Paul Brownfield

For a large and enviable portion of his adult life, Rodney Dangerfield has worn a bathrobe and nothing else. By his wife’s estimation, Dangerfield has more than 20 of them, including certain favorites. Every now and then, however, Dangerfield gets dressed.

When talking about his up-and-down career, Dave Chappelle is fond of quoting his relatives. When Chappelle decided to become a stand-up comedian in his native Washington, D.C., at age 14, it was his father, a music and voice teacher, who warned him of show business: “If you’re on your deathbed, and your best friend has an audition, he might not show up.” Chappelle remembers his grandmother saying that you should never be the first black person to do anything.

The comedian Phyllis Diller was sitting in the Raytheon Aircraft Services terminal at Van Nuys Airport, wearing a skirt and tunic that were both a deep pink. She saw Tim Conway approaching.

Here are some things you learn, being in a minivan driving through Texas with three pretty successful stand-up comedians: You get a thousand bucks to do a Letterman these days. Pittsburgh and Erie, Pa., are the only places in the country where they put coleslaw and French fries on a salad. If an attractive woman approaches you in a club, look over there and you’ll see the boyfriend who was too shy to come over.

This is the story of Gerald and the Naked Trucker. They met one night on the open road. The Naked Trucker was hauling 16 tons of horse meat back across the Arizona-Mexico border to a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints picnic. Gerald was standing by the side of the road, holding a bottle of sweet wine and sniffing from a gas rag, hallucinating a conversation with Joseph Campbell.

Today, when it comes to the art of the insult, the air is thicker but the skin is thinner. Maybe that’s why Rickles holds up; he is, finally, still better than anyone at making ridicule seem cathartic.

Pauly Shore emerged from his childhood home. It was a Sunday afternoon, the time of the week when a good son goes to see his aging mother. “I just fed her,” he said. Inside, in her den, was Mitzi Shore. Mitzi Shore, who was friends with Lenny Bruce’s mother. Mitzi Shore, who married a comedian (Sammy Shore) and divorced a comedian but not before giving birth to a comedian (Pauly).

Around the time that Bonny Lee Bakley, Robert Blake’s wife, was found shot to death outside Vitello’s restaurant in Studio City, I got one of Buddy Hackett’s phone calls.

It's Not Just 'Tonight.' It's Every Night. He's heard the critics carp and the rival comics grouse. But it's mere noise to Jay Leno. His only concern is the next joke. Some time after this, presumably, Brogan leaves, and Leno goes to sleep. Four or five hours later, it starts all over again. He gets to NBC at 8 a.m. He works out with a trainer. The rest of the day is spent in "The Tonight Show" offices. He follows the news, hangs out with his writers (there are 17 cranking out material, betwee

Eddie Izzard was talking about his comedy and his cultish fame and his upstart movie career. This was around midnight in a downtown Seattle restaurant.

Dave, Jay and the paternal shadow of Johnny Though Letterman didn't reveal until later that his "Late Show" monologue consisted of jokes written by Carson in the months before his death, you could tell because some of the references were a little outdated. Still, it was touching, as if Letterman were playing his dad's musical instrument at the funeral. For Letterman this, clearly, has been a quiet consolation for not inheriting "The Tonight Show" and then having to get used to losing to Leno i

Ever wonder what would happen if comedy lost its angst? Just take a look at its new smiley face. You could also, for variety's sake, be disappointed in HBO for giving the wrong comedian the right kind of platform -- a 90-minute concert act recorded recently at the FleetCenter arena in Cook's native Boston, apparently in front of some 18,000 people. To watch his HBO special "Vicious Circle," which airs Monday night, is to be both disappointed in Cook for foisting his surface act on people with

Whatever it is he does, Danny Gans does it well enough to sell out a theater named after him. Only here. So Gans went a different route. He got a job as an emcee-comedian in a tribute show in Palm Desert called "Salute to the Superstars," and work of this ilk gave Gans his entree into corporate entertainment. Gans applied that work ethic when his baseball dream went sour and he became an entertainer. He tried comedy clubs but says he never liked hanging out late at night. More relevantly, Gans

“I’m still not a peaceful man,” Shelley Berman said a few weeks ago. “I’m still not able to behave.... When somebody says ‘Relax,’ that really makes me nervous.” The 80-year-old Berman, who is experiencing some bittersweet career redemption playing Larry David’s alter-kocher father on the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” was sitting in the den of a friend’s house at the top of Country Club Estates, a development just up the 101 from the Berman place.