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Bill Cosby. If I'd been assaulted by Harvey Weinstein I could've had the evil trifecta.
Our show lasted for a couple of years. I gained about twenty pounds. Another lesson, never choose an apartment next to an Italian bakery. I'm a sucker for any kind of bread and theirs was out of this world.
As a side note, I just remembered another of my college jobs was washing dishes in a cheesecake bakery in Seattle. Once it gets out that you're a world-class dishwasher, the opportunities are endless. It was run by a Swiss gentleman and his product was used by the best restaurants in town. He made it in round metal molds, and my process was to run my finger around the mold, lick up the bits of cheesecake, and wash the mold. Again, a solid weight-gain technique.
The Canadian show was first called In The Round, then changed to Neun at Night. We had two good years and life was just fine. The show was successful but Ken Gibson, our producer, was a lover of pop music and big production shows. He wanted to make our show like that, and the next year we took our first show to a big auditorium and filled the stage with singers and dancers. All I remember is that about 30 people showed up to see it, and it bombed. I'd asked to bring in my old partner, Brian Bressler, for the show because I wanted to give him a Canadian shot and because again TV had sucked up every bit of material I'd ever come up with. We tried hard to make it work, but it came off as a big production show in an empty room and it failed. That was the end of my show in Canada.
Fame. It is relative, it is fleeting, it is fickle, and it's a lousy goal. Luckily I learned early that the best goal is to try to do good work and see where it takes you. Sometimes, because of your own limitations, you can't do good work. Sometimes you're at the mercy of others, or bad situations, or lousy microphones, or drunken idiots in a bar crowd. All you can do is keep going. The good news is I always had a fallback plan. I was a world-class dishwasher.