Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star (3 page)

“How could she do that?” my mother inquired. I was shocked when she marched herself down the street to Hal’s house. She returned some time later, almost in tears, admitting she didn’t have the courage to confront Hal’s mother. “It’s better to just let it go,” she sighed, then showed me the book on assertiveness she’d checked out from the library, hoping in the future to do better at speaking up for herself.

What my mother wasn’t shy about, however, was seeking out therapists for me. I went to see various ones since I was thirteen. One would tell racist jokes and get mad at me for being uptight and not laughing at them. And then for a brief while, she began seeing her own therapist. She’d come back from a session and for an hour or so be very nice: “How was your day, Freddie?” “Are you excited about any TV shows on tonight?” “I brought you some cookies.” I have to say that scared me to death.

I knew the shrink must’ve instructed her to make an extra effort to be nice to me, and I have to give her credit that she was trying her hardest, but I also knew that smile on her face would wear off rather soon and things would just go back to the way they always were. After a few months she announced she was quitting therapy. “I know I have hang-ups. You go! You deal with it!” So I went. After three sessions she said, “So, are you better yet?”

Out of all my mother’s neuroses, I think she was most afraid of me not doing well in school. She had been left back in first grade because she’d been very ill and had missed a lot of days. So I could never miss school, no matter how sick I was. I could be gushing blood and she’d say, “School goes on whether you’re there or not!” For years in a row, I won a perfect attendance certificate. Other kids may have been good at sports or drawing or music, but my greatest accomplishment was sticking my arm up in the air and calling, “Present!”

My mother also insisted I have a regular tutor, and I later found out that she paid others to secretly tutor me. She gave my babysitter, my sister’s friends, and some kids on the street small amounts of money to sneak in math lessons in any unsuspecting way they could. Most of them, though, had no math skills and just pocketed the cash.

Although I had that impeccable attendance record, I still felt invisible in school. I only had the one friend, Hal, who lived down the street (and who, to this day, still lives down the street, with his unwelcoming mother). I was often jealous of the kid in my class who always got chased and beaten up. I could never figure out why he was the chosen one; he wasn’t chubby or brainy or anything that distinctive. But then one day when he was absent, they chose me to pick on; they chased me and pulled my string tie through the fence and threw me down. It was actually kind of thrilling. For once, I wasn’t invisible. The next day, when the other kid returned, I felt a little sad it was over.

Let’s just say my imagination was not exactly encouraged. My mother threw out my G.I. Joe action figures because she thought I was a sissy for playing with “dolls,” so I resorted to clothespins to enact my mock battles.

To escape the fear I had about the world out there, I had two outlets. First was my imaginary basketball league. I’d shove a wire coat hanger I rolled into the shape of a hoop into the opening at the top of my bedroom door and closed it so it stayed in its place. My ball was a rolled up pair of socks. For hours on end I played games. But the basketball stars I grew up with such as Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, and Walt Frazier didn’t play in my bedroom. The players I invented had names, faces, and skills totally unlike anyone I had ever seen. There was Globolo, the tall thin guy with just one arm. And Dvest, the short muscular black guy who’d probably be labeled autistic today. He didn’t speak or communicate. One had a facial deformity, one shook nervously, one swatted the ball like a volleyball, and the rest were other misfits who shined in my bedroom.

My other outlet was acting out scenes from my favorite movies. But unlike most kids who grow up idolizing decisive, macho heroes like Clint Eastwood or Harrison Ford, I shunned the stars and gravitated toward the invisible bit players or outcast characters. In
Dog Day Afternoon
, I pretended I was the guy who chickened out in the beginning. In
The Parallax View
, I was the guy with the tuba who points out the bad guy. On long car rides I’d sit in the backseat with my head pressed against the window pretending I was Ratso Rizzo from
Midnight Cowboy
on his doomed bus ride to Florida. And I’d spend hours pretending to be Billy, the mentally disabled deaf mute from
The Last Picture Show
, who spends the whole movie sweeping only to get killed by a truck. I’d sweep the house with an imaginary broom and then lie on the floor, face down, pretending I too was run over by a truck. A less disturbing hero was Donald Sutherland playing the goofy character amongst all the other macho stars in
The Dirty Dozen
. I also connected with guys like Herb Edelman and Ron Leibman, and any other quirky character actor who made me sit up in my seat like a lone dog when it sees another of its own species. “I could do that! I could be that!” I’d exclaim. I knew I had no hope of being the leading man, but I could be an awkward blind date; I could trip and crash into the wedding cake.

Then, when I was in high school, I discovered another way you could get on TV, even if you didn’t start as a kid. One night, I tagged along with my sister and her friends to Pips, a local Brooklyn comedy club. Somehow I got in without being carded. Richard Lewis and Billy Crystal were performing; neither had broken through yet. Crystal actually did a bit about fake IDs. He said, “I see we have some people that snuck in tonight.” Despite being terrified that I was going to be singled out for being underage, I remember laughing. More than that, I became mesmerized with the idea of being a comedian. I had seen comics on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and
The Tonight Show
, but seeing it live and up close made it seem so much more accessible.

Even though Crystal wasn’t famous yet, he had a life from just doing comedy. That intrigued me. I had never been a big student of stand-up comedy, but I remember noticing on the back of the menu a list of all the famous comics that had started at that club: Rodney Dangerfield, David Brenner, George Carlin, Joan Rivers. One of my sister’s friends told me that actors like Jimmie Walker from
Good Times
and Freddie Prinze from
Chico and The Man
did routines at a comedy club in Manhattan and were spotted for
The Tonight Show
. From that, they got to be on a TV show. Even though both Walker and Prinze would end up as subjects on the
E! True Hollywood Story
, back then they were gods to me. The idea of
me
putting an act together began gestating that night. For the first time in my life, I thought there could actually be a place in the world for a guy who so far had only been noticed for raising his arm in the air.

3

“YOU’RE TOO DEPRESSED
TO BE A COMEDIAN”

I
t’s kind of amazing that I made the decision to get onstage in front of strangers and tell jokes, since at seventeen I was so shy, I practically needed to ask permission to enter a supermarket.

It was the summer before I graduated high school and also my eighth year at Camp Sequoia, an eight-week sleep-away camp in Upstate New York where I had risen up the ranks to camp waiter. I bought the comedy albums of Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and George Carlin to start off my research. For those eight weeks I honed my routine muttering my jokes to myself while walking alone in the woods. But then a bully went through my cubby and found my notebook I was using to craft my routine and read it aloud to everyone else.

“My name is Fred Stoller and if you never heard of that name before, you’re deaf because I just said it.”

“What kind of retard writes a letter to his parents and says what his name is?” he taunted.

I tried explaining it wasn’t a letter, but a joke I was writing. “A joke? What kind of joke is that?”

I knew I couldn’t tell all of them I wanted to be a comedian and get my dreams trampled on so early in the game. But I told myself that when summer was over, they’d be surprised that the guy they called “Galaxy Man” (because I always took off and went into my own world) would end up in a world of comedic stardom on game shows, talk shows, and movies!

When camp was over and I got back home, I went as soon as I could to The Improv, a famous New York comedy club where I was determined to make my mark. It hadn’t occurred to me that before my first time stepping on stage, it would have been wise to visit different comedy clubs to get a feel for the place, the comics, and how tough the crowd may be. But who had time to think about scoping out clubs—I had TV stardom waiting for me! That Sunday night there were dozens of other hopefuls like me who had waited hours on line praying that they could pass the audition. “Passing” meant the right to hang out all night in the bar so that maybe once every few weeks you’d get a shot to perform for no money very late at night after most of the crowd had gone home. On line was a guy actually skinnier than me named Steven Buse. His act consisted of him taking his shirt off and making muscles. I’d later see him pop up in movies when he went back to his real name, Steve Buscemi.

That first audition, I talked so fast that my five-minute prepared routine took only about three minutes. My jokes were not sophisticated, I talked about pay toilets. I said, “They should make it that you have to pay to get out, because anyone would pay to get out of there with that smell.” I also did one about asking this girl out. She told me I had to gain weight. I told her that every time I look at her, I do gain weight. I didn’t realize an erection meant you didn’t actually gain weight, but your weight was just a bit distributed elsewhere.

One night, I did a little better than the others. On the train ride to the club, I came up with this routine and, with nothing to lose, tried it out. “My friend told me that he was at a party, and he ate so many cookies, ‘it wasn’t even funny.’ Does that mean eating cookies is usually funny, but not in his case?” And then I took out some cookies and proceeded to eat them as I waited and got a few laughs. When I got off stage, another open mic comedian said, “You eating cookies, now that’s funny. You did that funny.”

But the long train rides to Manhattan for the longer waits to being rejected was more than I could take, so I quit and went to Kingsborough Community College as a way to keep my mother off my back. In some of my classes I sat with convicted felons. They were let out of prison to study at Kingsborough during the day and then had to report back at night. One fellow English student decided to skip school one day and go on his own field trip instead, a kidnapping and robbery spree at the local mall. He was sent back to a maximum security prison which he escaped from and went on another notorious kidnapping spree. He may well be Kingsborough’s most renowned former student.

During college, I worked for several years at horrible part-time jobs. I sold bootleg T-shirts at rock concerts where I had to watch out for the cops or the hired security of the rock groups or other vendors who tried to pickpocket my earnings. At Coney Island amusement park, I worked at a cheap haunted house called “The Tunnel of Laughs.” The ride was slow and dull, so to give the customers some sort of a fright, I was paid to dress up as the Wolfman and jump out and scare them. During several heat waves, I had to stand in the hot tunnel, wearing a heavy furry mask, waiting for the next car to pass. It got so hot that sometimes I’d take the mask off, put it on my fist, and just shoved it at the people. On several occasions, gang kids who were mad I scared them went on the ride again, knowing I was going to be there, and spit and swung at me. I’d sit in the tunnel between rides and think, “What the hell am I going to do with my life?” I felt as terrified about my future as when I was a kid. The Bruce Springsteen song “Factory” kept going through my head. It was just the working life for me, too.

Although three years had passed, I finally decided that I had to go back to the comedy clubs. I blocked out the prior rejections and recalled I did get those laughs when I ate those cookies. So I walked out of the dark tunnel, handed the owner my Wolfman mask, and quit.

After my three-year absence, I felt I had a stronger resolve to make it happen this time. On August 6, 1978, I was twenty years old and number thirty-seven on line for The Improv. I finally got onstage at around one in the morning. Besides my new opening joke, I did probably the only “political” joke of my career: “I think Gerald Ford was going after the Italian vote. Yeah, he made over fifty vetoes.” My big statement on religion was, “It’s a waste. Look at the Jews, for example. When we want to pray, we often go to The Wailing Wall. What good does that do? It’s like talking to a wall.” And my big closing was the last impression I ever did in my career: Ed McMahon. McMahon, of course, was famous for saying “And, heeeeeere’s Johnny!” My impression was of Ed McMahon as a baby, “Goo Gooooo, Ga Ga!”

Luckily, the few scattered audience members who remained happened to connect with me. Those jokes didn’t last in my act for more than a month, but for some reason, that night they did the trick. Perhaps the audience appreciated my do-or-die determination to sell those jokes and start a new life. They were with me for every beat and gave me a big ovation when I left.

When I got offstage I passed the emcee, Robert Wuhl (who years later would end up being the star and creator of
Arli$$),
who told me to see the manager in the bar, Chris Albrecht. Albrecht,who ended up being the head of HBO, said that if I wanted to, I could start hanging out at the club. I was so excited; I didn’t sleep for three days. I decided to quit college. I needed to spend all my time hanging out all night at The Improv, hoping they’d put me on.

My mother did not quite comprehend my career choice. “You’re so depressed, how are you going to make people laugh?” And I have to admit I could understand her bafflement. No one had ever told me I was funny. None of my relatives knew me to talk more than my father did. I only had a few friends and none of them thought I was funny. I didn’t even think I was funny. But somehow I had gotten my foot in the door at The Improv and I saw that as a way to find my place in the world somehow.

My family ended up helping me develop my best material. They’d just open their mouths and all I had to do was repeat what they said verbatim:

“My mother’s not very proud of me that I do this. She doesn’t tell her friends that I’m a comedian. She tells them I’m retarded.”