Some Comedy Lessons

“SOME COMEDY LESSONS”

Comedy is a funny thing...but not always. Those who write it or perform it hope to get laughs, but when they don’t come nobody really understands why. All you can do is take the silence, the hole where a laugh should have rocked the rafters, and consider it a lesson learned.

Once as writer/producer of some justifiably forgotten sit-com I wrangled with a network executive over whether some dumb joke in a scene was funny. Red-faced with self-righteousness, collar bursting, I ordered tee-shirts for my writing staff that read: “Comedy is truth.” Who knows what the hell I thought I meant at the time? The problem was, the guy who made the shirts couldn’t spell and they came back: “‘Comdey’ is truth.” The lesson there? A recurring one: there are more ways to screw up a joke than you can possibly imagine.

I came into the WGA at a propitious time, in the days of weekly variety shows. Every network had at least a couple of these shows and they all had large writing staffs combining seasoned pros, up-and-comers, and rank neophytes. That was me. Neo and rank to beat hell. But I had a JOB on staff of The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. And I began to learn the lessons.

Early in the run of the Goodtime Hour Jimmy Durante was booked as a guest. We’d written lots of stuff for him and Glen that promised to be very funny. Each show had a five-day rehearsal schedule starting on Wednesday and taping on Sunday. On Monday we heard Jimmy was in the hospital with some unspecified ailment. He must have been 80 then, so I figured he had a right to ail however he cared to, specified or not. The producers were assured Jimmy would miss only the first script reading on Wednesday, but Thursday found Jimmy still hospitalized. We were two days behind and uncertainty reigned.

On Friday the producers sent me, the most junior writer on staff, in a pouring rain to Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica to read Mr. Durante the sketches we’d written for him and return with his suggestions, if any. I walked into the dimly lit hospital room and saw this tiny, ancient man lying under a sheet with only his head and feet sticking out. I was fascinated by those feet, the bare feet of the famous Jimmy Durante. They were small, bunnioned...and old! Two men in suits sat at his bedside. One spoke softly into a telephone while the other read the paper. Agent and valet were my guess. Neither paid the slightest attention to Jimmy, who was squinting quizzically at my arrival. I tried a joke I’d made up on the rain-swept freeway: “Well, Mr. Durante, if you’re going to be under the weather, you picked the right day for it.” The agent hung up the phone and the valet put down the paper. Silence. My joke was DOA at Saint John’s. (Lesson...? Don’t open with your “A” stuff, I guess.) I still couldn’t keep my eyes off Durante’s feet. They were really ugly.

The valet leaned over the bed and said loudly, “Jimmy, this is the writer! From CBS!” Jimmy nodded. “Writers!” he said in his familiar rasp. Then he launched a profane tirade against some producers and songwriters who’d tried to cheat him. It took me five minutes to realize that this had occurred around 1928. He ended with a flurry of curses, then closed his eyes and went to sleep. The agent looked at me and shrugged.

Late Friday the producers managed to replace Durante with Tony Bennett. On Saturday we all gathered in a marathon session and came up with a whole new script. On Sunday, Glen and Tony, on a bare stage and wearing tuxedos, taped our tribute to the music and memory of the legendary Hank Williams. There wasn’t a laugh in the entire hour. The next season we were all fired. CBS thought the show needed to be funnier, and brought in some Dean Martin writers.

Lesson... If you’re going to do comedy, make sure you have a comic firmly booked.

Another lesson, a little harder to discern, happened a few seasons later on a Flip Wilson special, with Bob Hope as guest star. Not only did Hope faithfully attend rehearsals and taping, but much fanfare surrounded his arrivals and departures. It was deemed necessary to transport Bob between his Toluca Lake home and CBS Television City by helicopter. Don’t ask me why. But Coldwater Canyon traffic was a bitch even then.

The sketch we wrote for Hope was a take-off on his soldier shows, featuring Flip in his famous drag as our own glamorous Navy ensign...Geraldine. The set depicting the deck of a battleship was wonderful, but the sketch had problems. (This isn’t THE lesson, but an important peripheral one: “If the scenery gets a bigger reaction than the jokes, look for bigger jokes.”)

We, the writing staff (including Pat McCormack and Jack Burns) had great fun putting together a monolog following Hope’s patented rhythms: “Welcome to shore liberty in Okinawa. Okinawa, that’s native for ‘do I have time to take a pill?’ But I wantya to know...”

At first reading we got some encouraging table laughs (lots of lessons about believing table laughs, but that’s for another story) and Hope seemed satisfied. But the next day’s incoming chopper disgorged Hope toting a stack of replacement jokes for our monolog, commissioned from the stable of writers who worked for him on year-round retainer. At first we were miffed, and then we got really pissed. Because the jokes he brought in weren’t as funny as ours. And it wasn’t sour grapes, because when he tried them on the dress rehearsal audience only the dreaded sound of crickets was heard. Hope knew he’d bombed. Pat McCormack reported that he’d seen Bob with tears in his eyes, so upset was he at the lack of laughter. But no one had a wider appreciation of the lessons of comedy than Bob Hope. Hell, he wrote a lot of them. With not a moment’s pause he threw out his jokes and went back to ours. And he got laughs. The lesson? “Never look a gift joke in the teeth. You might miss out on a laugh.”

Alan King was more than a student of comedy; he was a professor who could have written learned volumes on the theory and practice of laugh-getting. But it’s probably good that he didn’t take the time to write text books or we’d have had that much less opportunity to enjoy his performing genius.

I met Herb Sargent on a Lily Tomlin special and, based on that, Herb introduced me to King, who hired me for one of his specials, “The Many Faces Of Comedy.” The faces were indeed many – Alan liked to swoop in from New York and from a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel book everybody in town from George Burns to Danny Thomas to Henny Youngman with Angie Dickinson thrown into the mix. (Peripheral lesson: “Man does not live on jokes alone. There must also be ladies.”)

My main contribution to the show was a sketch I wrote for Alan. He was a husband at a party who tries to tell a joke, but his wife keeps interrupting him with corrections and details and finally destroys any possibility of a laugh. “No, honey, it wasn’t a lobster, it was a parrot.” “No, dear, he took him to a barber shop, not a bar...” More Joe Miller than Moliere, I admit, but Alan liked the piece. He eventually decided that he was in too many sketches on the show and assigned the role to Danny Thomas.

I don’t remember any rehearsal with Danny. All I recall is that Alan set out a buffet and bar in his dressing room that must have been as long as the Santa Monica Pier. Cast and crew alike were welcomed and encouraged to dive in. Alan liked a party almost as much as doing a show. But Danny Thomas took one look at the groaning board and decided that nothing would suit him except a bologna and cheese sandwich on white bread. Alan cheerfully sent out for it and we all smirked at Danny’s idiosyncrasy. What the hell...more shrimp and chicken livers for the rest of us. But I should have seen this as a portent of idiosyncrasy to come.

When it came time to tape my sketch on a big stage at ABC Prospect, there was a huge studio audience and everybody was having a good time. Alan introduced Danny and Angie, who was playing the wife, to an ovation. As the cameras swung into place, Danny suddenly grabbed a hand mike and stepped down to address the audience. “Folks, we’re going to do a sketch now that isn’t funny. I don’t like this sketch and I don’t know why I’m doing it. But I’m Danny Thomas and because you love me...you’ll laugh.” Well, I’ve seen dog funerals start on a higher note. Naturally audience members were so cowed in their love for Thomas that they dared not utter a peep for the duration. Even the crickets kept silent. That’s when Herb Sargent noticed me standing shell-shocked next to one of those big weighted microphone booms, trying to figure how hard I’d need to swing it to knock Danny Thomas’s head off. Failing that, I knew that Danny always carried a pistol. If he’d left it in the dressing room maybe I could duck in there quick and grab it and hide and be waiting when he came - -

Herb gently took me by the elbow and moved me out of the path of Danny, who was striding off stage no doubt in search of another bologna on white. “You realize what happened there, don’t you?” Herb said. I stammered something to the effect that, no, I didn’t have a clue. “It’s his reputation,” Herb explained. “Danny Thomas is known as the master story teller. Nobody better at telling a joke. And even though your sketch was funny, it killed Danny to have to stand out there and be a guy who fell flat on his face. He made sure everybody knew that.” And there was my lesson: A comic will do ANYTHING to get a laugh...except not be funny.

I wish I could tell you I learned all the comedy lessons and became an expert. But I can’t. What I have learned very well is that when something that should get a laugh doesn’t, then blame must immediately be assigned in directions that do not fault the writer. (The obverse of the Shakespearean actor hearing boo’s who steps to the apron and says, “Don’t blame me, I didn’t write this shit!”) Actors are easiest to fault for jokes that bomb. After all, the stuff was funny when it left the writer’s room. Right? In any case, actors could stand to be a whole lot more helpful in this comedy game. We writers sit in a room and eat cold take-out while performers get to dress up and be in front of people and make big bucks. The least they can do is learn the classic lesson imparted by one of the pantheon figures of comedy writing, George S. Kaufman, who counseled actors: “Speak your lines loudly and clearly. If there is no laughter, other lines will be given to you.”