NEW YORK CITY
Writing for Stand-Up Comedians and Being Paid in Corn Beef
W HEN I CAME back from Korea I lived in my parents’ house in the Bronx and I was out of work for two weeks.
That was literally the only time in my life that I was unemployed against my will. I hated it. I felt lost. I didn’t want to rely on my parents to support me, so I felt constant pressure to find work. I decided right away that the best road would be to get a newspaper job and save money by moving in with my writing partner Fred Freeman, who had an apartment in the East Village. I went to
The New York Times
and was told they wanted only journalism graduates from Ivy League schools. So I headed over to the
Daily News
, where I was hired right away. They didn’t even care where I went to journalism school. As long as I could carry a cup of coffee without spilling it, I could be a copyboy at the
Daily News
.
Fred worked for a vanity press called
Exposition
, which published writers’ books for a fee. He got paid a hundred dollars a week, compared to my thirty-eight dollars a week at the newspaper. With low-key day jobs, we both had time and energy to work on our comedy writing at night. Just as Fred had planned before I went to Korea, we put our heads together to write and sell jokes and sketch material to stand-up comedians. To make our venture professional, we had business cards printed up that read “Freeman & Marshall—Comedy Writers 100 percent Virgin Material.” We would go to nightclubs and hand out the cards to anyone who would take one. With myconfidence from performing stand-up in the army, I began to step up to the mike in small New York nightclubs as well.
The story I told that got the most laughs was about how my first job straight out of college was as a fox-face stuffer in a factory that made ladies’ fur coats and stoles. The routine went something like this. “So in the factory the fox stoles would come to me and the foxes’ faces would be down and droopy because the fox was dead, of course. However, no fancy rich lady wants a droopy-nosed fox hanging down looking sad over her shoulder at a cocktail party. So my job would be to shove a piece of firm cardboard into the nose of each fox face to make it turn upward. So the cardboard would take each nose from droopy and sad to perky and fun. Women all over Manhattan were wearing perky-nosed fox stoles because of me.”
The truth was, that I never really worked as a fox-face stuffer. My friend Harvey Keenan from the Bronx did it, but it was such a funny story I put it into my act. He worked down in the Garment District for a company that sold fox stoles. And he really did shove a small piece of cardboard into the nose of each fox, and make it cute instead of droopy. I did a whole routine about stuffing the fox faces. And then I riffed on what it must have been like for my friend Harvey to pick up girls at bars with the line “I’m a fox-face stuffer. What do you do?” I got some big laughs with that routine, and I still perform it from time to time. It taught me an important lesson: You can hear a funny story from a friend and then make it your own.
Just as I had done in college and the army, I joined a band to make some side money. When you have a thirty-eight-dollar-a-week job, you need to make extra money. Jimmy Anglisano was back in New York, too, and we formed a group called the Mayfairs. We played in nightclubs all around Times Square. We hired a bass player named Richie McCormick, who had gone to Northwestern with me. Sometimes I would have to work late at the
Daily News
and then go right to my band job. So I taught my partner and roommate, Fred, how to set up my drum set so I could go straight from the newspaper to the nightclub and grab my drumsticks as the show started.
While back in New York, I reconnected with some of mychildhood friends from the Bronx. Marty Garbus and Joel Sterns were both going to law schools nearby. I dated a raven-haired secretary named
Writing for Stand-Up Comedians and Being Paid in Corn Beef
W HEN I CAME back from Korea I lived in my parents’ house in the Bronx and I was out of work for two weeks.
That was literally the only time in my life that I was unemployed against my will. I hated it. I felt lost. I didn’t want to rely on my parents to support me, so I felt constant pressure to find work. I decided right away that the best road would be to get a newspaper job and save money by moving in with my writing partner Fred Freeman, who had an apartment in the East Village. I went to
The New York Times
and was told they wanted only journalism graduates from Ivy League schools. So I headed over to the
Daily News
, where I was hired right away. They didn’t even care where I went to journalism school. As long as I could carry a cup of coffee without spilling it, I could be a copyboy at the
Daily News
.
Fred worked for a vanity press called
Exposition
, which published writers’ books for a fee. He got paid a hundred dollars a week, compared to my thirty-eight dollars a week at the newspaper. With low-key day jobs, we both had time and energy to work on our comedy writing at night. Just as Fred had planned before I went to Korea, we put our heads together to write and sell jokes and sketch material to stand-up comedians. To make our venture professional, we had business cards printed up that read “Freeman & Marshall—Comedy Writers 100 percent Virgin Material.” We would go to nightclubs and hand out the cards to anyone who would take one. With myconfidence from performing stand-up in the army, I began to step up to the mike in small New York nightclubs as well.
The story I told that got the most laughs was about how my first job straight out of college was as a fox-face stuffer in a factory that made ladies’ fur coats and stoles. The routine went something like this. “So in the factory the fox stoles would come to me and the foxes’ faces would be down and droopy because the fox was dead, of course. However, no fancy rich lady wants a droopy-nosed fox hanging down looking sad over her shoulder at a cocktail party. So my job would be to shove a piece of firm cardboard into the nose of each fox face to make it turn upward. So the cardboard would take each nose from droopy and sad to perky and fun. Women all over Manhattan were wearing perky-nosed fox stoles because of me.”
The truth was, that I never really worked as a fox-face stuffer. My friend Harvey Keenan from the Bronx did it, but it was such a funny story I put it into my act. He worked down in the Garment District for a company that sold fox stoles. And he really did shove a small piece of cardboard into the nose of each fox, and make it cute instead of droopy. I did a whole routine about stuffing the fox faces. And then I riffed on what it must have been like for my friend Harvey to pick up girls at bars with the line “I’m a fox-face stuffer. What do you do?” I got some big laughs with that routine, and I still perform it from time to time. It taught me an important lesson: You can hear a funny story from a friend and then make it your own.
Just as I had done in college and the army, I joined a band to make some side money. When you have a thirty-eight-dollar-a-week job, you need to make extra money. Jimmy Anglisano was back in New York, too, and we formed a group called the Mayfairs. We played in nightclubs all around Times Square. We hired a bass player named Richie McCormick, who had gone to Northwestern with me. Sometimes I would have to work late at the
Daily News
and then go right to my band job. So I taught my partner and roommate, Fred, how to set up my drum set so I could go straight from the newspaper to the nightclub and grab my drumsticks as the show started.
While back in New York, I reconnected with some of mychildhood friends from the Bronx. Marty Garbus and Joel Sterns were both going to law schools nearby. I dated a raven-haired secretary named
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