I wrote my book 'The Amorous Busboy Of Decatur Avenue' completely like a writer does, writing it down, re-writing everything. But in my stand-up, I improvise initially, never questioning it too closely.
There is a cliche that probably has some anecdotal evidence on the side that comedians are very depressed people, but that's because no one is ever going to seem as funny in a normal conversation as compared to when they're up there onstage in the spotlight making a huge audience keel over with laughter.
In the fifties I had dreams about touching a naked woman and she would turn to bronze or the dream about hot dogs chasing donuts through the Lincoln Tunnel.
One of my greatest inspirations for stand-up was Jonathan Winters. He was a genius. One thing about him, and also Lenny Bruce, is that they were in the tradition of the one-man show. That's why Richard Pryor was so great, and George Carlin, too. They prowled the stage, they used voices, they were really talents.
But I think the other is a little more like bullfighting, a little more daring and although I appreciate good acting and I liked being versatile my whole career, it kept me working.
So it took me five years because in the interim I have been doing a lot of personal appearances and movies and some television series that went into the plumbing and I stopped writing for a while.
I love live theater. I get my rocks off by doing stand-up, and I am the only actor. But to show up eight times a week and not have that time for myself; to do someone else's lines? When I work for Wendy Wasserstein or Terrence McNally, Neil Simon or even Shakespeare, I do not have the right to change the lines.
The '50s were terrifying with nuclear bomb stuff but boring in a social way, and then the '60s were happening, and remember, there was no AIDS.
Comedy is still alive, and there are still funny people. Jews are still overrepresented in comedy and psychiatry and underrepresented in the priesthood. That immigrant Jewish humor is still with us.
But to do it professionally is a quantum leap difference and my father had to be persuaded by these kind of Ivy League professors that I should go to the Yale Drama School, another one of the stories in there.
And the only studies were - Rodney Dangerfield was my mentor and he was my Yale drama school for comedy.
