Tim and Tom on The Tonight Show

Standing outside the door leading backstage at The Tonight Show, Tom looked at Tim and said, “Do you know how many times we tried to get here?”

“Well, we finally made it,” Tim said.

Over the years, Tom has appeared on the show dozens of times—both with Johnny Carson and Jay Leno—and Tim had been on several times himself. But as a team they could never quite make it. Their book describes in some detail the efforts they made, which included an all-night trip to New York on a Greyhound bus they made just to audition--they sat behind some nuns who farted the whole way--and how important an appearance on the show was to young comedians back in the 1970s.

“As soon as you told someone you were a comedian back then,” Tom says, “they’d say, ‘Oh, yeah? Have you ever been on The Tonight Show?’ If you hadn’t, you weren’t a comedian in their eyes.”

And now that they were there together, it was time for reflection. “It’s the same building, the hallways, the same rooms,” Tom said as he settled into his dressing room in NBC’s Burbank studios. “Johnny did the show on a different stage, across the hall from the one Jay uses, but nothing else has changed. The makeup room is the same one I sat in three times when they came in and told me I'd been bumped after Craig Tennis, who was in charge of booking the guests, saw me at The Comedy Store. Then one day Fred DeCordova, Johnny’s producer, came into the room and said, ‘I’ve got some bad news for you. You’re going on.’”

Tom went out that evening in 1975, broke up Carson and his audience with his monologue, was called back for another bow and woke up the next morning to find his life changed forever. He’s never been out of work since. Watching TV that night, Tim felt as if he had been kicked in the gut and realized he was going to have to make some changes in his life if his partner wasn’t going to leave him behind. Two years later of struggle and hard work later, he was Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati and his life had changed irrevocably, too.

They walked out onto the set, sat down next to Cate Blanchett and traded jokes with Leno, who told his audience how funny their book was, how full of great stories about the early days in which they had all been struggling young comedians together. Watching all the fun they were having, you might almost think it was worth the wait.