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thing in town, taking out full-color ads in Variety. The partners did scripted comedy on-air, for which they scoured the topics of the day and wrote furiously. “We were insane,” Carlin remembered years later, “and it was a funny show, but we had to open the station at six a.m., which was a drag. Sometimes we’d be as much as fifteen minutes late, all hung over, so we’d break in like, ‘—oudy today, chance of drizzle in the late afternoon,’ so the listeners would just assume there was something wrong with their radios.” It was a ploy they borrowed from Bob and Ray, whose bumbling newscaster, Wally Ballou, had an unbreakable habit of starting to talk a beat before his microphone went live.

The brief KDAY gig was just enough to get the partners’ feet in the door of the LA nightclub scene, the goal they’d set for themselves when they left Texas. Years after they quit the station, Carlin requested that his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame be placed outside the former KDAY studio.

In May they took a weekly engagement at Cosmo Alley, a quintessential Beat coffeehouse in Hollywood. The waitresses wore black tights and long hair combed down their backs; some of the customers wore stereotypical berets. The club was opened in 1957 by Herb Cohen, later known as an artist manager of Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, and many others. Cohen had previously managed the Los Angeles outpost of the Purple Onion, and he and the actor and folk singer Theodore Bikel had partnered in the opening of the Unicorn, the first folk café of its kind in Los Angeles when it opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1955.

For Cosmo Alley, Cohen took over a room that had been an Armenian restaurant—“sort of a back room to the Ivar Theater,” he says. “When they moved up to Sunset, I took over the space.” Named for the side street it was on, Cosmo Alley was on “a narrow street with nothing else on it. No big entrance, just a door. You couldn’t find it. There was no front to it.” The mystery of the place, of course, was what drew people in. When 150 people were in the room, it was packed. Cohen took down the plaster walls, exposing the original brick, and had the overhead pipes painted—“very sparse, very industrial, which is what I wanted it to look like. At the time, it was very hip. It was black and dark, candles, very intimate.”

In addition to folk and jazz music, Cosmo Alley featured comedy, and the trendy club attracted a Hollywood clientele—Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda. The place had a caged mynah bird, and one headliner, Lenny Bruce, labored for weeks to teach the bird a short phrase: “The pope sucks.”

At Cosmo Alley, Burns and Carlin put in their own hard work, fine-tuning the routines they’d conceived in Texas and developing several more. One bit was about Edward R. Murrow interviewing a bigoted senator, and another was about a boxing palooka (“Killer” Carlin) with a voice like a rusty saw blade. They also had Carlin’s uncanny impersonation of Bruce doing one of his own earliest recorded bits, “Djinni in the Bottle.” Their humor was biting, often flirting, as in the “Capt. Jack and Jolly George” routine, with outright tastelessness. But the two comics were also working out their social consciences. “We took positions,” Carlin recalled. “We did jokes about racism, about the Ku Klux Klan, about the John Birch Society, about religions. . . . We felt connected to that sort of movement that was starting then”: comedy about “values, the world, and, in a lot of cases, self.”

Not that they drew much in the way of a following. “They were booked when there was time available, when I couldn’t get Maya Angelou [then a calypso singer] or Lenny Bruce or the Limelighters,” says Cohen. “The act was not great. If you heard Lenny Bruce once, you were mesmerized. If you heard Mort Sahl, it was so unique, it was brilliant. . . . I’m not trying to denigrate what they did. It’s just that they weren’t in that category yet. I have this visual image of them in suits. It was a very straight comedy act. I’m not saying it wasn’t good—it just wasn’t anything special.”

Still, their