I’ve only seen him in a few things, but the first was in the early 80s, right after I’d moved to LA, Diary of a Young Comic. It is about him moving to LA, living on nothing, and bombing at open mike nights.
In on scene he has totally lost it, and is venting to his friend for about ten minutes, and then his friend tells him that his venting was funnier than anything he’d been doing in front of an audience, and he ought to go with it - which he did, and it worked.
What else I remembered was it was the first thing I’d seen that mentioned an obscure, but real, location in LA — the Rent-a-Wreck on the corner of Bundy Drive and Wilshire Blvd.
I had considered renting a car there, but didn’t. A couple of years later my girlfriend lived off San Vincente, and I’d drive up Bundy to get there. Eight years after that, Bundy Drive, and in particular that eight or ten block stretch, became famous in the OJ trial.
Lived on Barrington in Brentwood for 20 years.