Episode 314 - Kliph Nesteroff
Guest:Lock the gates!
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Pow!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Guest:What's wrong with me?
Guest:It's time for WTF!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:With Marc Maron.
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 fucknicks?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:I don't say things like what the fuck faces, because that doesn't sound good to me, or what the fuck wads.
Marc:That doesn't sound good.
Marc:That doesn't sound like a good thing.
Marc:You know, I don't really say that stuff.
Marc:That's mean.
Marc:Like, what the fuckaholics?
Marc:What the, uh, what the fuckaricans?
Marc:What the fuckaholics?
Marc:I can do all that.
Marc:I just felt like I became Andy Kinwer's impression of me.
Marc:Jesus, relax.
Marc:You don't know what kind of cat owner you are until one of your cat does some fucked up thing and you're worried.
Marc:Pow, justcoffee.coop iced.
Marc:Thank you very much.
Marc:I shit my pants.
Marc:I ran out of breath on that.
Marc:I shit my pants.
Marc:Okay, wait, before I forget this, Michigan, Detroit area.
Marc:I will be at the Magic Bag Theater in Ferndale, Michigan, on September 29th for two shows.
Marc:I believe the website is themagicbag.com, perhaps, or go to wtfpod.com and figure that out.
Marc:Cliff Nesteroff is on the show today.
Marc:Why is Cliff Nesteroff on the show?
Marc:Who is Cliff Nesteroff, do you ask?
Marc:Cliff Nesteroff writes a series of blog posts on the WFMU Beware of the Blog.
Marc:That's where you can find him.
Marc:You can also do a Google search on his name.
Marc:That is Cliff, K-L-I-P-H,
Marc:Nesteroff, N-E-S-T-E-R-O-F-F.
Marc:The reason I love this guy and wanted to talk to him is he writes some of the darkest, seediest, most beautiful pieces on show business, on comedy specifically.
Marc:He does other stuff, but the mob's included and TV's included, but he really gets into the nooks and crannies of the darkness behind old show business, primarily 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, all of it.
Marc:But he's great at it.
Marc:And I was completely enchanted with his writing.
Marc:And when I met him up in Vancouver, I had no idea who this guy is.
Marc:And some of you don't know what I look like, especially the writer.
Marc:You're like, I just pictured this guy, some dude who was probably in his 50s or 60s who had stacks of newspapers and clippings.
Marc:But he's a young dude, used to be a comic, very animated.
Marc:And I was thrilled to meet him.
Marc:And I couldn't wait to get him on the podcast.
Marc:I was extremely excited for...
Marc:Cliff Nesterov.
Marc:Four people come over.
Marc:LaFonda freaks out.
Marc:My cat LaFonda freaks the fuck out, and the door is hooked.
Marc:The screen door is hooked, and she just runs towards the screen door, sticks her head out of it, and wedges, squeezes her whole body, pulling her feet behind her through that little crack.
Marc:And it was like just an explosion of furious cat fear outside the door.
Marc:So now I don't know where the hell she is.
Marc:She goes outside, but I can't find her.
Marc:So now I'm left, Jess and I are left to worry about whether or not she heard herself going out the door.
Marc:I know cats can squeeze through a keyhole if necessary, but still you worry about a cat.
Marc:And that, my friends, is how you know.
Marc:what kind of crazy cat owner you are.
Marc:You can love your cat, you can feed your cat, but as soon as they disappear for any amount of time, shit, I have canceled trips for this cat.
Marc:You know, I can't go.
Marc:Fonda's not inside.
Marc:But it's been a while.
Marc:She's been a little weird about going out there.
Marc:So now we're like parents on edge over here.
Marc:We're sitting around waiting.
Marc:We're about to call the missing cat police.
Marc:I'm not going to make signs.
Marc:It's only been maybe an hour.
Marc:But I freak out.
Marc:And then, like, we both freak out.
Marc:And it's interesting when you're in a couple and you're close and there's love there.
Marc:If you both worry about the same thing, it's amazing how quickly you can make that each other's fault and start yelling at each other.
Marc:Elevate that problem.
Marc:Get away from the practical problem at hand, which is.
Marc:Our cat's gone.
Marc:We're sad and say, fuck you.
Marc:Why did you?
Marc:No, fuck you.
Marc:How come you wait?
Marc:Fuck you.
Marc:And then you've got a new problem.
Marc:So then you can sit there wondering where your cat is and just whether or not this relationship is going to survive.
Marc:That's what you do with problems in a relationship.
Marc:You escalate them to the point where they're personal.
Marc:And then the original problem becomes obscured by the clear problem you're having together.
Marc:So if Fonda doesn't come back soon, I'm thinking Jessica is probably going to leave.
Marc:She says it's funny.
Marc:She's here.
Marc:She's not laughing per se.
Marc:But she approved of that.
Marc:So let's get back to show business real quick and why I...
Marc:I was so excited to have Cliff Nestor off on the show.
Marc:I just did Chelsea lately today.
Marc:It's I don't do that show a lot.
Marc:I've been doing it a little more because I accept the fact now that I'm a comedian and I should do shows that comedians do and do the job that a comedian does.
Marc:I'm proud to be a comedian.
Marc:But there's also some other moment that I have, especially on a TV set or backstage at a show.
Marc:where you're watching somebody else approach the stage, where you watch somebody leave backstage and then go on stage and you're standing on the sidelines and you see the transformation of your peer, in my case, go from like, all right, I'm going on.
Marc:You good?
Marc:Okay, I'm good.
Marc:Are we good?
Marc:All right.
Marc:And then the announcing of the name, please welcome.
Marc:And then boom, they're under the lights.
Marc:And there's something so amazing about just being there
Marc:backstage and watching somebody under the lights doing their job, performing, entertaining, bringing it to the audience.
Marc:And I was at Chelsea today and she runs that place.
Marc:She runs a pretty tight ship over there.
Marc:She's very pleasant.
Marc:She's very professional.
Marc:But like I was watching her, I was sitting at the panel and she came out to do her monologue.
Marc:And just the difference between like, I know that person.
Marc:I was being on backstage with that person.
Marc:And now there they are under the lights.
Marc:The makeup person is fixing their face.
Marc:It's it's exciting.
Marc:And it's my job and it's my life.
Marc:And I've always been fascinated with it.
Marc:But I've also been fascinated with, you know, now that I'm privy to being behind the scenes because I am behind the scenes.
Marc:is that when I was younger, I always was fascinated with the older actors, with black and white photographs of people, black and white movies, watching old TV shows on Channel 11 in New York, the Dead End Boys or the Bowery Boys and Alfalfa and the Gang and the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy and all that.
Marc:I was just fascinated with these old guys.
Marc:I knew they were probably dead or old.
Marc:And you remember that first time where you watch Laurel and Hardy as a kid and then you see a picture of Laurel and Hardy when they're in their 70s and you're like, what?
Marc:Why?
Marc:That's so scary.
Marc:But they're people and they're people with lives and there's something sorted about black and white and there's something sorted about, you know, the scandal.
Marc:When I was young and in my room, I got some magazine, a tabloid magazine that all these pictures of Fatty Arbuckle and Jane Mansfield and all the scandals from the great era of Hollywood.
Marc:I cut out all the pictures and I surrounded my bed with them.
Marc:Not even really having a context with them.
Marc:I was enchanted by the darkness that was just, I knew, just pulsating behind black and white images.
Marc:So somewhere in my head, I began to feel like there were these mythic personalities that had these mythic dark capabilities.
Marc:I don't even know how to explain it.
Marc:There was a seediness to it.
Marc:And now I'm part of show business and I love it.
Marc:I'm actually part of show business.
Marc:And I'm excited because now some of that myth has been broken down a little bit, but not much.
Marc:I still am very starstruck and excited.
Marc:I'm very excited when people listen to my show or they respect what I'm doing, especially if they're movie stars.
Marc:I'm not a star fucker, but I got to be honest with you, it's flattering.
Marc:I went to a screening of Judd Apatow's new film.
Marc:This is 40, it's called.
Marc:And I was asking Judd through email if he wanted to do a little cameo on my show.
Marc:And then he shot back an email saying, I'd like you to come to this screening at the Soho Club.
Marc:So I, of course, said, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Marc:And it was a very small gathering of a very eclectic bunch of people that were pretty famous.
Marc:And I never really know how to behave in that in those situations.
Marc:I mean, it was a very interesting crew was Pee Wee Herman, Andy Samberg, Jon Favreau, Elizabeth Banks, Andy Dick, Phil Rosenthal, who's been on the show.
Marc:Was there is a very interesting and this happens in Hollywood a lot is that, you know, you see strange groups of celebrities, you know, just strange in the grouping of them where you like.
Marc:But then you realize this is their business.
Marc:These are these are business fellow.
Marc:They're co-workers, for God's sakes.
Marc:But I was pretty excited to be there.
Marc:I was pretty excited that Elizabeth Banks wanted to be on my show.
Marc:I was pretty excited to meet Jon Favreau because I'd never met him before, and he's a very nice guy.
Marc:Oh, Diane Cannon was there.
Marc:It's very interesting.
Marc:But as strange as it is to me, I would never have been invited to something like that in the past, but now...
Marc:I kind of stifle my starstruckness with a certain, you know, I don't know if it's confidence, but like, I guess I'm part of this now.
Marc:Finally, I'm in show business.
Marc:The movie was interesting because, you know, Judd basically made an autobiographical movie with his wife and his children and a guy playing him.
Marc:That takes some big balls to do that, to watch another man make out with your wife and parent your children on screen for two hours.
Marc:And some of it was very revealing.
Marc:There were some funny moments.
Marc:There were some touching moments.
Marc:There were some uncomfortable moments.
Marc:But it's a very personal movie.
Marc:And I think I was sitting right next to Apatow.
Marc:So the pressure was on.
Marc:I opened up my laugh gasket and let it happen.
Marc:I didn't stifle any laughs.
Marc:wanted to be encouraging see that's the interesting thing that's happened now i i hope i don't lose my ability to be cynical and critical uh you know knowing people now you know because you know the movie is one thing but you know i know judd spent a lot of time on it and this is a very personal movie for him and on some level as a friend i'm thinking like why i hope this goes well for judd there was a lot of things i could relate to and apparently
Marc:A lot of people with kids because I was walking out and I said to a couple of people, I said that was pretty good.
Marc:And John Favreau was like, I'm living it.
Marc:I'm living it.
Marc:But I guess I'm admitting that I love show business.
Marc:Is that OK?
Marc:Is that OK?
Marc:I love show business.
Marc:Can I say that?
Marc:I like Chelsea Handler.
Marc:I love show business.
Marc:I was flattered to be invited.
Marc:I guess that's it.
Marc:Maybe I'm evolving out of the darkness, but that's the other thing.
Marc:And my girlfriend is too.
Marc:Extremely fascinated with the dark nooks and crannies of celebrity culture.
Marc:And that's why we're going to talk to Cliff Nesterov.
Marc:Now let's get dark.
Marc:Let's get seedy.
Marc:Let's get into a conversation with Cliff Nesterov.
Marc:Please go read his stuff.
Marc:It's awesome.
Marc:Cliff Nesterhoff.
Marc:Nesterhoff.
Guest:Nesterhoff, no H. No H. Yeah, but I kind of like that aggressive pronunciation.
Marc:Hoff.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So, look, man, I don't know anything about you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I read your pieces on the WFMU, what is it, Return of the Blog, or what the monster, what is it called?
Guest:I just say WFMU because I hate using the word blog in connection with myself.
Marc:But there's a name to it.
Marc:Aware of the blog.
Marc:Aware of the blog, this weird corner of the world where you decide to publish some of the most gritty and insightful pieces
Marc:on the guts of old comedy.
Marc:And then I meet you in Vancouver.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you're all lit up.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And how old are you?
Marc:I'm 32 now.
Marc:Well, you're 32, but I wanted you to do the live one, but you were like, no, these Vancouver guys will get mad at me because you're a comic.
Marc:Are you still a comic?
Guest:No, I haven't been a comic for six years.
Guest:I quit doing stand-up.
Guest:I feel like I kind of peaked.
Guest:Maybe that's not true.
Guest:I didn't do it that long.
Guest:I did it for seven and a half years.
Guest:I really feel like you got to do it at least 10 to really be a comic.
Guest:Why'd you quit?
Guest:I think I kind of went as far as I could in Vancouver.
Guest:It was either that or move.
Guest:And I didn't really feel like moving to do stand-up.
Guest:I kind of got sick of doing very similar shows or the same venues every week and seeing the same people.
Guest:And I love seeing the comics that I love.
Guest:But when you do stand-up, you also got to see the comics that you hate.
Guest:and listen to them and deal with them and i didn't care for that it was just not enjoyable and then on the got no tolerance for uh for the sadness of it well that and then on the nights that i wasn't doing stand-up and that wasn't very often my god i enjoyed it so much not doing stand-up i was like this is like real people they're walking around at 8 p.m yeah instead of waiting in an empty dark room for an audience to show up
Guest:So you didn't have it in you?
Guest:I didn't have it in me.
Guest:I mean, in 2003, 4, and 5 in Vancouver, my stand-up act was, by regional estimations, very successful.
Guest:What kind of bits do you do?
Guest:What was your thing?
Guest:I had two acts.
Guest:One, which was just straight stand-up as myself, which wasn't successful.
Guest:This is probably one of the reasons I quit.
Guest:When I was being earnest and acting my own persona, it wasn't so hot.
Guest:I also had a very gimmicky act where I did a character, which was kind of dark.
Guest:It was sort of like my id.
Guest:It was a real angry comic, which I wasn't, but I would do it as a character and make fun of all the things that I hated, including some of those comics that I didn't care for.
Guest:And it was wildly successful.
Guest:The audience loved it.
Marc:What was the name of the character?
Marc:Shecky Gray.
Marc:Shecky Gray.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it became really, really popular and didn't really deserve to be so popular.
Guest:But one of the classic gimmicks in stand-up, which is almost always successful, is guys who talk loud and fast.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Whether they're funny or not.
Guest:If they're funny, then they're even more successful when they talk loud and fast.
Marc:You have found that from your research in clubs and in general?
Guest:I found that from my own act because I would do very similar material in my own persona in a measured pace and people fucking hated it.
Guest:I go, you assholes.
Guest:This is the same brain where that other shit that you're laughing at comes from.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was delivered in such a fast, loud, hostile way that people just cheered for it.
Guest:You don't feel like you're a hostile person.
Guest:uh not as my general persona but i'm sure like when i was doing that character i would get off stage and apologize to certain people maybe if the emcee was a real hack i'd say hey sorry about uh what i said you know it's all just an act he go yeah i know yeah it is all just an act but it was all in my subconscious what i would have normally wanted to say but would never actually cross that line did you find yourself alienating those other comics where they're like yeah he says it's just an act but that guy's a fucking asshole
Guest:uh maybe maybe i would i would try and diffuse it by saying oh my character's an asshole my character doesn't even like me he thinks i'm a hack and they'd be like oh yeah yeah i don't know they think you're just crazy i don't know like the act became quite successful and i think rather than uh hate me which i'm sure people did there was a modest amount of ass kissing because of that degree like a little bit of a deferment yeah um whether that was you know whatever a comic's motivations are for that
Marc:Rickles used to apologize to people after a show.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And my grandmother said he apologized very nicely to the people after the show.
Marc:But I didn't care for him, she'd say.
Marc:Shecky Green she liked.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, I've read, I think the first piece I read of yours was probably that Shecky Green piece.
Marc:And now you walk in, you're all upset.
Marc:You just got a call from Jack Carter.
Guest:Yeah, minutes ago, yeah.
Marc:What are you doing with Jack Carter?
Guest:So why?
Guest:Well, for the past couple of years, I've been interviewing old comedians, generally speaking, as a background for the articles that I write.
Guest:You know, I glean information and stories from them and weave a narrative in an article I write.
Guest:But I also transcribe these interviews and post them verbatim just for the sake of interest.
Marc:On the WFMU.
Guest:On my own site called Classic Television Showbiz.
Guest:It has a much smaller audience, but it's just real comedy nerds like reading these verbatim conversations with old comics.
Marc:Old-timey comedy nerds.
Marc:I mean, that's a rare thing.
Marc:It's still my belief that even the piece you wrote on Joe Ansis and Jack Roy was something that I didn't realize.
Marc:I found that in that piece...
Marc:That there was sort of a recalibration that needed to be done about the roots of modern standup.
Marc:Now, I don't know if you had that intention, but, you know, in talking about, you know, Jack Roy, who became Rodney Dangerfield and Joe Ansis, who was reputed to be the guts of Lenny Bruce intellectually.
Marc:that because they were selling jokes and because Rodney had quit the business and wasn't his own thing, that if the amount of jokes that they did sell was true, then they're sort of responsible for a lot more than we think.
Marc:And it puts Rodney in a whole new light for me.
Marc:So these articles that you write are well-researched, but the comedy nerddom, like I'm that kind of comedy nerd, but I don't know if what you would call the new comedy nerds give a shit about this stuff.
Guest:It seems like everybody that does stand-up at least has some kind of affinity for the comedy they watched when they grew up, whatever that might be.
Guest:So they have some kind of historical context.
Guest:I can't really gauge what kind of age group or who is more into a certain era than others.
Guest:Uh, but I do like to, I love it when I do discover something that breaks the mold of what has always been believed, you know, and Lenny Bruce is considered a God, even by people like, um, when Tracy Morgan went on Letterman and was kind of apologizing for his, his rant, he said, I'm in the tradition of Lenny Bruce, you know, I'm his truth teller.
Guest:And I was just like,
Guest:I don't think he's ever really paid attention to Lenny Bruce.
Guest:And even that being said, our record of Lenny Bruce, literally the records, don't give you a good indication of what he really sounded like.
Guest:And then that performance film of his is at the end of his career.
Guest:So we really listening to him or watching him, it doesn't seem as great as this myth has been made.
Marc:Well, it takes a while.
Marc:a contextualization.
Marc:Even as somebody who would throw that word around when I was younger, you've really got to look at the historical context and you've got to see why what he was doing was so provocative.
Marc:And then later, the information about him literally being made an enemy by the old boys network of judges previous to him becoming controversial, that plays into it too.
Guest:I had no idea about that shit.
Guest:Something I find fascinating, and I haven't written about this yet, and I want to,
Guest:Because certain myths just get passed on as fact over the years and then we all believe them and you start investigating, you find them contradicted.
Guest:I discovered a couple of comics that were busted for their language and their profanity on stage before Lenny Bruce.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we all think of him as being the martyr and I'm not taking that away from him at all because what he spoke about was definitely more culturally significant and did take certain topics on that these other comics that got busted profanity didn't.
Marc:Well, not unlike, I think, whatever has become alt-comedy.
Marc:Once comedy aligns itself culturally with music and a sort of youth trend, like I think the guy you're talking about was just filthy, right?
Guest:As far as I know, yeah.
Marc:And he got busted on just sort of community standards thing.
Marc:But I think that Lenny became a real threat because there was an entire shift, that sort of, what is it, just post-Eisenhower beatnik thing
Marc:thing, pre-hippie, that once the youth becomes unpredictable, the forces that run society get nervous.
Guest:Well, certainly.
Guest:So I would never take that away from him.
Guest:But the martyrism that people usually speak of in Lenny, they talk about the language.
Guest:And they say the whole reason we can say what we want on stage is because of Lenny Bruce.
Guest:And that's only partially true.
Guest:It's part of an entire cultural movement that he was part of with many others.
Guest:The guy that I'm thinking of whose name I can't even remember because I haven't written the article yet.
Guest:I just found a couple variety blurbs on him.
Guest:He went to prison.
Guest:He was a comedian that was imprisoned for five months.
Guest:What did he say?
Guest:Well, they didn't print it in the variety.
Guest:They just said profane language or lascivious material.
Marc:This is the 40s.
Marc:You've got all the varieties?
Marc:I mean, how far do your varieties go back to?
Marc:Are you...
Guest:I subscribe to a service online, which is not cheap, where you can access all the old variety.
Guest:But it's not through Variety?
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Guest:It's from 1908 to the present day, but I actually put a fun drive on my website simply to subscribe to Variety.
Guest:Variety Ultimate is the archive.
Guest:And that's where you start?
Guest:Generally, because it's the best resource.
Guest:But that stuff that I found out about that guy who went to jail, I found out by accident.
Guest:I was researching something else, and I saw that headline in the corner, and I was like, hello, what's this?
Guest:That's the same way I found out about that comedian whose wife was murdered by the mob, Alan Drake, because I found a headline that said, comedian's wife murdered in mob hit.
Marc:And I was like, my God.
Marc:Well, that's a great story.
Marc:Let's come back around to that.
Marc:Let's get back to Jack Carter.
Marc:So you're dealing one-on-one with Jack Carter.
Marc:So you interview these guys.
Marc:You put the transcripts up.
Marc:You know, obviously, there's something that... Are you Jewish?
Marc:No.
Marc:Carl Reiner thinks I am.
Marc:Well, then you are.
Marc:I guess.
Marc:He's the decider.
Marc:I thought so, yeah.
Marc:But, all right, so you're working with Jack Carter.
Marc:Now, what was the problem?
Guest:Well, I started interviewing him last April.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, he was always a ubiquitous guy on TV.
Marc:All I know him from is like what, Hollywood Squares or Match Game?
Marc:Both.
Marc:Like in television shows.
Marc:He was already old by the time I was a kid, but he was a Borscht Belt original, really.
Guest:He was a hokey guy in like a Milton Berle, Maury Amsterdam style.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I would watch him on old TV shows, and I was like, there he is again.
Guest:Oh, and here's an episode of The Odd Couple.
Guest:There's Jack Carter.
Marc:But he's a second stringer.
Marc:Even among those guys, like Freddie Roman, Jan Murray.
Marc:He wasn't milty.
Marc:There was four or five of those Borscht Belt guys that really became to national prominence in the early days of television.
Marc:But there was dozens of second stringers.
Guest:Well, Jack Carter, to be candid, I never really cared for.
Guest:But I found him fascinating because he was on every fucking show.
Guest:And I was like, he keeps popping up.
Guest:And it was the same kind of hokey act where he'd stick his tongue out and cross his eyes and go, oh!
Guest:And wouldn't shut up.
Guest:Any game show he was on, he's tearing up the cards.
Guest:He's causing havoc.
Guest:And so I got a line on him.
Guest:I tracked him down.
Guest:I decided, let's interview him.
Guest:And there was a girth of history to him I didn't know about.
Guest:He started doing stand-up in 1941.
Guest:He had one of the first TV shows ever.
Guest:Really?
Guest:1948.
Guest:He was the host of Cavalcade of Stars, which Jackie Gleason took over.
Guest:Because NBC courted Jack Carter and gave him the Jack Carter show Saturday nights, 8 p.m.
Guest:on NBC for an hour.
Guest:That's big.
Guest:It was the lead into your show of shows for Sid Caesar.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But nobody remembers it.
Guest:And Jack, to this day, is bitter about this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he felt like he was railroaded.
Guest:By who?
Guest:He goes, Sid Caesar, he was the darling, the critic's darling.
Guest:And I was treated like crap.
Guest:I was treated like crap.
Guest:Max Liebman said he can't be doing ballet shit.
Guest:That's our shit.
Guest:So to this day, he gets angry.
Guest:That Max Liebman shit still pisses me off.
Guest:Really?
Guest:So that was in April.
Guest:I did these interviews and they were transcripts for the internet and background for the material.
Guest:And he knew that.
Guest:I said, you know, this is for the internet.
Guest:I interviewed him several times because he had so much material.
Guest:He was the first guy to host a roast on TV.
Guest:The first guy to host a Tony Awards on TV.
Guest:He guest hosted The Tonight Show in the interim between Jack Parr and Johnny Carson.
Guest:Jack Parr left.
Guest:They hadn't brought Johnny Carson on yet.
Guest:There was six months in there where they had guest hosts.
Guest:And he did it?
Guest:He did it for a month.
Guest:Nobody remembers this stuff, and so he's really mad.
Guest:Nobody knows this.
Guest:So he sees you as his vessel for relevance.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So after about five interviews last September, he said, everybody's got a fucking book.
Guest:Dick Van Dyke's got a fucking book.
Guest:Betty White's got 12.
Guest:Who's this bitch?
Guest:Handler?
Guest:Writing shit books about vodka?
Guest:Bestseller?
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:Jeff Ross, King of Roasts?
Guest:King of roasts?
Guest:This two-bit comic's been in show business for three seconds.
Guest:He's king of roasts?
Guest:I did more roasts.
Guest:He just really steamed.
Guest:So he goes, you know a lot about me.
Guest:Maybe you should write my book.
Guest:I said, sure, I'd love to.
Guest:This is fun.
Marc:That sounds fun.
Yeah.
Guest:So we decided I'll ghostwrite his book.
Guest:So we started doing that in September.
Guest:And that was the whole point.
Guest:Well, Jack is almost 90 years old.
Guest:Just one month ago, his wife showed him something on the Internet, which was a transcript of our interview on my site, Classic Television Showbiz.
Guest:And Jack Carter phoned me and he goes, Cliff, I got a bone to pick with you.
Guest:I said, yeah, what's up, Jack?
Guest:He goes, my wife is on the computer.
Guest:She says, oh, look at this.
Guest:And there on the computer is every fucking word I ever said to you.
Guest:It's going to hurt the book.
Guest:I don't know who you sold this to.
Guest:You're making money off of me.
Guest:I didn't sell it to anybody.
Guest:It's my site.
Guest:It's on the internet.
Guest:It's your site?
Guest:Then how did it get on her computer?
Marc:No.
Guest:Have you ever tried to describe the internet to a 90-year-old?
Marc:Oh, God, yeah.
Marc:Well, that comes back around to the Shecky Green thing, too.
Marc:All right, so, okay, so what happened after that?
Guest:So I got him a gig in Boston, actually.
Guest:I didn't tell him.
Guest:I just recommended him, and he got the gig.
Guest:For what?
Guest:He still works?
Guest:Sort of.
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:He's burned so many bridges in the last five decades that he's almost persona non grata.
Guest:He does some TV.
Marc:But I got to imagine that the bridges he burned were built by people that aren't even alive anymore.
Marc:I mean, it's got to be relative to-
Guest:what what guy who's he gonna play to he can play to the synagogues this is how far reaching his bad rep got that in 2012 guys from 50 years ago are telling people don't book him don't book you serious yes i'm serious so this guy emailed me from boston he goes i contacted the friars club because we're it's like for old people this show and we want some old comedians and i wanted jack carter and the friars club said no no no you don't want jack carter you don't want jack carter
Guest:So this guy emailed me and he said, I just wanted your opinion.
Guest:I said, oh, Jack would love to do it.
Guest:He'd be great.
Guest:He's got an incredible memory.
Guest:He can just rattle off these old jokes like nothing.
Guest:And he's been in show business for 70 years.
Guest:So when the light goes on, like he turns on.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He can do it even though he's frail and, you know.
Guest:So he did the gig and it went well.
Guest:And then he called me or I called him the other day and he goes, I did that show in Boston.
Guest:Do you know this guy?
Guest:He mentioned your name.
Guest:I go, no, I never met him.
Guest:But he says nobody wanted to book me.
Guest:And then he said that you said he should.
Guest:I go, yeah, that's right.
Guest:And then all of a sudden Jack just was like, oh, well, you should come over for lunch tomorrow.
Guest:What's going on with you?
Guest:Let's talk.
Guest:Went over to his house and stuff like that.
Guest:And we had a good talk the other day at his house.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:Five minutes before I got here to your garage, we were driving up and my phone rang and there was a question mark on the phone, you know, like don't know the number.
Guest:I thought maybe it was your assistant because it was like five minutes before I had to be here.
Guest:And it's Jack Carter.
Guest:He goes, Cliff, I got a bone to pick with you again.
Guest:I go, what's wrong?
Guest:He goes...
Guest:I was at somebody's house last night.
Guest:All the laptops come out and people will look up Jack Carter and they say, look at this.
Guest:Oh, look, you called this person a scumbag.
Guest:You called this person a garbage pail.
Guest:You'll say anything, Jack Carter.
Guest:I was a laughingstock.
Guest:They were all laughing at me.
Guest:And he gets worked up like a snowball down.
Guest:He'll go, I don't know who you're selling this to.
Guest:You make it me.
Guest:There are people who have libel suits.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he just went crazy.
Guest:Just now.
Guest:Just now.
Guest:And to the end, I was supposed to go to his house tomorrow to keep working on the book.
Guest:He goes, we're through.
Guest:We're through.
Guest:You and me, we're through.
Guest:And he hung up.
Marc:So you're not now you don't have any reason to be down here.
Marc:Well, except to do this, which I appreciate.
Guest:Well, I appreciate it, too.
Marc:Well, it's very funny that, you know, that now now is that the the voice you're mustering up?
Marc:Does that is that anything like the character you used to do?
Guest:Yeah, a little bit too much.
Guest:I don't think this sounds anything like Jack Carter.
Guest:It does sound just like my character.
Marc:But ironically... No, but that is, in some weird kind of poetic channeling, it is the tone of Semitic fury that runs through what I would imagine to be the hearts of these guys that feel jilted by history.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now...
Marc:And that's, I mean, that's what I saw in the dressing room of Vancouver.
Marc:Like, I'd never met you before.
Marc:I didn't know what you look like.
Marc:I had no idea.
Marc:We had one email exchange about a Shecky Green issue.
Marc:And when you showed up, I'm like, this guy?
Marc:Who's this guy?
Marc:And then I'm talking to you, and all of a sudden, that fucking thing comes out of your mouth.
Marc:That voice.
Marc:And I'm like, that is the Semitic momentum of bitterness and shattered narcissism.
Marc:That I think runs through a lot of these guys, runs through me, it runs through, I mean, a lot of entertainers, but there's something specifically Jewish about it.
Marc:But I, just to tell my story so you know, I mean, I'd reached out to Shecky Green.
Marc:Now, there's part of me that you're going to have to give me some, you're going to have to facilitate some context for me.
Marc:There's a couple of guys, and we'll go over that.
Marc:I mean, I'd like to talk to Shelly Berman.
Marc:What about Newhart?
Guest:I think Newhart would do it.
Guest:I don't have a direct line with him.
Marc:Have you talked to him?
Guest:No, I've talked to his assistant, but, you know, he usually does interviews when he's, like, he does those fucking radio interviews when he's doing it some city.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, he goes into St.
Guest:Louis, he does the morning show.
Marc:Well, I think not unlike you, it's hard to get them to understand what the interview is for.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the Shecky Green thing was funny, because I wanted to do Shecky Green, I wanted to interview him, because my grandmother loved him, said he was great, and I'd heard that.
Marc:I'd never really seen, there's no real footage of him doing what he's known for, which was improvising.
Marc:And I think that your article on him puts him into context in a way that I'd never really thought of, that the transition from the main room show to the lounge show is an interesting thing.
Marc:And that on some level, not unlike the Jack Roy piece, what you're basically saying through your journalism is that he almost, I would say, not just invented things,
Marc:free association improvisation or riffing with an audience.
Marc:But I think because of the nature of them building these lounges and then having these entertainers in there before there were even stages in there on some level, like that's what the modern standup club really is.
Marc:Right.
Marc:is that whatever was going on in the lounges of Vegas, because it was cheaper to do, and they realized they had another room where they could drag people in, that's easier to get them back out to the casino, in and out of the casino, and maybe stay in the house, was really the beginning of a stand-up club.
Guest:Well, the lounge in Vegas...
Guest:initially you know it was thought well it's not such a big deal so we'll just throw somebody like Shecky Green up there or Don Rickles and they themselves felt it wasn't as big of a deal as a showroom so they had that freedom to say fuck it I'm not going to do this material I've prepared I'll just do whatever Don Rickles will just start berating people and it ends up being extremely successful and same with Shecky Green and that became what they were known for until it was in demand in main rooms but it was really because it was a low pressure environment a lot like an intimate
Guest:Yeah, and sort of like that alternative comedy concept of the early 90s.
Guest:Suddenly we're in a more low-pressure environment.
Guest:We can try things out.
Guest:This audience is kind of comfortable with that.
Guest:And we have a seed now of something that becomes something greater and organically builds into a legitimate act.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it was born in a lower-pressure environment.
Marc:Yeah, but also the experience of being in the audience of one of those lounge shows when things are happening in real time and in the moment, those have got to be the best shows.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:you know so well okay so I uh I called I called Shecky before I even read your thing on him and I didn't call him what happened was I found his website it looked like nobody maintained that thing so I'm like what are the odds I'm going to send an email to anybody so I send this email two weeks later I get an email back says Shecky Green's interested this is his phone number don't give it to anyone
Marc:There's a threat there that you don't want Shecky Green's phone number to get out there.
Marc:So I kind of put it on hold and I didn't call him back because I had this whole idea that I was going to drive out there as sort of a pilgrimage to talk to Shecky Green.
Marc:And then I read your article and I'm like, oh shit, that reminds me.
Marc:I got to get in touch with Shecky Green.
Marc:So I call that number and I go, Shecky Green, it's Marc Maron.
Marc:I'd gotten in touch with you a few months ago about an interview for my podcast, my radio show.
Marc:It goes, did you do that interview on me?
Marc:I'm like, no.
Marc:He goes, the one that the interview.
Marc:Are you the asshole?
Marc:You know, like that.
Marc:And I'm like, but just because I'd read your interview and I'd never met you before.
Marc:I'm like, no, but I think I know who did it.
Marc:That fucking guy.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Why do you say those things about me?
Marc:Where do you get that stuff?
Marc:Where do you get that stuff?
Marc:I'm like, what are you talking about?
Marc:He didn't even talk about the charities.
Marc:You know, and I don't know what.
Marc:I don't know what he's talking about.
Marc:So then I get in touch with you just through the email off the site.
Marc:And I go, I just talked to Shecky Green.
Marc:He wants to know where you got this stuff.
Guest:And you said, Shecky told it to me.
Guest:It was just his quotes verbatim in this article.
Marc:But that's the funny thing is that, like, see, there's a conditional relevance they want is that, you know, he's been known for years as this guy who was a drunk.
Marc:He was a depressive.
Marc:He drove his car into Caesars.
Marc:He's responsible for that.
Marc:The amazing Sinatra joke.
Marc:That is probably one of the best jokes ever written.
Marc:Wait, can you do it perfectly?
Guest:I can't do it perfectly because it's one of those things that over the years there's different phrases for the punchline, but essentially he was beat up by Frank Sinatra.
Marc:Well, no, the joke is Frank Sinatra saved my life.
Marc:He said, all right, that's enough, boys.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:So, you know, I mean, that's great.
Marc:And you brought up this thing with a gun and Buddy Hackett and Reefer and everything else, but in the big picture...
Marc:It's not that that wasn't him or that he's saying it wasn't him, but it's like he he doesn't understand the the why would anyone want to be known for that?
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, like in his generation, it's like that's the shit that I tried to fix.
Marc:I mean, he's probably in his mind been trying for years.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:To put that behind him.
Marc:Yet that was what's really interesting about his life.
Marc:And so all he really wanted from you was for you to talk about the charity's.
Guest:Well, that being said, that article that I wrote about Shecky Green, it's the most substantial thing that's ever been written about Shecky Green.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And before I started writing it and researching it and talking to him, all I knew about Shecky Green really was that the name Shecky is associated with comedy more than any other first name in history to the extent that it's just a first name.
Marc:This was after you had named your character that?
Guest:Yeah, I just named my character that for the same reason anybody uses the word Shecky.
Guest:They think of it like Henny Youngman, take my wife, please.
Guest:They associate it with some shitty hokey comic from the 50s without having any context for it, and I didn't either.
Guest:Although, ironically, I've learned that my character was pretty close to the real Shecky Green and the real Jack Carter, just totally by accident.
Guest:But Shecky Green, that's basically the introduction of the article.
Guest:It's like people hear the word Shecky and they think of an old-timey, hacky comedian.
Guest:The reality is something much different.
Guest:He's not that.
Guest:He was a very inventive, original comedian.
Guest:And for that time, he was one of the most outrageous original comics there was.
Marc:But it's interesting that he's one of those guys, unlike Shelley Berman or John Winters or Newhart or Jackie Mason or any of them of that time, Mort Sahl and even Lenny Bruce, that for some reason, he didn't have his shit together enough to have anybody capture his genius in any real way.
Marc:I mean, you try to look stuff up.
Marc:He's made appearances on the Dean Martin Show.
Marc:He's made appearances on roasts.
Marc:But to really think about the sweat and the intensity of a guy doing an hour plus, two hour improvisational rant fest
Marc:or just working with an audience in the moment, that so much of that stuff is uncapturable.
Marc:But he must have not had his shit together to such a degree that he didn't even think to record it.
Marc:I mean, I think there's a record or two, but I don't know if it's captured.
Guest:He himself would admit that he never translated well to television.
Guest:He never translated well to records.
Guest:And...
Guest:I've asked other old comedians, why do you think that is?
Guest:And they said, you just couldn't capture it.
Guest:It took 20 minutes for him to just warm up.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And every show was different.
Guest:And every show would be long.
Guest:It would go from 60 to 90, sometimes two hours.
Guest:And it was a real inside show.
Guest:They would throw him on stage.
Guest:Really, the big shows were at 2 in the morning.
Guest:All the other comedians and singers had finished their last show of the night in Vegas.
Guest:And everybody would go see Shecky.
Guest:And a lot of civilians couldn't get into the show because it was all the show people wanted to see him.
Guest:And it was a different show every time.
Guest:And when I asked old guys, I was like, well, what do you remember of his act?
Guest:Like, I can't explain it to you.
Guest:It's in the ether of the air.
Guest:It was just, it was different every time.
Guest:It was loud.
Guest:It was inventive.
Guest:He was just naturally funny.
Guest:The way some comics are funnier in conversation than on stage.
Marc:But there are certain comics, it's rare, but that live for that.
Marc:And they're usually aware of it, that they're doing something that is real, it's raw, it happens in the moment, and after it's done, it's gone.
Marc:Richard Lewis is now like that.
Marc:There are people that will, you know, they don't know exactly what they're going to do, but when they do it, that makes it all worthwhile.
Marc:It's not even a matter of like, you know, I should have recorded that or anything else.
Marc:Is that to be in that moment and to transcend reality in that present is what they're after.
Marc:And Richard does that now.
Marc:I mean, you know, Richard is out there, you know.
Marc:pounding the pavement in comedy clubs because he fucking loves it.
Marc:And he thinks that's his legacy that, you know, I'm the real deal and, and I'm, I'm working better now than I ever have.
Marc:And I'm completely open.
Guest:I mean, I don't mean to be hokey about it, but that's standup in its purest form.
Guest:I agree with you.
Guest:And, uh, but it's not the greatest, you know, it depends what you want.
Guest:That's not the greatest for mass.
Marc:So why don't you explain that to me?
Marc:You know what you mean by standup in its purest form.
Guest:Well, I mean, it's a live medium.
Guest:That's what it is.
Guest:I have many, many friends who are very funny, strong stand-up comics.
Guest:And then they do a comedy special.
Guest:And I know people that don't know them see the special and say, that guy's not funny.
Marc:And then you got to go, well, you got to see him live.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah, I've been living with that reality for my entire fucking life.
Guest:But the best analogy I can give it is if you've ever seen somebody videotape a play, a Broadway play, and they show a clip on the news.
Guest:Tonight, it's opening, and you look at it.
Guest:It looks like the shittiest, hokiest thing.
Guest:But if you were to see this play live, it might be riveting.
Guest:You just can't film it and make it look or sound effective.
Marc:Yeah, because what happens in a stand-up performance if the entertainer or the performer is open is that the relationship between the audience...
Marc:the room the comic that it becomes an organic body and that you know what what you're feeling is something you know visceral yeah it's very very difficult to explain that to anybody that hasn't done stand-up because it's such an inside thing uh and also stand-ups very disposable people see it on tv and and you have a tv medium you have a situation comedies you have television you have everything that's driven by jokes and i've been saying this a lot lately any idiot can write jokes
Marc:Anybody can write a joke.
Marc:And really, you know, a good 75 percent of any of those idiots can do them on stage and have some effect.
Marc:But, you know, what what what differentiates them from a stand up comic is is how much of their heart and their their self is invested in it.
Guest:Well, think about how many comics evolve organically.
Guest:Guys who start off funny and could be great for seven, eight years, I find that the height of their art is when they just unleash.
Guest:They get so comfortable on stage after 15 years that suddenly something snaps and they become much more honest than they used to be.
Guest:That to me is like pure comedy.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:It's pure art.
Marc:I'm with you on that.
Marc:So what was the moment where you became, because I have this sort of dark obsession that your stuff speaks directly to some sense of, I can't even call it nostalgia, but there's something fascinating about the eras that you write about, which I would say was probably from, you know, what, 1940 to 1970?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That, you know, that that that was that weird evolution of show business from what was legitimate kind of show people to sort of what happened once the the culture changed dramatically.
Marc:And that group of show people and show business tried to evolve with it and it got kind of messy and interesting.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Well, one thing that Gerald Nachman in his book, Seriously Funny, I think most people have read that are into comedy, The Rebel Comedians of the 50s and 60s, his thesis is that in the 50s, guys like Mort Saul and Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Jonathan Winters transformed
Guest:stand-up comedy from being the kind of comedy where a vaudevillian or a Catskill guy would memorize a joke book and do stand-up to this new breed of guys that wrote their own material and did it from sort of an intellectual perspective.
Marc:Sort of like the auteur theory in France, right?
Guest:His theory isn't flawed, but what he doesn't say is that now there was these two worlds that actually existed together.
Guest:Parallel.
Marc:Comedians and stand-ups.
Guest:It wasn't like one ended and another one started.
Guest:Shecky Green and Shelley Berman are the exact same age.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So they were still performing alongside each other, doing a lot of the same clubs.
Guest:And then guys like Bob Newhart would get booked into a place like Vegas, and it didn't fly so well.
Guest:The audience wasn't adjusted to this kind of comedy.
Marc:Because it wasn't general.
Guest:Yeah, it was just different.
Guest:It was just different.
Guest:In fact, I heard a great anecdote about the night that Bob Newhart did his first Ed Sullivan shot.
Guest:A bunch of comics were around TV in the Friars Club watching it.
Guest:And Bob Newhart spent 90 seconds setting up his first bit.
Guest:And these Friars guys were losing it.
Guest:They're like, this kid is going down in flames.
Guest:He's bombing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:90 seconds without a laugh.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I can't even watch it.
Guest:And Bob Newhart brings down the house with the last four minutes, you know, setting up this routine.
Guest:And these guys, when this spot finished, they were silent.
Marc:They didn't know what to make of it.
Marc:Well, they come from the old rule, you need to laugh every 30 seconds.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or quicker.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When I did the Chevy Chase roast, Freddie Roman actually said, you know, because I tanked.
Marc:And, you know, they were able to pull it together with a little sweetening and a little cutting.
Marc:But like I was, they interviewed me in The Observer.
Marc:And I, you know, because I made a choice.
Marc:You know, I made the choice to acknowledge that I was tanking.
Marc:And Freddie Roman's like, you never do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I read that article.
Guest:It was horrific.
Guest:Whoever wrote that... But that's what I mean.
Guest:The guy who wrote that Observer article obviously has never done stand-up in his life.
Guest:And he was on the side of Freddie Roman saying, these guys do know how to do stand-up.
Guest:And these other guys... It's not that simple, you schlub.
Marc:No.
Marc:I mean, the choice to get the laugh no matter what was the choice I made.
Marc:And it wasn't pandering.
Marc:It was really self-deprecating.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But...
Marc:But what was the moment where you're like, you know, what sparked your interest in this particular portal into this darkness?
Marc:I mean, there must have been, like, I understand you had this Shecky moment.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But what was the moment where you're like, like, I remember I met Jimmy Durante when I was a kid.
Marc:My grandmother, we were in Vegas.
Marc:We met my grandmother in Vegas.
Marc:I must have been nine or 10.
Marc:We grew up in New Mexico.
Marc:They come from Jersey, go to Vegas.
Marc:And somehow or another, she found out Jimmy Durante's room number.
Marc:And I didn't know Jimmy Durante.
Marc:She knew Jimmy Durante.
Marc:But by that time, he was already in his 70s.
Marc:And she's like, let's go meet him.
Marc:Cha, cha, cha, cha.
Marc:So we go to this room, and my grandmother knocks on the door.
Marc:And an old man with no makeup, no hair, in a wife beater, horrendous looking.
Marc:He opens the door and goes, hello.
Marc:And I'm like, oh my God, who is this?
Marc:And my grandma's like, hello, Mr. Durante.
Marc:This is my grandson, who's terrified.
Marc:And he did the little chat, chat, chat.
Marc:And I'm like, all right, great.
Marc:And why did we bother that guy?
Marc:But from that moment on, and also I saw Jackie Vernon when I was like 11.
Marc:And I love Jackie Vernon.
Marc:I saw him on TV with the slideshow thing.
Marc:I thought, it's hilarious.
Marc:So he comes to Albuquerque.
Marc:He played some lounge at a hotel.
Marc:My parents took me.
Marc:I must have been 12, 11 or 12.
Marc:And just sitting right there on the stage and having seen a guy on TV do this thing.
Marc:And then seeing this fat, sweaty guy with a worn out tux collar.
Marc:Just like there was something there that the humanity of it.
Marc:was so profoundly more interesting to me than what was happening on television, which I think that moment probably dictated why I ended up where I am.
Guest:Well, there's a level of desperation no matter what the era of show business and certainly no matter what the era of comedy is.
Guest:And people that dismiss that old timey comedy based on what they see on TV or hear on the radio don't realize what these guys went through when they were doing their live shows in that era.
Guest:It was very similar today to today when you're starting out and you have to do these horrible dives.
Guest:Back then, these same guys were schlepping around these horrible fucking dives, bombing hostile audiences, hecklers, drunks.
Guest:And one element that we don't have today is the mob.
Guest:They had to deal with the mafia all the time and they had to please them.
Guest:If they didn't, they didn't get booked.
Marc:Well, that was a very interesting thing.
Marc:Another thing I learned from your thing, like, you know, like when I am, as I sit here talking to you, like I realize that your pieces have really changed my thinking around that time.
Marc:And also, you know, explain something to me that, you know, when you watch Goodfellas and you watch, you know, this sort of intimacy, even in The Godfather with the story about the Frank Sinatra character.
Marc:you don't really understand what that relationship was.
Marc:And I thought that you explained it very well, that coming out of Prohibition, I mean, there was a big shift, right?
Guest:Yeah, big time, because the Prohibition was how the mob established itself.
Guest:It's where their wealth came from.
Guest:It's where their power came from.
Guest:So when Prohibition ended, there was this panic.
Guest:It was like, are we going to lose our power?
Guest:We've lost our market.
Guest:What, what the fuck do we do?
Guest:And plus we've got all this booze.
Guest:We've got a surplus of booze and there's this chain of command where our suppliers of booze are mob guys from here.
Guest:And these other mob guys run it across the border from here.
Guest:It was a whole chain of command in terms of the network.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:so that was in jeopardy so what do they do um they already had the speakeasies they already had all these venues and was it all going to go to waste so they decided well let's sort of do a switch and make them legitimate we own them we're not paying any overhead for the actual venues we have them they turned them into nightclubs and they started booking performers because they couldn't attract people based on the fact that it was clandestine booze anymore you can get it anywhere you can go to a liquor store now and buy it so
Marc:The booze was the star before.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:So now they had to sort of keep it making money, but obviously they had to bring people to the booze.
Guest:They had to bring people to the booze, and it had to be more than just some cockamamie singer.
Guest:They went tenfold.
Guest:They said, let's put on the biggest shows possible.
Guest:Like vaudeville, but instead of in a depressing, shoddy vaudeville house, we'll put it in the most glamorous, beautiful nightclubs possible.
Marc:So those were the dinner clubs?
Guest:Those were the supper clubs, yeah.
Guest:So places like the Copacabana in New York.
Guest:I mean, Miami Beach was really the hotbed.
Guest:It was Las Vegas before Vegas.
Guest:We're talking about the mid to late 30s is when this stuff exploded.
Guest:Miami Beach was the hottest place for comedians, the most work, the most glamorous supper clubs all through the 40s and 50s.
Guest:Even during Las Vegas' heyday, Miami Beach was still a real hopping place.
Marc:But that really sort of puts the history behind that bit of business in The Godfather, that the mob contract with a performer was solely to bring people into their venues to buy liquor, which is really what a bar does now.
Marc:But I mean that the intensity of it and the amount of money and power the mob had
Marc:They were able to draw these huge acts and to guarantee that those people brought business to where they were gambling and liquor was, and that was legal.
Guest:Yeah, and the difference also back then was that a lot of these mob guys were so hands-on with their operation, which is not necessarily the case with a lot of places now.
Guest:It's much more corporate now.
Marc:Oh, yeah, go to an improv.
Marc:I wish there was a mob guy at the improv.
Guest:Like these guys really took their dudes under their wing.
Marc:And that's also where the relationship sort of built that there was a comfort that, you know, they, cause there's those records, uh, that great bit that Lenny Bruce does about Shelley Berman.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Making fun of the mob guys.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he picks it on.
Guest:And it's a true story, too.
Guest:Shelly Berman actually told me the story himself in his own words and said what Leonard Bruce said was absolutely true, how he's on stage.
Guest:There was a guy being loud in the audience.
Guest:He, you know, got mad at this guy in the audience.
Guest:Could you shut up, sir?
Guest:I'm trying to do a very, you know, intimate piece here.
Guest:And the guy wasn't so happy with him.
Guest:And when he got off the stage, the owner of the club, who I'm assuming was also mob connected, this was in Chicago.
Guest:came over to Shelly and said, you got to go apologize to that man.
Guest:And you got to be earnest and gracious and you apologize and say it won't happen again.
Guest:He goes, nah, I'm not going to do that.
Guest:The guy's a fucking asshole.
Guest:He's talking during my show.
Guest:It's the most important climax of the whole bit.
Guest:It's a father talking to his son.
Guest:I'm not going to... He said, you go apologize to him now or you don't know...
Guest:not only is your career going to be over, your life might be over.
Guest:Go and apologize to that guy.
Guest:And it was one of the most powerful mobsters in Chicago, talking about the early 60s.
Guest:And that's exactly what he had to do.
Guest:He had to go grovel.
Guest:Shelly Berman has a lot of pompous pride.
Guest:He's not the kind of guy that would normally do that, but he had no choice.
Guest:So even those new wave comics had to deal with that mob element.
Marc:But you found that that is a story that a lot of comics have.
Guest:Oh, yes.
Guest:Yeah, Jack Carter was threatened by the mob six different times in four different cities over the course of his career.
Marc:Because he's an audience guy.
Guest:Yeah, he picked on people, or he picked on a woman with a crazy-looking hat in Chicago as well, I think.
Guest:Some woman in the middle of his show walked in with this thing with all these feathers, like a hat that was like four feet tall and sat down in the front row or the second row, and the whole audience saw that, and Jack Carter saw it, and you're not going to just let that go when you are an audience spritzing guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he went to work on this hat.
Guest:You know, what the hell's that on your head?
Guest:Da-da-da-da-da-da.
Guest:Looks like this.
Guest:Looks like that.
Guest:Oh, crazy hat.
Guest:Blah-blah-blah.
Guest:Did this five-minute rant.
Guest:Got off stage, and I think it was Jack E. Leonard, the predecessor to Don Rickles, the original insult comic of that era, ran into Jack Carter's- Was he the guy who had his throat cut?
Marc:Jack E. Leonard-
Guest:No, that's Joe E. Lewis.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:There was a lot of middle initials back there for some reason.
Guest:But Jackie Leonard ran into Jack Carter's dressing room.
Guest:He says, go upstairs.
Guest:Go to your hotel room right now.
Guest:Right now.
Guest:You're in big trouble.
Guest:And Jack Carter didn't know Jackie Leonard.
Guest:Never met him before.
Guest:He just thought he was some crazy fat guy in a white suit.
Guest:He goes, ah, get out of here.
Guest:He goes, kid, I'm telling you, run to your hotel room.
Guest:And these mobsters came hammering on the door.
Guest:But luckily, Jackie Leonard, who was from Chicago, was a darling of the mob.
Guest:He was one of the mafia's favorite comedians.
Guest:So he was able to calm these guys down.
Guest:The kid didn't know what he's doing.
Guest:He's green.
Guest:He's green.
Guest:I'll take care of him.
Guest:I'll take care of him.
Guest:Let me deal with him.
Guest:I'll wise him up.
Guest:Just let the kid alone.
Guest:These guys had their guns out.
Guest:They were ready to kill Jack Carter.
Guest:And this was at the start of his career.
Marc:this is that's mind-blowing to me that you know that you weren't just dealing with club owners or offending a studio executive there was a time where you know if you pissed off a soldier you had to do a sit down with the capo and and you know work this shit out that's right because the soldiers are going to be the guys that want to hang out at the clubs usually the capo if a big guy's in the room they're going to let you know the big guys in the room but you never know who these guns are right so there's probably at that time a good
Marc:possibility in a mob owned club that there were three or four contract killers.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Ready to fucking pull a trigger at the drop of an insult.
Guest:The other thing that's interesting about that code is that it works both ways.
Guest:Sometimes if a low level mob guy picked on the comedian and the capo felt that he was out of line, then that low level mob guy would pay the price.
Guest:And that happened with Jack Carter in Miami beach.
Guest:Uh,
Guest:I think in the early to mid-60s, he walked into a steakhouse that was connected to the club afterwards, and this young sort of upstart mob tough just got tough with Jack Carter and slugged him, and they got into a fistfight, and Jack Carter didn't know why.
Guest:He was just blindsided by this goon.
Guest:And Jack Carter phoned a friend there in Miami Beach who knew everybody.
Guest:He knew who everybody was.
Guest:He said, I don't know what's going on.
Guest:I just got attacked by this mob guy.
Guest:I don't know if I'm in trouble.
Guest:And he said, you know, describe the guy for me, his friend said.
Guest:And he did.
Guest:And he said, yeah, I think I know who that was.
Guest:Was it at the place for steak restaurant?
Guest:He goes, yeah.
Guest:He goes, okay, stay in your hotel room.
Guest:Don't go anywhere until I call you.
Guest:I'm going to make a phone call.
Guest:He phoned one of the Fischetti brothers in Chicago and explained the situation.
Guest:And Fischetti said, oh, yeah, I know that guy.
Guest:He's out of line.
Guest:He's out of line.
Guest:Jack Carter said he got a phone call from his friend four hours later in the hotel room.
Guest:He goes, OK, it's OK.
Guest:You're clear.
Guest:And he goes, well, what do you mean?
Guest:He goes, don't worry about it.
Guest:It's OK.
Guest:He said he was reading the paper a week later.
Guest:This guy who attacked him was found floating in the ocean, his body parts chopped up and thrown in a garbage can.
Marc:Probably not because of the Jack Carter thing.
Guest:Well, it was only a few days later.
Marc:Yeah, but I mean, generally, it must have been the last straw.
Marc:I mean, I'm sure in Jack's mind, he thinks, like, that guy got what he deserved for beating me up or getting in a fistfight, but that must have been the last fucking straw.
Marc:I'm sure you're right.
Marc:I'm sure you're right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, come on.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:They're not going to kill a made guy because some Jew got insulted.
Marc:Right?
Yeah.
Marc:Well, let's get back to this thing, though, because you say this is the people you grew up with.
Marc:I mean, you're younger than me.
Guest:I didn't say I grew up with them, but I used to see a lot of Jack Carter, and frankly, I'm a bit of a fraud because when I talk to these guys, they assume that I'm almost their age.
Marc:Well, that's crazy because I know you're younger than me.
Marc:But what I'm saying is, what was the moment for you where you're like, that guy's a window into something that is dark and rich and overly fascinating that is just filled with festering dark weirdness?
Guest:fairly recently like I'm really I've been able to consume a lot of this stuff through YouTube and the internet and really without that I would be lost I don't understand guys that had researched shit in the 60s and 70s and wrote elaborate books and went to libraries and I was like I can't even conceive of that not only how you would go about doing that but why you would ever want to fucking do that when I can just go on the internet and do a simple search and watch some videos but with guys like Jack Carter and Milton Berle especially who I always hated and I've come to kind of Did you write on him though?
Guest:No
Guest:But I always kind of hated him, but I've come to like him.
Guest:But he and Jack Carter have a similar quality that fascinates me.
Guest:If you watch them in almost any television footage doing stand-up, they got this sense of desperation in their eyes.
Guest:Look at their eyes.
Guest:They're darting around.
Guest:They're never comfortable on stage.
Guest:These are guys that were in showbiz their whole life, and they're still not comfortable on stage.
Guest:There seems to be this undercurrent that they're terrified that at any moment the audience is going to turn on them or not laugh at what they say.
Guest:And Milton Berle, who was a master...
Guest:stepped on his laughs constantly went from one to another to another and it was because there was this fear I think instilled in him that people weren't going to respond that wouldn't like him and he overcompensated or they'd see him yeah see the real Milton Berle I mean I noticed that too about guys that go too fast in my own mind is that you know because what happens if the laughs stop
Marc:You know, what are you going to do then?
Marc:I mean, you're going to desperately try to get laughs, but in that desperation, you're going to reveal your hand, which is you're a sad, desperate man.
Guest:That desperation is the undercurrent that fascinates me.
Guest:And I think it's the undercurrent for most stand-up comics and most performers.
Guest:But to actually...
Guest:See that that was a through line and a constant through all the showbiz history.
Guest:I think it's something that's not quite acknowledged.
Guest:We think of dark comics as guys that were addicted to coke in the 70s and 80s.
Guest:But back in the 30s and 40s and 50s, it was just as dark.
Guest:But people think it was a squeaky clean time, that it was a leave it to beaver era.
Guest:And I try and.
Marc:Well, show people have always been show people.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, you know, in the jazz age is the jazz age.
Marc:But before that, there was always, you know, bennies and pills and Dilaudid.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I think the television just distorts this for us.
Guest:And then people who get their history from watching TV of that era have a totally skewed sense, you know, especially when I talk to old people who go, I don't like the language of these young comics today when some of these old guys are the dirtiest, most foul mouth, most vile guys you could ever listen to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And but there were also guys like not unlike guys today.
Marc:And I think the thing that we share is that, you know, there are guys who chose to do this fucking ridiculous thing with their life that really forced them.
Marc:And I'm sure, you know, there's there's certainly a level of freedom to it.
Marc:But for guys that had a comment on the way things are and make people laugh at their own lives, these guys live completely off the grid lives.
Marc:I mean, some of them have wives and kids, but show people still have to go into the caves every night and have to sit there and eat with the other annoying Jews until four in the morning.
Marc:And, you know, figure out who's funnier and who's joke.
Marc:But there's that moment in, like Broadway Danny Rose, that table in that deli.
Marc:Who's that?
Marc:Who's that?
Marc:Was Jack Capri, Gale, Jackie Gale?
Guest:Jackie Gale, Sandy Barron, Will Jordan, and... Was Capri, Dick Capri?
Guest:Corbett Monica.
Marc:Oh, Corbett Monica.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, well, a lot of those guys are dead now, right?
Guest:They're all dead except for Will Jordan.
Marc:Yeah, Jackie Gale was filthy.
Marc:And he was Wendy Bruce's best friend, right?
Yeah.
Guest:They were close.
Guest:I don't know if they were best friends.
Marc:What do you think of this show?
Marc:There's this weird thing that I got, and I don't know if you got it too.
Marc:How many of the roasts have you watched, the D. Martin roasts?
Guest:They all kind of blend together.
Marc:Did you see that one that Don Rickles hosted that it looked like he was doing?
Marc:It was a special one, and it was mostly a celebrity audience.
Guest:Oh, that's from the Dean Martin show.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It was done on a soundstage?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Now, let me ask you something, because I have not had the opportunity to interview him yet, and I was hoping to, but he's had death in the family recently.
Marc:There is undeniable vicious rage in that guy's face.
Marc:Is there not?
Ha, ha, ha.
Marc:Especially when he was younger, yeah.
Marc:And like, you know, because he's like such a sweet guy and there's this idea that like, you know, I'm just having a good time, but I've never seen a fury as intense on a guy's face.
Marc:And there's moments.
Guest:Well, that being said, though, that...
Guest:uh performance which is from an staged uh episode of the d martin show where they would invite this exclusive celebrity audience and have don rickles do his thing that he did in the nightclub right that was his big break he had already done sitcoms but in terms of stand-up that was his big break that one thing
Guest:So I think the pressure was on for him to deliver in a way he had never delivered before.
Marc:I didn't realize that was the context of that performance.
Guest:Yeah, because he had done television before.
Guest:He had done an episode of The Addams Family and shit like that.
Guest:But he had never really done his stand-up act.
Guest:And it was kind of unprecedented to give anybody that amount of time to do stand-up on TV.
Guest:Because I think that's a 15-minute performance.
Guest:It's amazing.
Guest:And he's on fire.
Guest:There's one moment in that performance that is staged, unfortunately.
Guest:And it's when Bob Hope walks in from the back and the camera cuts to him immediately and shows him coming in with a newspaper and sitting down in the back.
Guest:And Don Rickles says, oh, Bob Hope's here.
Guest:What's the war over?
Guest:This is during the Vietnam era.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that line, which is a great line, is a line that did happen, I think, a couple months earlier in Vegas when Bob Hope walked in and he improvised that and they recreated it.
Marc:I remember some of those moments where when he was on those roasts when I was a kid, it killed me.
Marc:Jimmy Stewart, I talked to the family.
Marc:You're doing fine.
Marc:Oh, God, he was fucking great.
Marc:But what I was getting at is that there was something that irritated me in the documentary about Don, you know, and I love Don Rickles, but there was definitely this thing where Lenny Bruce was brought up briefly, and I don't know if he brought it up or someone else brought it up, but there was this thing that's sort of like, ah, he was with the drugs and this, you know, that there was definitely a schism between guys who played it straight and guys who were fucked up or guys who couldn't keep their shit together.
Marc:Was there not in your mind or in your research?
Guest:Well, I think everybody was fucked up.
Guest:It was a matter of those who... Degree.
Marc:Who did open, who didn't.
Guest:Yeah, and who was able to control that persona and let it affect their career or be shown or to ruin them or not.
Guest:Shecky Green was as fucked up as anybody.
Guest:And to this day, I don't think anybody... But I think it ruined him.
Guest:Realizes to that degree.
Guest:I think he would say it ruined him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I don't I don't know how he's not acknowledged in the same way it is with some of the other guys like Lenny Bruce, maybe because he died so young.
Marc:And also because of the the the reach of his relevance.
Marc:I mean that, you know, that Lenny Bruce became mythologized while he was alive.
Marc:You know, and someone like Shecky Green is is is a is a footnote in some ways in the history of comedy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, you know, Lenny Bruce set some sort of fucked up standard.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you think he killed himself?
Guest:Well, you know, his drug problem goes back further than anybody realizes.
Guest:It started in the late 40s.
Marc:When he was still just a mimic and a clown.
Guest:He was still an impressionist.
Guest:He was doing heroin at that age and that era.
Guest:So I think his health was going to be compromised one way or the other.
Guest:Like he was an addict very early on.
Guest:And think about it.
Guest:For a long time.
Guest:the attitude towards heroin addicts and the idea of getting a clean needle or scoring your heroin.
Guest:It was a darker period, even though it's still the darkest thing in the world.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Um, he was addicted to smack down as we call it in Canada.
Guest:Um, in 1949 down, um,
Marc:Well, okay, so now, okay, we discussed the Shecky Green, we discussed the Jack Roy, I think that the seminal pieces for me that really changed the way I thought was, yeah, the Shecky Green piece, the Jack Roy, Joe Ansis piece, and let's get into that story about Alan Drake a little bit.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:In that piece, that's where I really learned about the business structure of the mob evolving.
Marc:Let's get into that story about Alan Drake because this is a fascinating thing to me.
Guest:Well, Alan Drake was a comedian I only learned about a couple months ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A total cockamamie comic, which is a word I picked up from talking to these old guys.
Guest:Not an original guy, right?
Guest:No, just a substandard joke book memorizing comic from the 40s.
Guest:And he never really had any fame, but he played all the same kind of supper clubs and nightclubs that everybody did.
Guest:He was an opening act, but he started out as a cab driver in Miami Beach, and he used to drive mob guys from one place to another.
Guest:And this one mob guy named Anthony Carfano took a liking to him and said, I want you to be my personal chauffeur.
Guest:And he hired him, put him on the payroll as his personal chauffeur, and Alan Drake got to know all these mob guys.
Guest:At the same time, a couple comedians that are forgotten, a guy named Jackie Miles and a guy named Lenny Kent, who were...
Guest:very desperate sad fucked up comics who fucked a lot of whores and had drug addictions as well and jackie miles was really famous for about five years because he didn't go to war during world war ii and all the other comics did so he got all the work anyways that's another story
Guest:Alan Drake used to drive those comics around.
Guest:And they thought he was really funny.
Guest:And they sort of prompted him.
Guest:They said, you should try and go up on stage.
Guest:You're a funny guy.
Guest:And so he did.
Guest:He slowly started doing stand-up while he was still the chauffeur for this mobster.
Guest:And this mobster said, you know, I got connections.
Guest:I can get you some good bookings.
Guest:What family was he in?
Guest:He was under the tutelage of, well, it went back and forth.
Guest:It was initially Vito Genovese's crime family.
Guest:And then when he went to prison, it was taken over by Frank Costello.
Guest:And that's part of the crux of the story.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:But at the time, he was in the Genovese family.
Marc:He was just a soldier.
Guest:He grew up with Genovese, and so they were quite close.
Guest:And he was a surrogate in Miami.
Guest:Genovese was in New York.
Guest:So he's a big guy.
Guest:Yeah, he was big enough.
Guest:He was big enough.
Guest:And he kind of looked after the operations.
Guest:He wasn't a hitman, but he made sure everything ran smoothly in Miami Beach at their entities that they had there, which were several.
Guest:So he said, I got connections.
Guest:I can get you some good bookings.
Guest:I can get you into the Copa in New York.
Guest:That's a top club.
Guest:I can get you into this club and that club.
Guest:And Alan Drake said, yeah, by all means.
Guest:He didn't have that great of an act, but he was hitched to big opening act or big headliners like Tony Martin and the big singers of the day.
Guest:And even in a couple of the variety reviews I found, it was really quite amusing knowing the backstory now where it said, Alan Drake is opening for Tony Martin, which is interesting because Tony Martin usually has top stars opening with him.
Guest:Maybe there's more than meets the eye.
Guest:There's like this ominous tone.
Marc:But no one's going to point a finger.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So he did that.
Guest:But little Anthony Carfano was a bit – his nickname was Little Augie.
Marc:It's funny, though, that even Variety was not going to fuck with that.
Guest:Yeah, nobody would fuck with that.
Marc:But they knew it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Because at that time, in show business, certainly in the boots-on-the-ground show business, the mob was running most of it.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:By all means.
Guest:So Little Augie, Anthony Carfano, was a bit of a Machiavellian in the sense that Alan Drake had a gorgeous wife who was a Miss America and a showgirl.
Guest:And the mobster, Little Augie, loved her.
Guest:So he started sending Alan Drake on the road to do these gigs in New York.
Guest:And meanwhile, he starts fucking Alan Drake's wife while the comic's on the road.
Guest:And they became very intimate.
Guest:Over the course of a couple of years, this went on.
Marc:And he's calling his wife at home saying, sorry, baby.
Marc:I'll be home soon.
Marc:I'm working a lot.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:He's like, okay, honey.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So Alan Drake's star is rising.
Guest:He's becoming not a big star, but he's playing all the big rooms.
Guest:He's getting a lot of attention and a lot of exposure.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:but he wasn't ever going to become a big star because he wasn't that good.
Guest:He wasn't that talented, but he had the mob helping him.
Guest:You know, it's like anything that's manufactured even today, you know, musicians that aren't that talented, some corporation push.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So, um, long story short, and you can read in this WFMU article, uh, called, uh, the comedians, the mob and the American supper club on the WFMU site.
Guest:But, um,
Guest:little Anthony or little Augie Anthony Carfano got into trouble with the Genovese and Costello warring factions there was a power play at the top of the mob because Genovese went to prison and Costello was appointed head when Genovese got out of prison he wanted to be head of the family again and there was this power struggle where that wasn't going to happen
Guest:Well, Frank Costello, there was a hit on his life, a bullet grazed his head, he survived, but he stepped down for the sake of his life.
Guest:But anybody that had been associated with him was now persona non grata, and that included Alan Drake, the comedian, because he had been under Frank Costello for the last 10 years doing these nightclubs that Frank Costello ran.
Guest:And so when that happened...
Guest:Nobody wanted to book Alan Drake.
Marc:But Genovese was still... What happened to little Augie?
Marc:I mean, the thing is, he was a Genovese guy, right?
Guest:So why, when Genovese took back... Because when Genovese took it back over, he went to all the guys and said, okay, Costello's not in charge anymore.
Guest:You're with me.
Guest:Who was true to me.
Guest:So don't talk to Costello.
Guest:And little Augie wavered.
Guest:He hem and hawed briefly.
Guest:He went, ah, because he was really loyal to Costello.
Marc:He was hedging his bets.
Guest:Yeah, he didn't want to get knocked off by the guy.
Marc:He wasn't... He was saying who's going to win this.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And he went with the one he was...
Guest:Well, he ended up going with Genovese, but he hesitated initially.
Guest:He went, I don't know.
Guest:And because of that hesitation, Genovese never forgot it.
Guest:So he took little Augie back under his wing.
Guest:He said, okay, kid, you've made the wise choice.
Guest:Kept him close, not letting him suspect that he was going to be knocked off because of that hesitation a year earlier.
Guest:So, uh, Alan Drake is on the road doing a show in Washington DC and little Augie is fucking his wife and they go out for a night on the town.
Guest:And that night when they were returning to their car, there was hit men waiting for them and they drove them out to some part, some part of New York, somewhere out in the Bronx.
Guest:And they murdered little Augie and his date, which was Alan Drake, the comedian's wife.
Guest:So she got murdered in this mob hit while he was on the road and
Guest:And when that happened, that's when Alan Drake's career ended because he was still associated with little Augie who had just been murdered.
Guest:So none of the guys at the nightclubs wanted to defy the top mob guys that had just murdered Alan Drake's connection.
Guest:So his career went right into the toilet because his whole career had been buoyed by the mob.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that was a sad story.
Marc:And you found out more about the wife?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I didn't find out that much about the wife other than the fact that she had been questioned in connection with a different mob slaying in 1951 and another mob slaying in 1950.
Guest:She's a mob groupie.
Guest:She could have been very well a decoy.
Guest:for certain mobsters that were going to get murdered where she went on a date with them and led them to a to a place that's just total speculation speculation and then alan drake went on to obscurity he kept doing a bit of stand-up for the next decades in the gigs that he could get red fox was friends with him i think it was a drug thing they were both big into coke and red fox got him some guest shots on sanford and son in the 70s oh yeah
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I talked to this guy, Saul Weinstein, who wrote for Alan Drake, wrote for Joey Lewis, the guy who had his throat slit and wrote for another mob comic named Jackie Cannon.
Guest:And he told me that he eventually left Alan Drake, stopped writing for him because he got too weird and too dark and too drugged out.
Guest:And that in order to survive, because he couldn't get standup gigs, Alan Drake became a cocaine dealer.
Guest:That's not in my article because I discovered that later.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I've seen stuff like that happen.
Marc:Not in that era, obviously.
Marc:That's a fascinating story, because I think all the stories that we've talked about are sort of junctures in how we see that period of comedy.
Marc:Now, let's talk about Richard Nixon on Laugh-In, because your insight into that, that was really...
Marc:a profound attempt for Nixon to try to co-opt the subculture a little bit.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And it was not presented that way.
Guest:No.
Marc:You've talked to George Schlatter.
Guest:I've talked to George Schlatter.
Guest:I didn't interview George Schlatter for that article, but I've been friendly with George for the past year.
Guest:He's a fascinating guy.
Guest:I heard David Cross on your show talking about Bernie Brillstein and his relationship with him, and that's how I kind of feel with George Schlatter.
Yeah.
Guest:just this larger than life old timey guy, a throwback to another era where guys in charge of large entities are very personable, very big and have crazy fucking stories of their early career.
Guest:Like George slaughter produced the Judy Garland show in 1963 for six episodes until he was fired by CBS.
Guest:Uh,
Guest:All kinds of crazy things.
Guest:Then, of course, he created Laugh-In and helped discover Lily Tomlin and Goldie Hawn and gave a lot of big people their starts.
Guest:Lorne Michaels, one of his first jobs writing for Laugh-In, George Schlatter hired him.
Guest:All this crazy backstory.
Guest:So I like George Schlatter.
Guest:But I grew up watching clips of Laugh-In on Sweeps Week specials and things like that.
Guest:And I always found it kind of hokey.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But there was always this kind of story.
Marc:It was the old guard trying to appropriate the hippie culture.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Let's do 40s jokes, but paint people's bodies with flowers in a psychedelic fashion.
Right.
Guest:But people used to say, oh, it was a real counterculture show on the network.
Guest:All the hippie kids loved it.
Guest:Maybe they did, but... I don't think they did.
Guest:You watch it, it's very square.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's very, very, very, very square.
Guest:So I wondered where this came from, this idea that it was a counterculture show.
Guest:You still kind of hear that.
Guest:Oh, we were so risk-taking, so...
Guest:Ahead of our time, you'll hear Schlatter and people say, I don't think so.
Guest:And any show that has Richard Nixon as a guest star, and there's that famous clip of him saying, sock it to me, the catchphrase on laughing, and Nixon can't even pronounce it properly.
Guest:Sock it to me.
Guest:Any show that uses Richard Nixon, that's not a counterculture show.
Guest:You've bought into the system, right?
Guest:And there is speculation that that cameo by Richard Nixon put him over the top to be elected president in 1968.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And it was part of an elaborate... That and the rigging of the actual voting, I'm sure.
Guest:It was an elaborate effort to reshape the persona of Richard Nixon, because when he did that famous JFK debate in 62... The sweaty Nixon.
Guest:Yeah, he came across so poor on television.
Guest:And the famous story is that that affected the election, and that's why JFK won and Nixon didn't, because...
Guest:JFK looked good on TV and Nixon didn't.
Guest:So when that happened, Nixon and his organizers regrouped and said, we can never let that happen again.
Guest:We have to learn everything we can about television, about manipulating the medium for our benefit, how to present a context for Nixon so people don't actually know what he's really like because they would never vote for this fucking shady guy otherwise.
Guest:And a lot of the guys on the Nixon staff
Guest:For those several years were young university kids, right wing university guys like University of Chicago kind of guys who had just discovered the works of Marshall McLuhan.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they had read Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man, in which McLuhan talks about all these things about how you can shape perceptions and shape people's thoughts by effectively using the television medium.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And so they used these principles of Marshall McLuhan and applied them to Richard Nixon to shape him into a guy that people would vote for.
Guest:And one of the young Turks that was involved in that was Roger Ailes, who went on to found or be president of Fox News.
Marc:Evil wizard.
Guest:So he was a low level producer on the Mike Douglas talk show in the late 60s.
Guest:And Nixon was a guest.
Guest:And that's how Roger Ailes met him.
Guest:And he said, you know, Mr. Nixon, I got some ideas that might help.
Guest:He was brought on staff and he was one of the people instrumental in cultivating Nixon for all the talk show appearances and his appearance on Laugh-In in 1968.
Guest:along with one of the head writers of Laugh-In, a right-wing comedy writer named Paul W. Keyes, who would eventually be on the payroll of the Nixon administration at the same time that he was one of the head writers of Laugh-In, which seems like an incredible contradiction for those who think of Laugh-In as this counterculture beacon.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:That's a great fucking story.
Marc:Roger Ailes, who knew that?
Marc:I didn't know Lorne Michaels wrote for Schwatter.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And that guy keys.
Marc:Well, that stuff kind of happens a lot.
Marc:And, you know, it's always amazing when you pull the curtain back from that shit.
Marc:You realize, like, there's no integrity to any of it.
Marc:And, of course, that makes sense.
Marc:It's not even far-fetched.
Marc:Certainly not in the media landscape we live in now.
Guest:It's fascinating.
Guest:And there's a lot of stuff that when some of the Nixon tapes came out in the past few years and you can actually listen to those crazy tapes, there's a conversation with Richard Nixon on the phone.
Guest:He's phoning Dan Rowan and Dick Martin to thank them.
Guest:They came to his birthday party.
Guest:They fucking loved...
Guest:Richard Nixon.
Guest:They were big fans.
Guest:They they made all this money from laughing.
Guest:They suddenly became these big right wing guys and they fucking kissed his ass.
Marc:But that's also speaks a lot to the nature of show business that, you know, as somebody who did politics in my own career, that most show business publicly is not political.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And just to close off, I know you wrote a piece on Pygmy Markham.
Marc:You know, what was your fascination with him?
Guest:I try not to write about race factors too much because it makes me a bit of a polemic.
Guest:And then the comment sections are filled with people on both sides, either dismissing my assertions or saying that I don't know enough about it, which is probably true.
Guest:I have no education.
Marc:But Pygmy Markham was one of the original sort of, I think it would be called still the Chitlin Circuit at that time.
Marc:And between him and Red Fox, there was very little crossover at the time that they came about, correct?
Marc:Correct.
Guest:Yeah, black comics were not considered television friendly.
Guest:Black comics that were huge stars in the black community, and even in some of the white nightclub community, did not get television exposure.
Guest:Although Ed Sullivan, to his credit, gave a lot of black comics a lot of exposure as early as the late 40s, including Pygmy Markham.
Guest:But...
Guest:My fascination with Pygmy Markham was the arc of his career because he was an old-timey comic that suddenly... He probably did minstrelsy, did he?
Guest:This is the thing.
Guest:In the article, which is called Last Man in Blackface, this I found astounding and amazing, and I still don't quite understand it, and this is why I wrote that article.
Guest:We all know about White Axe doing blackface from the 1880s right through until the Second World War.
Guest:What I didn't know was that Black Axe, like Burt Williams and Pygmy Markham,
Marc:wore blackface.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:A lot of Minstrelsy was black.
Guest:That blows my mind.
Guest:A guy that is African-American puts on burnt cork and doles himself up like a white performer doing blackface.
Guest:I couldn't understand the reason why.
Guest:And I never came up with a proper conclusion.
Guest:I found four different theories in my research.
Guest:One was that some black performers couldn't get booked in white venues, so they would pose as white in blackface.
Guest:There was another theory that...
Guest:And Wolf Pigmeat Markham said that that's just what you did when you broke in.
Guest:Everybody did it, so he did it.
Guest:But he got so comfortable with it by the 30s, he couldn't go on stage without it.
Guest:He was totally insecure without this cork mask.
Marc:Well, I think also what it speaks to is it's sort of a consolidation of the black stereotype that you had the white interpretation.
Marc:which was over-the-top and awful in minstrelsy, but that became the standard identifier of what black was in show business.
Marc:Because I know that black minstrelsy was real, and they happened at the same time.
Marc:But I think it was just a standardization of the black type, the stereotypical type.
Guest:Well, I found it fascinating, and Pygmy Markham was the last black performer to stick with that, even after the Second World War.
Marc:And he was on laughing as well, wasn't he?
Guest:Yeah, that's when his career came back, and there was a crossover with white audiences.
Marc:Here comes the judge.
Guest:Yeah, but the NAACP tried to kill his career because he refused to stop performing in blackface after the Second World War.
Guest:He said, I've been doing it my whole life.
Guest:Don't tell me what to do.
Guest:I'm a veteran performer.
Guest:I know how to perform, and the people love it.
Guest:Go fuck yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:um so his career actually kind of floundered maybe under the pressure of the NAACP he stopped getting booked in a lot of black clubs and in the late 40s through the 50s and the first half of the 60s he became very obscure older black people remembered him from the Apollo and he still did some stuff with Moms Mabley but his career was not the same until laughing Pigmeat Markham started doing cameos because Sammy Davis Jr.
Guest:was a guest and he did a Pigmeat Markham bit
Guest:And it got a huge response, and he did the catchphrase of Pygmeat's, here come the judge.
Guest:That's where that comes from, which Pygmeat Markham did in the 30s.
Guest:And Sammy grew up watching Pygmeat Markham, so it was like an homage.
Guest:He was dressed in a judge outfit and said, here come the judge.
Guest:And I think George Schlatter or somebody around there said, whatever happened to that guy who used to do that, Pygmeat Markham?
Guest:And I don't know who said it, but somebody said, I think he lives in this rooming house, you know, in Washington, D.C.
Guest:They tracked him down.
Guest:They flew him to Los Angeles.
Guest:They taped the episode at the NBC studios in Burbank.
Guest:And it revitalized his career, mostly because of this fucking catchphrase, you know, suck it to me.
Guest:Here come the judge.
Guest:Another reason why laughing was really a lot of bullshit based on all these catchphrases.
Guest:But that revitalized Pygmy Markham's career.
Guest:He was in his 70s.
Guest:Suddenly had records coming out again.
Guest:Chess Records was pressing all these comedy albums by him.
Guest:A single, a song called Here Come the Judge, backed up by a bunch of soul artists, which was actually fucking great.
Guest:And he got big gigs.
Guest:He was opening for Aretha Franklin in the early 70s.
Guest:All this kind of stuff.
Guest:And he became a big star again.
Guest:I think he died in 1974.
Marc:Did he stop doing Blackface?
Guest:I think he did, yeah.
Guest:He finally came back, and I think maybe they said, no more Blackface.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Cliff Nestor off.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Cliff Nestor off.
Marc:Thank you for talking to me.
Marc:Now, where can we get these?
Marc:I want people to go to you.
Marc:And also, dude, you got to get that.
Marc:That mob story is a great movie.
Marc:You been having any talks?
Guest:None.
Guest:None.
Guest:Jack Carter was my only connection with Beverly Hills.
Marc:Now it's all over.
Marc:Unfortunately, it doesn't end well, but there's got to be somebody that's... I mean... All right.
Marc:We'll talk about it.
Marc:So just give the... It's a WFMU...
Guest:The easiest way to find it is just to Google my name, Cliff Nesterov.
Guest:K-L-I-P-H, spelled ridiculously.
Guest:Look that up.
Guest:You'll find a link or type that in with WFMU.
Guest:You'll find an archive of articles about the dark side of old-timey comedy.
Marc:Thanks for talking, man.
Guest:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:I hope that was engaging for you.
Marc:I certainly love talking to Cliff.
Marc:Go to the WFMU, beware of the blog, blog, whatever.
Marc:Do a search on Cliff's name, K-L-I-P-H-N-E-S-T-E-R-O-F-F, to read that stuff.
Marc:It's great stuff.
Marc:He's just a great writer on a very specific subject with a great tone.
Marc:What else?
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com.
Marc:Get on the mailing list.
Marc:I'll mail you some stuff once a week.
Marc:Buy some merch.
Marc:Got new posters up there.
Marc:I'm going to be in Michigan at the Magic Bag Theater.
Marc:Ferndale, Michigan, September 29th for two shows.
Marc:I'll also be at Riot LA.
Marc:for a WTF on September 22nd.
Marc:That's going to feature Ron Lynch, Chris Garcia, Andy Dick, and Lance Bangs, Eddie Pepitone, Jim Earl.
Marc:Maybe a special guest.
Marc:I think you can go to riotla.com or something similar to that.
Marc:Find that information.
Marc:Justcoffee.coop, of course, available.
Marc:Kick in a few shekels at wtfpod.com.
Marc:See who's been on the show.
Marc:Leave a comment.
Marc:Do what you got to do.
Marc:Next week, Key and Peele.
Marc:Is that it?
Marc:I gotta go find La Fonda.
Marc:No time for Boomer.
Marc:Boomer's fine.
Marc:La Fonda's out in the world.
Marc:Making us worry and fight.
Marc:We need peace in the house.