"Standup Comedian" Elayne Boosler Signed 5X7 Color Photo

Elayne Boosler  (born August 18, 1952) is an American comedian . Boosler was born into a Jewish immigrant family   and raised in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn . She was the youngest child and only daughter of her father, a Russian acrobat, and her mother, a Romanian  ballerina.   She attended public schools in Brooklyn, including Shellbank Junior High School and Sheepshead Bay High School . She is married to Bill Siddons , a music industry executive and former manager of The Doors . After a job as a singer/dancer in touring companies and many unsuccessful waitressing jobs, Boosler worked as a doorman at The Improvisation  comedy club in New York City  for two and a half years. While working there, she met comedian Andy Kaufman , a regular at the club, who convinced her she should do standup comedy . They lived together in Greenwich Village  for three years and remained close friends until Kaufman's death. For her "comedy education" Boosler credits Kaufman as well as her other peers at the time, which included Freddie Prinze , Jay Leno , Larry David , Richard Lewis , Richard Belzer , Jimmie Walker , and Ed Bluestone . In 1986, Boosler became the first woman to get her own one-hour comedy special on cable when Showtime  aired Party of One . Having no credit cards or borrowing power, Boosler saved her money to produce the special herself when cable executives told her that they did not believe people would tune in to see a woman do an hour of comedy. She successfully toured for 50 weeks a year performing a two-hour comedy show. Up to 2011, Boosler has done seven cable specials. Her one-hour standup comedy concert specials for Showtime include Party of One , Broadway Baby , Top Tomata  (broadcast live from Omaha  and voted Best Comedy Special of the Year by readers of Cable Guide  magazine), and Live Nude Girls . Her New Year's Eve comedy-variety special, Elayne Boosler's Midnight Hour , was a 90-minute special from a Town Hall in New York and telecast live on Showtime. She wrote, directed, and acted in two half-hour movies for Cinemax : Comedy From Here  (a drama) and The Call . Boosler hosted the short-lived game show Balderdash  on PAX  (now ION Television ). Other television guest-hosting duties include A.M. San Francisco , The Late Show , The Midnight Special , Comic Strip Live , Friday Night Videos , The Gossip Show  on E! , and many specials. She has contributed field pieces to many shows, including The Today Show , Not Necessarily the News , and Donny and Marie . In the early days of cable, Boosler wrote and hosted the Cable ACE Awards . Her specials were nominated every year they premiered. She has also written and hosted awards shows for the Writer's Guild of America  (both west and east), for New York Women in Film and Television twice, for the Pollstar Awards three times, the Daytime Emmys , the "Casting Director's Guild," and many others.