John Knoerle: Hollywood
Daze has asked me to reminisce a bit about my time as a struggling comic in LA
in the late 70s, the Golden Age of Standup.
I had tasted some success as part of a four-man comedy troupe in Santa
Barbara, The DeLuxe Radio Theatre. I wagered that our peculiar brand of
off-beat, satirical humor would go over in the big town as well.
Not so much.
But my timing was excellent because I got to witness firsthand the meteoric
rise of the Big Three – Jay Leno, Dave Letterman and Robin Williams.
Jay Leno was
the first one I got to share a stage with. It was 1978, at the dear departed
Westwood Comedy Store, a branch office of the main Comedy Store in Hollywood.
The room that weekday night was half-empty and dead. Everyone bombed, myself
included.
Then the
emcee introduced a guy with a big chin who looked about sixteen years old. And
the room snapped to attention.
Jay Leno in
1978 was precisely the Jay Leno you know today – brash, quick and bursting with
confidence and East Coast attitude. He killed.
I only
remember one line. Jay riffed off the men’s room, which had the newfangled hand
dryers. “Anybody use those things? I seen guys in six-hundred dollar suits
wiping their hands on their lapels.”
Not the
funniest joke of all time, but the way Jay told it, it worked like crazy. I
watched him with a mix of envy and amazement. The guy was younger than I was.
How in the hell had he progressed so far, so fast?
I got a
glimpse of his fascination with vintage cars a little later. I was out in the
parking lot commiserating with my fellow comics when we saw Jay drive off in an
old car. Not a fancy buffed-out Fleetwood or Packard like he drives now. It was
the car that Ralph Nader wrote about in “Unsafe at Any Speed.” A 1962 Chevrolet
Corvair.
I have no idea
if this is true but the scuttlebutt at the time was that Jay was living in it.
Dave
Letterman was the coolest of the Big Three. Leno would work the room like an
alderman on election eve, slapping backs and pressing flesh. Robin Williams
would run up and down the room and occasionally bounce off the ceiling. But
Letterman would hang back, wrinkle his brow sardonically and make the audience
come to him. It helped that he was wicked funny.
The proxy
assassin blog Tour Information:
About the
Author:
 | |
| Author John Knoerle |
Knoerle wrote the screenplay Quiet Fire, which starred Karen Black, and the stage play The He-Man Woman Hater’s Club, an LA Time’s Critic’s Choice. He also worked as a staff writer for Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion.
Knoerle moved to Chicago in 1996 with his wife Judie. His first novel, “Crystal Meth Cowboys,” was optioned by Fox TV. His second novel, “The Violin Player,” won the Mayhaven Award for Fiction.
John Knoerle’s novel, A Pure Double Cross, was the first volume of a late 40s spy trilogy featuring former OSS agent Hal Schroeder. The second volume, A Despicable Profession, was published in 2010. Knoerle’s latest book, The Proxy Assassin, Book Three of the American Spy Trilogy, has just been released.
Visit his website at www.JohnKnoerle.com.
About the
Book:
October, 1948. Former OSS agent Hal Schroeder gets invited to
Washington D.C. by Frank Wisner, who heads the CIA’s new covert ops division.
Hal is whisked off to Wisner’s Maryland shore retreat and introduced to a brace
of Romanian royals, including the scarily beautiful Princess Stela Varadja, a
direct descendant of Vlad Tepes Draculea.
Then Frank Wisner pops the question. Would Hal consider
parachuting into a remote mountain camp to meet with the leader of a group of
Romanian anti-Communist guerillas?
“I had already survived two previous suicide missions and a
third did not appeal. But I told Frank Wisner I would need a few days to think
it over. I had some sightseeing to do.”
As it turns out Hal Schroeder
gets to do a lot more sightseeing than he bargained for. A journey that brings the American Spy
Trilogy to a surprising, and emotional, conclusion.
The Proxy
Assassin Tour Page:
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