At age 14, Byron Allen was already doing standup, and one night at the Comedy Store, Wayne Kline, a writer on TV’s Good Times, happened to see his act. “He said, ‘Can I get your phone number? I know somebody that might be interested in working with you,’” Allen recalls. Two weeks later, he was sitting in star Jimmie Walker’s apartment alongside Jay Leno and David Letterman, writing material for the show. He got $25, the first money he made writing jokes, which paid a lot better than working as a paper boy. “I had to throw two papers to make a penny,” he says. “So, I had to throw 5,000 papers to make that.”
Allen, now 56, spent 18 years as a comedian and host of television hits such…
