Comedy

If I had a chance to do it all over again . . .
I’d do just what I’m going to do now.
Be a stand-up comic.

There’s no more exhilarating feeling than walking out on a stage and making people laugh. It’s orgasmic. I’ve always dreamed of doing a one-man show on Broadway. Who knows? Maybe in the future it’ll be one more thing that I can’t believe ever happened to me. For now, I’m taking a comedy show on the road. A guy asked me if I’m going to wear suspenders. What did he expect? A cape and a Phantom of the Opera mask? I’m not going to reinvent myself. I’m just going to show the world another side of me.


And if there is a touch of sadness left behind by the ending of Larry King Live, this is the best way to deal with it. As the playwright Neil Simon once told me, comedy is tragedy turned inside out.

The stories I’ll tell in my comedy show will be embellished a little—but they’re all true. They come from the panicky moments and foxholes of my life. Like the time when the Mafia guy who owed me a favor asked me if there was anybody I didn’t like. Or the day before open-heart surgery when I met my surgeon for the first time and counted only nine fingers. I would definitely list the day of Moppo’s assembly as one of the five worst of my life—right up there with my father’s death and Bobby Thomson’s home run against the Dodgers. But now that day brings only smiles. Almost everything can become funny over time if you look at it the right way.

If you’ve ever seen me as a guest on late night shows you’ll have a sense of what my comedy show will be like. On Larry King Live I asked one-sentence questions. But I’m very different when I’m in the other seat. I once made Jon Stewart fall out of his chair.

My challenge is the one faced by every comic. You’re standing on that stage, and there’s no telling if the audience will laugh. As Sinatra once said to me, “What if it ain’t there? That goes through you for a minute. What if when I walk out,I don’t get that prize?” The good news is, a lot of the material is unbombable. My stories have been refined over decades. Plus, I’m working the show out with my nephew Scott Zeiger, who produced Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays. A long time ago, I gave Scott his start by getting him a job at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Now he’s showing me how to put together a big-time show. Most important of all, I’m going out there with the passion of a kid getting to live his dream. But I have one big advantage: I’m seventy-seven years old. Inside me, there’ll be a piece of all the great comics who have made me laugh since I was a boy.

A little Don Rickles. Some Mel Brooks. And a few others I’d like to nod to simply because they make me smile . . .

Abbott and Costello

“Who’s on First?” may be the best comedy skit ever. I never realized that Abbott and Costello’s TV show was the model for Jerry Seinfeld’s sitcom until my final interview with Jerry.
Bud and Lou always came out in front of the curtain at the beginning of their show. Jerry ended each show doing stand-up in front of a curtain. Bud and Lou lived in an apartment house. They were always running into people and getting into hijinks. Same with Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine. All silly, with very little depth, but lots of laughs.

Another thing I didn’t realize until my final show with Jerry is that most comedians are left-handed. Jerry passed that on as he signed an autograph. He told me that 60 percent of comedians are lefties, as compared with 9 percent of the total population. It has something to do with the right brain being the center of creativity.

I guess I’m in the minority. I’m a righty, but I’m funny.

Groucho Marx 

I would love to have met Groucho. I just barely missed him one morning years ago. He was taking out food from Nate ’n Al’s as I came through the door. All comics want you to love them. They’re all pleading: I’ll deprecate myself. I’ll do anything. But, please laugh. All comics except Groucho. Groucho was the only great comic who never asked for your sympathy. His comedy was attitudinal. He didn’t give a damn. “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” That’s genius. That’s when you’re above it all.

Don Rickles

It was always the half-truth with Rickles—a safe attack. He’d see Sinatra in the audience. “Frank . . . Frank . . . The chambermaid, Frank? Couldn’t go an hour without it, huh, Frank?”

Joey Bishop would be laughing, and then Rickles would tag it with: “Joey, you can laugh. Frank says it’s OK.”
So, it’s risky. But is it risky? He hits, but not hard enough to hurt anybody. It’s over the line. But nobody ever comes back over the line to attack him—although Don tries to make you think retaliation is imminent.

Like the night Sidney Poitier and I were at a table at the Fontainebleau to see him. Rickles walked onstage and saw us.
“Jeez, Larry, you’ll hang around with anybody, huh? Sidney, I don’t know what you’re doing here. No fried chicken. No watermelon.”
Sidney was laughing, but Rickles turned to the band in a panic: “Is he coming up? . . . Is he coming up? . . .”

Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks is the funniest person I’ve ever met. I’ve always loved his definition of comedy and tragedy: “Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole. Tragedy is when I cut my finger.”

I was one of the first disc jockeys to play his 2,000 Year Old Man album. You can’t tell someone what’s funny. But to me, if you don’t think the 2,000 Year Old Man is funny, there is something severely wrong with you. Carl Reiner asked Mel, in character as the 2,000 Year Old Man, “Did you know Freud?” There are a million things Mel could have done with that. But he went with: “What a bas- ketball player! Best basketball player in Europe!”
“Basketball?”
“You don’t know about the basketball? Your books don’t tell about basketball? Oh, I know why. He passed off. He fed the other guys. He was a point guard. He didn’t like to shoot.”
So, now, Reiner asks the logical follow-up question:
“What about psychiatry?”
As if as an afterthought, Mel says, “That was good.”
“How about Shakespeare? Did you know Shakespeare?”
“Of course I knew Shakespeare.”
“What a great writer!”
“Hold it! Stop! Whoops! P looked like an R. S looked like an F. Failed penmanship three straight years!”
That’s lasting. That doesn’t go away. It’s like The Honeymooners. It holds up. The great ones are never dated.
Comedy is based on the element of surprise. It can also diffuse the tensest of situations. Mel was a master at both because he’s so quick. On opening night of The Producers, an angry guy from the audience came running over to him at intermission. “I served in World War II,” he said. “You are making fun of that war! You’re making Hitler into a comic. You are humiliating everyone who served! I’ve never been so embarrassed.
I’m ashamed of this show.”
Mel says, “You were in World War II?”
The guy says, “Yeah.”
Mel says, “So was I. Where were you? I didn’t see ya . . .”
Mel could also set you up. One time, he was booked to fly to Washington for my all-night radio show. “Can you meet me at the airport?” he asked. “I can get a limo, I know, but it’ll be nice if you drive out.”

So I went out to Dulles. I waited. He walked off the plane with a crowd behind him. As soon as he saw me, he turned to everybody and yelled, “Did I tell ya? When I do a show, the host comes to the airport!”

Lenny Bruce

Every comedian you see now who uses profanity owes Lenny a debt. If there had been no Lenny Bruce, there would have been no Richard Pryor. No Richard Pryor, no Eddie Murphy. No Eddie Murphy, no Chris Rock. Chris Rock gets paid for doing the same thing that Lenny Bruce got arrested for doing. Lenny was the first one to curse onstage. He changed the culture. But he didn’t curse just to curse. There was a point behind it. He used words to make you think.

He’d say: “Fuck is colloquial for intercourse. So, I don’t get mad if somebody says ‘Fuck you, Lenny!’ And if I get mad at someone, I tell him, ‘Unfuck you, forever!’”

Although he was infamous at the time for his language, I think he was arrested more for the way he spoke about religion. But it didn’t matter how much he got fined or arrested. He refused to change. Bob Hope would go see him and say, “Lenny, lighten it up a little bit and you’ll get on every television show in the world.” But Lenny wouldn’t go on Ed Sullivan. It was frustrating. It was easy to want him to be what he refused to be. He was a great mimic. He did a great Chaplin. He just wouldn’t cop out. He thought it was insane to be upset over language.

Once while performing in San Francisco, Lenny used the word cocksucker onstage. The police hauled him away and drove him to night court.

In the car, the cop driving said, “You’re a funny guy. A real funny guy. Why do you have to say words like that?”
Lenny says, “It’s just a word. Ever had your cock sucked?” The cop sitting with the driver said, “Ah, the wife don’t like it.”
The driver said, “Your wife don’t like that? It’s the best thing.”
“Oh, my wife . . . How do I get my wife to do it?”
Now Lenny’s giving him advice. He tells him to take a banana to bed.
So all the way down to court they’re talking about blow jobs. They get to the court. Reporters have followed them. The court is packed.
Next case: Lenny Bruce.
The charge: Lewd and lascivious language in a public place.
The judge says, “What did he say?”
The cop says, “I’m sorry. I can’t repeat it in an open court.”
Lenny, of course, was his own best lawyer even though he had an attorney. He says, “Your honor, you can’t rule unless he repeats it.”
The judge says, “He’s right, you’ve got to repeat it.”
The cop says, “I’m embarrassed.” So he whispers it:“Cocksucker.”
The judge can’t hear him. He says, “What?”
The bailiff says, “Cocksucker!”
The judge says, “Cocksucker!”
The whole court erupts, “Cocksucker!”
It’s like an opera.
And Lenny says, “I charge this court with lewd and lascivious behavior!”
I think he got acquitted.
Lenny’s humor was really about the way he used his intelligence to turn the world upside down so it could be seen clearly. He wasn’t generally a joke teller. But this is one that I’ll always remember.

The greatest argument in the history of mankind, he said, is between the environmentalists and the geneticists. The geneticists claim you are the way you are because of your genes. The environmentalists contend that you are the way you are because of the way you were raised. Here’s a story that doesn’t give any answers, but shows you just how deep the problem is.

A family is in Yellowstone National Park for a weekend. On the way home, they suddenly remember they forgot their six-month-old boy. Now, they’ve got a choice. If they go back and get the kid, the father will have to miss a sales meeting. There won’t be another sales meeting the next day. But, hey, you can always have another kid. So they go home and leave the kid in the park. The kid is raised by wild dogs. That’s all he sees for eight- een years—wild dogs. No humans. Just wild dogs. One day, one of the dogs, in a fit of understanding, drops him on the side of the road and leaves.

The kid is picked up by a hitchhiker and is integrated into society. He enrolls at the University of Chicago. Makes Phi Beta Kappa. The president of the University of Chicago says in the history of the school this is the brightest kid with the most promising future—and then, damnit, one day he’s killed chasing a car.

Joan Rivers

What makes somebody funny? That’s an impossible question. It reminds me of the greatest answer ever in horse racing. The jockey Willie Shoemaker was asked about one of his competitors: What makes him a great jockey? And he said, “Horses run for him.”

Joan Rivers keeps a catalog of every joke she’s told. But if she gave you or me that catalog, and we told those jokes, they might not be funny. Joan Rivers is funny because she makes people laugh.

George Carlin

George Carlin became our Lenny—except he didn’t get busted. The most amazing thing to me is how he remembered all his material—it was so involved. He used to do the weatherman, make fun of disc jockeys, the sportscaster. “Here are tonight’s scores: 6–3. 2–1. And now, a partial score: 6.” It’s not good to say you have a great joke before you tell it, because it’s a letdown if people don’t laugh. But this is a great joke from Carlin: A Catholic kid goes into confession. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Yes, son, what did you do?”
“I cannot say.”
“You must confess, or I cannot give you absolution.”
“Well, Father, I had relations with a young girl.”
“I will forgive you. But who was the young girl?”
“Sorry, Father, I cannot betray a confidence.”
“It would help a lot to give forgiveness if I knew who the young girl was. Was it Angela Latrice?”
“I cannot say, Father.”
“Was it Betty Santangelo?”
“I cannot say.”
“OK, you’re absolved. But for four months you cannot be an altar boy.”
The kid comes out of the confessional box and his friend asks, “What happened?”
The kid says, “I got two great leads and I don’t have to work for four months.”

Henny Youngman

Henny was known for his one-liners. But there’s a story my friend George Schlatter loves to tell that shows him off-the-cuff. Henny invited George to eat at the Carnegie Deli. “Come by for lunch, the family’s here. I want you to meet everyone. Just come by to say hello.” So George goes over as the family is finishing up a big lunch. George has a cup of coffee, and the server places the check in front of him. George picks up the check—and Henny says to make sure to leave a big tip. George says, “Henny, I can see picking up the check. But the tip, too?” Henny says, “I don’t want you to look cheap.”

Milton Berle

Once, Berle and Jack Carter were at a Henny Youngman performance. They let him tell the run-up to one of his jokes, like this:
“A Polish guy buys a zebra for a pet. You know what he calls him?”
And then, before he could say another word, Berle and Carter shouted out the punch line: “Spot!”

David Letterman

David Letterman is one wacky guy. First of all, he keeps the temperature in his studio at about forty-eight degrees. When you go onstage, you’re freezing. It warms up a little when the lights are on you. But maybe an undertone of discomfort plays into his humor.

A person could have been on his show forty times, but it wouldn’t matter, he’d never say hello beforehand. That’s how he works. When you come on, he’ll greet you with a big hug, then not say anything to you during the commercial break. One time, during a big intro, as he was hugging me, he whispered in my ear: “I hate my tie.”

We did a nice first segment. As soon as we broke, he looked at his tie and said, “Why did I wear this?” He was tortured.
“Why did I wear this?”
“You wanna change ties?”
“No, they’ll notice. They’ll notice.”
Then he calls to his producer. “You let me wear this tie!”
But out of nowhere, he’ll come up with the perfect line. Like the time I came on a couple of days after a crazy airplane experience. I had been flying across country with the talk show host Cyndy Garvey and some other friends. As we were landing, the winds were so strong that they blew the plane backward. It was unbelievable. The gusts must have flung us five hundred feet in reverse. The pilot recovered and landed us safely, but afterward he told us he’d never experienced anything like it. I told Letterman the entire story on the air. “What if the plane had crashed?” I said. “Can you imagine what the head- line would have been the next day?” “Yeah,” Letterman said. “ CYNDY GARVEY AND FIVE OTHERS PERISH .”

Jay Leno

Jay is the opposite of Letterman in that he comes by before the show to say hello.

He works very hard. I can remember years ago when he’d call CNN for the overnight news as soon as he got up in the morning so he could get started on his material. If you ever get a chance, see him in Vegas. His Vegas act is much different from what he does on The Tonight Show. He stalks the stage. Three times as much energy. I guested on his show shortly after Larry King Live ended and we did a nice bit. “I want to ask you something honestly,” he said for the cameras. “Do you miss the routine of doing the show after twenty-five years?

“You know something,” I told him. “I’ve got to be honest with you. I never even think about it.” “Never think about it?”
“Never.”
The phone rings. I pick it up. “Albuquerque, you’re on the air!”

Conan O’Brien

“There’s a rumor that NBC is so upset with me they want to keep me off the air for three years. My response to that is if NBC doesn’t want people to see me, just leave me on NBC.”

Jimmy Kimmel

I don’t go on the Internet. But if I did, I’d go to YouTube to see the clip of Jimmy talking to kids in Hollywood while he’s dressed up as a chimpanzee.

Jimmy Fallon

Jimmy had Tiger Woods on not long ago. He said, “I want to say thank you for having the courage to come on a late night comedy program. . . . It must have been painful and awful— everything you went through. But from a comedian’s standpoint, and my monologue writer’s, thank you! . . . Not even making jokes—it kind of wrote itself: Balls, shafts, holes, four- somes . . . Thank you, thank you, thank you!” When you can make Tiger Woods laugh at what happened to him, you’re funny.

Lewis Black

Nobody makes anger funnier.

Woody Allen

“I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Larry David

What’s the expression? A comic says funny things. A comedian sees things funny. Larry David sees things funny. The situations he puts himself in are amazing. He never really behaves badly—but he’s so honest that he gets himself into all sorts of trouble. There’s a genius to that. Larry David is leaving a restaurant. He’s got his claim check for the valet. A black guy is standing next to him, and Larry gives him the claim check. The black guy is waiting for his car. Larry didn’t mean anything wrong by it, but . . .

Bill Maher

Bill used to come on my radio show in Washington back in the eighties when he was just starting out. He’d dissect the political landscape for two hours and take calls. Nobody really knew him. Then look what happened. Last year, I introduced him when he got his star on Hollywood and Vine. When I did, I saw Kato Kaelin in the audience.
“Hey, Kato,” I said, “who’s house you living behind now?”
“Tiger Woods’s,” he said.
Bill was the perfect guy to have as a guest the night I announced my resignation. He came on with little notice and no preparation and turned what could have been a difficult night into a lot of laughs.
“I’m glad you’re not being fired for your comments about 9/11,” he said. “Oh, no, that was me . . .” Bill is often misunderstood. People say that he hates America. But he loves America. He wants it to be a better place and he believes that the only way to make it a better place is to criticize what’s wrong with it. If we can laugh along with him, so much the better.

One night, he went off on Mitt Romney’s book, titled No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. “Really?” he said. “Always waving the big foam number one finger. We’re not number one in most things. We’re number one in military. We’re number one in money. We’re number one in fat toddlers, meth labs, and people we send to prison.

“We’re not number one in literacy, in money spent on education. We’re not even number one in social mobility. Social mobility means basically the American Dream, the ability of one generation to do better than the next. We’re tenth. That’s like Sweden coming tenth in Swedish meatballs.”

Stephen Colbert

Colbert is basically doing a parody of Bill O’Reilly. So when I went on his show, I did a parody of Larry King. I parodied his parody. We had fun. Afterward, he said, “I was going to say it on the air, but I’ll tell it off the air: My first sexual experience was in a car, and you were on the radio. I was in college—in the back seat.”
“Was it romantic?” I asked.
He said, “You had a good guest.”

Jackie Gleason

Jackie was very much a perfectionist. There were no satellites in those days. He’d do a show for the East Coast. Later on, they’d play it for the West Coast. In between, he’d watch and know if the third violin was off. He was not a joke teller; he was a sketch comic. He needed that rotund physique. There was a time when he lost a lot of weight and he wasn’t funny.

Before he died, he told me he wanted to do The Odd Couple. I said, “Jackie, that’s right up your alley. You’d be a great Oscar.”
“I don’t want to be Oscar,” he said. This shows you how Jackie understood comedy. “Oscar’s easy. I want to be Felix. You play off Oscar. Oscar has one note. Felix has layers. As Felix you get bigger laughs.”

Kathy Griffin

“I have a very unusual stance, which is that I am pro-gay marriage, but I believe that heterosexual marriage should be a criminal offense because I’m divorced and a little bitter.”

Craig Ferguson

I can only hope to be as free flowing as Craig when my show gets to the question-and-answer session with the audience.
Craig is from Scotland. I once asked him, “What’s under a kilt?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “On a good day,” he said, “lipstick.”

Bob Hope

I can’t explain it, but I never thought that Bob Hope was funny.

Colin Powell

Not many people are aware that General Powell has a great sense of humor.
When I was in Washington, the hot invitation in town every New Year’s Eve was Ben Bradlee’s party. Ben was the managing editor of the Washington Postat the time, and anybody who was anybody was at his home on that evening.

The first time I went, the music was playing but nobody was getting up to dance. So Colin and I got up and started dancing together. It became a ritual. For years, we opened up the dance floor by dancing together.

In the fourth year, I said to him, “Think of it. A poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn. A black kid from the South Bronx. Who would’ve thought that the editor of the Washington Post would invite them to a New Year’s Eve party and they’d be dancing together.”
Colin leaped back and said, “You’re Jewish?”
Colin has become mishpocheh—family. Whenever we see each other he’s got a joke in a Yiddish accent.
This is the one Colin told me after the last time I interviewed him.
A Jewish woman says to a friend, “I’ve got to tell somebody! I’ve got to admit it! But how do I say it? How do I say it? I can’t tell anybody.”
“Please tell me,” the friend pleads.
“OK. I’m having an affair.”
“Who’s catering?”

Robin Williams

He’s so fast you can’t even remember afterward what he said. But you were laughing.

Shecky Greene

“I’ve got a four-hour erection.”
“Call the doctor!”
“I will not!”

Steven Wright

I’m still amazed by creativity. After all these years, I haven’t heard it all. I can still hear something new that makes me laugh. Steven Wright’s mind is in another league.
“Doesn’t it bother you that Monopoly has only one manufacturer?” Monopoly is a monopoly. What made him think of that?

Mark Russell

Mark is a great political comedian. He plays the piano and relates popular songs to politics. The thing is, we do kind of look alike. One day he was walking through the Atlanta airport and passed three pilots. One said, “Hey, that’s Larry King!” Russell looked over and said, “Fuck you!” The best part of the joke is that he kept walking. He did it just so he could tell me, “I don’t think I did you a favor the other day . . .”

Jon Stewart

“Democrats always seem to have to prove to America that they love America. Republicans love America. They just seem to hate about 50 percent of the people who live in it.” Jon is the Mark Twain of our time. He does the fastest half hour on television. Who else would come on my show after I announced that I would be leaving and say, “What’s happening, baby? Can I tell you something? You made the right choice. You are leaving this place. You know what you are? You’re the last guy out of a burning building, my friend! . . . Oh, I’m sorry. Am I . . . are we on CNN right now?”

George Burns

Even at the end, Burns presided over the Hillcrest Country Club. He made them put up a sign that said it all:
NOBODY UNDER AGE 98  MAY SMOKE

Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live is America’s weekly campfire. I’ve seen about 70 percent of them since the days of the original cast. That show had giants: John Belushi. Chevy Chase. Steve Martin. Bill Murray. I interviewed the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, and some of the show’s recent stars last year. Saturday Night Live has been around for thirty-five years and had a lot of fun with me during that time.  It once began a show with a sketch of my wedding to Shawn. But the bit that always stuck with me is the one about the famous philosopher. It’s not all that funny—it’s more just true. The philosopher had a new book out about the philos- ophy of life. An interviewer asks, “Can you briefly tell us what your philosophy is?”
“Yes. My philosophy is to live in the now.”
“What does that mean?”
“That means you’ve got to live in the now. Because as soon as it’s over, it’s a was. You can’t do anything about the next minute, because it’s in front of you. You can’t do anything about the minute you just lived.

So you’ve got to live in the now. You’ve got to grab the now, now.” You’re frantic. Because all you’ve got is the now. And see, this now, it’s already gone. So, I’m still going to be waking up at 6:15 every morning. As soon as my eyes open, I’ll be shooting out of bed. I’ll be trying to make the best of all of my nows.

The last words I said on Larry King Live were: “Instead of goodbye, how about so long.” But that’s not how this book is going to end. This book is going to end with the start of a new chapter. And my new chapter is going to begin like this:

All these years you’ve been listening to me and watching me, I’ve been sitting down.
Next time I see you, I’ll be standing up.