5 Comedians Who Quit While They Were Ahead
From The Simpsons to John Cleese to Chevy Chase, history is littered with beloved comedies and comedians who kept going well past their primes. Can you blame them? If someone is writing you a check to be funny, why not cash it? There are a handful of comedians, however, who decided to get out while they were still on top.
Here are five who decided quality was more important than quantity…
Steve Martin — The Stand-Up Comedian
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It’s no longer unheard of for a comic to sell out a stadium, but the idea was patently absurd when Martin started doing it in the late 1970s. Small, smoky clubs were for comics — arenas were reserved for rock acts. That’s exactly why Martin wanted out. “Though the audiences continued to grow, I experienced a concomitant depression caused by exhaustion,” he writes in his memoir Born Standing Up. “The act was still rocking, but audience disruptions, whoops and shouts sometimes killed the timing of bits, violating my premise that every moment mattered. … I had become a party host.”
And that’s not what Martin had set out to be. So at the height of success, he left stand-up for good and tried his hand at the movies. It worked out okay.
Carl Reiner and The Dick Van Dyke Show
Reiner’s sitcom collaboration with Van Dyke proved to be one of the most successful of all time, earning 15 Emmys during its five-season run. The show could easily have run for 10 except for one reason: Reiner.
“Carl felt strongly that he would get stale after five years of writing and rewriting 39 episodes a season, and so would the show,” Van Dyke writes in My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir. “He thought all of us would lose the spring in our step. I think he also recognized that all of us, through our collaboration and hard work, had produced a TV classic, and he feared that if repetition and fatigue set in, it could tarnish the show’s magical reputation.”
Van Dyke wasn’t ready to leave, but “I couldn’t imagine anyone considering The Dick Van Dyke Show without Carl Reiner.” Five seasons and out.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Fleabag
Five seasons seems like a lifetime compared to Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, which only ran for two. Turns out we were lucky to get that. Waller-Bridge thought the story was told perfectly well in its first season, and they’re wasn’t much left to say. She was persuaded to continue the story but insisted that Fleabag had come to its proper conclusion after a second run.
“I was performing the end and I was really emotional and I was suddenly hit by the whole journey of the character and then I felt her go,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “And it was such a lovely feeling, Ah we’ve done the right thing, we’ve ended the story at the right time.”
Nathan Fielder and Nathan For You
In the case of Nathan For You, it wasn’t so much an “ending on top” situation as much as “this probably isn’t going to work anymore.”
The entire conceit of the show relied on everyday people not knowing who Fielder was. As the show grew in notoriety, finding unsuspecting players for Fielder’s strange comedy scenarios became much more difficult. That’s okay — between The Rehearsal and The Curse, Fielder continues to find unexpected ways to be weird.
Andy Kaufman
Come on, we all know he’s still out there.
