Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (8 page)

Many years after my first Apollo appearance I opened for Gladys Knight and the Pips at the Westbury Music Festival on Long Island. I ordered a limousine to chauffeur my mother to the concert. She came backstage afterward. The first thing she said?

“You’re still doing the algebra question!”

4

Making It in New York

FROM THE EAST WIND TO THE APOLLO, I WAS PERFORMING IN FRONT of almost wholly black crowds. I was spinning in place so fast that I hardly knew I was not moving forward. Then someone said, “You’re not bad. Maybe you could be a more commercial act. There’s this room downtown run by a guy named Frankie Darrow who puts on comedians. He’d probably love to see what you do.” Appropriately for a black comic, it was called the African Room.

Near Times Square, on 44th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, the African Room was a nightclub that, despite its name, featured limbo contests and calypso music from a Caribbean steel band led by a singer named Johnny Barracuda. On Monday nights though, Darrow hosted a showcase, attracting upward of twenty acts—singers, comedians, jugglers, dancers, whatever.

The audiences were still basically black, but there were also whites, and many of the showcase performers were white too. Comedians David Brenner, Steve Landesberg, and Danny Aiello, and singers Bette Midler and Melissa Manchester were a few of the unknowns trying to get on stage to do their thing. One of many acts who would never be heard from again was Three Is Company, a trio of brothers from Long Beach, New York. They tried to be a new Marx Brothers, I guess. Uh, not good. But one of the brothers did go on to fame and fortune, by the name of Billy Crystal.

Usually you had to audition to get a spot, but I came in with such energy and a different flavor that Frankie put me on right away. It was either that or he was scared I was going to shoot somebody—because I came on very strong and very ghetto.

I was far more street than the other black comics at the African Room—Stu Gilliam, Scoey Mitchell, Joe Keyes and an older comedian named Jay Bernard. He had an odd opening: “My name is Jay Bernard. That’s J-a-y B-e-r-n-a-r-d. That’s Jay Bernard. Just in case you can’t remember it, it’s Jay Bernard. J-a-y B-e-r-n-a-r-d.” He went on like that for three minutes. If a comic did that today, it would be called deconstructing comedy à la Andy Kaufman. Back then it was just stupid funny, for the first minute anyway.

Next to the stage in the African Room was a giant, eight-foot mechanical gorilla that slowly rotated back and forth and would growl as its green and yellow eyes rolled around in its head. The gorilla would continue its antics even while someone was on stage. It distracted the audience and annoyed the performer. But Darrow would only turn it off during the most popular acts.

Here was a new audience for me—the somewhat racially mixed downtown crowd. But I did the same material as I did at the Apollo, the same edgy racial humor labeled Black Only. Such as a routine about pitching pennies—about how the guys in the projects talked as they gambled, flinging pennies onto the cement, trying to land them as near as possible to a wall. The end came when someone threw a “leaner,” a rare feat in which the penny stands on its edge and leans against the wall, beating everything. I had my characters arguing and cursing like cousins at a Harlem barbershop.

If a heckler kept interrupting my act, I would use an old Redd Foxx line: “If you keep on, I’m gonna have to come out there and cut somebody!” If it was a white guy, I would hit him with “Hey man, what’s wrong with y’all? This is great shit. Oh, you’re white! Now I know why you don’t get it.” If they were black: “Ever notice how in a whole crowd of black people, a nigger always stands out?”

The problem was that even the black people in this audience wore leisure suits. These blacks had stuff, and people with stuff like having stuff and don’t want to lose their stuff. This was not the militant crowd of the East Wind who didn’t have stuff to lose. And the white people in the audience were liberals not particularly wanting to be attacked as though they were notorious Alabama police commissioner Bull Connor.

The audience would turn on me. People came up afterward and said, “What’s with the anger, man?”

One of those was Brenner. He was an Army veteran, a college graduate, and a television producer in his hometown of Philadelphia. He was smart, savvy, and had substance. He was also a very funny stand-up who you knew was going to succeed in a major way. He was white and Jewish, but he had grown up in the only Caucasian family in a black neighborhood, so he knew the black experience.

After watching me, Brenner introduced himself.

“What’s your name?”

“Jimmie Walker.”

“I’m horrible at remembering names, but I’ll remember yours,” he said, “because that was the name of a famous mayor of New York.”

He sat me down. “Have you ever worked in front of a white crowd?” he asked.

“No, not really.”

“Well, you can be a star in the black community doing what you’re doing, but if you want to be a big star, you have to learn how to make white people laugh.”

James Brown had said it was “a man’s man’s man’s world,” but most of all, it was a white world—and that was a world different from the projects and pitching pennies.

“I think you have talent,” he said. “You’re young, you have the energy, the look. But none of that will get you anywhere if you can’t get on the floor in a white club.”

He said I needed to tone down the racial rhetoric. “Hey, I understand there are problems,” Brenner explained. “The Italians have had problems, the Irish have had problems, the Jews have had problems, the Puerto Ricans, the Chinese, everybody has had problems. Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years. But you don’t hear me talking about that on stage. If you’re going to do stand-up, you need to worry about being funny. Bringing up that five thousand blacks died in Biafra today isn’t funny. You’ll have a better chance of getting a following—of being heard—if you go more middle of the road. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you will never be heard by anyone except blacks because no one else will hire you.”

When Brenner spoke, you had the feeling you should listen. And if you didn’t, he told you that you should. Brenner befriended me, and he was right. This was truly a career-changing conversation, and I knew it immediately. I wasn’t that angry young man off stage even though I played one on stage. I was never nasty, but I did have a sharp edge. If I wanted to achieve universal appeal, I now realized, my material had to relate to white people as well as black people.

That did not mean I had to become Bill Cosby. I had gone by myself to see Cosby at Carnegie Hall a year or so earlier. I brought some jokes with me, naively thinking I could lay a few on him and he would take me under his wing. But then I saw his act—in front of an audience of a lot of white people, not many black people. He told stories—like his routine about Noah—not badda-bing jokes, and nothing racially charged. They gave him a standing ovation.

I recognized that Cosby was the best comic rolling and that there has never been anyone better as a stand-up—or sit-down—comic. But what he did was not me, not my style, not my thing. I knew that my jokes were not for him, so I never approached him.

I learned that blacks and whites are different audiences. White crowds give you a few minutes to win them over. Black crowds—you have to get their attention right away. For them, I would stand on the bar. I would stand on tables. I would take a drink in my hand and yell, “Don’t think I’m not going to nigger lip this!” That would turn their heads toward me.

“You’re offending people when you say that word,” Brenner said disapprovingly of “nigger.” “People can’t laugh when they’re uptight.”

“But black people say it to each other all the time.”

“You know, white people get offended hearing that word too. People have to like you.”

I continued to use “nigger” and “whitey” or “cracker” but only when I did black gigs (I was still with the Last Poets and the Panthers). At mixed shows they became “black folks” and “y’all.”

I had a mixed act and a black act, and the mixed one was starting to succeed at the African Room. After about three months they gave me a regular spot. Then, one night as I was about to go onstage, Frankie pulled the plug on the gorilla. To this day that remains one of the highlights of my career. “I’m on my way,” I said to myself.

I began to play increasingly white crowds at clubs downtown and in Greenwich Village—from Café Wha? (where I first met Richard Pryor) to the tiny Apartment, with its wall-to-wall carpeting; from hootenanny nights at the Bitter End to Gerde’s Folk City (opening for the likes of folk stars such as Eric Anderson, Dave Van Ronk, Karla Bonoff, Bonnie Raitt, and the McGarrigle Sisters); from the Gaslight to Upstairs at the Downstairs (where Joan Rivers ruled).

At the Bitter End, if you won the Tuesday hootenanny night, determined by audience applause, your prize would be the opening-act gig for the star headliner the following week. The crowd was with me one of those Tuesday nights and I won, much to the chagrin of co-owner Paul Colby, who was not a Jimmie Walker fan. He couldn’t believe I had won, couldn’t believe anyone ever laughed at my jokes.

Nevertheless, I opened at the Bitter End for Labelle, which went very smoothly because I had earlier worked with them in upstate New York when they were Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. We did three performances a night, at seven, nine, and eleven, from Monday through Sunday, and all twenty-one shows sold out.

I must have done okay because a writer for
Variety
gave me a review I still have, from 1970: “Jimmy Walker, 23-year-old black comic, is drawing yocks. . . . Material is usually ghetto-based, quite pointed and always funny. . . . When response is lukewarm, he quickly shifts gears with resulting guffaws.”

After the last of the twenty-one shows I hung around to get paid. Colby paid everyone, from the wait staff to the busboys. I think he even went outside and gave a couple bucks to the homeless guy in the alley before he finally got around to me.

He was about to hand me $50 but then stopped.

“Oh, you had two chocolate shakes,” Colby said. “That’s $1.25 a piece. Here’s $47.50.” Then he tagged it. “I’ll see you on hootenanny night!”

I was happy I could put the Bitter End on my credits and happy that I had done well, but it was clear that this comic was the low man on that totem pole.

Gabe Kaplan was a comic who insisted on getting respect, even if it was in only a token way. At the Gaslight the opening act might be a magician, followed by a comic, then a poet, and finally a headliner such as singer José Feliciano. Kaplan asked the club manager how much the comic was usually paid for the three shows a day, seven days a week.

“Fifty dollars.”

Gabe said, “Then if you want me, it will cost you $51.”

The most important club for a comic was the Improvisation on West 44th Street in Hell’s Kitchen. The Improv was a showcase club where the bookers for national television shows such as the
Tonight Show
would scout new talent. You were not paid, and there was no lineup for the acts. You showed up, and when owner Budd Friedman felt it was the right time for you, he’d say, “You’re next.” Some nights you might hang around for two hours and never get on stage.

Budd also insisted that comics not perform back to back. He would put a singer or some other act between them. Mike Preminger, a comic in our group, said that he dreamed one night that he had died and all of us, including Budd, were at his funeral. Suddenly Budd stood up and stopped the funeral. “Wait,” he said, “first we bury a singer and then Preminger.”

I auditioned for Budd, but apparently he wasn’t impressed—he put me on at one in the morning. So I stopped going. After all, I was killing downtown. But Danny Aiello, who was also a doorman at the Improv, said he would put in a good word for me. When I did go back and did well, Budd finally gave me better times.

The Improv featured many of the same people I was working with at the African Room but also others, such as Robert Klein, Richard Lewis, Stiller and Meara, the Ace Trucking Company, and Andy Kaufman. The waitresses, including some who later became stars such as Midler, Liz Torres, and Elayne Boosler, doubled as singers, breaking up the comedy acts.

Klein was highly respected and an important influence on many comedians of that day and today. He graduated from De Witt Clinton High School like I did, but we were polar opposites. He was very serious—even wanted to be a serious actor—and I was very loose and had no interest in acting. Klein considered himself better than anyone else and acted like it. But like Brenner, he knew what he was doing.

Until I met him and Brenner, my material was pretty much kept in my head, barely written down, and I never knew what I had performed where. I learned the stand-up’s work ethic from them. Every joke of theirs was written down and arranged by subject into “chunks” that were TV-ready for appearances on the
Tonight Show
or
Ed Sullivan
. They audio taped every show and knew when and where they told every joke. They worked very hard, and comedians like Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, and, later, Jerry Seinfeld picked up on their way of working. So did I.

That stage at the Improv was where we honed our craft and paid our dues. That stage was the only place we could get exposure, where we could get discovered, where we could try out new material, where we could get better.

I would come off stage after a bad set and say to Budd, “That audience was terrible.” Budd would answer, “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, young man.” I did not like it when he said that, but it was true; almost every time the fault lays with the comic, not the audience. Even if the set is not going well, you must look like it is and plow through. At some point, hopefully, the audience thinks, “Wow, maybe we’re wrong.” Then they loosen up. Lessons like those were hard earned.

To any stand-up, those moments on stage provided our oxygen, kept us breathing. We performed for free, but we fought for stage time. So when Klein would take our spots in order for him to hone his act before a Sullivan or Carson shot, the other comics were not happy. One of us would be about to go on stage and Budd would rush in and say, “Oh, Klein’s here. He’s going on now.” You were bumped out of your spot and into a later time.