Growing Up Laughing Page 2

  You’d think that Jan would let up, having gotten him to the floor—but, no, now he really had him. Jan stood over my father’s prone body, legs straddling him, as he dug even deeper into Dad’s funny bone. My father was laughing so hard he screamed, “Stop! Stop!” afraid he would actually die of laughing.

  In the real world, the guy laughing that hard is having the most fun. In this world, the guy getting the laugh is getting what he lives for.

  They were called “The Boys,” and like all boys, they had a clubhouse. It was the Hillcrest Country Club, and that’s where they spent their afternoons playing golf and cards. Hillcrest sat on a sprawling property in a beautiful setting just south of Beverly Hills. Its famous, rolling green golf course ran along Pico Boulevard, across the street from 20th Century Fox Studios.

  Hillcrest had a terrific brunch on Sundays, and it was a great place to throw a party. The only problem—it was restricted. Jews only. This was because the Jews had been kept out of every other club in the city—the Bel Air Country Club, the Los Angeles Country Club—so in the 1920s, they built their own.

  “The Boys” celebrating Dad’s seventieth birthday at Hillcrest. BACK ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Art Linkletter, Milton Berle, Don Rickles, Steve Landesberg, Bob Newhart, Morey Amsterdam, Bob Hope, Jack Carter, Joey Bishop, Carl Reiner, (honorary “Boy”) Phyllis Diller, Sid Caesar; FRONT ROW: Jan Murray, George Burns, Dad, Red Buttons and Buddy Hackett.

  All of my dad’s pals belonged to Hillcrest, but since he was a Lebanese Catholic, he wasn’t permitted to join. He’d spent so much time there, however, that the boys decided they should find a way to make him a member, even if he was just an honorary member.

  Of course, such a big decision had to be voted on by the board. Groucho Marx had the most memorable comment at the meeting.

  “I don’t mind making a non-Jew an honorary member,” Groucho said, “but couldn’t we at least pick a guy who doesn’t look Jewish?”

  Dad got in. And Groucho got his laugh.

  George Burns was also a club member. He didn’t play golf, but he loved to play cards. George would go to Hillcrest in the late morning, then spend the rest of the afternoon there, smoking cigars, having lunch and playing bridge with his cronies. He was such a darling, funny man. And a modest one. One day during a card game, he made a remark that broke up everyone at the table. I never knew what he said. I only heard the story of how he got such a big laugh he couldn’t wait to use it again. But George, being George, decided to attribute it to someone else—Georgie Jessel—so he could retell it without sounding like he was bragging.

  Everywhere he went, George would say, “Did you hear that great thing Jessel said at Hillcrest?”—and, sure enough, he’d get the laugh. This went on for a few weeks. Finally, Jessel ran into George at a party.

  “Hey, George,” Jessel said, “did you hear that great thing I said at Hillcrest?”

  That story went around and got an even bigger laugh than the first one.

  All of the boys took pride in coming up with the killer line, and if there’s one thing they had in common, it was how quick they were. But Dad always said that the quickest of them all was Joey Bishop.

  Joey and Sammy Davis were once driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The route is 270 miles of flat highway through the desert, and everyone speeds like a demon through it. Sammy was going about 90 miles an hour, and, of course, he got pulled over. The cop asked to see his license.

  “Do you know how fast you were going?” he demanded of Sammy.

  “Around 70,” Sammy said innocently.

  “Seventy?” the cop said. “You were way over that. You were going at least 90.”

  Joey leaned his head toward the window.

  “Officer,” he said, “the man has one eye. Do you want him to look at the road or at the speedometer?”

  Most people would think of a line like that three days later and say, “You know what I shoulda said?” These guys said it on the spot.

  Sometimes the boys would travel in a pack, and one of their favorite pack nights was a trip to a club where Henny Youngman was playing. If ever a comedian was a joke machine, it was Henny. He was the kind of comic who built his entire act around a string of one-liners, bouncing from one joke to the next without any segues. He’d make a crack about his wife, then without the slightest concern for any semblance of a connection, talk about the snow outside.

  The boys, all of whom painstakingly constructed their own acts, found this hilarious—and audacious. So they’d sit in the back of the club and yell out, “Hey, Henny, what about your wife?” Or, “Hey, Henny, get back to the snow!” Henny loved it, of course, and would heckle them right back.

  Like everything else the boys did, it was all about having fun and getting laughs. That’s what they knew. That’s what made them the most comfortable.

  But the toughest hecklers of all were the kids Milton Berle faced when he did card tricks at our backyard birthday parties. He wasn’t the world’s smoothest magician, and the kids called him on it.

  “I saw what you did with that card!” they would holler. “Cheater!”

  But nothing fazed Milton—or stopped him. He was on, and that was just where he wanted to be.

  Years later, when I was doing my television series, That Girl, Milton appeared as our guest star one week. I had never worked with him—I only knew him as one of my dad’s pals. But he was different on the set. Difficult, really. He’d roam around the soundstage in his big, white terry-cloth bathrobe, with a towel wrapped around his neck, like he’d just gone six rounds with Ali—constantly complaining. It was too cold in his dressing room. It was also too small. He’d been kept waiting too long. He wasn’t feeling well. He had to get home. On and on and on.

  Milton was driving everyone so crazy that our assistant director begged me to do something. Desperate, I called my father.

  “Dad,” I said, “Milton is behaving impossibly and I don’t know how to deal with him. What should I do?”

  Without a pause, my father said, “Ask him to spell words that begin with R.”

  “What?” I said. “Ask him to spell words that start with R?! What are you talking about?”

  “Just do it,” Dad said.

  I walked back to the stage baffled, and spotted Milton, who by now was coughing and hacking and whining about how sick he was to anyone who would listen.

  “Hey, Milton,” I yelled, “how do you spell recluse?”

  Milton snapped his head toward me.

  “R-E-C-Q-U-L-S-E,” he shot back, feet pointing inward.

  Everyone laughed.

  Then I yelled out, “How do you spell remember?”

  “R-E-M-M-M-E-M-M-M-B-M-M-E-R-M.”

  Another big laugh from the crew.

  That was it. Milton just wanted to feel comfortable. And he felt comfortable when people were laughing. Now he could go to work.

  Kind of touching, really. I loved those guys.

  P.S. Jan never got Frank’s autograph.

  DID YA HEAR THE ONE ABOUT . . .

  An old man and his wife die and go to heaven.

  They’re sitting at a table having iced tea, with little

  umbrellas in their drinks. They’re looking out at the lush

  hills and valleys, birds are fluttering about and the

  beautiful aroma of lilac trees is wafting over their table.

  Everything is perfect. Even no waiting at the tees.

  After a while, the wife turns to her husband.

  “Darling,” she says, “isn’t heaven wonderful?”

  “Yeah,” he says, “and if it hadn’t been for your goddamn

  Oat Bran we would have been here ten years ago.”

  Chapter 4

  Socks and Moxie—Jerry Seinfeld

  Like the comics I grew up with, Jerry Seinfeld has a genuine need to perform. No matter his success or the fortune he has made from it, Jerry is still out there on the road, building an act—story by story, joke by joke, laugh by laugh. In 2
002, he produced and appeared in the documentary The Comedian, which trailed him as he traveled the country, determined to try out untested material one small club at a time, motivated only by the sheer challenge and his love of the craft. It was a brave and humbling adventure, and I found it touching to see into the heart and mind of a comedian who, like the legends before him, takes very seriously the art of being funny.

  —M.T.

  Marlo: Your generation of comedians is not all that different from “The Boys” I grew up with. No matter which generation, there’s never a formula, but always a wide range of styles. And they each have their own loyal following.

  Jerry: I was just saying to someone this morning that comedy is like smells. It’s like a cologne counter at a department store. People just pick up the little tester bottles and say, “I hate this one, I love this one . . .” There’s really no rhyme or reason to any of it.

  Marlo: Did you ever doubt that you could make people laugh?

  Jerry: Oh, always.

  Marlo: Always?

  Jerry: Sure. Still do. I think that’s been the key to my success. I’ve never been overconfident.

  Marlo: So where do you get the guts to say, “Okay, I’m going to do it anyway?”

  Jerry: It’s a very funny little mixture of humility and outrageous egomania. That’s what makes a good comedian.

  Marlo: So when it gets down to it, laughter—

  Jerry: . . . is the greatest thing there is. I mean it. Even if you’re not a comedian, if you say something funny or tell a joke and make somebody laugh, it’s a moment of pure joy, one of the best things I know. It’s cultural, it’s genetic.

  Marlo: You once said that stand-up comedy doesn’t belong on the arts pages, it belongs on the sports pages. What do you mean?

  Jerry: One of the things that drew me to comedy was that it’s a simple world. It doesn’t require the interpretation of any critic to tell you whether something is good or not good. If the audience is laughing, the guy’s good. If they’re not laughing, he’s not good. Period. And that’s the analogy to sports: You can talk all you want about how two teams played in a game. But we all know who won at the end. There’s no debate. It doesn’t require any perception.

  That’s where comedy is different from the other arts. Stand-up comedy doesn’t require value judgments. If you get laughs, you work; if you don’t get laughs, you don’t work. It’s all about the score.

  Put it this way. When you do a play, your friends come backstage afterwards and say, “You were great,” right?

  Marlo: Right.

  Jerry: And you say, “Really! Was I?” And they say, “Yes!” But all along you’re wondering, Are they telling me the truth?

  Marlo: Right.

  Jerry: Well, I don’t have to do that. No one has to tell me after a stand-up show whether I did well or not. It’s quite clear to everyone what happened.

  Marlo: Okay, so running with your analogy, does comedy take the same kind of training as sports?

  Jerry: Oh, definitely. I was recently talking to a baseball player who played third base, but his natural position—the one he grew up playing—was shortstop. So I said to him, “If you wanted to switch back to shortstop now, how long would it take you to get comfortable there again?” And he said, “Six months to a year,” because there are so many subtleties to playing that position.

  Same thing with comedy. Stand-up has nothing to do with anything but stand-up. If you can do stand-up, that doesn’t mean you can do anything else. And if you can do anything else, that doesn’t mean you can do stand-up.

  Marlo: Were there funny people in your childhood?

  Jerry: Well, I think all kids are funny. But what was different in my life was how I valued it.

  Marlo: I know exactly what you mean.

  Jerry: Yeah, I’ll bet you do. So I thought being funny and making other kids laugh was the greatest thing in the world. Then again, I recently read that the average child laughs something like 75 times a day . . .

  Marlo: Really?

  Jerry: Yeah. And the average adult laughs like 12 times a day. So I think as I grew up, I wanted to maintain that 75 figure into adulthood. It was always the most valuable thing to me, so I developed it. I worked on it. I was completely focused on what was funny.

  Marlo: So were you the class clown?

  Jerry: Not really. I could make other kids laugh, but I didn’t think I had any real talent until I started doing stand-up in my early twenties. Any kid can make his friends laugh. That’s just being a kid. But could I make strangers laugh? That was the question.

  Marlo: Who was funny in your life when you were a kid?

  Jerry: My dad was a hugely funny guy—unbelievably funny.

  Marlo: Really? In what way?

  Jerry: Just by being silly and singing funny songs. When he was in the army, he used to collect jokes in a file. He was stationed in the Pacific, in the Philippines, and I remember him telling me that he had all these jokes stored away. He was a great joke teller.

  Marlo: Do you remember any of them?

  Jerry: Oh, sure. One that I loved was about a guy who somehow falls out of a building window and lands on the pavement. Everyone runs over, saying, “What happened? What happened?” And the guy looks up and says, “I don’t know. I just got here myself.”

  Marlo: That’s a good joke. Your father sounds adorable.

  Jerry: He was.

  Marlo: Did your mother laugh at your dad’s jokes?

  Jerry: My mother was a good laugher. She always said that she married my father because he was so funny and the life of the party. But then once they got married, he wasn’t so funny around the house. I think my wife has discovered the same thing about me. Comedians are not that upbeat in their private world, you know.

  Marlo: Yeah, my dad worried a lot about his act. But he sure was funny at the dinner table.

  Jerry: The dinner table is a good stage.

  Marlo: Yup. And my father loved listening to his children tell jokes. Were your parents the same way?

  Jerry: I was never funny around my parents.

  Marlo: Really?

  Jerry: Yeah. I was too shy.

  Marlo: Did your father eventually see you in a club?

  Jerry: Yes. And he’d say, “If I’d had some place where I could have gotten on stage, I would have wanted to do the same thing.”

  Marlo: If you were never funny at home, your parents must have been very surprised to see you perform.

  Jerry: Oh, my God. My first Tonight Show? I’m telling you, I have never been more nervous about anything. Having my parents in the audience used to just terrify me.

  Marlo: Really? Why?

  Jerry: Because I was showing them this side of me that they had no idea about. Like, when I first told them I wanted to be a comedian—I was about 19 or 20—they said, “Really? But we’ve never seen you do funny things.”

  Marlo: That’s a riot. So you were like this little closet comedian.

  Jerry: Yes, yes—I was much more the closet comedian than the class clown.

  Marlo: How did you do that night on The Tonight Show?

  Jerry: I did well. But I wasn’t that happy with it. I thought I could have done better.

  Marlo: You were probably still nervous. Back then, The Tonight Show was like the holy grail for comedians. What does that feel like for a young comic?

  Jerry: It feels like, like the stomach flu, you know? Except it’s in your whole body. You can’t eat, you feel sick. Those first couple of years, every time I did The Tonight Show, it was such a gigantic event in my life. I’d be up all night the night before, and so sick the day of the taping. I remember one time asking myself, Why do I do this? Why would anyone put themselves through this?

  Marlo: And your answer was . . .

  Jerry: Because if anyone can, we can. And that’s why we do it. The only reason anyone would go through this hell is because they love it.

  Marlo: Exactly. What about bombing? Do you remember one particularl
y awful bomb? Because, sorry to say, nothing makes me laugh more than flops.

  Jerry: Well, I remember once doing a club where the waitress had to step on stage in front of you to get to her section.

  Marlo: Oh, my God.

  Jerry: And so all throughout my sketch, she would get up on stage and walk in front of me, with the drinks and the tray—back and forth, back and forth. Just awful.

  Marlo: That must have been great for your timing. Tell me the anatomy of a Jerry Seinfeld joke. Like your famous missing sock routine, where you try to understand why there’s always an odd, partnerless sock when you pull your clothes out of the dryer. And you theorize that the missing sock is actually a fugitive on the run. That joke’s a classic. How did it come about? Were you actually folding your laundry one day when the idea hit you? How does a piece like this evolve?

  Jerry: Well, first, there’s always the missing sock.

  Marlo: Right.

  Jerry: And I can’t remember how I hit upon the idea that they want to escape, but once you get your hook, you try to do what we might call a “switch piece,” where you take everything that fits that scenario and apply it to the joke. Okay, so we have an escaped convict scenario. Now you find all the pieces that match up. You have the sock hiding inside the wall of the dryer, preparing for its getaway . . .

  Marlo: [Laughs] Right.

  Jerry: You have the sock out on the street that’s gotten a few blocks . . .

  Marlo: [Laughs] Right.

  Jerry: Then you try to figure out the reason they would want to escape in the first place. Maybe it’s because of their horrible life in the shoes, with the smelly feet . . .

  Marlo: Right, right!

  Jerry: And if you can come up with enough examples, what you’ve done is taken an absurd idea, then laid it out, proving it with rock-solid logic. That’s the formula for that kind of joke. That’s what audiences love.

  Here’s another one that I do in my act now. It’s about the piñata at children’s birthday parties. I explain how the piñata works, then say, “And then the parents tell the kids, ‘And after we’re done beating this animal senseless, we’re going to put a picture of his brother on the wall, and everyone’s going to get a pin and we’re going to nail his ass!’ ” So I’m basically creating this whole idea about some kind of donkey hostility at children’s birthday parties.