A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

COMEDIANS FOR COMPENSATION: There is a great book to be written about the standup comedy scene of the 1970s in Los Angeles, a worthy successor to Gerald Nachman's Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s. Too bad William Knoedelseder's I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy's Golden Era isn't it.

And it's a real missed opportunity, because we're talking about a scene which catapulted into national stardom David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, Andy Kaufman, Elayne Boosler, Jimmie Walker, Freddie Prinze and countless others ... including, um, Leo Gallagher. But instead of doing the research and telling the whole story from all the participants, supplementing with deeper research, Knoedelseder seems to focus on the folks he was closest to back in the day like Tom Dreesen and the forgotten, sad Steve Lubetkin, whose every scrap of paper winds its way into the book.

Yes, it's interesting to read about the labor dispute which forms the centerpiece of this book, with Dreesen and Leno among the lead negotiators and Garry Shandling and Yakov Smirnoff crossing the picket lines at The Comedy Store, and the attention paid to the importance of The Tonight Show and the place of women in the scene is worthy. But the book's not well-written (misspellings abound) and it doesn't linger in the places you'd want it to -- there's just not enough about the comedy itself and how the various performers developed their routines. Anyone who didn't seem to give him access (like Robin Williams) gets unrebutted potshots, and the whole thing feels uneven.

Still, if I'm going to post a negative review about a comedy book, I ought to give you something to smile about, so here's two related notes: (1) the casting call from Happy Days for "Mork from Ork" went to Robin Williams and ... master of neurotic comedy Richard Lewis, who told producer Garry Marshall that the only potential alien in the room was Williams (2) via YouTube, David Letterman's 1978 appearance on Mork & Mindy as an EST-ish cult leader. And while we're at it, rare footage of Letterman competing for CBS in the that year's Battle of the Network Stars in kayak and track relay.