Budd Friedman, founder of the Improv comedy club, dies at 90
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Budd Friedman, founder of the Improv comedy club, dies at 90
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One of a young writer’s “larks,” Budd Friedman was a pioneer of the 1960s counterculture and the first to put his own name and a group of his friends on the stage.
He was one of a young writer’s “larks,” Budd Friedman was a pioneer of the 1960s counterculture and the first to put his own name and a group of his friends on the stage.
DURING his career as a writer, actor, comic and club owner, Budd Friedman became, in the estimation of his friends, one of the most original performers in America.
Among his most noted work to date, he wrote the first comic strip by a Jewish American, for the Saturday Evening Post, and the first scripted program on television, “The Dick Cavett Show,” which included the first television appearance of the Beatles. He made one of his TV appearances when he was 8 months old — sitting at the controls of “The Jetsons’s” rocket to the moon.
“I’ll never forget it. I was going to be a boy,” he said recently in a television interview. “I was going to be an astronaut.”
It was a moment that became the origin of his long friendship with the other members of “The Jetsons” — Walter Mathews Jr. and Joe Campell.
“To me, they were not really human beings, but a kind of super beings,” he said. “We were just boys who had learned to fly. I think we were on a spaceship and we were like the aliens, or the gods.”
He was a Jewish kid from St. Louis who came of age in the turbulent years leading up to the Second World War.
His mother, who was Jewish and raised him to be a Zionist, was deeply involved in the war effort as a member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and as a refugee from Europe.
“She was a very forceful person,” he said. “She wanted to see the world be free. She saw the beauty around her and saw a world beyond the country we were from.
“My mother was very, very strong. She became a Russian communist. Then she became Jewish. For her, this was the right thing to do