Larry David remembers the day he first met stand-up comic Michael Keaton. “I met him standing in line at Catch a Rising Star in 1974. Isn’t that something?” David said in an Esquire profile of Keaton. “Then I saw him here and there doing stand-up for a couple of years, and then he just wasn’t around.”
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Where did Keaton go? In his early career, he was determined to succeed at stand-up, Keaton told Jimmy Fallon in 2017. He played clubs in his native Pittsburgh “that I shouldn’t have been playing,” joints where no one announced a comic’s name before they wandered onto a stage to tell jokes. Other places had no microphones, requiring aspiring comics to talk/shout at the room. “It was just horrible.”
But Keaton persevered, heading to New York to meet comics like David and tackle places like the Gotham Comedy Club. Despite Keaton’s obvious charisma in this clip, Rolling Stone says stand-up comedy wasn’t his future: “He just wasn’t very good at it.”
He told Fallon that he spent years trying to figure out what kind of comedian he was. Maybe he was wacky? Keaton tried out props, a pre-Carrot Top technique that he says only worked for Steve Martin at the time. The problem with props? “When you die — and if you’re not that wacky guy, you’re going to die — the problem is leaving.” A regular comic can just wave good-night. A prop comic has to end the set, then spend 10 minutes picking up the rubber chickens he left on the stage. “It’s humiliating.”
He also bombed opening for Cher in Las Vegas, facing an audience eating dinner while waiting to hear pop music. “They’re still eating, all you hear is silverware and people mumbling things like, ‘Hey, I didn’t order Thousand Island.’ You’re up there and they go: ‘Who is this kid? Why is he bothering us?’”
Ultimately, Keaton decided to leave Cher and his props behind. “People can never understand,” he told Ellen DeGeneres in 2015. “People think they get how hard that is, to get to the level that you reached.”
But stand-up greatness is much harder to achieve than people believe, Keaton realized. With his focus on acting, he’d never reach the stand-up pinnacle. “When I hear people talk about stand-up, no one really gets — unless you’re in that world — what that world really is; what you have to do if you want to be really good and how serious it can get,” he told The New York Times. “I was always afraid that the fun would go away.”
Yet, despite his decision to walk away, Keaton told DeGeneres that he does miss stand-up. “Once you get up at that level where you’re really good, that’s a true art form, and I have nothing but respect for that, man.”