Until the Fish Started Talking

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.

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.

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.

Thank you and goodbye.