Hollywood and Horsepower Show, September 17, 2026

Hollywood and Horsepower Show with Mark Otto The first in a series, "The path to the comedy stage", what comedians go through to get into show business and entertainment Boston's Comedy Boom, the Art of Building a Set, and Johnny Carson's Magic Touch with Michael Blowen Mark Otto opens a new series on the history of stand-up comedy with former Boston Globe entertainment writer Michael Blowen, who covered the city's comedy clubs through the 1980s and shares stories of Steven Wright, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Rodney Dangerfield, and Johnny Carson's outsized influence on young comics. Kicking Off A Series On Comedy History Mark Otto opens the Hollywood and Horsepower Show with his usual thanks to sponsor Tony's Steaks and Seafood before explaining that the episode is the first in a new series on the history of comedy, recorded a day ahead for broadcast. He tells listeners the plan is to show the many different paths comedians take to build a career, since most people assume every comic simply walks onto an open mic and takes off. His guest is Michael Blowen, a former entertainment writer for The Boston Globe who covered comedy through the 1980s. Otto notes that Blowen was one of the first journalists anywhere to treat stand-up as a beat worth covering, at a time before the internet gave comics their own websites and profiles. Blowen agrees, recalling that covering movies meant competing with two or three other writers at every paper, while Boston's booming comedy scene offered him an almost uncontested subject and comics who were unusually accessible to a reporter looking for real stories. Boston Becomes A Comedy Breeding Ground Otto and Blowen dig into what made Boston different from Chicago, New York, or Toronto: its clubs actually paid comics well enough to make a living. Blowen credits Emerson College, where he taught, as a breeding ground for talent, naming Steven Wright and Mike McDonald as students who worked out material there before testing it onstage at night. He recalls that Jay Leno and Henry Winkler both went to Emerson, and that Leno has told the story of playing drums in a strip joint at the edge of the Combat Zone to work his way through school. Otto adds a favorite detail, that Leno once prepped and cleaned a new car for Robert Klein at a Boston dealership before ever meeting him as a fellow comic. Blowen praises Wright as an underrated genius who built his act by trying ideas out in class and then testing them live, and he stresses that facing an unfamiliar crowd with unproven material takes real courage, since a comic alone onstage has nowhere to hide. The Discipline Behind A Polished Act Otto calls stand-up the most honest form of entertainment because the audience's reaction is immediate and unarguable, a point Blowen echoes by comparing comics to cliff jumpers who must keep leaping to stay sharp. Blowen offers Chris Rock as his sharpest example of discipline, describing a night at Bill Blumenreich's Comedy Connection when Rock spent hours polishing just four jokes, playing each one like a musician adjusting tempo and emphasis and recording every version on a cassette recorder to study later. Otto contrasts that meticulous approach with true improvisers such as Don Rickles, who worked largely off the crowd itself, and recalls Frank Santorelli telling him that comics once wrote together in groups of four or five, tailoring bits to each other's styles, a practice Otto says has faded as performers have grown more independent. Blowen notes that Boston's clubs, unlike Chicago's or New York's more competitive rooms, paid comics well enough that many built entire careers without ever leaving the city, citing Lenny Clarke and Steve Sweeney as examples still working decades later. Stolen Jokes And Rodney Dangerfield's Code The conversation turns to the darker side of the business, the material theft that shaped how comics protected their work. Blowen recalls a running joke of his own, an unmade movie idea about warring comedy club owners feuding like mobsters, inspired by real stories of comics who stole each other's bits and clubs that quietly punished the thieves. Otto brings up Milton Berle's reputation as a notorious joke pirate, and Blowen counters with Rodney Dangerfield, who ran his own club, Dangerfield's, and paid comics twenty-five or fifty dollars per joke, once spending months tracking down the true author of a bit he suspected had been stolen so the original writer could finally be paid. Otto adds a story about Dennis Miller, who has said that watching an unnamed comic perform one of Miller's own jokes on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was the moment that pushed him to finally build a real act of his own, determined never to be the writer left off the couch again. Comic Geniuses From Jeni To Wright Blowen shares memories of comics he calls genuine originals. He remembers Richard Jeni, creator of the Platypus Man character, and Albert Brooks, describing both as comics who saw the world in a way that seemed almost genetic, recalling Rob Reiner's story that his father Carl Reiner once called the teenage Albert Brooks the funniest person he had ever met. Blowen calls Richard Pryor a fearless genius, comparing him to Otto Preminger's description of the rare director who never has to work at the craft, and recounts how Columbia blocked Pryor from starring in Blazing Saddles despite his writing much of the script for Mel Brooks. He praises George Carlin as timeless, tracing Carlin's start as a Boston disc jockey doing weather reports from a street-level studio at the Statler Hotel under the character Hippy Dippy Weatherman, long before his political satire took shape. Blowen also singles out Steven Wright, noting that Wright delivered his strangest lines without ever smiling, which only deepened the effect of his material. Johnny Carson's Couch And What Comes Next The two turn to Johnny Carson's Tonight Show as the moment that could remake a comic's career, agreeing that a strong set, and especially an invitation to sit on the couch, could set phones ringing with club bookings overnight. Otto recalls hearing that Carson would lean in during commercial breaks to quietly coach nervous young comics on their sets, and both agree Carson stayed funny even when a joke bombed, which Blowen says made him feel human to millions of viewers. Blowen recalls listening to Conan O'Brien rehearse jokes above a Cambridge Chinese restaurant early in his career, working out timing alone with a notepad long before he became a host himself. Otto reflects that many performers spend a decade or more grinding through clubs before any breakthrough, and that writers such as Jack Handey and Robert Smigel shaped shows without ever seeking the spotlight themselves. Closing the hour, Otto thanks Blowen, plugs Tony's Steaks and Seafood again, and previews next week's guest, comic and actor Frank Santorelli, who will dig deeper into the Boston scene.