Free I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder by William Knoedelseder

would call him Tuesday afternoon with assigned time slots. If he didn’t get a call on Tuesday, then he should show up again for Monday night tryouts. That was Mitzi’s system.
    Letterman likened it to trying out for the high school basketball team: If you didn’t make the cut, nobody told you directly.
    Your name just didn’t appear on the list the coach posted on the bulletin board. He felt like such a freshman.
    He phoned in his availability the next Monday and held his breath. Sure enough, he got a call back on Tuesday assigning him time slots for the week. They weren’t in prime time, but they were a start. The other comics quickly took notice of him because he wasn’t like anyone else. For starters, he didn’t tell jokes.
    He used everyday experiences as the setup and then supplied his own punch line, like the dreaded call from the mechanic telling you there’s a lot more wrong with your car than you’d thought:
    “Yeah, Dave, this is Earl down at the garage. . . . We were adjust-ing the dials on your radio . . . and the engine blew up. . . . Yeah, it killed one of our guys.”
    The other comics also noticed that Letterman didn’t sound like the rest of them. He didn’t have the staccato cadence and hard sell delivery that usually came with being a club comic. He sounded more like a broadcaster—smooth, controlled, conversational—in the style of Carson, Steve Allen, and Jack Paar. That, combined with his caustic wit and ability to turn the tables on hecklers, created a presence on stage that belied his limited experience and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 51
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    cued his fellow comics that a major talent had arrived. It also helped to offset his appearance: the Hoosier clothes and scraggily red beard that Jay Leno said made him look like “either Dinty Moore or Paul Bunyan’s son.”*
    Johnny Dark thought Letterman was a “hayseed” when he first met him. They were standing in the hallway by the Comedy Store restroom waiting for Letterman to go on. Letterman introduced himself, called him “Mr. Dark,” and said how much he admired his act. Dark then watched as the scruffy newcomer took the stage and faced a crowd that had been tough all night. “They are going to eat this kid,” he thought.
    Instead, Letterman took it right to them. “So what do you puds want to talk about tonight?” were the first words out of his mouth.
    From opposite sides of the room, two men heckled him simultaneously. He fired back, “Are you two guys sharing a brain? ” The crowd roared. After that, he owned them. Johnny Dark was awed.
    Given Letterman’s cocksure stage manner, other comics were surprised to discover that offstage he was shy and socially ill at ease. Fellow Midwesterner Tom Dreesen took an instant liking to him. They were both married, lived in the San Fernando Valley, and had their days free, so they quickly bonded over sports activity. Dreesen invited Letterman to play racquetball and join in pickup basketball games at the Van Nuys YMCA. When Dreesen put together a Comedy Store basketball team, the Bombers, he drafted Letterman as the power forward. Tim Reid, Jimmie Walker, and Johnny Witherspoon also played on the team, as did Paul Mooney’s twin sons, Daryl and Dwayne, who would only pass to one another, which meant that their teammates constantly had to steal the ball from them.
    Dreesen worked hard to draw Letterman into his ever-widening social circle of comics. It wasn’t easy because Letterman was a
    *Jay Leno with Bill Zehme, Leading with My Chin (New York: Harper-Collins, 1996).
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    loner, almost to the point of being a recluse. He was comfortable hanging out with Dreesen one-on-one, shooting hoops, and having a sandwich, but he was uneasy in the kind of larger group situation that Dreesen was constantly engineering. But Dreesen pulled him along, counseling,