Comedians: Country Boy

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Ever since Will Rogers first ambled onstage with his lariat, comedians have played the hick-in-the-big-city for big laughs and good money. From Herb Shriner to George Gobel to Andy Griffith, dozens have twirled the same line — and still left enough rope for their lineal descendant, Dick Cavett. In a Greenwich Village nightclub last week, Cavett, 29, recited the doleful tale of his country boyhood in Nebraska. The story, as he tells it, is comical enough, and perhaps just true enough to serve as his public autobiography.

He grew up, he explains, in Gibbon, Neb., where his schoolteacher father earned only $900 a year and his mother helped out by taking in washing at night — off other people's clotheslines.

When he won a scholarship to Yale, his scarecrow clothes drew jeers. "My whole freshman year I wore brown and white shoes," he recalls. "Actually they were impractical because the white one kept getting dirty."

There was one student at Yale who was even dumber than Cavett — a rich alumnus' son named Clarence. On a final exam, a multiple-choice question was posed:

Lot's wife turned into a pillar of

A) Salt.

B) Pepper.

C) Margarine.

Clarence answered it "No."

Antimissionary. After he graduated from Yale ("What can you say about a school that has a song entitled For God, For Country and Yale and is unhappy about the order of the billing?"), Cavett tried to take New York by storm—and was immediately snowed. He dined at a restaurant that was noted for its German-Chinese cuisine—only to find that one hour later he was hungry for power. He attended a wedding at which the bride was pregnant—so the guests threw puffed rice.

Later he fell in love with a misanthropic girl who had gone to Bennington on an Ayn Rand wrestling scholarship and had majored in guerrilla warfare. At school she had written a term paper for Religion 1, proving that there was room at the inn—only it was restricted. She was expelled from school and went into antimissionary work, following Billy Graham by two days and bringing people back from God.

Do-lt-Yourselfer. Cavett began his New York career in 1959 as a TIME copy boy (a job about which, fortunately for all concerned, he has no jokes). Then he wrote comedy lines for Jack Paar, Groucho Marx, Jack E. Leonard and Jerry Lewis. Typical problem: how should Paar introduce a certain buxom movie star? Cavett's solution: "Here they are, Jayne Mansfield!"

After four years as a supplier, Cavett decided to be a do-it-yourselfer. Now he earns $1,000 a week on his own. With his laconic style and boyish innocence, he ought to go far. "I'll be happy," he says, "if I can just stay out of Nebraska."