The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics by Phil Berger

Author:Phil Berger [Berger, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 2000-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Robert Klein: “The comeeee-dian, the comeeee-dian.”

Robin Williams Courtesy Home Box Office

Robert Klein

Billy Crystal Courtesy Home Box Office

Bogart made out better on the executive end. He and Buddah had a series of hits, including a comedy album, David Frye’s Richard Nixon, Superstar. Bogart, it turned out, was a fan of Klein’s. When he learned the deal with Signpost was tottering, he arranged a new one. He put Klein’s manager, Buddy Morra, on to Brut, the toiletries division of Fabergé. Brut had an entertainment subsidiary with its own record label. Morra negotiated a new and better deal than the one with Signpost. The advance was twenty-five thousand dollars. And Buddah was to distribute the album.

Robert Klein: Child of the 50’s it was called. The hope was that the nostalgia craze the country was in the midst of would run the album up the charts. The ’50s theme recurred in the material on the record, and its cover shot. It was a photo of Klein in a bedroom made up to resemble the one he’d had back then. In it were ’50s memorabilia: baseball cards, erector set, Kingston Trio album, football helmet, cap gun, a satin Yankee jacket, actual photos of the short-haired Klein himself. It even had a DeWitt Clinton pennant that Buddah tried to obtain from the school. Clinton authorities refused unless they could hear the album first. The pennant ended coming from a Bronx sporting goods store.

On the back cover were more mementos of the ’50s: a tattered copy of Catcher in the Rye, a Tootsie Roll wrapper, civil defense dogtags (Klein, R.M. 3525 Decatur Avenue) a jackknife and a coaster with the famed Marilyn Monroe nude. Sunflower seeds were placed over nipples so as not to offend merchandisers.

With the record, he was ready to take his 33⅓ word on the road, and see what it’d fetch. What it came to was playing catch-up in the neocomic trade. As one of its early, prolific and literate voices, Klein was yet to get the turnout he wanted. Out of the old comedy and into the new: jumping-off point for a tour to promote the LP came at the

BITTER END

in late February 1973.

The Bitter End remained a name to conjure with.* The red brick wall that Peter, Paul and Mary popularized on an early album cover was still there. So was the club’s precarious location—just beneath several floors of apartments. From time to time residents still phoned the police about the noise. It made the Bitter End’s Paul Colby wary of amplified musicians. Colby was a cryptic man given to blue work shirts and denims and thirty-dollar Stetsons. An ex-music publisher, furniture designer, artist, he was more relaxed out of the club. In it he had the dark eye, particularly for raucous rock. “You trying to put me out of business?” he’d ask musicians who played loudly.

For Klein the Bitter End was the closest thing to his comic turf. He’d been there in ’64 to play the hootenanies, and could still recall other hopefuls knocking around then.

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