Growing Up Laughing Read online

  Marlo: That’s great. You know, my dad used to take me to comedy clubs and I remember seeing you at a little place called—

  Rickles: . . . the Slate Brothers. They’d line up around the block at this dumpy joint. I had no act, really. I’d just get up and make fun of people. Everyone showed up.

  Marlo: Was this the act you wound up doing later, or were you doing something different?

  Rickles: I was honing it. I developed a beginning, I developed a middle, and I developed an ending. And now, today, I got music and I’m a big star.

  Marlo: You always end your act by confessing that your ribbing is just in fun, and that you really like people. Didn’t my father tell you that you needed that little cutter at the end, just to let people know you’re a good guy?

  Rickles: Yes, and I still do that to this day, but in a much smaller way. If I’d left it up to your father, I’d be reading the Bible at the end of my act.

  Marlo: That’s funny, Don.

  Rickles: But, yes, your dad was always full of advice about how to make a joke better.

  Marlo: He was that way with me, too. I was on Letterman’s show once, and he asked me to do a spit-take, because Dad was famous for spit-takes. Well, I’d never done a spit-take in my life, but I said to Letterman, “Okay, give me a glass of water.” Then I whispered in Letterman’s ear, “You’ve gotta say something to set this up. Say to me, ‘Aren’t you the girl who’s married to Geraldo?’ ”

  So Letterman says, “Oh, I love this—this is going to be fun!” So I lift the glass to my lips, Letterman says the line and I spit out the water. But the spit-take is terrible. The water just kind of dribbles out. Sure enough, that night I get a call from my father. He says to me, “You’re supposed to blow, sweetheart. You don’t spit, you blow.” And I said, “Oh, okay, Daddy. I don’t think I’ll be doing a lot more of those; it’s not really my thing. But if I do it again, I got it now. Blow, don’t spit.”

  Rickles: Oh, that’s funny.

  Marlo: You mentioned before that when you were a kid, your mother made you do impersonations. In a way, are you still trying to perform for her?

  Rickles: Well, if we get into the mental stuff, who knows? But I will say that if it wasn’t for my mother, I’d probably still be a very shy kid living in a box. She always made me get up and entertain—and I would.

  Marlo: You wanted to please her.

  Rickles: Yeah. She was the driving force behind everything I did.

  Marlo: And your dad? Was he funny?

  Rickles: He wasn’t a funny guy, but he was a kibitzer—and very warm. Nobody in my family was really funny. My mother was like a half-assed entertainer. She’d stand up and do an impression of Sophie Tucker. She loved to get up on the stage. She was a frustrated actress, I suppose, living her life through me, performing-wise. But her Sophie Tucker was pretty good.

  Marlo: You make me laugh, Don. Okay, I’m going to let you go now. You’ve been wonderful.

  Rickles: You, too, Marlo. And, listen, if you and Phil are in L.A.—and I mean this sincerely—we’d love to see you. Give us a call sometime.

  Marlo: I’ll do that.

  Rickles: And could you please tell Phil something for me?

  Marlo: Sure. What do you want me to say?

  Rickles: Tell him I’m a star.

  DID YA HEAR THE ONE ABOUT . . .

  An old Jewish man is walking along the beach when he sees something glittering in the sand. He picks it up—it’s a bottle. He brushes it off and a genie pops out.

  “I will grant you one wish,” the genie says.

  “One wish?” the old man says. And from his back pocket, he takes out a crumpled old map.

  “You see this?” he says to the genie. “This is a map of my homeland, Israel, and right next to it is Palestine. They are neighbors and yet for years and years they fight and kill each other. My wish is that you bring peace to my homeland and Palestine.”

  The genie says, “Oh, my, that is a very big wish you ask for. And though I am a very magical genie, I don’t think even I can grant that wish. Do you have any other wish?”

  The old man says, “Okay. How ’bout that my wife Sadie should like the oral sex?”

  The genie thinks a moment and says, “Let me take another look at that map.”

  Chapter 24

  The Two Dannys

  My father had a thing about fear. He hated it. He would get angry with Terre, Tony and me if he thought we were afraid. Then he’d talk admiringly of his father.

  “Your grandfather was fearless,” he’d tell us. “At funerals, he would kiss the corpse on the mouth!”

  Why that was a good thing I never knew.

  When Dad went to London to appear at the famed Palladium, it was a great test of his appeal. London audiences and critics were known for being very tough on performers, and though Dad was a household name in America, he wasn’t known in England. He was coming in cold.

  He was also following Danny Kaye, who the London press adored. One of the newspaper stories heralding Dad’s arrival bore the headline “AMERICA HAS SENT US ANOTHER DANNY!”

  The two Dannys couldn’t have been further apart in what they did onstage. Kaye was a lighthearted, aristocratic elf; Dad told stories of the struggles of his immigrant neighborhood, with all the colorful accents he had picked up as a child. The comparison was not one that gave my father an edge with the London crowd.

  He’d had trepidation even before he left. He’d told Jack Benny that he was worried that the London audience might not get his material. Benny tried to put him at ease.

  My friend Julian Schlossberg unearthed this treasure in a dusty little poster shop in London.

  “You’re a great storyteller,” he said to Dad. “Just do your stuff and you’ll be fine.”

  “But their humor is so different from ours,” Dad said. “What if they don’t understand me?”

  “You’re going to do your act in English aren’t you?” Benny said.

  “Of course,” Dad said.

  “Well, the language was born there,” Benny said. “They’ll understand you.”

  Dad said that on opening night, when he walked out on the Palladium stage, it was the first time he’d ever experienced that kind of fear. He actually felt his knees knocking together. He was terrified and he hated himself for it.

  He looked up at the tiers of well-dressed, well-heeled Brits, and out of his mouth came words that were at once spontaneous and brilliant.

  “I hear you’re the toughest, most discriminating audience in the world for a performer,” he said. “Well, I wouldn’t be in your shoes tonight for all the money in the world.” Olé.

  The audience roared—he knew he had them.

  My father told me later that he had no idea where that line came from—that it had sprung from a fight-or-flee situation. He had found himself cornered, then turned the dynamic around—which is crucial to a stand-up comic (or any stand-up person). He had taken the bully to the ground.

  But no audience in the world was as appreciative of my father’s craft as I was. When I was a teenager, and out on a date, I’d catch myself checking my watch. Even if I was having a good time, I’d want to get home to the dinner table—or coffee afterward in the living room—when all the guys would gather with Dad, smoking cigars and telling stories. My friends were great, and I was always crazy about some boy, but Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers and George Burns were at my house. The laughter would go on for hours. And I wanted to be there.

  Some nights our living room would be filled with comedy writers, working on a TV special, Dad’s act or one of his shows. They’d be throwing around ideas—“spitballing” they called it—and I’d laugh at something that one of the writers threw out.

  “You like that?” Dad would ask me. “You think that’s funny?”

  He got a big kick out of his kids seeing the funny.

  One night after the taping of one of Dad’s specials, he and I were leaving the El Capitan, the grand old theatre palace on Ho
llywood Boulevard. As Dad and I hit the sidewalk, one of the people from the audience waiting outside called out to him.

  “Hey, Danny,” the guy shouted, “Jack Benny just about stole the show from you!”

  “He’d better,” Dad hollered back. “That’s what he gets paid to do.”

  On the drive home, I asked my father what he thought about that man’s comment.

  “In any business, Mugs, you want the strongest people around you,” he said. “It’s not the strong ones that’ll kill you. It’s the weak ones.”

  Always a killing.

  Chapter 25

  Turn-ons with Conan O’Brien

  Conan O’Brien is a genuine double-whammy. A lot of comedians write their own material; but rare is the comic who cuts his teeth writing for other hit comedy shows (Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons) before becoming a star performer himself. Since 1993, Conan has been television’s favorite goofy cut-up, and his unique blend of Harvard-boy charm and unapologetic nerdiness has earned him his own niche in the late-night TV galaxy. It also makes him terrific to talk to. I enjoyed spending time with both Conans—the clown and the intellectual.

  —M.T.

  On . . . the kitchen table

  Conan: There’s definitely a genetic component to comedy, and there’s also a huge cultural part. My family is Irish-Catholic, and I’m one of six kids, the third boy from the top. My brothers were funny and my sisters were funny, and both of my parents had a really good sense of humor. So whenever anybody asks me how I got started in all of this, I tell them that I learned ninety-five percent of what I know at the kitchen table. We’d sit around that table and see who could make my dad laugh—and he had good taste. He wouldn’t laugh at everything, so if he did laugh, you knew you had said something really funny.

  Even at an early age, I remember thinking that all my brothers were good at things, but I didn’t know what I was good at. Then I figured it out—this is what I do. I can really make people laugh.

  On . . . that magic moment

  I want to do what that guy is doing. That’s what I was thinking when my father took me to see Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows in a movie theatre. I was ten years old and I distinctly remember watching that famous “This Is Your Life” sketch, when Carl Reiner goes into the audience to get Sid Caesar and bring him on stage. But Caesar runs away—and then everyone chases after him. That was a seminal moment for me. I literally remember thinking, This is what I want to do.

  On . . . those 10,000 hours

  A lot has been written about how you need ten thousand hours of practice to get good at something, and comedy is no different. You have to put in a lot of time. Like the Beatles—before anybody knew who they were, they went to Germany and played clubs where their sets went on for ten or twelve hours, seven nights a week. So by the time they started recording, they’d already done their ten thousand hours. They really knew their stuff. I believe I got my thousands of hours, too.

  On . . . the class clown

  I was never the class clown. To me, the class clown is the kid who jumps up on the desk and sets the clock ahead an hour, the one who plays all the pranks. That kid usually doesn’t end up too well. He winds up in some sort of motel shooting. I was the kid who did my work and kept to myself. And then, when I made close friends, they would say, “Hey, wait a minute—this guy’s really funny . . .”

  That’s sort of been the way my careers have unfolded. When I was a writer, I would always show up in the writers’ room and be quiet for a few days. But by the end, I was Morey Amsterdam—the one who was up on the table making everybody laugh. I need to get comfortable with people. When I first showed up on TV, people were like “Who is this guy?” They didn’t get it right away. They had to get acquainted with me—and I had to get acquainted with them.

  On . . . repression, sex and comedy

  Growing up in a Catholic house, you learn that there’s a lot you can’t talk about. Like sex—no one talks about sex. But I think repression gets a bad rap in our society. Think about the way an engine works—you’ve got a confined space, you build up all this pressure, and it makes the car go ninety miles an hour. Same thing with growing up in a Catholic house. Our mother wanted us to behave. Manners were very important to her; no elbows on the table, get good grades in school, that sort of thing. And then you have all this stuff that you’re taught through the Catholic Church about what you can’t do and what you can’t say.

  So what happens is, comedy comes out of it. It’s like a teakettle, where there’s just this tiny little spout that steam can shoot out of. Comedy becomes the way that you can talk about things, and it’s okay because you’re being funny. It’s like an escape from never having had the permission to really go for it.

  I still feel that way when I do my show. The show is my hour where I’m allowed to do whatever I want to do—things I’d never do at a party or at a friend’s house. I’m chronically polite and nonconfrontational, the kind of person who, if someone punches me in the face, I’ll say, “Excuse me. I shouldn’t have put my face there.” But on my show, I have permission to be somebody else. And that’s where a lot of really good comedy comes from. It’s like a slingshot: You get pulled way back, then snap forward in the other direction.

  On . . . the pluck of the Irish

  I was at some event once, and looked around, and there were Rosie O’Donnell and Regis Philbin and me—and I remember thinking: All Irish. Oppressed cultures do well with comedy because it’s all we had. You have no power over your life, you don’t have a gun, you don’t have a tank. So, instead, you mutter jokes under your breath, and make fun of everyone. It’s been that way throughout history. The Irish were oppressed by the English. African-Americans were oppressed by the West. The Jews were oppressed by everybody. And now these are the really funny people.

  On . . . being ridiculous

  I’ve always, always been self-deprecating. And it’s funny because it all comes out of something real.

  When I was a kid, I wasn’t good at sports. I also looked funny. I fell in the driveway when I was about two years old, and for a long time had two dead teeth in the front of my mouth. I had orange hair and freckles, and I was really skinny. So I felt like I had a lot to overcome.

  So I would make fun of me. I’d find myself ridiculous because I couldn’t go the other way—I couldn’t really say, “Look at me, I’m the greatest!” Your core personality develops pretty early on, then you hone it, hone it, hone it. So this is the style I adopted as a kid. What’s interesting is that some people now say to me, “You’re six-four, not a bad-looking guy, have a beautiful wife and kids, and this big, successful career. Why do you still make fun of yourself?” And I think it’s because that ship has already sailed. I’m still that kid who finds himself ridiculous. I could be made dictator of the world tomorrow, and I would still make fun of myself. My personality is my personality.

  On . . . surrendering dignity

  I love—absolutely love—silly stuff. To this day, I can be in a foul mood, but watching a Pink Panther movie with Peter Sellers still does it for me. He’s so outrageously committed to his comedy. And I still laugh at W. C. Fields in that famous clip of him playing ping-pong at a fancy party. I love it when people completely surrender their dignity. It all appeals to me on some sort of anarchic level.

  And the Three Stooges! I’ll never forget this one short they were in. They were all in the woods, hitting and yelling at each other, and then this bear steals their car and drives away. There’s this long shot of the bear driving down the road, and at the last second you see the bear put his paw out the window to signal for a left turn. I’ll be ninety years old and still think that’s hilarious.

  On . . . playing the room (any room)

  I went to jury duty not long ago, and what happens is, when famous people show up, they’re put in a separate room and told, “Look, you’re not going to get on a jury because everyone knows who you are. But we’d like you to get up and speak to the bailiff
s and court officers and the different people who work in the courthouse.” So that’s what they did with me, and I did really well. I remember turning to someone and saying, “I’m killing with these court officers.” I’m sort of shameless that way.

  But it doesn’t matter where you are—you could be at a wedding, you could be waiting for a subway, you could be with a bunch of three-year-olds at a birthday party. You’re always aware when you’ve got a good audience.

  I got married in the Catholic Church, and my wife and I were up on the altar. It was a pretty formal ceremony, so we had to kneel. The priest, who was a friend of mine, was giving the sermon at the wedding Mass, and he started to joke around a little with the audience. All of my friends were laughing—and it was hell for me. I was kneeling up there thinking, This is a great room and I’m forced to kneel here and not say a word. It was like some kind of punishment in the afterlife.

  On . . . comedy snobs

  My least favorite thing about comedy is the occasional snobbery. People often say they want their comedy to be meaningful and intelligent. But I say: Comedy is hard. And if you’re really making people laugh, you’re probably doing something good, so don’t think about it too much.

  When I first got my show and nobody knew me, people made assumptions about me. They’d look up my past and say, “Oh, he went to Harvard, so he’s going to be a very erudite, serious, Dick Cavett kind of guy. He’s going to do intelligent comedy.” But why put labels on comedy? I like giant ostriches. I like absolute silliness. I love that almost cartoon childish sensibility. That stuff can be funny and still be smart.

  My dad is the perfect example of this. When he was a resident in medical school, he always stayed up late. So he’d watch Steve Allen’s Tonight show. Or Jack Paar. And he loved Johnny Carson. And what’s funny is, my dad is this really brilliant guy—a highly intelligent scientist—but he’s always just loved to laugh. And so I learned early on that being funny doesn’t necessarily mean being stupid.