But Seriously, Folks

To the dozens of comics who grew up there -- some of whom became very famous -- Long Island is no laughing matter.

Take Alan King.

``I loved the city . . . I love the city,'' said King, ``but I just like those weekends in the country. I had the golf, lived on the water, I got the German shepherd.''

To the Brooklyn-born King, who may be more closely identified with Island culture and Island shtick than any of his fellow comics, the ``country'' wasn't Rutland, Vt., or Amish farmland or even Poughkeepsie. It was Long Beach and Rockville Centre and, for the past 40-plus years, Kings Point.

When his career began to take off in the late '50s, King had chances to move to California and rub shoulders with famous people, but he elected to stay home . . . on Long Island. Besides the golf and the water and the dog, ``I had the mall, the deli on the corner, it was great for my kids. Going to the Hamptons, for me, was like going to Europe.

``Walter Winchell gave me the title of `General DeGaulle of the Crabgrass' when I was doing those suburban routines,'' said King, now a vibrant, still-on-the-road-and-touring 70 years old. ``I'm still not sure exactly what that means.''

Observers and interested parties can only attempt -- without much logic -- to explain why so many comedians who grew up on Long Island developed into first-rank stars. OK, so King was inspired by the ``country'' life, but was it a diet of crabgrass that made him funny? Was it the Massapequa water that gave Jerry Seinfeld his off-kilter sense of humor? Was it strolls on Long Beach that made Billy Crystal dance on the table and make funny faces as a child? Did the crisp Commack air leave Rosie O`Donnell breathless?

An impressive list, that one, and it's just for starters. You can't leave out Eddie Murphy or Howard Stern or Carol Leifer. Consider the geographical entity of Long Island -- which means, toss in those folks from Brooklyn and Queens -- and the roster of success expands to include Rodney Dangerfield, Rob Bartlett, John Mulrooney, Andrew Dice Clay and many more.

``It's the water,'' says Bartlett, who grew up funny in Massapequa Park with some of the other ``usual suspects'' as his close friends: Eddie Murphy, Bob Nelson, Jackie Martling, Richie Minervini.

``Part of the reason is because Long Island is kind of a microcosm of the rest of the suburban world,'' Bartlett said, reminiscing over the phone recently. ``Then there's the proximity of New York City and the fact that most of us who grew up on Long Island led a relatively unremarkable middle-class upbringing. I guess those humble beginnings sow the seeds for such a plethora of comedic talent . . . it does seem kind of weird.''

Leifer has a slightly different, but equally affectionate, take on the situation.

``I always notice a tremendous difference between people who grew up in Long Island and people who lived in the city,'' says the comedienne-actress. ``I really loved Long Island. I liked that it was so suburban. When we said we were going to go into town [she's from East Williston], `town' had a hometown kind of feel. There was an ice cream place, Hildebrandt's, and Big D's was where we got our school supplies. To go into the city was major.''

Leifer, whose weekly WB network sitcom, ``Alright, Already,'' borrows heavily on her Island family and friends for its subject matter, remembers how a joke about Waldbaums or Fortunoff would die in Manhattan, but flourish in Deer Park.

``I loved making local jokes, and people really related to them,'' she said. ``Like Waldbaums. The Waldbaums brand has a picture of Julia Waldbaum on the can, just her head. So I would say, I did some research and I found out this woman, it's very sad, she's just a head. She has no body. It's very sad. She just dates cameos.''

Billy Crystal may not have an explanation for why comics bred like rabbits from Hicksville to Hempstead, but he still savors dozens of sweet memories of growing up on Long Beach: ``You had the bay on one side and the ocean on the other. It was a very soothing place . . . you'd go to sleep at night and hear the ocean. Wintertime was almost better. Something about the four o'clock sun, something really beautiful.''

At his 1985 high school reunion, he talked about how many of his friendships with schoolmates had survived. ``We all went to Laurel Beach and had a beach party, and all of our kids were the same age we were when we met . . . And here we were, walking around using words like minoxydil and prostate, some of us were in cabana suits, a real sign of middle age, black socks and sandals, looking like our relatives from the Bronx.''

In tears when he finally left his East Coast home for his West Coast career, Crystal recalled in a 1991 Newsday profile how he had encountered people during his youth who later resonated in his life.

``The first time I saw Sammy Davis, it was at the Lido Hotel . . . I worked there as a busboy, making like twenty dollars for the day. Sammy Davis was my Michael Jackson. Steve and Eydie had a house in Lido, and Carol Burnett had a place. Alan King, the first time I saw him was in a little Italian restaurant called Russo's. He's very close to me now. Al Kelly, the double-talker, used to live in the Jackson Hotel. Friday nights, he'd go to this kosher restaurant called Marron's, and you hear him ordering, double-talk: `I'll have a fine with a drell and poimin, with a leetle slice of bleave hove.'''

Another local boy who's parlayed his roots into career rewards is Ray Romano. Romano's CBS series, ``Everybody Loves Raymond,'' is about a fictional Newsday sportswriter, Ray Barone, who lives on Long Island; the real Ray grew up in Forest Hills. ``Somebody called me an Italian Jerry Seinfeld,'' Romano joked in a 1996 interview. The analogy is not so far-fetched: Romano, who is 39, began by doing stand-up comedy (delivering mattresses was his day job) and his is a similar kind of eccentric humor.

Of course, comedians came from other places as well: North Andover, Mass. (Jay Leno); Nebraska (Johnny Carson); Indiana (David Letterman), even Canada (Dan Aykroyd). But the tri-state melting pot -- NYC and points east, especially -- seemed to generate and cultivate the kind of comedic attitude that so neatly fit Woody Allen's definition: ``Comedy is tragedy plus time.''

``The best audiences in the world are from New York City, and move to the suburbs,'' says veteran comic Bob Nelson, who is still a staple at many of the Island's comedy clubs. ``My theory is that there's so much stress for the people who live in the suburbs and work in the city . . . there's two hours of traffic in the morning and two in the afternoon. So there's a tremendous amount of stress to be released.

``When I was in Hawaii, I performed for the locals and they just sat there smiling, and I got the best reviews of my life, and I don't think I got one laugh. You just don't get the reaction you get in New York, especially on Long Island,'' he said.

Historically, there were funny people in Nassau and Suffolk before the mid-'70s: Lenny Bruce, whose life was tragicomic on several levels and who died of a drug overdose at the age of 41 in 1966, was born in Mineola. But it was in the mid-'70s, about the time ``Saturday Night Live'' debuted to raves on television -- that comedy, crystallized in the form of comedy clubs, exploded on Long Island, and carried on far into the next decade.

``What disco was to the '70s, comedy became in the '80s,'' said Bartlett. ``There became a local circuit where you could get paying gigs. And by paying, I mean fifty or a hundred bucks.''

Governor's in Levittown, Chuckles in Mineola, The Brokerage in Bellmore, the defunct White House Inn in North Massapequa and Huntington's East Side Comedy Club are monuments (some still standing) to the art of the laff. Legend says the very first comedy club in the state was not, in fact, on Long Island or in Manhattan but in Sheepshead Bay, a coffee-house-cum-jokes hangout called Pips; the first stand-up act at Pips, in 1962, was Stanley Myron Handelman -- followed in later years by Bruce, Dangerfield, George Carlin, Crystal and a few more of that caliber.

It is a wonder that most LI comics seemed to easily sidestep the potential inferiority complex that you'd expect, being so close to Manhattan, yet attitudinally, so far.

``Almost every comic who was in the city had the attitude that the audience stinks,'' recalled Nelson, ``so they would rag the audience. Us guys from the Island didn't know any better. I'd be pulling stuff out of suitcases and doing impressions of Q-Tips. The audience never saw stuff like that before, so they would really laugh at it.''

Nelson, who modeled his visual style of comedy on heroes Jerry Lewis and Jonathan Winters (``It was totally different from the Paul Reisers and Jerry Seinfelds''), remembers a childhood in Hempstead (that segued to Freeport, then Copiague, then Massapequa) where ``I had three different types of hair on my head. I had pimples and my teeth stuck out pretty good. I had these crusty eyes.'' Nelson was a theater major in college -- and made money playing a clown at private parties.

Many of his pals went on to the Big Time, but their joint efforts are part of LI's comedy lore. O'Donnell, Murphy and Nelson formed an improvisational group called the Laughter Company in the late '70s. And at about the same time, Nelson was one of a group of comics Jackie Martling dubbed the Magnificent Seven (of which Murphy, Nelson says, was the eighth member). Nelson, Bartlett and Murphy had also formed a trio called the Identical Triplets.

``Once the work went from Long Island to the rest of the country, it changed,'' Nelson said. ``There's still an incredible love among us, but we don't have time to hang, which is disheartening.''

King, who convulsed a nation via ``The Ed Sullivan Show'' with his suburban shtick that was as self-deprecatory as it was dead on target, has written books about living on Long Island, and how living there is different from living on Central Park West.

``The suburbs really started with Levittown,'' said King, who used the concept of Levittown the way his successors employed the concept of Joey Buttafuoco. ``The original suburban family was funny, it was a part of Americana. I used to joke about the wagon trains coming down Queens Boulevard with the mink stoles hanging out the back.''

That was 20 years ago and more. Dramatic shifts in demographics have softened suburban humor, but some of King's observations, from his 1962 book, ``Anybody Who Owns His Own Home Deserves To,'' remain classic:

On home decorators: ```We're Feibish and Bowles of East 62nd Street. Decorators,' they chorused, flying around the room. They were wearing rope-soled sandals and tight Italian pants, and I wish my wife was built like them . . . Our mothers didn't have decorators. Pictures from the rotogravure section and furniture by Gypsies -- that was it, but it was comfortable and it was home.''

On commuting: ``You speed along the highways at two miles an hour, bumper to bumper, gas fumes hitting you in the face and some imbecile on the radio is giving traffic information: `The traffic on the Southern State Parkway is medium to moderate.' Where the hell did he get `medium to moderate'? I haven't moved for an hour. Then, you hear, `This traffic report is coming from helicopters.' Sure, up there it's medium to moderate, but down here, there's no moving.'' On suburban parties: ``What they're all alarmed about is something called the `Switch-Partners Party,' and let me go on record right now that I don't believe in that kind of nonsense. Suburbanites are very moral people. If anyone actually knows just where these switch parties are going on, I wish he'd come to me because I would like to move to that town just for laughs.''

In a 1979 New York Times feature, a reporter described a comedy workshop held in the packed-to-the-gills cafeteria at Nassau Community College in Garden City. The focus was on the stage antics of Nelson and Bartlett but, near the end of the story, the writer noted, ``Eddie Murphy, an 18-year-old from Roosevelt, also did a routine.

```I'm not Irish, I'm black,' he deadpanned to a surprised audience after Mr. Nelson had introduced him as Irish Eddie Murphy. Mr. Murphy is, in fact, black.'' And he is, in fact, from Roosevelt.

Murphy's ascendency in the world of comedy was short of meteoric, but not by much. At the age of 16, he was performing -- for free -- on the Long Island comedy club circuit; at the age of 19, in 1981, he'd joined the cast of ``Saturday Night Live,'' and rose from there to become a movie star of the first rank.

Murphy's comedy heroes were Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, and he used to hone his craft in neighborhood candy stores, because Roosevelt High didn't have a drama program. ``I'd spend hours in my basement making up routines,'' he told a reporter years ago. ``My mother would come downstairs and see me doing impressions and she'd say, `What are you doing?' and I'd say, `Rehearsing.' She'd answer, `Rehearsing for what?'''

Murphy practiced and practiced as well at places like the White House Inn -- where Richard M. Dixon did his impressions, legendary among his fellow comics, of Richard M. Nixon -- before moving up a step to the East Side Comedy Club in Huntington, where he actually got paid for performing. Murphy eventually gravitated west, to spots like the Improvisation and the Comedy Strip in Manhattan, and then Hollywood, and didn't look back.

Others, however, look back all the time. O'Donnell, for instance.

How many daily talk-show hosts, after all, devote a broadcast to their hometown, as O'Donnell did last year, when she invited old friends, teachers and classmates from Commack to attend a taping?

Clearly, O'Donnell -- whose comic sense led her from stand-up to featured roles on Broadway (``Grease'') and in movies (including ``Sleepless in Seattle'' and ``The Flintstones'') to hosting her own TV talk show (she can even put on her resume that ultimate brag, ``did commercials for Kmart'') -- does not shrink for her Commackian heritage, nor does she take cheap comic shots at a town with no Main Street.

She was born Roseann, the eldest daughter of the O'Donnell family that lived on Rhonda Drive. At Commack High School South, she was president of the senior class, and even then had begun to sharpen her craft in comedy clubs on the Island, cheered on by an audience that included school friends and more than a few teachers.

One night -- Rosie was a teenager -- she accepted a dare to go on stage during an open-mike session at the now-defunct Round Table Restaurant in Mineola. ``I had no act at all,'' she told Newsday some years ago. ``I hid behind a big pair of goofy glasses, pointed at guys in the audience and said things like, `Nice shirt, pal.''' She said that she lifted each joke, word for word, from a routine she'd heard Seinfeld do on ``The Merv Griffin Show.''

``I thought once a guy told his jokes on TV you were allowed to use them,'' she said. ``It never occurred to me that I was stealing.''

Ed Lowe, whose columns for Newsday have segued into a part-time career as stand-up comic at clubs such as Governors and the Brokerage, fondly remembers meeting O'Donnell for the first time at the East Side Club. ``She was 18. She wasn't that funny, but she owned the stage,'' Lowe said. ``It was hers and the audience was hers by virtue of this presence. Even though she was 18, she could've been your Aunt Rosie.''

Lowe has spent more than a couple of decades observing Long Island and Long Islanders, and he has his own explanation for the wealth of comics in his neighborhood, which extends from Lake Success to Montauk.

New York, he says, ``is the epicenter of the megalopolis, and we're in the concentric circles around that, in the first ring around the center. The competition here is brutal. Our bar bands would be titans anywhere else. Even the unsuccessful comics on Long Island are terrific.''

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