Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [9]
One Saturday morning when I was fifteen, my best friend James Barone (a guido) drove me to Rascals Comedy Club in the bordering town of West Orange. There was an ad on public access television that week that Rascals was searching the country for teenage comedians. Heck, I lived right down the street. I don’t remember much of what I said that day, but I can assure you it was awful. Regardless, I had been given a precious glimpse of Technicolor that day. I couldn’t wait to see it again.
After I finished high school, I planned to attend community college, but when I reached the parking lot on enrollment day, I turned the car around. I was going to be a comic, and the only school for that was in the clubs. I continued doing one-nighters—as they are called—earning $25 here and $50 there. Through persistence, I met Barry Katz, who agreed to manage me. I made the rounds of the New York clubs—the Boston Comedy Club, the Comic Strip, the Comedy Cellar, and the now-defunct Village Gate—and soon I was approved to do backup at Catch a Rising Star’s Princeton club. Though I was being paid $50 to sit around in case one of the comics on the bill didn’t show up, this meant that I would have a chance to become a featured performer there, which paid $500 a night. Forget community college, I was going to Princeton.
My big break came when I auditioned to become an MTV veejay and was hired to host the show Lip Service, a lip-synch game show. Instantly, I became more marketable on the college circuit because I now had 600,000 television viewers. I knew I had made it when I was hired to perform at my grandmother’s alma mater, a women’s college in Denton, Texas, for $750—which represented the entire balance of my checking account. For me, the family connection was huge. I proudly showed my mom the contract—though she was more shocked than sentimental because I was going to be paid $750 to tell jokes.
After thirty episodes, Lip Service was canceled, but it gave me a lead item for my résumé. I was soon hired to do a pilot for an ABC sitcom called Camp Wilder that costarred Hilary Swank and Jerry O’Connell, which would air for twenty episodes. For the pilot, I was flown to Los Angeles and put up at the Century Park Hotel. I was nineteen, and the room had a minibar. My first afternoon, I sat on my balcony, looking out over the swimming pool and the city of L.A., downing beer after beer, thinking, I will never be more successful than this.
It was official: One Saturday night in July, I was going to have a shot at SNL. The audition would be at the Boston Comedy Club in Greenwich Village, which is owned by my longtime manager, Barry Katz. As you might imagine, this is an amazing luxury for a young comic. If you can’t get stage time at your manager’s comedy club, then you’d better leave the business. But it was hardly the home court advantage for an SNL audition.
The Boston Comedy Club isn’t exactly a suit-and-tie joint. It’s located on the second floor above an Irish pub that has live music. Regularly, you will be onstage and hear “Auld Lang Syne” pumping through the floorboards. The club is also next door to a fire department. Now, I don’t think it’s asking too much for people to call the fire department in between shows, but like clockwork, every other weekend you could count on being onstage at the exact same time someone called in a three-alarm fire. Off the fire engines would race—if you were lucky—but more likely they would sit in the thick Greenwich Village traffic with their sirens blaring, for once, thank God, drowning out the sounds of “Auld Lang Syne.”
The Boston Comedy Club is also a rough room. People in the Village on weekends get really drunk, and some wind up sitting in the room. Slurred heckling ensues, and if you don’t have your thick skin and your A game, they will bury