RIP Louie Anderson

[TotallyOz]

 

[floridarob]

Read this the night before:

 

 

 

Louie, Louie…

Published Thursday, January 20, 2022 at 7:21 PM

Four hours ago, comedian Pauly Shore tweeted that he'd just come from a hospital in Las Vegas where he visited Louie Anderson to "say my goodbyes." Yesterday, a spokesperson for Anderson announced that Anderson was being treated for Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma which news stories described as "a common and potentially curable version of non-Hodgkin lymphoma."

So either Pauly Shore is exaggerating the seriousness of Anderson's condition or we may be about to lose another very funny man. This is no time for us to be losing so many people who can make us laugh.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[floridarob]

Then this today:

 

 

 

 

Louie Anderson, R.I.P.

Published Friday, January 21, 2022 at 11:03 AM

Sadly, Pauly Shore was right. And once again, the comedy community is is mourning the loss of a really nice, funny man.

I was impressed at least three times with Louie Anderson. One was the first time he did stand-up on Johnny Carson's program. You instantly knew a star was born. He had a fresh, honest approach, talking mostly about his weight…but wisely, about other topics, as well. It wasn't all just fat jokes. He was instantly endearing and you knew this guy was going places.

He'd been appearing in all the local comedy clubs but somehow, I'd missed him. It wasn't until he was "hot" that I caught him one night at the Comedy Store. I was backstage with a female comic for whom I'd written some material and she was waiting to go on. This was in the big room. One of the house managers came by to inform her that she would not be on next. Louie Anderson had dropped by and he wanted to do an unbilled set…so he was going next.

This was not a sexist thing. It was because he was better known than she was and that was how it worked at The Store. The next time I was backstage there, she was bumped because Roseanne Barr walked in and said, "I wanna go on."

Louie showed up backstage and the first thing he did was seek out my friend and make sure she was okay with him going on before her. Most "better known" comics didn't do that. Roseanne didn't do that.

I was introduced to Louie and we had a nice conversation — nothing memorable — but I remember thinking he was friendly and polite and (jokes like the following are unavoidble) concerned she'd think he was throwing his weight around. Couldn't have been nicer. And then he went on stage and he couldn't have been funnier.

A lot of comics working a club like that view it as pure audition. It's probably not the case when they play Yuk-Yuk's Comedy Cave in Sparrowfart, Pennsylvania but at the Comedy Store or The Improv or any club in L.A., you never know who's in the audience who can or may soon be able to hire you. Many comics will not go out there and do anything but the set they want that elusive Talent Scout From The Network to see. You never know when he or she might be at Table 1A.

Not Louie, at least not that night. He was there to practice, not audition. He went out to the kind of thundering welcome that occurs in such places when there's a surprise appearance by someone they've heard of. He did a few prepared lines just to establish a connection and then he launched into what some call Crowd Work.

Crowd Work is ad-lib chatting with the audience. It's inventing on the fly. There are some comedians like Paula Poundstone or Jimmy Brogan whose time on stage is mainly that and they're great at it. Whenever I hear a comic say to someone in the front row, "Where ya from?," I think, "He'd doing Brogan's act."

Mr. Anderson hit gold right away. Most of the front of the house was an office party of folks who worked at the corporate offices of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream company. I don't remember exactly what he said but the first line, almost instantaneously, was something like, "And you're all here to thank me for single-handedly keeping your company profitable for years." Huge laugh — as much for the speed as for the content.

And then he chatted for maybe fifteen minutes with them about the ice cream business and how he felt sorry for the flavors nobody ever orders. More huge laughs…and none of it was written in advance by him or any writer. There have been a lot of successful comedians who couldn't do that — not for that long and not for that many laughs.

He did it until he'd just about worn out the topic and then he seamlessly segued into a prepared bit that he knew would give him a strong closing. He then gave a strong recommendation that they stay for the next comic — my friend, the one he'd bumped — and left the stage to more thunderous ovation. Like I said: Couldn't have been nicer, couldn't have been funnier.

In truth, there are stories about Louie Anderson not being that nice or not being that funny but I prefer to think of them as outliers. We all have bad days. I prefer to think that what I saw that night was the real guy, the one who just died way too soon.