First,
a joke:
There
are these two fish in a tank and one turns to the other and says, “I
am really hoping you know how to drive this thing.”
Comedy,
as I learned from a very young age, has a great power to alter your
circumstances, lift mood and reduce tension. Like that joke, comedy plays on your assumptions about words and their meanings. You think you understand what is going on right up to the point where the fish start talking.
I have always been fascinated by funny.
I grew up around funny people, people who liked to listen to and tell stories about one another. Many times these stories would start with "Remember the time you..." and involve some sort of embarrassing experience like the times I got my dad's car stuck in a snow bank, or in the mud, or somebody else's fender. They weren't always funny for me to listen to, but they seemed to make other people laugh.
I have always been fascinated by funny.
I grew up around funny people, people who liked to listen to and tell stories about one another. Many times these stories would start with "Remember the time you..." and involve some sort of embarrassing experience like the times I got my dad's car stuck in a snow bank, or in the mud, or somebody else's fender. They weren't always funny for me to listen to, but they seemed to make other people laugh.
On holidays, we would gather with cousins and there was a kind of competitive comedy festival where the adults and the kids would each try to come up with the next clever quip, or funny story. It was not by accident that one of our family's elder statesmen was a master of the shaggy dog story.
There was a kind of a farm team system at the kids table where we would jockey for position, for the chance to be heard by the adults. To graduate from the kids table was to be granted entree into the adult conversation, to compete for the floor, for a chance to be heard.
If you opened your mouth at one of these gatherings, you had better know exactly what you were going to say. Nature and my extended family both abhor a vacuum and if you couldn't get your words out in that first fraction of a second, it was on to the next person. And lest you think that because you didn't say anything you were somehow immune from ridicule, you learned very quickly that the success of getting a laugh lasted but the blink of an eye, but the failure--any failure--had a half-life measured in forever.
How to tell a joke, to lighten the mood, change the subject, to alter perceptions was a survival skill and one that I needed to learn.
As a kid, I remember spending Friday nights watching "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" with its rapid-fire assault of knock-knock jokes, one-liners and broad sketches. I may not have been old enough to understand all of the references, but I was well aware of its effect. At the end of a week, where the news seemed to be full of the war in Vietnam, protests on college campuses and riots in the streets, it was a welcome respite to be able to laugh when some celebrity, or political figure, said “Sock it to me” and then got doused with water.
There was a kind of a farm team system at the kids table where we would jockey for position, for the chance to be heard by the adults. To graduate from the kids table was to be granted entree into the adult conversation, to compete for the floor, for a chance to be heard.
If you opened your mouth at one of these gatherings, you had better know exactly what you were going to say. Nature and my extended family both abhor a vacuum and if you couldn't get your words out in that first fraction of a second, it was on to the next person. And lest you think that because you didn't say anything you were somehow immune from ridicule, you learned very quickly that the success of getting a laugh lasted but the blink of an eye, but the failure--any failure--had a half-life measured in forever.
How to tell a joke, to lighten the mood, change the subject, to alter perceptions was a survival skill and one that I needed to learn.
As a kid, I remember spending Friday nights watching "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" with its rapid-fire assault of knock-knock jokes, one-liners and broad sketches. I may not have been old enough to understand all of the references, but I was well aware of its effect. At the end of a week, where the news seemed to be full of the war in Vietnam, protests on college campuses and riots in the streets, it was a welcome respite to be able to laugh when some celebrity, or political figure, said “Sock it to me” and then got doused with water.
How did language have the power to transform people's attitudes?
I remember having a subscription to Jack & Jill magazine. The only part I remember was the joke page.
Q:
What state is high in the middle and round on both ends?
A:
Ohio?
Q:
Why is your heart like a policeman?
A:
It follows a regular beat
I
would copy down these magic spells in an effort to decipher their
power.
But
saying funny words was not the same thing as being able to say things
in a funny way.
In
among our records, between the soundtracks to “Doctor Dolittle”
and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” we had a copy of Bill Cosby's “Why is There Air?” This record was my first introduction to comedy
storytelling. It was a revelation to hear how he got laughs without
jokes or any punchlines, in the conventional sense. He was just
telling stories in a funny way. He thought funny. To
this day, I am in awe of his standup and have no idea how it works.
I have tried to tell stories from my own life in a funny way with
only indifferent results.
As I
got older, I discovered the daytime talk shows and the comedians who
were their staple guests. Mike Douglas was on in the mornings and
Merv Griffin was on when I got home from school. Over time, I got to
see everyone from George Jessel to George Carlin, David Brenner to
David Letterman. It was a senior seminar in stand-up. I did
my best to soak up their material so that I could repeat it at the
dinner table, or on the walk to school.
I was
never the class clown, but I was a fringe dweller: I was smart
enough to never be popular and fat enough that I was never going to
be accepted. So I tried to be funny.
Another
big comedy influence was the Carol Burnett Show.
I
never was a big fan of Lucille Ball, or Dick Van Dyke, but the Carol
Burnett Show came along at exactly the right time for me.
Though
well-written, this was a performer's showcase where each week Carol,
Vicky, Harvey, Tim and Lyle took the material and sold the heck out
of it. They routinely took the amusing and made it hilarious.
The
highlight of the broadcast was any sketch featuring Harvey Korman and
Tim Conway. Putting them together was a masterstroke.
Korman
stuck to the script and Conway refused to rehearse so when the time
came to shoot the sketch it had real spontaneity, it had comic life.
You could see the fear in Korman's eyes because he had no idea what
his scene partner was going to do next. The surprise would
frequently cause Korman to break up which only encouraged Conway to
go farther.
I would watch these moments—I still watch them whenever the infomercial for the “Best of” DVDs comes on—and be just amazed at the performers who were having fun, were fully in the moment, so in touch with their creativity that they could take whatever came at them and turn it to comedic effect.
I am
the person who rewrites life so that I sound better. I think of the
right thing to say only after the audience has left and the moment has
long passed. The performers I was most in awe of were the ones who
could, like Conway and Korman, take from, and work with, whatever
came at them in real time.
Shortly
after the Burnett show left the air came “Saturday Night Live.”
Like many of my generation, I was drawn to the guerrilla style of the
show and had my favorite Not Ready for Primetime player.
Initially,
I was a Chevy Chase fan because he did “Weekend Update” and said
cleverly written and well-timed words. But, lurking in the
background, was John Belushi. From the very beginning, he was
something different—even for that show.
Belushi
was a force of nature. He didn't just say funny things, he was
funny. There is a reason why his standout performances are largely
dialogue-free. He could use words (“Cheeseburger”), but he
didn't need them. He could get a laugh with a look and those
eyebrows.
He
could play a killer bee with such honesty that you couldn't help but
laugh and he could sell a song like Randy Newman's “Guilty” so
well he could make you cry.
There
is a reason why I don't watch the show anymore. When you see the
vitality of sketches like “Samurai Delicatessen” where Belushi
and Buck Henry are playing the truth of their absurd premise, the
stock sketches of the current show, with the recurring characters and their stiff catchphrases ring
hollow by comparison.
Also from Saturday Night Live, and his brilliant comedy records, I came to be a fan of Steve Martin. What drew me to his work was the relish with which his on-stage persona was discovering his inner sense of the ridiculous. So what about energy crises, Watergate and global unrest, it's time to recite the Non-Conformists' Oath.
Martin's
thoughtful comedy about the absurd in everyday life helped take
ourselves and the times in which we lived less seriously.
A
little banjo music makes everything okay.
I
could not throw myself into a situation like Belushi but I was one of
those annoying teenagers who looked for any and every opportunity to
say “Excuuuuuse me!”
I was
looking for a release, my own opportunity to let loose the way that
Martin did when his character had an attack of “Happy Feet,” or
when Belushi turned a summersault to the strains of “Somebody to Love.”
These guys were my proxies, my avatars, whose joy at being on stage could be mine, if only for a moment.
I
remember when Belushi died in 1982.
I
felt that loss personally.
I am
not sure that I could have explained it at the time, but as they kept
replaying the footage of his body being carried out of the Chateau
Marmont Hotel, I felt as though they were taking away something that
belonged to me; the training wheels had been removed from my bicycle
and I was going to have to navigate the world on my own.
Belushi
had introduced me to the blues and to soul music, to a kind of
relentless forward momentum that had made him seem impervious to real
life and an aspirational role model. And now he was gone.
I
read a lot of the material that came out after his death about his
demons and dependencies. I read them, at first, because they seemed
like a way of preserving my connection to his comedy, his legacy, but
I had to stop because they eventually seemed more intent on dwelling
on his clay feet than his comic genius.
At
the time of his death, I was twenty-one and, like most at that age,
trying to figure out my place in the world and how to tell my story
in my own voice. I wanted to transform my circumstances.
When
I was in high school, I discovered the works of Raymond Chandler and
they spoke to my teenage sense of dislocation, corruption and
disappointment. His mean streets of Los Angeles were my mean
corridors and locker rooms; his first-person private eye who was too
stubborn to know when he was holding a losing hand, was my
self-centered loner who couldn't seem to find his way into an open
field.
I
wanted to be a writer, but I was concerned that I would have nothing
to say and no one to say it to. All of my influences, my comedy
mentors, were interesting people who said interesting things in
interesting ways and represented something I could never live up to.
This
perhaps explains my fascination with Robin Williams.
To
watch him work was to see an idea as it came to life, like the first
kernel in a Jiffy Pop pan, and then be joined by another and another,
each careening into, and bouncing off of, all the others until the pan
was no longer big enough to contain them.
The
process of being a grown up is one of finding ever more lines within
which you must stay, but, at least in public, those boundaries seemed
not to apply to him. The size of the stage never seemed to limit his
ability to conjure up a situation and a character for him to play and
that can be intoxicating, especially for someone like me trying to
find their voice.
Though
he may have tried to distance himself from it, the character of Mork from the planet Ork was an ideal one for him. Mork was discovering
the whole world and everything in it for the first time and he could
react and associate without any restrictions, like a new-born. His
character was able to say things that we all were thinking, but
didn't dare say out loud.
To
watch Robin Williams play was to feel safe enough in your own ideas
that maybe you could play too.
I
will leave it to others to talk about what it took for him to go on
stage and be that person. We all have things to run from and places
we go to feel a sense of freedom. We all have leashes that connect
us to the real world, his just seemed a lot longer than the rest of
ours.
I am
certain that, after four decades in the public eye, being seen only
as a clown was a strain—it would be for any artist—but the
Pagliaci cliché is not big enough for him either. I have no special
insights here, just a life spent trying to figure out how to tell my
own story. It seems to me that you work with the tools you have
until they don't serve you any more and then you pick up new ones.
New tools suggest new possibilities and new directions. New tools
can also breathe new life into the old ones. That more people will
choose to remember the genie from “Aladdin” than his performances
in “One Hour Photo” or “Insomnia” is unfortunate but
understandable.
What
I know is that to tell a joke well, is to tell the truth and that
truth is not always pretty.
As
the news came out about Robin Williams last week, I was reminded of
Belushi's last night and how then, as now, they were together, no
doubt trading stories, living in the moment and making each other
laugh.
Like
most, I have been looking at clips online of Robin Williams appearing
on talk shows all over the world and laughing again and being
awestruck anew by the force of his comic character. I know that he
has inspired me, I know that I regret there will be no more
opportunities to experience his talents, but I am also strengthened
by the experience of his work to tell my own stories and get my own
laughs.
I have a better sense of what my verse will be.
I have a better sense of what my verse will be.
Thank
you and goodbye.