In the mythos and lore about the comedy boom of the 1980s, one tale told of how nobody could follow Sam Kinison at The Comedy Store.
But when Kinison got his big break from Rodney Dangerfield, on the HBO Young Comedians Special that aired in 1985 (a year before they co-starred together in Back to School), do you know who Dangerfield asked to follow Kinison? Bob Saget. And then Dangerfield called on one more comic to follow Saget and close out that showcase of young talents. That young man was Louie Anderson.
All of those guys came out of venerable Los Angeles stand-up hotspot The Comedy Store, and now all of them are gone, leaving us little to no time to pay tribute to them before they’d left us. Saget died earlier this month at 65, suddenly in his sleep just last week while on tour; Anderson died last week at 68, shortly after being hospitalized for cancer.
Seeing the outpouring of love and admiration for Louie, I’m grateful as a comedy fan and as a journalist to not only experience his comedy and kindness firsthand, but also to sit down with him and learn more about what made him so funny and so kind. But even more than that, I’m grateful that Louie had the opportunity to make a first, second and even third impression upon audiences of multiple generations. Not everyone gets or realizes their second chances. Louie did.
It’s particularly poignant now, in this time when we’re sometimes so quick online to shame or “cancel” people out of their livelihoods and ambitions, to see how Anderson came back from his own dark period to shine his light once more.
Of all of the oversized personalities in stand-up, Anderson was perhaps the first and the best to take advantage of his size, seizing upon self-deprecation to master fat jokes at his own expense. He had Johnny Carson howling and pounding upon his desk when Louie got his first big break in 1984 on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Anderson told me in 2018, reflecting on that first big break: “And it changed my whole life overnight. I got a holding deal from NBC. The next day, I debuted in Las Vegas at The Comedy Store at the Dunes Hotel. The next week, I was opening for the Commodores at the Bally’s hotel on the Strip. So it was fast. It was fast. The Tonight Show had more power maybe than American Idol. You know what I mean? It could have been overnight. It was like overnight power. You know, the next day people are going, ‘You were great on Carson!’ ‘You sucked on Carson!’ Shut up!”
He also got that HBO gig with Dangerfield, which filmed at Dangerfield’s — itself now a relic of the past, permanently closing in 2020 at the start of the pandemic — then small parts in movies, from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to this memorable turn as a fast-food worker in Coming To America.
Go back to that Tonight Show set, though, and you see Anderson also figured out how to mine his own troubled childhood for laughs. It took him to even bigger heights. He’d film stand-up specials for both HBO and Showtime, star in a short-lived sitcom for CBS, and win Emmys for his voiceover work on the animated FOX series, Life With Louie. He popped up in the middle of Hollywood Squares and even hosted Family Feud for a years.
But it almost all came crashing down on him a couple of times.
Talk about second chances, here’s Anderson (via music producer Steve Albini) talking about one of his most eye-opening experiences with gambling addiction.
There were other rumors about Anderson’s offstage behavior, too. And in 2000, the tabloids had a field day after a man blackmailed the comedian for hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money, only to be convicted for his extortion instead.
It was a darker time personally and professionally for Anderson. He wasn’t scoring roles and gigs, but he could find a temporary home in Las Vegas, where he held three separate casino residencies over the next decade.
Anderson decided to do the ABC reality diving competition, Splash, which he told me: “That was really the beginning of me coming back.” He did it because he literally needed to make a splash to get back into America’s good graces, to remind us of both his humility and his humor.
Then came the phone call out of the blue from Zach Galifianakis and Louis CK to play Christine Baskets in Baskets.
“I was on my way to work, yeah. I got the phone call. They said, Would you do it, play a part in Zach’s sitcom? I go, yeah. They go, would you play the mom? I go yes! I would! So I went there and we shot a pilot. I put the wig on, put the outfit on, put the lipstick on. I had one scene and that was it. I ad-libbed trying down one of those Kirkland drinks and I couldn’t, and I spit it out. I tried to save the take I go, ‘That hit the spot,’ or something like that, because I wanted to save the scene. If you look at that scene, Zach’s laughing in his cup. He’s laughing right in it because that’s your job is to try to crack each other up.”
He won an Emmy for that role, channeling his own late mother without adding any irony or exaggeration for a cheap laugh. As he told me in 2018, “I’m not playing a cartoon. This is not Mrs. Doubtfire.”
And he’d get new acclaim and adoration, and the work that came with that. Playing a defense lawyer in season three of Search Party for HBO Max. Maurice on Twenties on BET+.
And spinning more tales about his family for comedy club audiences and Comedy Central showcases alike. Here was one such story about how one of his older brothers found fame, or infamy at least, years before Louie did.
Louie Anderson never gave up on his career, nor did he ever give up on himself or any of the comedians he loved along the way as if they were part of his very large, extended family.
That’s a great lesson for all of us.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
