Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  There was a young lady named Rocksucker, [he recited]

  Who lived in a town called Docksucker.

  She was lively and gay,

  And I’ve heard people say,

  She was quite a . . .

  “And here’s where I get in trouble,” he continued. “I can’t think of the third rhyme . . .”

  “Cocksucker” was among his favorite words, and Brooks’s coarse vernacular in any setting could be as off-putting as it was humorous. Your Show of Shows was a classy program, and nobody said “cocksucker” on television in the 1950s; nobody talked quite like that at work on the program, either. Some, like Tolkin—who said “Pole,” not “Polack”—never used expletives. That was Brooks incarnate: blurting out expletives, never mind the ladylike Lucille Kallen, typically the only woman surrounded by a half-dozen men, herself five feet, one inch, with the rest either big, tall, and loud or (with the exception of Tolkin) acting big, tall, and loud. Kallen endured the rituals—the manly men (Tolkin excepted), their smelly cigars, the side-of-the-mouth talk about the broads they’d nailed over the weekend.

  Brooks’s crudeness went beyond the boundaries of good taste for most of the other Caesar writers, the big, tall men included, but that didn’t stop them from often finding his antics very funny. Years later, watching Blazing Saddles, Caesar alum Neil Simon doubled over watching a scene he would not have dreamed of writing: cowboys sitting around the campfire, eating beans, and farting. “When something was funny to [Simon], he enjoyed it full out, scatological humor especially,” his then wife, actress Marsha Mason, recalled. The farting scene “brought Neil to his knees, literally. He finally got up and ran up the aisle to the men’s room, not being able to contain himself.”

  The regular salary and official screen credit turned the onetime “talking writer” into even more of a “performing writer.” Always quick to talk, now Brooks had a small captive audience, and in script conferences he was fast to leap to his feet and launch into shtick, briefly nabbing the spotlight and in the process of his performance often topping the sketch at hand. “He performs brilliantly and it’s very difficult to compete with that,” Tolkin conceded.

  Mocking imitations was one specialty: Hitler was already a go-to, behind closed doors. (Herman Raucher’s novel There Should Have Been Castles, set partly in the 1950s, depicts a Jewish writer on “a weekly Saturday night TV show,” a stand-in for Brooks named Monty Rivers, who breaks up rehearsals with uproarious tirades about Hitler and Fats Göring.) U-boat commanders were also regulars in his gallery of types. Following his appointments with Dr. Staff he added psychiatrists. One was an accented psychiatrist who cured patients of aberrant behavior by exhorting them “Don’t do that!”

  Caesar’s writers were the first to experience the roughhewn side of his personality as a form of performance art. The bad habits were uninhibited and studious at the same time. They were part of his persona. “You have to distinguish between Mel the entertainer and Mel the private person,” novelist Joseph Heller said once. “He puts on this manic public performance, but it’s an act, it’s something sought for and worked on.”

  Inevitably, when Brooks performed, everyone else in the room became his straight men, yet certain people were more willing and able to play that role. One late afternoon the group was stuck on a joke that hadn’t quite jelled. Glancing at his watch, one of the scribblers remarked dolefully, “Three-fifteen p.m. on a Friday. The last joke in the world has been written. There is nothing left to laugh at.” Brooks whipped out a roll of Scotch tape and began slapping pieces across “his nose to his cheek,” Tolkin said, “his lower lip to his chin, an eyebrow to his forehead. His face looked cruelly disfigured.”

  Without missing a beat, Carl Reiner popped up beside Brooks, assuming the guise of Intrepid Reporter. “Oh, how did this terrible thing happen? Who did it to you?”

  “The Nazis,” wailed Brooks. “They did it to me. Threw me in a ditch and did it.”

  “Oh, they beat you, eh? Disfigured you?”

  “Oh no! No-o-o. They took Scotch tape and stuck it all over my face . . .”

  The room dissolved in laughter. His performances, like his rudeness and crudeness, were never entirely for work purposes. Sometimes they were just Mel being Mel.

  The willing and able straight men had the best odds of maintaining a long-term friendship with Brooks. Carl Reiner had the straight-man qualification, and more.

  Born in the Bronx in 1922, Reiner had been trained in theater under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After serving in the air force during World War II (he produced a Molière play in French during language training), Reiner performed in Broadway musicals, including the lead in the postwar GI hit revue Call Me Mister, in which Max Liebman noticed him and began casting him in other revues and television shows.

  Reiner checked all the boxes for Brooks. He was tall, handsome, and Jewish to boot. A consummate performer, he seemed able to handle any silliness or depth. Also he was a closet writer, witty and adept as such, as he soon proved. As Reiner sat in on Your Show of Shows script sessions, he made an increasing contribution and, over time, became an arbiter of taste in the room; partly that was because everyone liked him but also because they trusted his judgment. An impossibly nice, earnest guy, Reiner was just as nice and wholesome as the writer Rob Petrie (the character played by Dick Van Dyke) in the television series Reiner later created, The Dick Van Dyke Show, which also had a character, Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam), who was a softened-up version of Brooks.

  When it came to indulging Brooks, Reiner vied with Caesar, and early on the straight man became the number one fan of the talking/performing writer. Reiner reliably guffawed at Brooks’s toppers and his writers’ room impersonations, like the one of the Jewish pirate, Reiner often recalled fondly in interviews, who had trouble getting sailcloth at a good price. Reiner always looked past Brooks’s anger, vulgarity, and piques, seeing only the positive side of his friend, just as Rob Petrie has only love and regard for Buddy Sorrell.

  “I instantly knew Mel Brooks was the funniest man I ever met,” Reiner reminisced later. The straight man “recognized that performing talent in me,” Brooks recalled, at a time, lasting a decade, when his performances were all behind closed doors, at the office, or at parties. “What he secretly wanted was to perform himself,” Reiner realized.

  The 2000 Year Old Man had its roots in office byplay between Brooks and Reiner, originating one day when Reiner tried arguing for a Caesar segment in which the star would interview a plumber who has overheard Josef Stalin make newsworthy comments while fixing a faucet in the dictator’s bathroom. The piece would parody the Sunday-night TV show We, the People, in which famous people were interviewed. Jumping up to demonstrate how the sketch might work with other historical figures, Reiner teased in Brooks. “Here with us today, ladies and gentlemen,” Reiner declared sonorously, mimicking Dan Seymour, the on-air announcer of We, the People, “is a man who was actually at the scene of the Crucifixion, two thousand years ago. Isn’t that true, sir?”

  Aging before his very eyes, as Reiner recalled, Brooks allowed a long, sorrowful sigh to escape his puckered lips. “Oooooh, boy!”

  “So, you knew Jesus?” Reiner prompted.

  “Jesus . . . yes, yes,” Brooks answered, his brow furrowing. “Thin lad . . . wore sandals . . . always walked around with twelve other guys . . . yes, yes, they used to come into the store a lot . . . never bought anything . . . they came in for water . . . I gave it to them . . . nice boys, well behaved . . .”

  Everyone collapsed helplessly “for a good part of an hour,” Reiner recalled, with—it was always key to the contagious quality of the 2000 Year Old Man—the straight man laughing longest and hardest. Their impromptu skit didn’t get onto the air, but no matter: they began to bring the routine into living rooms and dinner parties, with Brooks channeling his mother, Uncle Joe, The Yiddish Philosopher, and the way older-generation Jews had of pronouncing and expert-opinionating about “any
thing and everything.”

  No one can separate out who wrote what tidbits of comedy amid the tangled web of collaboration on Your Show of Shows. The dynamism that reigned in the writers’ room has become legendary. Lucille Kallen said that writing the scripts was like throwing a magnetized piece of a puzzle into a room with all the other pieces racing toward it.

  Every Your Show of Shows writer and a few of the performers made contributions to nearly every comedy sketch. Once, when pressed to say who had written the riotous send-up of This Is Your Life, in which Sid Caesar played a man who is plucked from the audience and literally has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, onstage to rehash the highs and lows of his life, Brooks said, “Even if I remembered to the line, I would never tell you because that is a secret code of comedy writers.” However, that secret code of never boasting “I wrote that joke” was—as Mel Tolkin once dryly noted, referring to all of Caesar’s writers, not only Brooks—“a rule observed more in the breach than in the observance.”

  With Brooks, sometimes even his solo writing claims had a suspect provenance. That may be true of his first celebrated work independent of Your Show of Shows, which came toward the end of the 1951–52 television season and which raised the bar for his future.

  Originally Brooks wrote that major breakthrough for a Broadway-bound show called Curtain Going Up!, another William Morris Agency package, with the head man, William Morris, among the chief investors. Other backers included Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, Catskills resort owner Jennie Grossinger, and, making his first appearance in Brooks’s life story, a young, aspiring producer named Daniel Melnick.

  Curtain Going Up! was touted by insiders as a sure thing: a revue with up-and-coming comics, pretty soubrettes who danced, and jazz dancers who sang, all the sketches and music wrapped around the marquee attraction of Marilyn Cantor, the youngest of Eddie Cantor’s “famous five” children. Included in the large ensemble of principals and chorus were M. K. Martinet and her new dance partner, Charles Basile, another veteran of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; the two performed a skit about a ballerina in a dime-a-dance hall.

  The William Morris Agency initially took Brooks on as a client “probably as a favor to Sid,” in the words of his agent Lester Colodny, who handled Brooks for the agency for several years in the 1950s. Despite his Your Show of Shows contract, the agency did not work too hard on Brooks’s behalf, partly because writers ranked “at the bottom of the status totem pole,” in Colodny’s words. Still, writers were a necessary evil, and in late 1951, the agency sent around word that it was looking for fresh material for Curtain Going Up!

  What Brooks came up with was a savage takeoff on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which he titled “Of Fathers and Sons”—echoing Ivan Turgenev, one of the Russian authors he had learned to love. Unlike Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama, in which the goods Willy Loman is selling are never specified, Brooks’s version featured a second-story man exhorting his son to follow in the family footsteps of petty thievery. The son is a failure as a no-goodnik; he gets A’s on his report card and dreams of being a violinist.

  “Of Fathers and Sons” was one of the few bright spots in Curtain Going Up!’s late-February tryout at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia. Local papers singled out Brooks’s sketch for praise, and Billboard acclaimed it as a “sock sample” of satire. Unfortunately, the rest of the revue did not live up to the same high standard, Marilyn Cantor disappointed critics and audiences alike, and Curtain Going Up! rang down—forever—in Philly.

  Another Broadway-bound musical revue, Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952, was scheduled to take over the Forrest after Curtain Going Up!, however. Among the new faces behind the scenes and cavorting onstage was a multitalent named Ronny Graham, who dragged producer Sillman to one of the last performances of Curtain, so he could meet Brooks backstage. When Curtain folded, Sillman scooped up two of its better set pieces—the “Lizzie Borden” hoedown and “Of Fathers and Sons”—for his New Faces.

  A native Philadelphian seven years older than Brooks, born in a trunk to vaudevillians, Graham had been trying to make headway in New York and New Jersey clubs for a year, playing piano, singing jazz, and performing bent comedy before small audiences. After Brooks saw Graham’s act, they began to hang out together. Their shared sense of humor led them one night to a New Jersey truck stop, where, famously, they entertained themselves and others by staging a “berserk faggot row” (Brooks’s words).

  “A grinning wag,” as one critic dubbed him, Graham had a steeplechase grin that telegraphed his inner sweetness. In performance he was as nutty and nonsensical as Brooks, although in private—as close friends knew—he also harbored inner demons.

  Sillman hired Graham as a composer, lyricist, and lead performer for his New Faces of 1952. Sillman had been producing variations of New Faces ever since its first Broadway manifestation, in 1934, which launched “new faces” Henry Fonda and a former child acrobat named Imogene Coca. That first edition was followed by 1936 and 1943 renditions; Brooks must have seen the 1936 show, which had the through line of a Broadway producer who thrives on surefire flops and was filmed as New Faces of 1937.

  When New Faces of 1952 acquired “Of Fathers and Sons,” in effect Brooks traded up, and with his friend Graham he began to rework the entire book for Broadway.

  The Broadway veteran John Murray Anderson was the director, and Sillman’s team of sketch writers and songwriters included Peter De Vries and future Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick. Besides Ronny Graham, the “new faces” in the production included the French-American comic and singer Robert Clary; lyricist, singer, and actress June Carroll (Sillman’s sister); the droll comedienne Alice Ghostley; singer-actress Carol Lawrence (later the original Maria in West Side Story); and Eartha Kitt, an ex–Katherine Dunham Company dancer, whose sexy purring of “Monotonous” (lyrics by Carroll) was a showstopper.

  Another up-and-comer, the campy comic Paul Lynde, played the patriarch in “Of Fathers and Sons,” while Ghostley was the mother of the wayward son. According to Brooks, he was allowed to go onstage and help guide the actors during final rehearsals at the Royale Theatre in New York, before New Faces opened on Broadway on May 16, 1952.

  Sillman’s revue easily won over critics and audiences, ultimately running for ten months. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times hailed it as “one of the pleasantest events of the year” and praised “Of Fathers and Sons” as “triumphantly sharp and satirical, both in the writing and the performances.” (From one Brooks to another, the writer also named Brooks liked to say.) Arthur Miller himself attended New Faces, columnists reported, and had a good laugh, sending Brooks a nice note about his sketch afterward.

  Although the revue had a thin continuity, and multiple writers and lyricists were involved in the patchwork script, Graham and Brooks shared the main book credit for New Faces. “Of Fathers and Sons” was always attributed solely to Brooks, however—a rare solo credit for him during those salad days (and just as rare later in his career).

  But did Brooks really write that breakthrough alone? He was already known in show business circles as a talking writer who could not and did not actually write complete sketches, never without a collaborator. Not knowing how to type was his usual excuse, and for a long time he refused to learn. If he did scratch something out by hand, he wrote laboriously with pencil on lined yellow paper, then and for most of the rest of his career; usually, early on, the pages ended up jumbled with notes, circled lines, and arrows.

  Brooks sorely needed another person in the room: someone to listen to his stream-of-consciousness talking, react to his nonstop performance, and edit his jokes and ideas. Ultimately, as well, he needed someone to type up the script, and that was how he was known to coax his ghost collaborators in the 1950s: Please, help me out, I need a typist!

  That was what happened once in the early 1950s when Brooks approached a freelance specialty writer for Your Show of Shows, asking for assistance with some co
medy sketches he was trying to write in his free time. He handed over some lined yellow pages. They were lengthy, repetitive. His sketches zigged and zagged, but the material was also promising and funny. The writer went home and turned the pages into coherent form. Several were incorporated into another musical revue, not New Faces. When the ghostwriter showed up for the opening, he saw only Brooks’s name on the playbill.

  “I wasn’t surprised that my name did not appear,” recalled the ghostwriter, “I hadn’t really any creative input to the sketches. Still, if I hadn’t written them down . . .” That writer, who later became well known in his field, asked to remain anonymous; no matter what had transpired between them, he liked Brooks personally, admired him professionally, and thought that much of his comedy—then and later—was funny.

  Some people who knew Brooks well wondered if Ronny Graham had lent an invisible hand to “Of Fathers and Sons” while shrugging off any credit. It turned out exceedingly well for Brooks: New Faces of 1952 had what in show business is called “legs,” with multiple remunerative iterations over the years. Shortly, in 1954, the revue became the second New Faces to be re-created as a Hollywood picture.* A road version of the Broadway show toured the nation, and an original cast recording sold briskly. New Faces was revived on Broadway for its thirtieth anniversary in 1982, and no one could argue with including Brooks’s sketch that year in a book entitled The Greatest Revue Sketches.

  “Of Fathers and Sons” was indeed a great sketch and a bright feather in Brooks’s cap as the television season wound down in 1952. He was no longer “just a TV writer.”

  One of the first times Brooks and Carl Reiner entertained people outside NBC and the Your Show of Shows writers’ room with their 2000 Year Old Man routine was at an early-1952 dinner party convened in the flat of the married actors Gene Saks and Bea Arthur. Reiner’s wife accompanied him, but Brooks’s date surprised everyone: Florence Baum.