Tom Finnigan was a fairly mediocre comedian. It wasn’t his material. He just didn’t have a lot of stage presence. Cantu knew Finnigan was out of work and had a family to support, so he gave Finnigan a job as the bartender. Which at the Zoo was no big deal, because we only had a beer and wine license, so the hardest thing you might have to do in a night was install a new cask of draft beer.

But Finnigan is absolutely the best comedy writer ever to come out of San Francisco. He soon was writing for tons of comics, because the word got out, if you needed material, call Finnigan. Or let me put it another way. On a whim, he sent two pages of his material to the Tonight Show when Carson was still there, and got hired. So he went from being paid $5 an hour to making $200,000 a year.

Now that is a career leap. Finnigan wrote one of my favorite lines that I heard during my years in comedy: “I was talking to my parents, and they told me my grandmother is upset because she found out I’m doing stand-up comedy. You see, my grandmother had a horrible experience with comedians… she was sexually assaulted by the Three Stooges. A senseless crime. They dragged her in an alley and… threw pies up her dress. To this day, she wakes up in the middle of the night screaming, ‘Woob woob woob woob!’”

Anyway, after we closed the Zoo at 2:00 in the morning, to unwind we’d often go to the only restaurant open nearby, the Sugarplum on California Street, which really was just a glorified Dennys. Cantu says that night it was me, him, Finnigan, and Warren Spottswood; I seem to remember Karen Warner being there, which means I’m probably wrong; I’m almost always wrong. At another table was a group of comics. Barry Sobel, Al Clethan, Jeremy Kramer are the ones I remember, maybe Stephen Pearl too.

Our table was writers. Writers couldn’t stand to be around comedians. (Karen Warner wrote something like, and wrote it much better than I’m going to remember it, “Being a comedy writer means you write brilliant things for comics who can always remember them but can never remember to pay you.”) But writers can have a conversation, it could flow, it wouldn’t get interrupted. (Michael Robertson at the Chronicle wrote about driving with a bunch of us comedy writers and said, “The surprising thing is that they were polite. They didn’t try to one-up each other. They didn’t make fun of each other.”

That’s because we were writers, not comedians. You cannot have a conversation with a comedian.

So our table was laughing, but because we were having a conversation, and the humor kept building with each story that flowed from the last one. The comics at the other table were laughing, because they were throwing food at each other. Each to his own method of entertainment.

One last note about Finnigan. While he was writing for Carson, he told me, “I used to love writing jokes. But now I have to do it everyday, under pressure and deadline. Writing jokes isn’t fun for me anymore.” He also told me, “The editors reject a lot of the stuff I do, but what they do accept, if 25% of those things I write for Carson’s monologue works, I’m satisfied.”

That’s the brutal reality of comedy. If you can succeed 25% of the time – which would mean you’d be fired on any other job – you feel a sense of accomplishment.