There is a difference between performing and giving a performance. Alan King learned this lesson almost 60 years ago, and it helped him become one of the most enduring stand-up comics around.
“Performing is just standing up there and doing something,” he said. “Performance takes on an edge to it. It has a more dramatic context.”
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King elaborated on these complexities while in Chicago recently for a benefit on behalf of the Gastrointestinal Research Foundation at the Fairmont Hotel. Relaxing in his hotel room after an early morning flight, he ruminated on how some comics today are so intent on getting on stage and firing off jokes that they miss the nuances that go into a well-rounded act.
“I think most people seem to forget the fact,” he offered, “that what they’re really doing is a performance. And that encompasses a great deal. It’s what an actor does. It’s what we do.”
The Brooklyn native, now 73 and sporting the well-manicured beard he recently adopted, remembers the night he started thinking differently about his stage presentation. It was in the mid-1940s, just after World War II, and he was working Chicago at the time, playing a date at the Chicago Theatre on State Street. He and another comic, who was playing across the street at the now-deceased State-Lake Theater, took a cab after their respective shows to a joint called the 5100 Club on North Broadway. to see a comic they had heard some buzz about: Danny Thomas (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
It was a revelation, King said.
Material based on truth
“First of all, his material was no longer `Take my wife, please!’ He wasn’t doing the one-liners. He was telling stories.” King smiled as he settled into the memory of Thomas’ tales “about his family, things that were based on truth. Or distorted truth.”
King also remembered Thomas was an actor as well as a comedian. As a result, his show was more theatrical.
“Whatever he was telling — whether he was talking about getting stuck on a road and trying to get a spare tire fixed, or how the bosses were all over [you] screaming — it was a big performance piece,” King said of the way Thomas got into the voices, gestures and physicality of whomever he was mimicking on stage.
“I was fascinated. I didn’t laugh as much as I should have. All of a sudden it was like sitting in a classroom watching a professor or watching a teacher. And it really did change me.”
King started making his own presentation showier, weaving into the fabric of his jokes a theatricality that enlivened both the bit and how he delivered it.
All these years later, King is still something of a student of comedy. Several years ago he initiated a series of university forums on the nature of comedy. The debut of the series, which was held at Harvard, featured a panel that included Tim Conway, Buddy Hackett and Judy Gold.
It is the changing face of comedy over the past decades that particularly intrigues him. One of the central figures of that change, along with Lenny Bruce, was Richard Pryor, whose routines in the 1960s and ’70s, King said, embodied Thomas’ performance ethic. At times, Pryor’s social commentary and rants on the human condition — usually his human condition — verged on the lyrical.
“Pryor was total jazz. He took tones, he did things, he walked, he went from one side to the other, it was really like watching Charlie Parker,” King said, adding that Pryor’s legendary foul language was just “part of the entire context, the dramatic context . . . after five minutes, you didn’t even hear the words.”
Today, what used to be outrageous, King said, is “not that outrageous anymore.”
And there has been another shift, he laments. The comedy venues have been drying up.
It is a direct result, he said, of the trend toward big paydays from hit TV shows and movies. It has caused younger comics to start asking for more money than the comedy club market can bear.
“That,” King said, is “where the comedy started changing.”
“Comedy became so big, and these guys and gals became so hot, that small clubs couldn’t handle them. They were looking for the big bucks,” King said.
“When a kid gets good now first thing they do is they get a series. [They] get rich and get fat. And sometimes [they] forget what they do.”
Taking Crystal to task
This turn away from stand-up concerns King. He gently chastised one of the top comics not currently working as a comic: Billy Crystal.
“Billy’s been like another son to me, and with Billy’s movies and Billy’s this and Billy’s that, I always used to say, `Billy, you’ve got to get out on the road. You’ve got to do a few dates just to keep that brain going, keep the timing going.”
On the other hand, King said, there is Ray Romano, of CBS’ “Everybody Loves Raymond.” No matter how rich and famous Romano gets, said King — and he may be getting richer thanks to a new deal with CBS — he has not deserted the stand-up stage.
“When you become a professional and you get noted, you know you’re going to get your laughs, that’s why they pay you. But you’ve got to tone it and hone it. And when you see that in young comedians it’s terrific to watch.”
King developed his comedy on the streets of Brooklyn. He grew up a tough kid during the Depression, but when he realized “I didn’t have to beat everybody in the neighborhood to prove a point,” he turned his energies elsewhere. Realizing he had a knack for making people laugh, he started entertaining when he was 13.
“I was a protege, in a sense of Milton Berle — the wisecracking, the one-liners, the tumbling; you had to do anything for a laugh, roll up your pants legs, lie on the floor.”
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King joined the circuit, traveling around the country and enjoying the freedom, the laughter and, he grinned, “the girls.”
Soon King found other outlets in which he could perform after amateur nights, nightclubs and cabarets, and the Catskills circuit of hotels that provided live shows in upstate New York.
King had especially fond words for the Catskills, which he called “a breeding ground” for developing acts.
“I was very fortunate,” he said. “It was like going to school. In the small towns up there, there was always a diner or a Chinese restaurant, and all the comics at 12 o’clock when everybody got through, everybody would sit around and we would learn from each other.”
King’s career took off after that and he long since became a staple of TV and the movies. But during this time, King has never stopped performing stand-up. He has, however, slowed down his schedule, from 200 dates a year to perhaps 50.
Keeping up a lively pace
That doesn’t mean he is semi-retired by any means. Besides keeping up a decent stand-up pace (“I do it [now] because I need it . . . emotionally and spiritually”), each year he produces the Toyota Comedy Festival in New York, which just wrapped up its ninth edition. It allows King to keep an eye on the new talent coming up (he cites Jeff Ross, Dave Chappelle, Wendy Liebman as among those to watch).
King is among a handful of comedians of his generation who still keep their chops up with dates. He said Buddy Hackett isn’t as active as he once was, but still takes the stage once in a while.
Jerry Lewis is still performing, and even Berle, while in his 90s and reportedly in poor health, may do “15, 20 minutes,” King said.
“We always used to say [Don] Rickles keeps moving because if he stands still he’s a target,” King laughed.
“That’s what we do. It’s not like a singer whose voice reaches maturity and then starts to slide. If you keep yourself alive and current, funny is funny.”