Comedians: Chopped Liver

The former Irwin Kniberg proudly took his mother for a ride in his new Rolls-Royce, and waited for her first impression. "Irwin, don't be insulted," she said finally. "But it's a real old-fashioned car."

Irwin was not insulted; he was delighted to put up with the putdown. Unimpressible Jewish mothers—and surly children, complaining wives, urban sprawl and the 20th century—have been his bread and butter ever since he changed his name to Alan King and became, successively, a big-time comic, author, actor, producer and all-round impresario.

Today Ed Sullivan pays King more than $10,000—or roughly $400 per joke—to be a guest on his TV show. King is the star of The Impossible Years, an impossible Broadway play, which, despite chilly reviews from the critics, has been selling out for seven months.

On the side, he is co-producer of another play, A Lion in Winter, and he has just set up a deal to produce a concert tour for Barbra Streisand, who will get $1,000,000 for 20 appearances. Almost old hat now are King's two non-books (Anybody Who Owns His Own Home Deserves It, Help! I'm a Prisoner in a Chinese Bakery), which have sold over 900,000 copies. To his fans, he seems to have been around and on top forever. Around he has been; on top he has only recently arrived.

Soup du Jour. Before Kinging himself, the kid from Brooklyn jumped from dropout to drummer to boxer to dancer. By the time he settled on his name and his occupation, there was nowhere to go but up to the Catskills, where the jokes, like the soup du jour, are always borscht. Notwithstanding the ethnic limitations of comic performance in the borscht belt, King kept plugging, waited to be discovered.

While he waited, he bounced like a matzo ball from Montreal to Minneapolis, from Cleveland to Cincinnati, driving himself 52,000 miles a year. His delivery ranged as wide as his itinerary; finally he settled down to a hostile style that got the audience before they got him. "I don't like you either," became his opening line. Somehow this worked, and King began earning as much as $2,000 a week with a stand-up routine of one-liners like, "We were so poor we lived below the candy store." Later, he played up to London, even got to meet the Queen. Their brief exchange, since widely publicized, may be apocryphal. She: "How do you do, Mr. King?" He: "How do you do, Mrs. Queen?"

Fun at the Waldorf. After Britain, King captured Canada, and then achieved his greatest prominence in the U.S. (the Sullivan show, the Garry Moore program) with curt wisecracks mostly about the sorrows of suburbia: "I really believe my wife collects the garbage from the neighbors just so I can take it out for her."

Now that he owns a Rolls and a $250,000 suburban home in Long Island, King knows whereof he piques. "I've been making fun of weddings and bar mitzvahs for years," he says. "Then when my son's turn comes, I turn around and do it worse. It was at the Waldorf. I had a $150 heart-shaped chopped-liver mold. The cook said, 'For $50 more I can make it pulsate.' I had more fun making an idiot of myself."