Friars Club

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.

So in 1949, Groucho Marx, the comedian Groucho Marx, resigned from the Friars Club in New York with this simple note.

He said, I resign my membership from the Friars Club because I have realized that I don't wish to belong to any organization that would have me as a member.

I love that for a lot of different reasons.

One of the reasons I love it is that it kind of gets at our kind of hypocrisy around the idea of equality, right? Equality is a good word.

He was playing Whoopi Goldberg because Ted Danson was dating Whoopi Goldberg.

And they went to the Friars Club thing and Ted Danson had minstrel makeup on, blackface.

And he got in trouble for that.

But, I mean, come on.

You see, it's kind of a pun on the last na- ah, never mind.

[upbeat music] Hi, this is Gilbert Gottfried, and this is Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast with my co-host, Frank Santopadre, and we're here at the Friars Club in New York City.

Our guests today are a screenwriter, television writer, and playwright who's written 12 TV pilots, as well as the screenplays for the movies The Guru and Confessions of a Shopaholic.

And our other guest, a songwriter, singer, actor, and member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame who's written some of the most popular and enduring songs of our, uh, lifetimes, including We've Only Just Begun, Rainy Days and Mondays, and The Rainbow Connection, among many others.

My new favorite episode.

Thank you, guys

... at, at the Friars Club in New York City, where we've been [laughs] interviewing Tracy Jackson and Paul Williams, who revealed today he fucked Shirley Temple.

[laughs]

didn't like that at all.

But for me, just going versus what a roast was, it was the Friars Club, it was Dean Martin.

You

had a certain amount of class, you had to put a tie on, and there were certain things that were just off limits.

I mean, first of all, everybody knows your listeners love you, as we all do.

But your stories about legendary New York and the Friars Club, you know, they'll be lost.

So I want to do that with you, and my team is behind it.

So I just want you to know that.

Everybody told him to turn it down but his wife.

His wife – Johnny didn't realize his wife – secretly arranged for two NBC people to come to see Johnny perform at a Friars Club roast, and they were the ones.

She's like, offer Johnny the Tonight Show.

Johnny had no idea how powerful she was.

She was getting producers at the Tonight Show hired and fired, and Johnny had no clue the power that his wife had yielded behind the scenes.

So he did the Friars Club.

I never really knew where Carson kind of came from.

Did he do stand-up? Or I know the Friars Club is more like you go in and you roast