A few days later, Langston sits in the hotel restaurant eating breakfast, two pieces of whole wheat toast, and downing large swallows of coffee, truly an unknown comic. When he tries to charge the meal to his room, the waitress asks him to prove he is a hotel guest. Two tables down, some other people recognize him and wave.

Langston, 34, came to the United States 15 years ago from Canada and joined the service. The only thing close to stage experience was a radio show he had while in the Navy, "Musical Murray's Murray-Go-Round of Music." After a four-year hitch in the Navy aboard an aircraft carrier that stayed in Europe, Langston moved to Los Angeles where he eventually landed a job as a computer operator. After four years of punching cards, he was ready to expand his horizons.

"I called up Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, asked to speak to the producer and said I wanted to be on the show. He asked me what I did, so I told him I could do an impression of a fork. He said come on down."

As beautiful downtown Burbank's greatest impressionist, he appeared four times on Laugh-in during its last season in 1973, doing such classics as his fork, a grandfather clock and toothpaste. He was promptly fired from his computer job. "From then on," he remembers, "I was a typical Hollywood story. I didn't work for a year and a half."

Slowly, though, Langston managed to find work as a comic actor, appearing regularly in skits at Redd Foxx's Club and as a regular on The Sonny and Cher Show. When the show was retired, Langston, who had been pocketing about $1,500 a week, decided to call it quits too. He dropped out of performing for about a year and a half to open and manage his own Los Angeles nightclub, Showbiz.

"It was interesting for a while, and something I always wanted to do. Then when I realized I had to change the toilet paper and buy all the booze, I grew tired of it in a hurry." In 1977, nearly broke, he ditched the club. Enter the Unknown Comic.

"I was in the actor's union and I knew if I could get on The Gong Show I could earn the $250 fee they are required to pay. My inspiration was simply money and embarrassment. I needed the cash, but was too embarrassed to appear as a contestant, so I figured the simplest and cheapest disguise would be a paper bag."

Langston was what is called a "Curtain Closer," a person who did something utterly ridiculous or insulted host Chuck Barris right before the curtains were closed on him. When Barris asked him to be a semi-regular on the show that features irregulars, no one was more surprised than Langston. "I never expected to be on more than once."

He started taking the Unknown Comic act to different clubs around Los Angeles, which led to other jobs such as a character on The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show, aimed at the Saturday morning kiddies, and a syndicated variety/talk show called Everyday. Though he hasn't yet taken the bag off during his television appearances, he finds that in lengthier live performances he must. "The bag thing is really just one joke stretched out. After about 15 minutes it starts to get old," he says. "Plus I also start to suffocate."

He rises from the coffee shop table and starts to walk. "I'll tell you one thing that's really strange. I can go into a restaurant or sit down somewhere and over-hear people talking about the Unknown Comic. Once, I asked two girls what they thought of him and they said he was awful. Naturally I agreed. Another time people were talking about him and I introduced myself and said I was the Unknown Comic. They said, 'Sure buddy'. They didn't believe me."

Langston reacts to those situations the way you would expect: he laughs them off. Comedy is his bag and the bag is his comedy and as his alter ego might put it, sack-cess is just around the corner. "Let's face it," he says, "right now people are coming to see the Unknown Comic and not Murray Langston, but that should change soon." Then, having given his prediction, Murray Langston walks up a flight of stairs, across the long hotel lobby and seems to disappear in the crowd.&

Bill Braunstein is a Gainesville, Florida freelance writer who seeks fame and fortune through any legal means; be aspires to be a talk show guest.