Dick Cavett - Stand-up Comic

Stand-up Comic

Cavett began a brief career as a stand-up comic in 1964 at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. His manager was Jack Rollins, who later became famous as the producer of Woody Allen's films.

His most famous line from this period may have been the following:

I went to a Chinese-German restaurant. The food is great, but an hour later you're hungry for power.

He also played Mr. Kelly's in Chicago and the Hungry i in San Francisco. In San Francisco, he met Lenny Bruce, about whom he said:

I liked him and wish I had known him better...but most of what has been written about him is a waste of good ink, and his most zealous adherents and hardest-core devotees are to be avoided, even if it means working your way around the world in the hold of a goat transport.

In 1965, Cavett did some commercial voiceovers, including a series of mock interviews with Mel Brooks for Ballantine beer. In the next couple of years he appeared on game shows, including What's My Line. He wrote for Merv Griffin and appeared on Griffin's talk show several times, and then on The Ed Sullivan Show.

In 1968, after the premiere of the international film Candy, Cavett went to a party at the Americana Hotel, where those who had just seen the film were being interviewed for TV.

When the interviewer, Pat Paulsen, got to me, he asked what I thought the critics would say about Candy. I said I didn't think it would be reviewed by the regular critics, that they would have to reconvene the Nuremberg Trials to do it justice. He laughed and asked what I had liked, and I said I liked the lady who showed me the nearest exit so that I would not be forced to vomit indoors.

After doing The Star and the Story, a rejected television pilot with Van Johnson, Cavett hosted a special, Where It's At, for Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear.

In 1968 Cavett was hired by ABC to host This Morning. According to a New Yorker article, the show was too sophisticated for a morning audience, and ABC first moved the show to prime time, and subsequently to a late-night slot opposite Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show.