Catch a Rising Star comedy club founder Rick Newman, 81

Rick Newman, the founder of Catch a Rising Star comedy club in New York City where a generation of stand-up comics — Billy Crystal, Richard Lewis, Jerry Seinfeld, Robin Williams, Richard Belzer and countless others — honed their craft in the 1970s, died Feb. 20 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife Krysi Newman, who like Crystal and Lewis noted with bewilderment and a twinge of wistfulness for a bygone era that Newman died the day after Belzer, the club’s longtime emcee.

“What really bound us all together back in those days was this place we felt safe in, where the common goal was to just get laughs. And for me, there was no better place to do that than in New York at Catch,” Crystal said in a phone interview. “It was a gymnasium where you worked out your stuff.”

Located on First Avenue between 77th and 78th streets on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Newman’s club supercharged “the stand-up comedy explosion of the 1970s,” Richard Zoglin wrote in “Comedy at the Edge,” and at its height rivaled Studio 54 as a “celebrity-studded icon of the drugs-and-disco decade.”

Newman opened the club in late 1972, nine years after the Improv debuted on Manhattan’s West Side in Hell’s Kitchen. He positioned Catch both in name and vibe as a place for upand-comers to sharpen their material in a more welcoming place than his crosstown rival, a more cutthroat environment that catered to more established industry types.

“The Improv was more rough-and-tumble, more gritty, while Catch a Rising Star was a more homey kind of hangout,” Lewis said, recalling how patrons sat at tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths. “And that’s because of Rick. He was like the loving brother we all wanted. He made you feel like you were already a star when you worked there, like anything was possible.”

When Newman, who had previously run a downtown bar, took over the saloon that eventually became Catch a Rising Star, he wasn’t planning a comedy club.

The club’s name was a twist on the Perry Como song “Catch a Falling Star.” At first, Newman also booked musicians, including up-and-coming rocker Pat Benatar. Business struggled to catch on. Crystal recalled how Newman would sometimes slip him gas money as payment. Cab fare and hamburgers were also currency.

Then, one Saturday night in 1973, David Brenner showed up.

“At that point, David had been on ‘The Tonight Show’ many times and was very respected,” Newman told Parade. “He wasn’t your father’s comedian. He was your comedian. And he was hot.”

Brenner sat down at a table and Newman wandered over to introduce himself.

“How about getting up?” he said.

“No, not yet,” Brenner said. “Let me watch.”

So Brenner watched. An hour and a half went by. Then he called Newman over.

“I’ll get up,” he said “I’ll do some material.”

The audience was gobsmacked. More importantly, Brenner kept coming back to perform.

Brenner’s appearances inspired other comics to show up, including Andy Kaufman, who used Catch a Rising Star to try out the barely-speaks-English “Foreign Man” character he later played as the mechanic Latka on the sitcom “Taxi.”