Larry David remembers the day he first met stand-up comedian Michael Keaton. “I met him standing in line at Catch a Rising Star in 1974. Isn’t that one thing?” David stated in an Esquire profile of Keaton. “Then I noticed him right here and there doing stand-up for a few years, after which he simply wasn’t round.”
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The place did Keaton go? In his early profession, he was decided to succeed at stand-up, Keaton informed Jimmy Fallon in 2017. He performed golf equipment in his native Pittsburgh “that I shouldn’t have been taking part in,” joints the place nobody introduced a comic book’s identify earlier than they wandered onto a stage to inform jokes. Different locations had no microphones, requiring aspiring comics to speak/shout on the room. “It was simply horrible.”
However Keaton persevered, heading to New York to fulfill comics like David and deal with locations just like the Gotham Comedy Membership. Regardless of Keaton’s apparent charisma on this clip, Rolling Stone says stand-up comedy wasn’t his future: “He simply wasn’t excellent at it.”
He informed Fallon that he spent years making an attempt to determine what sort of comic he was. Possibly he was wacky? Keaton tried out props, a pre-Carrot High approach that he says solely labored for Steve Martin on the time. The issue with props? “If you die — and in case you’re not that wacky man, you’re going to die — the issue is leaving.” An everyday comedian can simply wave good-night. A prop comedian has to finish the set, then spend 10 minutes choosing up the rubber chickens he left on the stage. “It’s humiliating.”
He additionally bombed opening for Cher in Las Vegas, going through an viewers consuming dinner whereas ready to listen to pop music. “They’re nonetheless consuming, all you hear is silverware and other people mumbling issues like, ‘Hey, I didn’t order Thousand Island.’ You’re up there they usually go: ‘Who is that this child? Why is he bothering us?’”
In the end, Keaton determined to go away Cher and his props behind. “Folks can by no means perceive,” he informed Ellen DeGeneres in 2015. “Folks suppose they get how exhausting that’s, to get to the extent that you just reached.”
However stand-up greatness is far tougher to realize than folks consider, Keaton realized. Together with his concentrate on appearing, he’d by no means attain the stand-up pinnacle. “Once I hear folks discuss stand-up, nobody actually will get — except you’re in that world — what that world actually is; what you need to do if you wish to be actually good and the way critical it could get,” he informed The New York Instances. “I used to be at all times afraid that the enjoyable would go away.”
But, regardless of his choice to stroll away, Keaton informed DeGeneres that he does miss stand-up. “When you rise up at that stage the place you’re actually good, that’s a real artwork type, and I’ve nothing however respect for that, man.”
