes up to me who I don't even know.
Marc:I heard you stole Mitzi's driver's license from her purse.
Marc:How the fuck does that even happen?
Marc:There's just something about the comedy store that churns out.
Marc:I guess it's not unlike any den of evil, insecure fuckers.
Marc:Like the Republican Party and conspiracy theories.
Marc:It's just that's the title pool of conspiracy theories and bullshit mythology is just a festering insecurity among vindictive competitive fuckers.
Marc:That's where it comes from.
Marc:But anyways, long story longer.
Marc:I'm able to talk about.
Marc:this story with Argus.
Marc:And, you know, many people have mentioned Argus on this show.
Marc:And many, a few people have mentioned that story.
Marc:This is actually Robin Williams mentioning it in my talk with him years ago.
Guest:Those are crazy times because Sam, you know, Sam's first night up was just, I remember seeing, who's the guy screaming?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And supposedly Sam got on because he rescued Mitzi from Argus.
Marc:Right, it was Argus Hamilton who was strangling her in some sort of drunk frenzy.
Guest:Ah!
Guest:I'll get away.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Sam rescued her and then they put Sam up.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So that was Robin Williams.
Marc:And this is part of the mythology.
Marc:But, you know, there's a bigger story here about the comedy store, about Argus's place in it.
Marc:And it's not just about him supposedly choking Mitzi.
Marc:You know, this guy is a veteran.
Marc:He's still at it.
Marc:He still gets big laughs.
Marc:He's still at the comedy store every weekend.
Marc:And and he has been since the since the 70s.
Marc:And he is almost the singular presence of that generation at that place holding up that end of it.
Marc:And it's taken years for me to get him in here.
Marc:And this is me talking to Argus Hamilton.
Marc:And you can listen to Argus or watch him, actually.
Marc:He's got a talk show called The Comedy Store Tonight.
Marc:It's on YouTube.
Marc:You can watch new episodes every Tuesday night.
Marc:Plus, the old episodes are up right now.
Marc:They're up there now.
Marc:I believe it goes live on Tuesdays.
Marc:But this is me talking to Argus Hamilton.
Marc:Argus Hamilton.
Guest:Nice to see you, buddy.
Guest:Nice to see you.
Guest:Thank you so much for having me on the show, Mark.
Guest:It's a real pleasure.
Marc:Sure, man.
Marc:It seemed like it was destined to happen at some point, but there was a moment there a while back where I was like, let's do it.
Marc:Let's talk, and you're like, you couldn't do it with Mitzi still alive.
Marc:You literally said that, that I can't do it while she's still alive.
Guest:Well, I appreciate the ride out here this morning because I got to come by Forest Lawn Drive and Mount Sinai Cemetery and got to wave to her up at the top of the hill.
Marc:Oh, is that where she's buried?
Guest:So she's still on my ass about coming here.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:Yeah, well, I don't think she is.
Guest:I'm kidding.
Guest:She loved you.
Guest:She loves us all.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I guess she loved me.
Marc:You know, it's weird.
Marc:When I got to the store, my recollections of you, because I didn't spend that long a time.
Marc:I wasn't at the comedy store that long the first time.
Marc:What year?
Marc:Well, I think I got there.
Marc:When I was there, I'd gotten there, and I was working the door.
Marc:And I remember it was actually probably, it was like, when did you get out of rehab?
Marc:You got out of rehab when I was there.
Guest:86?
Guest:I went in in November of 86, 28 days at Betty Ford, and then 90 days in Scottsdale.
Guest:I arrived back in L.A.
Guest:with six months of sobriety in April of 87.
Marc:Yeah, so that's where I first saw you.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Because I remember Belzer, we were out on the patio, and Belzer saw you walking up, and he goes, is this an apparition?
Yes.
Marc:They can't kill me.
Marc:They never could.
Marc:And I remember because it was weird, these weird memories, because I was all fucked up on drugs and doing blow, and we had gotten these little vitamin B squirty things that you could put in your nose.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:And I remember offering you one, and you're like, I'm not putting anything in my nose ever again.
Marc:But my nasal hairs would experience euphoric recall.
Marc:Sure they would, yeah.
Marc:I lived in Cresthill.
Marc:And there was pictures of you up there on The Tonight Show in Cresthill, in the house where I was living.
Marc:And I didn't know who you were.
Marc:And I didn't know the whole history of things.
Marc:And then the weird thing about this comedy story is that you start picking up little bits and pieces of the mythology.
Marc:So I was spending a lot of time with Kennison.
Marc:And there was the sort of... The idea was the story...
Marc:The existing myth was that he pulled you off of Mitzi.
Marc:Right.
Marc:When you were attacking her.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And because of that, he was able to manage Westwood.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is that the story?
Marc:Total crock, of course.
Marc:That required.
Marc:Well, let's go back.
Marc:Let's lead up to it.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So when did you get to L.A.
Marc:to begin with?
Guest:Right out of the University of Oklahoma.
Guest:I came out March of 76th.
Marc:So you're from Oklahoma?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And your parents, your family's in the preaching racket?
Guest:Yeah, my father's in the preaching racket, yeah.
Guest:The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Methodist ministers.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How does a Methodist minister approach the ministry?
Guest:It's Church of England, just like the Episcopal Church.
Guest:They are sister churches, and they're about to reunite.
Guest:But it's very mainline, very conservative, very traditional upper middle class, high class.
Guest:Oh, so it's not fire and brimstone.
Guest:No, not like Kennison.
Guest:No, not that group from Oklahoma.
Guest:No, not that group at all.
Guest:There's country club Protestants and then there's salt of the earth.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then there's the Baptists.
Guest:The Baptists.
Guest:Yeah, the Cromwell's army.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Since 1640s, the...
Guest:Enemy of the Hamiltons and the Cavaliers even beheaded one of my ancestors.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:The day before they beheaded King Charles I. Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you tracked your genealogy back that far?
Guest:Oh, way farther than that.
Guest:We married into the House of Stuart in 1487.
Marc:How did you find all that stuff out?
Guest:My grandmother and father tipped me off to it, and then people have let me know, and then genealogists have tracked my family line.
Guest:Why?
Marc:Why your family?
Guest:Well, the Hamiltons are very—we've got 28 Hamiltons in the House of Lords.
Guest:It's a very noble English family.
Guest:Is Alexander Hamilton of it?
Guest:Yeah, he's a cousin of mine.
Guest:We're from the same Ambuskeen line from the Duke of Hamilton.
Guest:However, if he is a Hamilton, there's a chance he was a Stevens because he looked just like a Stevens and his mother slept around.
Guest:But he's believed to have been a Hamilton.
Guest:But he was the black sheep of the family because he fought for Washington.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Against the king.
Guest:The king.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So you grew up there with a big family?
Marc:No, no.
Marc:Just a brother and sister.
Marc:That's it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so your father's a minister.
Marc:Your grandfather's a minister.
Marc:So you spend, like, growing up, you're at the church.
Guest:Well, my great-grandfather owned a huge plantation in Alabama.
Guest:But during the Civil War, right in the middle of the Battle of Shiloh, he made a deal with the Lord.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's how we got into the ministry.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Did he lose the plantation?
Guest:Oh, yes.
Guest:He lost it all.
Guest:40,000 acres on the Tennessee River.
Guest:He gave 20,000 acres to the town, and it was named Hamilton, Alabama, and it's still on US 78 between Birmingham and Memphis.
Marc:It's still called Hamilton?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that's your great-grandfather?
Marc:Great, great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:After John Hamilton.
Marc:Did your brother, you have a brother and sister?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Did they end up in the church?
Guest:Yeah, my brother ended up in the ministry, and my sister is a president of a computer company.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Here in town?
Guest:No, in Washington State.
Guest:And you got family in Oklahoma, Phil?
Guest:No, not anymore.
Guest:No one's there.
Guest:No reason to go back.
Guest:No, I go back a lot for corporate events, and there's a brand new big club opening up in Bricktown, about a 350-seater that you might be hearing about.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In Bricktown, where's that?
Guest:It's a renovated area.
Guest:You know how a lot of cities have renovated areas?
Guest:This is the one in Oklahoma City, and it's just beautiful along the river there.
Marc:I did a gig in Oklahoma City once, and it was... Jokers?
Marc:No, it wasn't a comedy club.
Marc:I did a little theater thing.
Marc:Somebody brought me out there for some reason.
Marc:It was a great crowd, though, wasn't it?
Marc:Yeah, no, I like it.
Marc:Yeah, I like it.
Marc:And there's some freaky people out in Oklahoma.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I mean, I grew up in New Mexico.
Marc:I think we share a corner with Oklahoma.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Don't we?
Marc:Doesn't New Mexico up there on the northeast side have a little piece of the panhandle?
Marc:Something up there in the panhandle.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:The panhandle is more like New Mexico than it is Oklahoma.
Marc:All right, so now what was the plan in college?
Marc:So you're in college.
Marc:You're at Oklahoma State.
Marc:No, no, no, Oklahoma University.
Marc:Oh, Oklahoma University.
Marc:Oh, yes, big difference.
Marc:You know you're not going to go into the ministry.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And how do you end up, like, when is the decision to do comedy?
Marc:Why?
Marc:Because, like, you're the only guy of your generation that seems to be able to work at the store anymore.
Marc:Like, and I know there's politics around that or whatever, but you're the only one left, man.
Guest:Well, to answer your first question, since the second one was an observation, what I did was I went into the University of Oklahoma, and the only time I'd ever really connected, since I'm a real alcoholic like a lot of us, there was this time I could connect with people without alcohol, and it was when I was on stage.
Guest:Doing what?
Guest:High school, grade school.
Guest:The very first time when I was on stage, I was six years old.
Guest:It was the Christmas pageant in Oklahoma City.
Guest:A thousand people in the church auditorium.
Guest:And I'm supposed to walk out there with the angels and the shepherds and everybody and the cablo.
Guest:And I'm supposed to sing a cappella away in a manger.
Guest:But I'd heard a Perry Como song on the way to church.
Guest:And I liked it better.
Guest:And I had a real good memory.
Guest:So I stood before the baby Jesus and Mary and Joseph, and I opened up my arms and started singing.
Guest:Oh, hot diggity, dog ziggity, boom, what you do to me?
Guest:It's so new to me, what you do to me?
Guest:Hot diggity, dog ziggity, boom, what you do to me?
Guest:When you're holding me tight.
Guest:And the crowd just went wild.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They went.
Guest:He killed.
Guest:And I got.
Guest:I killed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Six years old.
Guest:That's all you need to know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so the next thing I knew, my father would allow me to watch Jack Parr's monologue before I went to bed.
Guest:And of course, Johnny Carson's monologue later on before I went to bed.
Marc:Jack Parr, yeah, he kind of did long form.
Guest:Yes, he did.
Marc:Yeah, it was good.
Guest:But nevertheless, it was the introduction to the New York Society of wit and sparkle.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Guest:And not prairie grade school.
Guest:And it was a great escape because these people were smart and witty and funny, and I was determined, well, I'm that way too.
Guest:Were you growing up in Oklahoma City?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I was in Oklahoma City until the fourth grade, and my father got promoted to a bigger church in Ponca City, Oklahoma.
Guest:And Ponca City is a very wealthy old oil town, the world headquarters for Conoco.
Guest:And it was very sophisticated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I was never in that kind of situation, this crystal meth redneck situation.
Guest:I was never in that.
Guest:No.
Guest:My parents didn't need a babysitter.
Guest:They had me on the country club every day playing golf.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:But to get back to the point about the University of Oklahoma, after going through Rush Week and pledging ATO, Alpha Ta Omega just made me because we had a –
Guest:a thing called good of the order at the end of our first chapter meeting after initiation.
Guest:And I just started talking and everybody's falling over laughing.
Guest:And I thought I was pre-law.
Guest:And my best friend at the time, and still, Greg Hall, an Oklahoma City oil man, came up to me.
Guest:Pledge brother, we've been initiated together.
Guest:He said, Argus, you're not gonna be a lawyer, you're a stand-up comedian.
Guest:and it just validated every secret thing I'd ever told myself.
Guest:Interesting, because you could have used those skills as a lawyer.
Guest:You could, but I had this compulsion at the time to be a campus personality.
Guest:And before you knew it, this was all during the Watergate era, I had a, we had the University of Oklahoma had a newspaper called the Oklahoma Daily, 40,000 circulation, everybody read it every day, there was no,
Guest:handhelds back then.
Guest:And I was on the editorial page two or three times a week with a column called Okie Dokie with my name and my picture as big as the copy they gave me.
Guest:And it's all political humor.
Guest:It's all jokes.
Guest:This is the era of the early National Lampoon.
Guest:There's so much freedom.
Guest:Everybody's just joking
Marc:their butts off because it's the Nixon era.
Marc:It's the high mark of political satire.
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Guest:And so we're with the Michael O'Donohue.
Guest:And so I'm doing this at the University of Oklahoma and then every Thursday night on Campus Corner I host a show
Guest:called Trivia Night, and I packed this place called Across the Street Restaurant on Campus Corner, downstairs and upstairs.
Guest:They all have phones on each booth, and I ask trivia questions, and if they get it right, they phone it in, I give them a free pitcher of beer, or punchlines to jokes, and stuff like this, and we really had a roaring time.
Guest:So you're doing bits and stuff?
Guest:Yeah, and this is all for three years at OU with Trivia Night, and three and a half years with a column, so I was...
Guest:I was the best known personality on OU besides the athletes.
Marc:And you're writing jokes and you're being on stage in a way.
Marc:And riffing a little bit.
Marc:And drinking.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:It's all you did.
Guest:It was 3-2 beer.
Guest:It took you forever to get drunk.
Guest:3-2, like Coors?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Was it Coors?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So you weren't drinking hard.
Guest:Yes, I was.
Guest:Because by the time you're a junior and a senior, you discover wild turkey.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because I know you talk a lot about being sober, and it's been a long time for you.
Marc:Because it sounds like once you got to L.A.
Marc:and the cocaine started, that's when you shifted gears.
Marc:But it was always part of your trip.
Marc:Shifting gears is a great way to put it, Mark.
Guest:Downshifting even.
Marc:Downshifting and upshifting at the same time.
Marc:You bet.
Marc:Downshifting, upshifting.
Marc:So when you graduate college, you just immediately come out here?
Marc:How did your parents react?
Marc:Well, my parents were just fine with it.
Guest:My father was kind of grateful to get me out of the state.
Guest:I'm kidding.
Marc:Were you causing trouble?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I had a good time.
Guest:And they were tremendously tolerant of me.
Guest:My mother didn't want me to come out.
Guest:She said, what if they don't laugh at you?
Guest:And I've never forgotten that.
Guest:Really?
Guest:When your mother says, what if they don't laugh at you when you get out there?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:So you basically said to them, I'm going to go be a comic.
Marc:Yeah, well, I'm gonna go be what I am.
Marc:Right, but you did not do any comedy outside of college before you came out here.
Guest:No, but my talisman was one afternoon, one evening, I should say, at the ATO House living room.
Guest:We're sitting around watching The Tonight Show.
Guest:All right.
Guest:This was the key.
Guest:The one thing I didn't like about going into stand-up was the prospect of going to New York and freezing my ass off in the winter.
Guest:I hated cold weather.
Guest:And I just didn't like the idea of New York.
Guest:It was a seedy town at that time anyway, in the 70s.
Guest:And I'm watching The Tonight Show with a bunch of guys in the living room at the ATO house.
Guest:And Sammy Davis Jr.
Guest:comes on.
Guest:And Johnny and Sammy always do great together.
Guest:And Sammy says to Johnny, listen, Johnny,
Guest:Welcome to LA, I know you've just gotten here, but there's this young kid I want you to see tonight, I brought here, his name is Freddie Prinze.
Guest:And Johnny said, let's bring him out.
Guest:And so Freddie Prinze came out, brought down the house, and sat down.
Guest:Johnny waved him over, and Freddie Prinze sat down and started talking about this brand new place on the strip called the Comedy Store.
Guest:I said, Los Angeles has a comedy store.
Guest:That's where I'm going.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So that was, what year was that?
Guest:I think it was the spring of 73.
Marc:Oh, so it really was just starting out.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And when did you graduate?
Marc:Graduated in January, December of 75.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And you were like, that's it.
Marc:That's where I'm going.
Marc:And you didn't know how you were going to start or what you were going to do.
Marc:You were just going to go out there.
Marc:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:So what'd you do?
Guest:Well, I jumped into my MG Mizzet convertible.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And drove this little thing over the Khyber Pass to get to Los Angeles.
Guest:And got into town, and I started coming to the open mic night surreptitiously on Monday night.
Marc:So where'd you get the place?
Marc:Where were you living first?
Guest:Oh, I had a cousin who lived in Manhattan Beach.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:And so an older cousin, 20 years older.
Guest:And I stayed at his house for about a month while I was coming to the comedy store and getting my bearings.
Guest:And I went up on March 8th, 1976.
Guest:So happened the same night Marshall Warfield went up right after me, her first night.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That was your audition night or that was the first time you played on the stage?
Guest:No, that was my audition night.
Marc:So you'd already been coming to open mics?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:That launched my open mic.
Guest:Okay, got it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That launched because I would go around with B.J.
Guest:Douglas and Joey Gaynor all over town doing our open mics together.
Guest:Where'd you meet those guys?
Guest:At the comedy store that night.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And so I went on stage and I stood up.
Guest:I had all this fresh stage presence.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, I just left Oklahoma.
Guest:We're smoking pots of federal crime.
Guest:Traveled through Colorado.
Guest:We're smoking pot.
Guest:It's illegal.
Guest:Finally got to California where it's mandatory.
Guest:Oh, they just laughed.
Guest:I said, I got my secret.
Guest:Always open with a drug joke in Los Angeles.
Guest:Never failed.
Guest:Still do it to this day.
Guest:And then I struggled through a bunch of stuff.
Guest:I'm talking to get jokes off Humphrey and Ford and stuff like this.
Guest:Were you like a Mort Sahl fan?
Guest:I didn't know who I was.
Marc:But you decided on politics yourself.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:yeah of course yeah this is what gentiles do or at least protestants anyway because we don't have enough self-honesty to talk about ourselves on stage okay so um uh but i got there was something interesting because i got toward the end and i remember i picked up something you could always kill with a drug joke in l.a and at the time you could always kill with a nixon joke yeah okay right and you still do both yeah
Guest:At the time, Nixon had just gone to China.
Guest:This is two years after he resigned, a year and a half, for some goodwill mission.
Guest:And it was in all the papers.
Guest:And at the end, I said, you know, why did Nixon bother taking a jet to China?
Guest:Why didn't he go in a rickshaw pulled by a mule?
Guest:That got a laugh.
Guest:And I said, Spiro could have used the exercise.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, man, they just, oh, Agnew and Nixon joke.
Guest:Oh, boy, tremendous joke.
Guest:And two things happened from that.
Guest:First of all, there was a reporter from Orbit magazine.
Guest:Do you remember Orbit?
Guest:I don't.
Guest:It was a Sunday supplement that was in all the Sunday papers all around the country.
Guest:And it was a little mini newspaper-looking magazine with color pictures and stuff and articles.
Marc:Like the Parade magazine?
Guest:Exactly like Parade.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And it had an article about the Comedy Store, and it quoted that Nixon joke.
Guest:And my fraternity brothers read this the next Sunday in the Daily Oklahoman and thought I'd made it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He did it.
Guest:He did it.
Guest:And the second thing that happened was the most important thing that happened in my life.
Guest:And that is that...
Guest:Mitzi had Ollie Joe Prater standing by her.
Guest:The great bearded Ollie Joe Prater, our Falstaff, our Gleason, our Jackie Gleason.
Guest:That's all you can say about him.
Guest:The late, great Ollie Joe Prater.
Guest:And he was running comedy store Westwood at the time.
Guest:And trying to appear late at night there.
Guest:And she said, make him a doorman.
Guest:Mitzi took one look at me and she saw doorman.
Guest:Me too.
Guest:And I wasn't sure if that was a promotion, but it was my foot in the door, and I didn't realize I was getting admitted to graduate school.
Guest:Right, that was the system.
Guest:Yeah, I started out as a doorman.
Guest:And at that time, the comedy store was, as Julius Caesar would say, es divisa en tres partes, divided into three parts, like gall.
Guest:There were the TV stars, there were the draws,
Guest:Freddie Prinze, Gabe Kaplan, who both got their shows from the comedy store.
Guest:Pryor's that special case.
Guest:And then Jimmy Walker was the big one.
Guest:Jimmy Walker packed the room on Sunset, on weekends, and he would drive over to Westwood and pack Westwood.
Guest:Both shows, both nights, every weekend.
Guest:Because he was on What's Happening?
Guest:Good Times.
Guest:Good Times, yeah.
Guest:Good Times was on CBS...
Guest:Seven years.
Guest:I just talked to Byron Allen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was a gag writer for Jimmy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:When he was like 16.
Guest:Jimmy would have Byron Allen, Jay Leno, David Letterman, and a couple of other guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wayne Klein.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Would have them at his house every week.
Guest:Pay them $100 a week.
Guest:And then, this is back when Letterman was paying $117 a month rent.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Across the street from the comedy store.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:$117 a month.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And they would write all this brilliant material for Jimmy.
Guest:And then Jimmy would have it all on note cards.
Guest:And every night of the week, Jimmy would do his regular act except Sunday.
Guest:And then Jimmy would sit on a bar stool and read these jokes.
Guest:The crowd would laugh and Jimmy would throw them over his shoulder.
Guest:Like, okay, that was funny, that was funny, that was funny.
Guest:And it's the last he would ever hear of these jokes.
Guest:Really?
Guest:It was the last.
Guest:He would never add it to his act.
Guest:That's weird.
Marc:He would pay him for them.
Guest:He would never add them.
Guest:He just enjoyed the company, I guess.
Yeah.
Guest:And seeing if they worked.
Guest:But that time, Jimmy Walker, Freddie Prinze, Gabe Kaplan were the TV star guys.
Guest:And then there was a group of guys that were in and out of the comedy store because they were working Vegas.
Guest:Right, on the road.
Guest:Kip Adada, Steve Blustein, Steve Landsberg.
Guest:These guys that were doing really work.
Guest:Didn't Kip just die?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he was just taking off at that time.
Guest:And he was very popular.
Marc:And Steve Blustein.
Guest:Yeah, Steve Blustein.
Guest:Brilliant comic.
Guest:And they were working.
Guest:That was the other level.
Guest:There were a lot of them at that level, but those are the ones off the top of my head.
Guest:And then there was the heart and soul of the comedy store.
Guest:The heart and soul were, I would say, four guys.
Guest:That would be Letterman, George Miller, Tom Dreesen.
Guest:Oh, and Leno.
Guest:Those four guys were there every night, and they were the ones that you gathered around.
Guest:The young comics would gather around.
Guest:They were encouraging.
Guest:They would suggest punchlines, give you lines, and you would just laugh it up.
Guest:All in different areas.
Guest:Letterman was like a god.
Guest:Everybody saw future Carson in him at the time.
Guest:And this is 76?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:George Miller was doing The Tonight Show and murdering at the time, and he was just in his sardonic wit height at that time.
Guest:Tom Dreesen, the nicest guy in the history of stand-up comedy.
Guest:I talked to him, I talked to him.
Guest:Always there for you.
Guest:Always helping and giving to you.
Guest:And Leno wasn't so much approachable, but he was nice to everybody.
Guest:But Leno gave you the example you needed to follow if you wanted to be a success.
Guest:Leno was a work junkie.
Guest:Work, work, work.
Guest:So the smart guys aped Leno.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So who were the guys?
Marc:Those were the guys that the comics were looking up to.
Marc:So who was your little crew of weirdos?
Guest:Well, I've gotta add, there were two superstars at the time, too.
Guest:One of them was my idol.
Guest:That was Tim Thomerson.
Guest:Tim Thomerson is the only guy who could follow Pryor.
Guest:He was a tremendous stage presence.
Guest:There was nothing like him before or since.
Guest:I mean, he had it.
Guest:I always thought that...
Guest:Harrison Ford had the career Tim Thomerson should have had.
Guest:How's Tim doing?
Guest:He's surfing.
Guest:He has some back problems, but I hear from him from time to time.
Guest:He stays in touch with his good friend Letterman.
Guest:But Timmy was a star.
Guest:And then Richard Pryor was God.
Guest:And he would come in and everything that he did is well known.
Marc:Well, right.
Marc:So he was like, but he, you know, he kind of, um, put that place on the map in a lot of ways.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Uh, cause he would do the weekend shows that, that, no, that's how it's, that's how it's remembered now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the guy that put the place on the map was Jimmy Walker and, and Gabe Kaplan and Freddie Prince.
Guest:Those guys got it going.
Guest:Uh huh.
Guest:What happened to Pryor was that Pryor cracked up on stage in Las Vegas in the early 70s.
Guest:Just cracked up.
Guest:And Paul Mooney.
Guest:He got fired, right?
Marc:He lost it.
Guest:Paul Mooney is the other god.
Guest:Paul Mooney would race across town at 1 o'clock from Westwood to watch his hour-long set at Sunset.
Guest:Yeah, at 1 in the morning.
Guest:Yeah, he was my artistic.
Guest:I love Paul Mooney.
Guest:Sitting in the back of the room watching Paul.
Guest:And Paul would always have, at the time, he would have protégés like Sandra Bernhardt or Jackson Perdue.
Guest:And he helped build them up.
Guest:So what Richard would do is, Paul kind of rescued Richard
Guest:and they worked together and they sold some scripts to Red Fox, you know, for the Red Fox thing.
Guest:For which, he had a production company?
Guest:Oh, Sanford and Son.
Guest:Sanford and Son.
Guest:So in 72, 73, Pryor started putting it back together.
Guest:And it was, at the time, Richard Pryor did these cute little impressions and stuff like this, exactly like Jim Carrey started.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay?
Guest:And then just like Jim Carrey had his epiphany through Sam Kennison and became his roaring self, it was Paul Mooney who turned Richard Pryor into Dark Twain.
Guest:And Richard did his first huge album, that N-word's crazy.
Guest:And it was such a huge success around campus.
Guest:It made him a movie star.
Guest:even though he was not allowed to be on Blazing Saddles, that was written for him.
Marc:Oh, so when he had the identity crisis, you know, because he was just sort of a Cosby clone, and he kind of hit the wall, and then he went to San Francisco for a while, and then Paul kind of like befriended him and
Marc:Or they were aligned together and started writing together, and Paul sort of helped him inform the new socially relevant Pryor.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And they were nothing alike because Paul was a Robert Klein-ish bit comic.
Guest:They were both derivatives of Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory.
Guest:But Pryor was a storyteller in the Mark Twain series.
Guest:I begged him to title his album Dark Twain because that's what he was.
Guest:He was a great storyteller.
Guest:And what he would do is he would come to the Comedy Store Sunset and during the maybe two or three months he would put together an album.
Guest:He would go on every night at 10 o'clock.
Guest:And Mitzi would have two shows before him and then him.
Guest:and Pryor would schedule his own show.
Guest:He would have David Letterman or Johnny Witherspoon at the start, Marshall Warfield, then himself, and then Mooney afterwards would clean up.
Guest:And it was just tremendous.
Guest:And he would work out.
Guest:Yeah, and he would never do a joke he'd ever done on a previous album.
Guest:He started from scratch.
Guest:It was painful at the start.
Guest:You would just, like Harris Peet and Johnny Witherspoon would sit in the back with Mitzi and just watch him build it.
Guest:It was so beautiful to watch.
Guest:I'm pretty sure Bill Burr is the closest who works the closest like that.
Guest:And probably Louis C.K.
Guest:as well.
Guest:You might do that as well.
Guest:You start from scratch and that's what he did.
Guest:That's the only way I can do it.
Guest:And you work just like Pryor, okay?
Guest:And you have the advantage as well, Mark, of being a, you're the best storyteller along with Alan Steven I've ever met.
Guest:And I mean, you guys are just naturals.
Guest:You were on my podcast, Argus Hamilton's Comedy Store tonight, and I could have listened to you for three hours.
Guest:As you know me, I go home right after my set.
Guest:I never see anybody's work.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You just mesmerized me, man.
Guest:And so Pryor would come in and the line would be around the block.
Guest:Johnny Witherspoon and Harris Peet at the door would make $100 at table.
Guest:Back when rent was $200 a month, nobody had a phone bill.
Guest:It was unbelievable.
Guest:The table hustling was something that we did too.
Marc:Didn't you do it when you were a doorman?
Guest:No, Mike Binder and I were dormant at Westwood for a while.
Guest:And the Comedy Store Westwood was a 235-seat.
Guest:This is a good point about the Comedy Store Westwood.
Guest:235-seat room, Mark.
Guest:Brick walls.
Guest:Tremendous acoustics.
Guest:And the original room at the Comedy Store was terrible because it had been the old holding room at Ciro's Nightclub.
Guest:And they had...
Guest:padded walls where the laughter just died.
Guest:And so you had to earn every laugh in the original room.
Guest:Did they take those out?
Guest:No, it's still a tough room.
Guest:That's why it's a tough room.
Guest:You go from the original room to the main room, it's like you're released from jail.
Marc:It does take a while to learn how to work the OR, but it's
Guest:I like it.
Guest:Yeah, you do, but you just learn to not let any air go between your punchline and your next setup.
Guest:You got to stay on top of them.
Guest:Yeah, and so, but there was a good point about Westwood.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was there from 1975 to 84.
Guest:Binder and I would sell the best tables for $5 a piece.
Guest:We didn't know what we were doing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We could have gotten $20.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:But the thing about Westwood is interesting.
Yeah.
Guest:Because it was such a good room that, first of all, all the big shots, the big comics, the New York comics, would come to Westwood on Thursday night because that was showcase night.
Guest:William Morris night.
Guest:Your managers, the producers, and everybody would come in and showcase for the industry.
Guest:They wanted Westwood because it was such a great room.
Guest:It's a hot room, yeah.
Guest:But for us regulars, us baby boomers that Mitzi put over there, my class of 76...
Guest:myself, Robin Williams, Michael Keaton, Marshall Warfield, Bob Saget, Arsenio Hall, Mike Binder, Alan Steven, Mitchell Walters, Ollie Joe Prater, Vic Dunlop.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Where does Craig T. Nelson fit into it?
Guest:Craig T. Nelson's much earlier.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:72, 73.
Guest:And he's in a partnership with Barry Levinson, the director.
Guest:They did a team thing?
Guest:Yeah, and they go their own way.
Guest:But the point about Westwood is something I bet you'd never thought of.
Guest:And it just has occurred to me in the last couple of weeks.
Guest:It made us, see, Mitzi would send us over there to make us ready for sunset.
Guest:It was such a great room and we were able to create so much that by the time we'd been there for two or three years, we weren't ready for sunset.
Guest:We were ready for the Tonight Show.
Guest:And we would just hop right over sunset and go right to Johnny, okay?
Guest:But the problem is,
Guest:There's a bunch of crazy-ass baby boomers, right?
Guest:And technically, we're just great, but emotionally, we're not ready.
Guest:And Westwood made you ready too fast.
Guest:Because it was such a good room.
Guest:It was such a good room.
Guest:And you got so good so fast, your emotional age didn't catch up with you.
Guest:So these doormen at the comedy store now have to wait five, six, seven years to become regular.
Guest:That's the right pace to go.
Guest:Because us hotshots that got...
Guest:Too fast, too good.
Marc:Okay, so that's your crew, and so you're at Westwood, but you're also working the original, you're also coming back.
Guest:Mitzi would have me come over on Sunday nights and work the door there and host a show.
Guest:Now when's the cocaine start?
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:I had a roommate named Dale Reese.
Guest:He was a bartender at the Comedy Store from Pennsylvania.
Guest:And who's the big movie star that pays John McClane?
Guest:Oh, Bruce Willis.
Guest:Yeah, Bruce Willis.
Guest:He's Bruce Willis' cousin.
Guest:Bruce Willis was a bartender at the Improv at the time, along with Les Moonvis, the CBS chairman.
Guest:So it was a randy group, let's put it that way.
Guest:And let's see, Dale Reese had an eighth of an ounce, an eight bowl, I guess you'd call it, in one of those vials.
Guest:And I turned it down the first three times.
Guest:I'm still angry at myself over that.
Guest:Yeah, for turning it down?
Guest:For turning it down.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Come on.
Guest:I didn't even know I was an addict yet.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:And he gave me this eight ball for some reason.
Guest:And the next thing I knew, four or five days had gone by.
Guest:And I was in La Mirada.
Guest:Why, I don't know.
Guest:Coming out of a blackout at a Denny's, talking to a policeman across the table from me, just chatting up, having a good time, having no idea how I got there.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:It was nuts.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I've loved it ever since.
Marc:But so when does this align with, when did you get your, how many times did you do Carson?
Marc:About 15 times.
Marc:You did a lot, right?
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So you were in the regular rotation.
Guest:So when does that start for you?
Guest:Well, it was in, what happened is interesting.
Guest:In the fall of 79, Mitzi had a showcase with myself, Joey Kamen, Jimmy Brogan, and four or five others.
Guest:for this Today Show shot.
Guest:Okay?
Guest:And it's a Today Show feature story on who's going to be the hot new comic of the 1980s.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Okay?
Guest:Jim McCauley, The Tonight Show.
Guest:It's funny because Brogan went on to book The Tonight Show.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And...
Guest:Mitzi had a big crowd there on a Thursday night, Jim McCauley.
Guest:And McCauley had been bringing us all along for the Tonight Show.
Guest:He just nurtured us all for years before we did our first shot.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you got there in 75?
Marc:76.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So it's been a few years just been looking at it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I had one of those sets.
Guest:Whenever I get to go at 10 o'clock, it's like easy for me.
Guest:Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Guest:I just murdered the room.
Guest:and I found out the next day the story was going to be about me.
Guest:I was going to be the comic who can't miss in the 80s.
Guest:You're the guy.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And so they come over to Crest Hill, and we stay up partying.
Guest:Are you living up there?
Guest:I was the first one.
Guest:You were at Crest Hill?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, I didn't realize that.
Guest:Who do you think would be the first one?
Guest:You see, Crest Hill came with the purchase of the Comedy Store when Mitzi bought the Comedy Store in 1976.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She was a sub-lici from 72 to 76.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She got a balloon loan, bought Crest Hill from the old Ciro's owner, and he owned the house above it.
Guest:And it was a spectacular view, as you know, of Los Angeles.
Marc:What, at Crest Hill?
Marc:At Crest Hill.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He owned that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, so that's where she got it?
Guest:Yeah, that was Frank Sendes' house.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so as soon as she bought it, she had me, Yakov Smirnoff, and Andrew Dice Clay move into it.
Marc:I was in Dice's old room.
Guest:You were in Dice's old room?
Marc:With its own bathroom.
Marc:Off the kitchen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay, so the NBC Today show, it's like in October, comes to...
Guest:DeQuestio to shoot me.
Guest:That's why your picture was up there.
Guest:And we'd been up partying all night, as always.
Guest:With Dice?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Dice and Yakov never partied.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Dice would take a wet sponge and take all the coke off the table and just break our hearts when we wake up.
Guest:Anyway, it just killed us.
Guest:So...
Guest:NBC Today Show shows up, and they have to wake me up at two in the afternoon to come downstairs for my Today Show interview.
Guest:So I shower real quick, I come down, and I have a great interview.
Guest:It's just, knock it out of the park.
Guest:And so I get the air date, and so we stay up all night, November 3rd, to see it on November 4th.
Guest:So it's an excuse to party and stay up and snow and coat.
Guest:And we turn on NBC Today, and the Iranians have just taken 52 Americans hostage.
Guest:Ah, November 4th, 1979, the 100th anniversary of Will Rogers' birthday.
Guest:Preempted.
Guest:Preempted.
Guest:And they put the story off on me for like seven agonizing weeks.
Guest:But they put it on in late December and Fred DeCordova sees it, The Tonight Show, and they say, boom, let's have Argus on The Tonight Show.
Guest:So on January 8th,
Guest:I make my debut.
Guest:In 1977?
Guest:1980.
Guest:Oh, 1980.
Guest:1980.
Guest:It's from 79 to 80.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I start out, and I just had a tremendous time.
Guest:Johnny came over and shook my hand, put his arm around me.
Guest:It was fantastic.
Marc:You guys are getting jacked, though.
Marc:You're in it.
Marc:You're partying all night.
Guest:No, but not on the Tonight Show.
Marc:No, no, I know that, but I mean in general.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But we didn't know any better.
Guest:We'd been doing this since college.
Guest:This is how you live.
Guest:No, no.
Marc:The cocaine is not how you live.
Marc:Oh, that's right.
Marc:Well, cocaine accelerated.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I mean, drinking.
Marc:I mean, I know the difference.
Marc:But like when you're up in that house and you're gone for two days, you know, I mean, it's different.
Marc:Yeah, it is different.
Marc:And, you know, you do get used to it.
Marc:But I had an experience where I when I was in there, when I was living at that house doing that life.
Marc:Some woman came out and visited me that I knew in college.
Marc:Oh, no.
Marc:And I was sitting around with, like, we were on the floor.
Marc:There's a bunch of dudes.
Marc:We're doing everything.
Marc:We're playing guitar.
Marc:We're doing coke.
Marc:And I'm like, isn't this amazing?
Marc:It was just against the normies.
Marc:Like, you know, they don't know how to live.
Marc:This is how you live.
Marc:No one lives like this.
Marc:And then this woman writes me this letter two weeks later.
Marc:She goes, no one would want to live like that.
Marc:What a square.
Marc:And you haven't been east of La Brea since.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I mean, I just remember that moment where it's sort of like, it is an insulated thing.
Marc:You think that everyone's living like that, and you see those people going to work the next day or running or jogging.
Marc:But you do, at some point when you get sober, you realize like,
Marc:You know, it was a freaky life, man.
Guest:Yeah, well, and in like the summer of 80, my parents came out to surprise me.
Guest:Yeah, I got that one too, yeah.
Guest:They came by Crest Hill like at 10.30 in the morning and everybody's laid out, just drunk and lying out over the floor.
Guest:Waitresses passed out face down on the floor.
Guest:God knows.
Guest:And mother was just furious.
Guest:but they were coming to the comedy store that night in the main room to see me.
Guest:It was a Saturday.
Guest:So Mitzi lined up the show just perfect so that Bishop Hamilton and Lady Hamilton come in to see their little boy.
Guest:They had Ronnie Kenny open the show, then Mike Binder, then myself, then Shandling.
Guest:So Binder comes on, does a clean set, kills the crowd, and asks for a round of applause from my parents.
Guest:And everybody in the main room, tremendous crowd.
Guest:Ronnie Kenny does it Mike Binder does the same thing tremendous clean set and then Binder introduces my parents again I walk up kill the crowd and everybody's proud of my parents so Shanling walks out on stage and Shanling says yeah I guess your parents are here yeah nice to have you here I think you should know something I fucked him and
Guest:And the crowd just went berserk.
Guest:They just had enough of Mr. Mr. Hamilton.
Guest:Oh, and the group just came down.
Guest:And my mother jumped up, grabbed Dad.
Guest:They took her out of Mitzi's booth and led my dad down the hall.
Guest:And she goes by poor Daley Pike, who's standing there strumming his guitar, getting ready for his guitar act in the original room.
Guest:And my mother waves her finger at Daley and says, you boys are never going to go anywhere with your filth.
Guest:And you know what?
Guest:They didn't.
Guest:Somehow she knew.
Guest:Shandling did all right.
Guest:Shandling did just fine, rest his soul.
Marc:When did you start dating Mitzi?
Marc:When was that happening?
Guest:Well, the night of the comedy, my first Tonight Show shot, I was the last one to leave Mitzi's house when we were partying all night long to celebrate.
Guest:At Mitzi's?
Guest:Yeah, at Mitzi's.
Guest:Well, about once or twice a week we would party at Mitzi's house and not at Crestal.
Guest:Who's in that crew?
Guest:Biff Maynard, Tim Thomerson, Diane Ogden, wonderful, wonderful talent coordinator.
Guest:Richard, whoever Richard's wife was at the time.
Guest:Prior?
Guest:Yeah, prior.
Guest:His wife, Deborah, would sometimes be there.
Marc:So this is when Mitzi was in her partying phase.
Guest:Yeah, Mitchell, Walter.
Guest:Yeah, Mitzi didn't do coke.
Guest:Mitzi liked pot.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But the rest of us would go, and we'd drink, and we'd sit there and...
Guest:Robin Williams and Valerie would be there.
Guest:And we would just solve the problems of the world, talk about everything.
Guest:It was like a reverse AA meeting.
Guest:When you stay up all night and you exchange your truth.
Guest:You need this lubrication to be truthful with each other.
Guest:And Mitzi was there for it too?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Mitzi would hang out, too?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Well, we were up until about 6.30, sometimes 7 in the morning, and then Peter and Polly would come downstairs.
Guest:It would be time to go to school, and that would break up the party.
Marc:Oh, that's hilarious.
Marc:Isn't it interesting how it's all played out that, you know, that Peter has turned the place around?
Guest:Yeah, it really is.
Guest:Peter and...
Guest:The people for whom you and I, I know, are most grateful, and that is these millennials who come in and they buy up the tickets on websites and the shows are sold out ahead of time.
Marc:It's pretty diverse, though.
Marc:They're not all young people.
Marc:I think over the course of the last few years with people, big acts, kind of supporting the place and putting it out in the world and talking about it,
Marc:that it's become notorious again in a good way.
Marc:I mean, for a while there was infamous.
Marc:Now it's great.
Marc:But for a while there was like, no one goes there anymore.
Marc:You know, after Kenison, when I left in 80, when did I leave?
Marc:87 or 88, right when you got back,
Marc:It went through a pretty nasty time for a while.
Guest:Well, I've got another explanation for that.
Guest:There were 75 million baby boomers, and there were 80 million millennials.
Guest:But for your group, there were only about 35 or 40 million Generation Xers.
Guest:I'm 1963.
Guest:I'm like, maybe the tail end of the boomer.
Guest:The tail end of the baby boomer.
Guest:And one of the security guys told me just the other night, I was talking to him about this, and he said, well, one reason was, one of the big security guys, he says, I'm a GNXer.
Guest:We weren't into comedy.
Guest:We were into music and violence.
Guest:Yeah, interesting.
Guest:And there just weren't enough of them to fill the clubs, to fill the comedy clubs.
Marc:Really?
Guest:You think so?
Guest:That was my experience.
Guest:I was there.
Guest:Well, no, I get it, but didn't Mitzi get a little dark?
Guest:Didn't the place get dark?
Guest:That's the way people look at it, but I'm telling you, during the OJ, okay, let's think out loud here for a second together.
Guest:In Los Angeles in the 90s, we went through this glorious comedy time
Guest:of the flooding, okay, the earthquake.
Guest:We had Rodney King, we had O.J.
Guest:Simpson, Bill Clinton's impeachment.
Guest:We had from 92 to 99 a glorious time in comedy, stand-up, okay?
Guest:And the rooms, I would just say there was just no way to completely fill up the room because the comics were great, the crowds were good, and I wouldn't say that there was really a dark time until the early 2000s.
Guest:2001, 2002, 2003.
Marc:And then... Also, you know, man, the business of comedy clubs kind of took a dent, made a dent in it, because people could see comedy in their cities.
Marc:I hadn't thought of that.
Marc:That's a good... I mean, like Jesus, I mean, everybody was out there on the road.
Marc:I mean, there was no... The imperative to sort of see comedy in L.A.
Marc:was diminished a bit if you could see it in Denver or you could see it in Columbus.
Marc:Did you see the same people?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:The headliners.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And...
Guest:The interesting thing about those comedy clubs was there was this show in Los Angeles in 1978.
Guest:I forgot to tell you about it.
Guest:I'm sure you've heard about it.
Guest:Make Me Laugh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:What people today don't know, they need to Google Make Me Laugh because it was huge.
Marc:All you guys did it, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Bruce Babyman Bombs.
Guest:Yeah, and Biff Maynard, Mr. Bitchin'.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Kip Adada.
Guest:But all of us did it, okay?
Guest:And it was fantastic.
Marc:What was the name of the host?
Marc:Bobby Vann?
Marc:Bobby Vann, MGM dancer.
Guest:Wonderful guy.
Guest:And George Foster was the producer, and he had produced the show in 1958 when it got kicked off the air for a Nixon joke, okay?
Guest:And so it came back in syndication.
Guest:And here's the important thing.
Guest:Two things happened.
Guest:First of all, it was on at 11 o'clock.
Guest:It was syndicated, I think, Metromedia, all right?
Guest:And all across the country, any area that had four or five TV stations would make me laugh, and it was on up against the local news.
Guest:And we were kicking the news's ass in LA.
Marc:You were one of the regulars?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And what it did was it made stand-up,
Guest:For the casual listener right now, Make Me Laugh went like this.
Guest:There's a crowd of 300 people in the studio audience.
Guest:I'm facing Marc Maron.
Guest:I do material here on Marc, secretly hoping he doesn't laugh because the crowd is laughing and giving me airtime.
Guest:Yeah, right, right.
Guest:And so we're looking at you and playing to the crowd at the same time.
Guest:The crowd's going berserk.
Guest:And, of course, the...
Guest:the person at home is seeing these fresh Baby Boomer comics.
Guest:They're just fantastic.
Guest:That's funny.
Marc:So you were all aware that you didn't want the guy to laugh?
Guest:No, you didn't.
Guest:Well, you wanted that airtime, okay?
Guest:And so it became popular.
Guest:It kicked ass, and that is what started all the comedy clubs around the country.
Guest:It came from Make Me Laugh, and that came with its own reward and poison mark because once these comedy clubs sprang up, with which you're well familiar, in the early 80s, mid-80s,
Guest:What happened was they would give the headliner $5,000 a week or a door deal, and everybody would just take off for it.
Guest:It's kind of like cruise ships now.
Guest:The money's so good, you just keep doing it, and pretty soon L.A.
Guest:forgets about you.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So there were guys who would be on the road for months.
Guest:For months, even longer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they would fall in love with the waitress.
Guest:They decide to buy a home somewhere here and there.
Guest:And pretty soon they had a kid and they were locked into that lifestyle and gone from L.A.
Guest:They just self-exiled.
Guest:So you're saying that the people started to diminish?
Marc:They've diminished themselves just by.
Marc:And they disappeared from L.A.
Marc:From L.A.
Guest:When they disappeared from L.A., the town and the industry forgot about you.
Guest:Enjoy your money because in about 1986 and 87, every single one of these cities is going to have a second and third comedy club.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then they start competing, having paper wars, giving away tickets.
Guest:The revenue goes down and these guys are stuck out there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:One fifth of the money they were making.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And yeah, that was a sad crash of the boom.
Marc:But now it's interesting because if you can find your people, you can just play anywhere.
Marc:You need the fucking comedy club.
Marc:Well, you're the one that's just led the way with this show.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I did.
Marc:Yeah, I'm happy that people were able to get the hang of me and I could sell a few tickets eventually.
Marc:Yeah, it worked out.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So now, how does it get progressively bad for you?
Marc:How many years did you see Mitzi for?
Guest:About two, and then while I was off to my first rehab, Yakov Smirnoff introduced Mitzi to a Russian psychiatrist, and she fell for him, and I was out.
Marc:Russian psychiatrist.
Marc:Yeah, a handsome guy, too.
Marc:How long did she date that guy?
Guest:Until he drank himself to death.
Guest:You know, once an Al-Anon, always an Al-Anon.
Marc:Sure, yeah.
Marc:Wait, so were you there for the strike?
Guest:Oh, was I. That was 76?
Guest:I caused it.
Guest:You caused it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I caused the strike.
Guest:How?
Guest:Well, in the summer of 78, Mitzi's really this consulate because she has purchased a comedy store.
Guest:She had a dream for the main room, Mark.
Guest:And you guys aren't together yet.
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:I'm sitting there at 2.30 in the morning with her and Biff Maynard.
Guest:Biff and I are snorting coke and Mitzi smoking a joint.
Guest:We're in the main room by ourselves.
Guest:And she's crying because her whole idea about the main room, this 400 seat room, was for her peers to come back and play.
Guest:Her peers, Buddy Hackett, Don Rickles, all that group.
Guest:It was Mitzi's dream to have these comics come back and play the main room.
Marc:Weren't they Sammy's friends?
Marc:Yeah, but Mitzi was the den mother in Vegas.
Guest:Mitzi knew all of them.
Guest:They all loved Mitzi.
Guest:Elvis loved Mitzi.
Guest:They all loved her.
Guest:And she could pick up the phone and get any of them on the line.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So that was her dream.
Guest:Okay, the problem was their agents.
Guest:Their agents would not let them play the Comedy Store Main Room because they were afraid it would hurt their Vegas draw.
Guest:Yeah, cut into the draw.
Guest:Because Vegas was these super salaries at the time, and Vegas is 90% L.A.
Guest:on the weekends.
Guest:So they wouldn't let them do it.
Guest:And Mitzi just couldn't.
Guest:She'd tried Tiny Tim.
Guest:She'd had the great Dick Gregory in.
Guest:She could get some spot things.
Guest:Buddy Rich and his band would bring Johnny Carson out.
Guest:It would be exciting for a night.
Guest:But she couldn't get it filled.
Guest:And so Bip and I are sitting there saying, look, you've got these great comics, okay, with Mooney and Dreesen and Glitterman, Leno, Elaine Boosler, all the mule deer.
Guest:My God, it's incredible.
Guest:The guys that are now out working, you can have them in the main room, and then we could do the original room in Westwood, and our goal is to be in the main room.
Guest:And this is summer of 78, and Mitzi said, well, that would turn this into a professional room.
Guest:And I see the comedy store as an art colony and as a place to where you get ready to go out and work.
Marc:Right, in the OR.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But not the main room.
Marc:She wanted big shows in the main room.
Guest:And then Biff and I said to her, to hell with it.
Guest:Split the ticket money and give half to the comics and half to yourself.
Guest:I said, Mitzi, over at Westwood right now, when I'm at the door, I'm sending 150 people every Saturday night over to the improv because of the spillover.
Guest:and I'm telling you we can do it and she tried to devise a little ticket purchase thing where you buy six tickets for $25 for six shows it was some crazy idea it didn't work and
Guest:this was all about the main room comics.
Guest:There's about 25 of them.
Guest:And I talked Mitzi into doing this.
Guest:Putting the comics in the main room.
Guest:Yeah, putting comics in the main room.
Guest:And she balked on a couple of the payment things, and so Tom Dreesen,
Guest:wanted to, of course, Tom knew a professional room when he'd see one.
Guest:And so he wanted the 25 comics to come in and talk about it and take some action.
Guest:Problem was 200 comics joined the meeting that had no business being there.
Guest:There weren't main room comics.
Guest:And all of a sudden, before you knew it, it became a movement.
Guest:It's off to the barricades.
Guest:And the strike of May of 79 occurred.
Guest:And all your listeners, all they have to do is Amazon buy William Needle Cedar's book, I'm Dying Up Here, that HBO made the series out of.
Guest:Or was it Showtime?
Marc:Oh, they know about it.
Guest:I talked to Dreesen about it.
Marc:I've talked to a lot of people about it.
Guest:And so it happened.
Guest:And there were about a dozen of us that stood by Mitzi during the strike.
Guest:It's just in my DNA going back 400 years of Stand by the Queen.
Marc:So you crossed the picket line.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:I stood out there and talked people into walking through.
Marc:So there was tension between you and the other comics?
Guest:No.
Guest:If you look at the book, they say Argus was always a gentleman.
Guest:I was always happy.
Marc:But you were a loyalist and you were not going to let this fuck up the business.
Guest:No, I wasn't.
Guest:At one point, Mitzi was so angry when David Letterman, bless his heart, came down after his very first night of guest hosting The Tonight Show in the middle of the strike.
Guest:He came walking down the ramp of the Hyatt house with the picket line out front.
Guest:And the picketeers all started singing The Tonight Show theme song.
Guest:And he joined them instead of going in to see Mitzi.
Guest:And Mitzi was sitting at the original room window looking out and saw that.
Guest:She was sitting there with Alan Stevens, and it broke her heart because two years earlier, or five years earlier, she had talked Letterman out of going back home to Indiana when he was discouraged.
Guest:No, I get it, I get it.
Marc:So who were the loyalists, you and Stevens?
Guest:Alan Stevens, Alan Bursky, Lois Bromfield, Yakov Smirnoff, Frank Karaschio,
Guest:Biff Maynard joined a little later, and a lot of people that were loyal to Mitzi simply stayed away, both from the picket line.
Guest:Because nobody knew which way this was going to break, because the firebrands on the picket side said, we're going to join AGVA, and AGVA is going to keep you from ever joining AFTRA, and you're never going to get to do television.
Guest:That was their threat.
Guest:And that was Lanao and Driesen.
Guest:That was really from the left wing of it.
Guest:Dreesen was just trying to manage things.
Guest:Well, who's the left wing of it?
Guest:Mark Lono?
Guest:No, Lono and I came up with the solution.
Guest:I'll get to that.
Guest:There were some, let's just say, open micers.
Guest:that were really good at union stuff.
Guest:And they were the ones that were trying to threaten union cards.
Guest:And two weeks into the strike, I met with Mark Lano next door at the Hyatt House on the mezzanine.
Guest:And we came up with the pay scale for the main room, for the original room, and Westwood.
Guest:I came back and presented it to Mitzi, and she said, I'll think about it, and that's the night that Letterman walked down, and she said, I will never settle with those bastards.
Guest:And it was just, it was lights, Mitzi was so angry for two weeks, there was no dealing with her.
Guest:And finally, she just sort of came to.
Guest:My other thing that I did was.
Marc:Didn't the improv agree to do it?
Guest:The improv wasn't paying, and they got to be strike headquarters.
Guest:Bud Friedman played this very cleverly.
Guest:But the most important thing that happened in the middle, if I had a role in it, was that Glendale Federal stepped in and offered Mitzi $15 million for the entire building and the whole location, which was a lot of money back in 1979.
Guest:And she was back and forth on it.
Guest:And a couple of us gave her a serious talk about it.
Guest:She's not going down in history.
Guest:If she's going to be another rich Jewish woman at the tennis club, this is her mark on history.
Guest:She's got to stay with us.
Marc:Oh really, so you talked her out of selling?
Guest:To Glendale Federal for 15 million.
Guest:I was always good with somebody else's money.
Marc:So she finally resolved it.
Marc:Yeah, finally resolved it.
Marc:The strike lasted five weeks.
Marc:So once it's resolved, then there was either real or thought to be real reprisals for being disloyal, correct?
Guest:That was their perception, and I'm here to say no.
Guest:There were just a couple of guys like Labetkin who weren't really that regular a regulars that she just didn't give any spots for two weeks to, and he jumped off the Hyatt over it.
Guest:Yeah, well, he had some mental problems.
Guest:And it was detailed in the LA Times by William Needleseeder again.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:About what was interesting was that Dreesen told me that, you know, when he was on his way out after the strike, you know, he had he was going out to Vegas or somewhere to work.
Marc:And Lebecken was concerned he wasn't going to get spots.
Marc:And Dreesen had said to him, you know, well, I'm not going to do spots here until you get spots.
Marc:And then he killed himself.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Dreesen didn't go back for 40 years.
Guest:I know, I introduced him, remember?
Guest:You were there that night.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but I talked to him.
Marc:I didn't know that part of the story, though, that the reason that it was this, not a shame thing, but sort of a haunted thing about Lubeckin saying that.
Marc:That he made this promise to Lubeckin that could never be altered because the guy killed himself, and he stood by it.
Guest:Well, of the comics that we've mentioned, Mitzi was hurt by Letterman and then she was spited by George Miller for a while.
Guest:Miller eventually came back.
Guest:That hurt her too because she loved George.
Guest:But George could turn his wit on you and it wouldn't be pretty.
Guest:And Mitzi always suspected that George's mother had a hand in the strike because...
Guest:She had been Mitzi's accountant in 78 and 79, and Mitzi moved her office up to the third floor, which is a long walk for a 75-year-old lady.
Guest:And so Mitzi always suspected that George's mother leaked how much money Mitzi was making to George, who leaked it to the strikers.
Marc:Interesting.
Guest:Oh, it was Byzantine politics.
Marc:But it was the right thing, though, man.
Marc:It was good policy to pay the fucking comics, right?
Guest:Well, once the... See, everyone accepted the lay of the land as we found it, that these showcase clubs were places that you showcased for the industry, which is where you got work.
Marc:Fine.
Guest:We didn't know any better.
Guest:We didn't know it was a nightclub, okay?
Guest:Right, but the main room's a main room.
Guest:But the main room's a main room, and that turned everything into a nightclub.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the deal still holds today.
Guest:It still does.
Guest:I never understood.
Guest:I begged Mitzi, just double the cover charge.
Guest:We've got plenty of money.
Guest:Double the cover charge, and your problems are over.
Guest:But you have to remember that Mitzi Shore was an early to mid-1950s bohemian.
Guest:I mean to the core, an artist.
Guest:And when she said artist colony, she meant artist colony.
Guest:I need to show you my souvenir.
Guest:Oh, my.
Guest:Oh, my.
Marc:Mitzi's driver's license.
Marc:Were you a runner for her, too?
Marc:I did, but I found this on the floor in her office when I was in there with Binder.
Guest:Mark is showing me Mitzi Shore's driver's license, and when I was her runner and doorman, and she was buying all the materials to redecorate the main room in the summer of 76, I was running all over town in her little Pinto with her driver's license and her checkbook to buy all the paint and this, that, this, that, and the other, and it was so cute because it was,
Guest:driver's licenses were still paper back then and I would hand the check to the paint store and give them Mitzi's driver's license and she would have her birth year marked over in pencil because it's none of their fucking business that's so funny and of course all the merchants they knew her that was her biggest laugh of the day give them a story for dinner table so now how does it all come unglued man
Marc:How do you hit the wall?
Marc:And was it dramatic?
Marc:And, like, let's go now to, like, you know, so you're pretty steadily, what, doing two Tonight Shows a year?
Guest:No, I'm just going up and down, doing a lot, doing a little, doing a lot, doing a little.
Marc:And were you working almost exclusively with the store?
Marc:Of course, yeah.
Marc:But are you opening for musical acts or anything?
Guest:Well, after my first Tonight Shows shot, Jeff Wald, the manager, Helen Reddy's husband, took me on.
Guest:And I would open for Helen Reddy across the country.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And not emotionally ready for that either, but there was nothing like- Are you emotionally ready now?
Guest:No.
Marc:All right, so you never get emotionally ready.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:All I want to have is fun and give joy to the crowd.
Guest:That's all that matters to me.
Guest:And I notice things that are fun, like when the mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, comes backstage to say hi and give Helen Reddy the key to the city and-
Guest:It's 1980 and she's locked in her dressing room smoking a joint.
Guest:And he's standing there with two Louisiana cops wanting to give her the key to the city.
Guest:Oh God, just wait, come back, come back later.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:So anyway, you get those great stories.
Guest:But what happened to me was by 1981 I started to bottom out.
Guest:And I would just start my day and end my day partying.
Guest:And the telltale sign, as you'll know, is I stopped writing new material.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, you stopped sleeping, too.
Guest:Yeah, that doesn't help.
Guest:And your brain starts to go a little nutty.
Guest:And so in the fall of 81, they send me back to a famous Episcopal hospital in Tulsa.
Guest:And I go back for... Your folks did?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Mitzi does.
Guest:And they...
Guest:It's a tremendous St.
Guest:John's Hospital there.
Guest:But it was one of the first of the rehabs.
Guest:And I loved AA as soon as I got to it.
Guest:Man, this was fantastic.
Guest:Just great.
Guest:And I'd get 45, 50 days.
Guest:I love the laughter in the rooms.
Guest:The crowd.
Guest:Yeah, and I'm spiritually involved and connected anyway, so I got it early on that my connection with God is just as good a buzz as any blow that I ever did if I'm helping somebody.
Guest:That's the key.
Guest:And so I loved it, but when I got back, I didn't have enough sobriety under my belt to withstand a week at the comedy store.
Marc:A week.
Guest:Who pulled you out?
Marc:Which monster gave you the line?
Guest:A good friend from Nebraska named Dave, who's dead now.
Guest:And so I would hide for a while, and then it became apparent again.
Guest:And I would go to the Cedars-Sinai, had a care unit in 84 and 85, and then care unit Orange in March of 86.
Guest:Care unit The Chain?
Guest:Yeah, at the time it was.
Guest:I went to care unit.
Guest:That's when I left LA.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so finally the Betty Ford Center in 86, and that's because Mitzi got together with Johnny and my father.
Guest:The three of them got together.
Guest:Johnny Carson?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Johnny and my dad corresponded.
Guest:They intervened?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, in a way.
Guest:Mitzi said, no more stand-up.
Guest:Johnny says, no more TV.
Guest:Daddy said, no more money.
Guest:And I got willing.
LAUGHTER
Guest:My sobriety was somebody else's idea.
Guest:They got you.
Guest:Yeah, but they got me.
Guest:And then, you know, I found out that it's the best buzz of all.
Guest:It really is.
Guest:But it's just like becoming a great stand-up comic like you or however good I am.
Guest:You have to go through those open mics.
Guest:You have to go through all that pain in order to become bulletproof and irresistible up there.
Guest:You have to.
Guest:If you don't do it, the crowd is going to sense the weakness.
Guest:They're going to sense it.
Guest:And you just have to go through whatever it takes to get to your bottom in order to be fully convinced.
Marc:It's weird, that bulletproof business.
Marc:Because that doesn't mean you're going to win all the time.
Marc:No.
Marc:It just means you can take it.
Marc:You can take it.
Marc:You know tomorrow is another day.
Marc:I do.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, because I follow you most of the time in the main room, and you always come off, you're like, you have to stay on top of them, or it's like, you're going to love them.
Marc:Yeah, it's one of the two.
Marc:If it's Joe Rogan's crowd, you've got to stay on top of them.
Marc:Yeah, to keep their attention.
Guest:But if it's a regular crowd and they just show up and they've got money, then they're on your side.
Marc:Yeah, no, it's very funny how often I see you and how often I follow you in there and how we had kind of that exchanging of the baton business.
Guest:Yeah, I'm just telling you, don't go dancing between jokes with this crowd.
Marc:Yeah, you've got to do the job.
Marc:So, all right, so let's clear up that.
Marc:So what was your relationship with Canison?
Marc:Oh, fantastic.
Guest:I discovered him in Houston.
Guest:You did?
Guest:I did, yeah.
Guest:In 1979, Showtime had their...
Guest:comedian of the year things that were regional.
Guest:And the southern comedians were in Houston.
Guest:They said they were gonna fly us back to Houston.
Guest:So me, Ollie Joe Prater, and Jim Varney were flown to Houston for this big Showtime special.
Marc:Jim Varney Ernest?
Marc:Yeah, Ernest.
Guest:Varney, brilliant actor.
Guest:And then they would have two local comics and then they would have three TV stars from Hollywood judge.
Guest:So we went back there at this room called Rockefeller's in Houston.
Guest:It was a redone bank with marble walls and tremendous acoustic.
Guest:We just murdered the show.
Guest:And Ollie Joe won something.
Guest:He didn't know how to handle it.
Guest:But after the show... Wasn't Ollie Joe known for taking other people's bits?
Guest:There's a great story about Ollie Joe Prater.
Guest:Yes, he... But the problem was he was like Gleason.
Guest:Gleason did the same thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He did him so well that you didn't really mind.
Guest:Okay?
Guest:And what they said... If it was your bit, you mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Here's the joke.
Guest:It says it perfectly.
Guest:The comics in the early 80s, they came up with this joke.
Guest:They said, Ollie Joe, if you come into the club a night early and it's Sunday night, okay, and you just want to see the previous week's show,
Guest:Ollie Joe comes up to you.
Guest:If he offers you a beer, it means he did one of your jokes.
Guest:If he offers you a joint, he did one of your bits.
Guest:If he offers you a line of cocaine, it means you just played Pittsburgh.
Guest:So anyway, Ollie Joe wins this Southern thing, and we go backstage, and there's this huge real estate agent in Houston with a softball in his hand.
Guest:it's actually a ball of cocaine the size of a softball with a runway scraped off of it.
Guest:And we all have to sit around and wait our turn and I'm looking, we're all like the RCA Victor dog, you know, his master's voice, we're just staring at that ball.
Guest:And I'm looking straight across and the other pair of eyes is Sam Kennison's.
Guest:And we met across a ball of cocaine.
Guest:And I canceled my flight back to LA to hang out with Sam for three or four nights.
Guest:And I told him, I said, you guys are so damn funny.
Guest:Were you talking Jesus talk?
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:Well, when we'd get real coked up, he would talk about praise and singing.
Guest:And I would say, no, it's the ritual.
Guest:I mean, it's the high church, low church argument.
Guest:But we're both Arminians, so we both believe in Jesus.
Guest:you can come back from sin and be saved.
Guest:I think that was his, I think he was always counting on that.
Guest:Yeah, me too.
Guest:Right up till the end.
Guest:Grace can be earned and lost is the point.
Guest:So Sam and I, we would talk a lot of theology, and I just loved him, I just loved him.
Guest:And he sent out the kid that became famous, that died with his... Hicks?
Guest:Yeah, Bill Hicks.
Guest:Hicks came out first.
Guest:Hicks ran away from home at age 19 and I put him up at Crest Hill in one of the rooms.
Guest:It was 1980 and got him a doorman's job and he would showcase for Mitzi and it would drive Mitzi crazy because he took so much time between jokes, standing up there preening
Guest:And it just drove her nuts.
Guest:But Sam Geig followed out and we would be just thick as thieves all the way through.
Guest:But the incident you were talking about.
Marc:How did Hicks get, did Hicks have a falling out with him and then left?
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:I just know that Hicks took off on the road and went to Britain and that's where he got, you know.
Guest:That was later, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but just took off.
Marc:Yeah, because when he got there it was like, what, 80?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, I never, I lost, he just disappeared as far as I was concerned.
Guest:And when I heard some of Hicks' stuff, I could hear Sam's setup.
Guest:I could hear Sam's voice in him.
Guest:There was, well, there was some continuity there.
Guest:And Sam's calm joke, when he was calm.
Guest:How he built.
Guest:The calm joke.
Guest:I could hear that in Hicks' voice.
Marc:The build.
Marc:Well, you know, I tell that story about what Sam told me when I was asking him, how'd you figure it out, man?
Marc:How'd you, you know, the...
Marc:Where'd you get your style?
Marc:Like, you know, what was it that inspired you?
Marc:And he goes, Gene Wilder.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah, because we'll think about how Gene builds.
Guest:Oh, that's right!
Guest:That's right!
Guest:That's very Jewish, Sam.
Marc:No kidding.
Marc:No kidding.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:But there's that slow build he does.
Guest:Oh, and he was so wonderful.
Guest:Oh, my gosh.
Guest:And he was like Charles Fleischer.
Guest:Fleischer could break down a molecule into what was called moleads.
Guest:Yeah, I know, moleads.
Guest:Weischer could get a crowd going talking about molecular structure.
Guest:I know.
Guest:It's all about your belief and commitment, what you're talking about.
Guest:And Sam could get him going on theology.
Guest:He could.
Guest:He'd be up there.
Guest:He would say, you know, he'd look up at the sky and say, when are you coming home, Jesus?
Marc:Well, he knows how to preach.
Guest:When are you coming home, Jesus?
Guest:When are you coming back, Jesus?
Guest:He says, I'll be glad to come back.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:As soon as I can no longer whistle through my hand.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Guest:And so he would just have me on the floor.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, it was something.
Marc:I mean, he was, yeah, I met him right when I got there and I got tangled up with those guys pretty quickly.
Marc:He was a bit of a bully and a mind fucker, but yeah, he definitely is a charismatic dude.
Marc:Well, every other day you'd just have to say that's the cocaine talking.
Marc:I guess.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I was never let into the inner sanctum, really, because I was just up in Cresthill, and I was the guy that set up the parties.
Marc:He'd give me money.
Marc:I'd go to Pink Dot and buy booze and cigarettes and wait for the freak show.
Marc:He brought the Coke and the weirdos.
Marc:You both did your part.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:But what was this mythological incident where you were?
Guest:Well, one afternoon, and it was in August of 80, August of 82, okay?
Guest:So before you got sober.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was Falstaff.
Guest:was one of the comedy actors who dealt coke at the comedy store.
Guest:And he dropped by in the afternoon and I got a gram from him.
Guest:And Robin dropped by.
Guest:And Robin and I are upstairs doing coke.
Marc:In the middle of the day.
Marc:In the green room, yeah.
Guest:And for some reason I get a call from Alan Stevens.
Guest:And Alan is just angry at the time because
Guest:Mitzi won't give him any time slots at Westwood and he's making hamburgers at six in the morning and making $1.90 an hour, he said.
Guest:And I said, he was loyal to Mitzi during the strike.
Guest:This can't happen.
Guest:So I said, Robin, I've got to go in and talk to Mitzi.
Guest:And Robin says, I'm leaving already.
Marc:So this is during the day Mitzi's in her office.
Marc:You're doing blow in the green room with Robin in the middle of the afternoon.
Guest:Late afternoon.
Guest:That's because she's going to leave in a minute.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I burst into her office and she's sitting there with Meg.
Guest:And you're jacked.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she's sitting there with Meg Stahl, her longtime assistant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The perfect lady, Meg Stahl.
Guest:And I go into this.
Guest:Missy, Alan Stevens starving.
Guest:He can't pay his rent.
Guest:He's making hamburgers.
Guest:And he stood by us.
Guest:And he's the funniest guy you have in La Jolla.
Guest:You've got to give him some time slots.
Guest:It's over at Westwood.
Guest:What's the big goddamn deal?
Guest:And she says, Argus, you're high again.
Guest:God damn it, Argus, you slipped.
Guest:And so she got mad.
Guest:All of a sudden I go, I'm in trouble.
Guest:So I follow her to her car.
Guest:And I've got my hand on her car.
Guest:And she's telling me, Argus, get well, get help.
Guest:And Sam comes over and says, Argus, get over it.
Guest:This isn't any good.
Guest:So he pulls me away.
Guest:But I wasn't hitting her.
Guest:And I said, Nancy, I love you, but...
Guest:You've got to help Alan.
Guest:Well, Sam's pulling me away.
Guest:So what I'd done was she'd tried to make up with me and wanted to make up with me and take me to Paris the next day.
Guest:This was all planned.
Guest:I was supposed to stay with Mitzi for a week at the George Sank Hotel.
Marc:Just for fun?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this canceled my trip.
Guest:She went to Paris herself.
Guest:Oh, because you guys were dating at the time.
Guest:No, no, we weren't really dating.
Guest:She just wanted to hang out with me.
Guest:Because I was a really good political advisor.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And so we were going to go to the George Sank Hotel for, I think, two weeks, it turned out.
Guest:And she flew off to Paris by herself.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Okay?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And I wake up the next morning.
Guest:I still have the passport I got for that trip.
Guest:And I wake up and I go, oh man, I've blown it.
Guest:Oh, what have I done?
Guest:I go to the comedy store and Mike Becker is at the phone.
Guest:He says, Argus, you just got this letter today.
Guest:And it's official looking brown envelope.
Guest:And it's a rebate check from the IRS for $5,000.
Guest:Mitzi's out of town for two weeks, $5,000.
Guest:You paint in the picture.
Marc:Best two weeks of your life.
Guest:I said, God, I'll be good after this.
Marc:So that's the way that went down, huh?
Marc:Yeah, oh yeah.
Marc:I lost my shit in that parking lot.
Marc:It's just interesting about the place to me.
Marc:where I don't know, my history there early on was short and it was after yours, but if you're either connected to that place or you're not.
Marc:When I lived in Crest Hill, I used to go down there during the day and make coffee and start my day there and I'd listen to music in the original room and fuck around in the parking lot.
Marc:Either you have some part of your heart that lives at that place, for better or for worse, or you don't as a comic.
Marc:But there's 5,000 places where you can fit in now.
Marc:I guess.
Marc:But like the store is still the store.
Marc:And it's really interesting now to see it well managed with security, with bathrooms that are fucking decent, you know, like, you know, with a staff that sort of I mean, it's a little it doesn't feel corporate, really, but it feels well operated for the first time I've ever seen it.
Guest:And Mitzi, oddly enough, Mitzi would be happiest of all with the bathrooms.
Guest:Because she always said it's the women who decide where you're going, and they decide on the bathrooms.
Guest:She always said that.
Guest:It took a long time to get those bathrooms fixed, dude.
Guest:And she also put a big bowl of Spanish peanuts on every single table.
Guest:So you'd eat those Spanish peanuts, get that salt in your mouth, and order another drink.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I remember the old bathrooms.
Marc:The only thing you missed is we don't do Coke anymore, so you don't need that single occupancy bathroom.
Marc:Those two bathrooms in the hallway were the best Coke bathrooms in town.
Marc:Oh, God, yeah.
Marc:And you have to pay phone right there in case you need to run over to Debbie's.
Marc:So now what is it that, because I know there's still cats from your generation around that are kind of locked out of the club now.
Marc:in a way, and you're the guy that, like, was there, like, you're the one who works.
Marc:You always kill, I'm not begrudging you anything, and you're a great comic, but you are the only one of your generation that can still work at that place.
Marc:Was that in her will or something?
Marc:I have no idea, I have no idea.
Guest:I just know that, here's what happened.
Guest:I read something by Mort Saul in his 1976 book called Heartland, okay?
Guest:And he was talking about how he made it big at the club in San Francisco in the 1950s.
Guest:At the Hungry Eye.
Guest:And he said regarding that, he said he learned something important.
Guest:He said, if I'll just stay in one place and become great, the world will find me.
Guest:And so when I started doing The Tonight Show, there was a serious side to me as well.
Guest:And I was offered 36 sitcoms
Guest:Okay, in 80, 81, and 82.
Guest:36, Mitzi counted them.
Guest:I had holding deal offers from Lord Lou Grade from Matty Simmons at Universal for National Lampoon.
Guest:They were offering me 50, $7,500,000 holding deals, and I turned them all down.
Guest:Frankly, because I wanted to host a talk show, like I finally wound up doing.
Guest:In the basement.
Guest:In the basement, but we're on our way up.
Guest:Thanks for the basement remark.
Guest:It is in the basement.
Guest:Dude, I started in the garage.
Guest:I'm not being condescending.
Guest:Well, I'm debating whether or not to say that's where it all ended for the Romanovs was the basement.
Guest:That's your big last show.
Guest:The last time I stand up to those fucking socialists.
Marc:So that was the plan.
Marc:You were holding out because you wanted to do your talk show.
Guest:Yeah, I was loyal to the Comedy Store, and the Comedy Store was loyal to me through the strike and through this, the other.
Guest:And my payback to the Comedy Store is I write 13 jokes a day for all these newspapers that take my newspaper monologue.
Guest:Still?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I take those 75 jokes a week or whatever it is and pick out the best...
Guest:20 of them, and I use that for my monologue on Argus Hamilton's Comedy Store Tonight, which I'd love for you viewers to check out.
Guest:I really would.
Guest:Argus Hamilton's Comedy Store Tonight.
Guest:I give them that six, seven-minute monologue.
Guest:As you know, we have a great crowd down there.
Guest:Because Marc Maron came, and I'm telling you, he destroyed that crowd, and the acoustics are great down there.
Guest:The basements are made for entertainment.
Guest:You'll have 20 people down there, and the laughter just rocks all over the place.
Guest:And we're going to be moving up
Guest:to the uh belly room in about six to eight weeks when the comedy channel gets launched mitzi very shrewdly trademarked the comedy channel yeah in 1978 or 79 uh-huh hbo tried to buy it from her they bribed her with specials and you know five hundred thousand dollars and she said no they said okay we'll just call it comedy central yeah
Guest:And we kept the trademark.
Guest:And so the Comedy Channel will be launching in about six weeks.
Guest:Streaming.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:It has something to do with Amazon and all this other stuff they're doing.
Guest:But it's going to be a big deal.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:And my show's like the linchpin of it.
Guest:And if we get...
Guest:Comics like you keep coming back if you'll do it.
Guest:And we had Joe Rogan on.
Guest:And then we've got Daryl Hammond next week.
Guest:And the week after that, we've got Bill Burr on.
Guest:Oh, great.
Guest:And so if I can keep guys on like you with followers, real followers, we can generate the following and try to make enough money to pay our freight.
Guest:Yeah, for sure, man.
Guest:Yeah, I'll come down again.
Guest:If you folks have not come to see Mark perform stand-up, I'm telling you, I've never heard a better storyteller.
Marc:Well, thank you so much.
Guest:I mean, who was your hero as a storyteller?
Marc:You know, I don't know how I evolved my style, but the guys I liked when I was younger were, I listened to Richard Pryor a lot.
Marc:I think that first movie really changed my life.
Marc:Did you ever listen to David Steinberg?
Marc:I was never a David Steinberg fan or a Robert Klein fan.
Marc:I was really like, you know, Carlin, Pryor,
Marc:Woody Allen, Cheech and Chong, and then the older guys, Buddy Hackett, Don Rickles.
Marc:I loved early Leno when I used to see him on the talk shows when I was a kid.
Guest:When he was trying.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We all have that time when we're trying.
Marc:But it was sort of a mixture of Pryor and Woody Allen and some of the older guys.
Marc:I used to love Jackie Vernon.
Marc:Oh, I loved him.
Marc:He had a good stick.
Marc:Yeah, he's just deadpan, the slideshow thing.
Guest:Any of the guys that can do deadpan just kill me.
Guest:There's this New York comic named Mark Norman who was on my show last night.
Guest:He can deadpan.
Guest:He just cracked me up.
Guest:He's the one he used to open for Schumer, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Guest:I know that guy, yeah.
Guest:I think that deadpan goes from George Goebel to Tommy Smothers to Steve Martin.
Guest:All these guys that can deadpan just always kill me.
Marc:Jack Benny.
Guest:Jack Benny.
Guest:Oh, the king of it.
Marc:The king of it.
Guest:Yeah, that's where Goebel got it.
Marc:Yeah, I like deadpan guys.
Marc:I like cranks.
Marc:Cranks are always good.
Marc:Yeah, Mark Norman's both.
Guest:He's really funny.
Marc:All right, man.
Marc:Well, you always do a great job, and I'm glad we got to talk finally.
Guest:Well, Mark, it's a pleasure being on your show, man, and I love you and look forward to working with you every weekend you're in town.
Marc:I see you every weekend I'm there.
Marc:All right, thanks for having me on.
Marc:Yeah, buddy.
Marc:Argus Hamilton.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:This was like... We're getting to the bottom of it.
Marc:We're getting a lot of the Comedy Store stories and a lot of the Comedy Store history.
Marc:Look, it still fascinates me.
Marc:So, I'm going to play some guitar.
Marc:I'm going to tell you to go to WTFPod.com for all those...
Marc:Upcoming shows, the Red Cat Theater, the live taping is happening on October 30th.
Marc:I've got San Francisco.
Marc:We've got Nashville.
Marc:We've got Atlanta.
Marc:I've got D.C., Boston, and Philly.
Marc:All those tickets are available at wtfpod.com slash tour.
Marc:There's new swag there.
Marc:I'm excited.
Marc:I didn't do any posters for this tour, and I'm having one done for San Francisco.
Marc:That's exciting.
Marc:And I've got a new recipe that I invented.
Marc:Remind me to tell you about it.
Marc:It's garam masala hash browns made with purple sweet potatoes.
Marc:Enough said.
Marc:I'm going to play with some... I pulled out the gold top.
Marc:And this is the gold top through an ecoplex straight into the 58 Deluxe.
Yeah.
Marc:Boomer lives.