Richard Zoglin is the author of " Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America ." Bad news often comes in threes, even in the world of comedy. The death on Feb. 20 of Rick Newman, the founder of New York City's landmark comedy club Catch a Rising Star, at age 81, came only a day after the passing of the club's longtime emcee (and Newman's close friend), Richard Belzer, at 78. And that was three months after Budd Friedman, owner of New York's other big comedy club of the 1970s, the Improv, died at age 90. I got to know all three while researching my book on a seminal era in stand-up comedy that has now definitively, inexorably passed into history. Catch a Rising Star and the Improv were the first clubs to feature comedians almost exclusively, places where young comics could work on their routines, try out new material — and maybe get seen by the agents and bookers who could get them jobs. Robert Klein, Jay Leno, Andy Kaufman, Richard Lewis, La...
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