Jimmy Brogan: formed on South Quad

Notre Dame class of 1970 · first stage time at An Tostal, before some one thousand students

The tie: Jimmy Brogan grew up in Cleveland; the tie here is formation, and it is documented in the university's own alumni record in his own telling. At Notre Dame — class of 1970, then graduate study he jokes the university ended after six years — a member of the original An Tostal festival committee, he proposed an impersonation contest and was made its emcee. Expecting five kids under a tree, he faced some one thousand students on a portable stage on South Quad in front of Alumni Hall, and got his first laugh with a joke at the expense of the passing President Hesburgh. "Based on that one laugh," in his account, he concluded he could do stand-up. It was the first time he was ever on a stage.

The career that followed: The alumni record carries it whole. In New York he played the Comic Strip, and Jack Rollins became his manager off a bill that also held Jerry Seinfeld, Larry Miller, and Larry David. His first Tonight Show appearance, with Johnny Carson, came eight years after he had bought Dick Cavett's book Cavett for $8.95 — and Cavett was the guest immediately before him. He starred in the ABC sitcom Out of the Blue. He spent nine years helping Jay Leno assemble the Tonight Show monologues — "I'll do it for six months," it began; it ended up being nine years — and thirty-two years opening for Leno on Sunday nights at the Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, still performing at the alumni story's date. None of the career happened here; the first laugh did, and the record states the claim at exactly that size: South Bend formed this stand-up, it did not raise him.

Sources

1. "From South Quad to Stand-Up," We Are ND (the University of Notre Dame's alumni record) — the Cleveland upbringing, the An Tostal impersonation contest and the Hesburgh laugh in Brogan's own account, the Comic Strip and Jack Rollins, the Carson appearance and the Cavett book, Out of the Blue, the nine Leno years, and the thirty-two Hermosa Beach years.