Now That's Funny!: Jokes and Stories from the Man Who Keeps America Laughing

by Andy Simmons

  Best Heckle

  TOM DREESEN IS A FREQUENT GUEST AND OCCASIONAL GUEST HOST OF THE LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN.

  I was at a club trying out new material. Every time I got a laugh, some guy in the back would say something for a bigger laugh. I’d reply and get a laugh, then he would top me. After ten minutes of this, I finally trumped him.

  “Just between you and me,” I said, grinning, “I won that one.”

  He responded: “Just between you and me, you needed it.”

  The Day I Won Them Over

  JIM MENDRINOS WROTE THE COMPLETE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO COMEDY WRITING.

  Right after 9/11, I performed for some relief workers. The audience was justifiably on edge, and I was just as nervous. What could I possibly say under the circumstances? How about the one thing that kept nagging at me?

  I began by thanking them for working so hard. Then I said, “On that terrible day, New Yorkers asked two questions: ‘Is everyone safe?’ and ‘I wonder if I’ll have tomorrow off?’”

  The relief workers laughed their butts off, and we had a great show.

  Learning to Be a Pro

  ANDREA HENRY’S THERE SHE IS… WAS NAMED BEST COMEDY AT THE SENE FILM, MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL.

  I was backstage at a talent-based reality TV show watching another comic being interviewed on camera. This, he said, was his last shot in the business. He had a wife, a baby, and one on the way, so he either wowed them tonight, or he was quitting the business forever and getting a real job. As he spoke, he choked up, and I saw a little tear well up in the corner of his eye. When he finished, the producer said, “Great! Now let’s shoot it from a different angle.”

  After they readjusted the camera and lights, he did it pitch-perfect again, even the same little tear.

  The Funniest Person I Know: An Older Garry Shandling on a Younger Garry Shandling

  Putting together the It’s Garry Shandling’s Show for a DVD box set, I paid particular attention to the young star as he rambled on before the camera:

  “I go to couples therapy…alone. There are two therapists, and they argue about what’s wrong with me.” And, “I met a girl at a barbecue. Blonde, I think. I’m not sure, because her hair was on fire. And all she talked about was herself. Everything was, ‘Help me. I’m on fire. Put me out.’ I said, ‘What about my needs?’” Because it was twenty-two years ago, and he doesn’t look exactly like me, I had enough distance to think, This guy’s pretty funny, forgetting that that was me.

  Younger Garry was quick and upbeat. Older Garry tells dour jokes like, “I’m conservative on some things, liberal on others. I never burned a flag, but I never put one out.”

  Younger Garry also did a good job emceeing the Emmys, but the awards got in the way. Here’s how Older Garry would improve those shows: Give everyone an award when they walk in, then take them away—one by one—during the night.

  Stop Clowning Around: Alan Alda Says the Joke’s on You

  Here is Alan Alda’s nightmare: He’s at a party filled with fascinating, erudite people, men and women whose minds he would love to pick. But he can’t.

  Why? Because some moron has him cornered, pelting him with joke after lousy joke—a ritual from which it’s nearly impossible to escape.

  Now, it’s not that Alda doesn’t like a good laugh. He loves a good laugh. And therein lies the problem. Whereas Alda likes his humor spontaneous and intimate, he finds jokes formulaic. And who are the main purveyors of this so-called art form? The same sex that “likes to take apart clocks” is attracted to “the mechanical formula of the joke.” That’s right, Alda’s ratting out his own kind…men!

  “You seldom have a woman walk up to you at a party and say, ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one,’” says the actor/director (and author of Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself. That’s because women tend to tell funny stories that let the other person in. “You won’t believe the crazy thing that happened to me at the doctor’s office today,” they’ll say. That kind of thing…

  “It’s actually more fun to tell a funny story than a joke,” Alda insists. “Then it really becomes like cooking a meal for somebody and hoping they enjoy it with you. That’s way different from the comic who’s out there to kill.”

  Alda has a theory that men hammer away with the jokes because there’s more simmering under the surface than simply trying to make the other guy laugh. “When I walk over to you and make you listen to me, and I deliver the punch line and you laugh, for just a second there’s a power imbalance,” he says. “It’s like I’ve said I’m going to compete with you. And then you’ll find it impossible not to come up with another joke. It’s like two moose when they’re young locking horns. A little bit of an invitation to joust and not just jest.”

  Here’s another reason why guys tell jokes: Humor is a great aphrodisiac. Alda’s alter ego, Hawkeye Pierce, was one of the great lady-killers of our time, which gives him an insight into why women dig funny guys. “There’s the hope that if you have a sense of humor, you can be the butt of your own jokes. Or,” he grins, “the butt of hers, which is higher up on the rings of paradise.”

  On the flip side, guys, the puppy dogs that we are, dote on gals who laugh at our antics. But what does that say about men seeking validation? “We need it a lot,” Alda says, laughing. That’s because there’s a power imbalance here, too. Rumors to the contrary, women, he says, are the stronger sex. “Just think how strong you have to be to give birth.” And men’s claim to fame? A beer belly. Of course, “we can maintain that for more than nine months. In fact, for years. So maybe we are the stronger sex.”

  Well, then, what’s a funny guy to do? Try being smart. “When you have a dozen people around a dinner table, it’s not jokes that are prized,” Alda says, “it’s wit.” And should that joke fail? Forget about it. “Oh, the deathly silence when the angel passes over. It’s the angel of flop sweat. You really don’t know what to talk about after a joke bombs.”

  Hearkening back to his nightmare, the actor, in his best borscht belt-ese, shouts, “Stop me if you’ve heard this!” And, cocking his arm back, he delivers a blow to the puss of his imaginary tormentor. “Pow!”

  Now, that’s funny.

  Oy, It’s the Holidays!

  Curmudgeon Fran Lebowitz explains why she loves Christmas.

  The Holidays Growing Up

  I loved Christmas. It was the only time of year that was colorful, because the rest of life was a serious, black and white world. And then there was Christmas, which, to me, was dazzling—just the look of it. The town square was decorated, and there was a Santa Claus house. I lived in a town where there were relatively few Jews. And no one loves Christmas more than a Jewish child in a Gentile town.

  My Tree-trimming Technique

  I grew up with a girl who lived in this really big house with a huge central hall and a tree that went up about, I don’t know, three stories. And my friend’s mother and I had wildly divergent tinsel-tossing habits. I thought you should be meticulous about it, and she thought you should just stand upstairs and drop it all.

  Why I Don’t Shop Online

  I don’t shop online because I don’t own a computer. My belief is they haven’t completed inventing them yet. Why? Because they don’t work. If they worked, not every business in the world would have a department to fix them. They don’t have a department to fix pencils.

  The Worst Gift I Ever Got

  My parents once gave me a carpet sweeper. And by the way, I was in my thirties. And I didn’t have any carpets.

  Mirth Mother: My Interview with Comedian Anita Renfroe

  It began with some mother. The year was 2007. She was online watching a hysterical video of another mother breathlessly reciting a list of familiar momisms to the tune of the William Tell Overture.

  “Are you hot? Are you cold? Are you wearing that? Where’s your books and your lunch and your homework at?” She forwarded the video, “Mom-Sense,” to a friend, who sent it to a friend, who…About fi
fteen million friends later, Anita Renfroe, the funny mother on that video, became a not-quite-overnight sensation.

  “Getting the kids up and out the door, keeping them from bleeding or setting things on fire, and getting them into bed—condense that into two minutes and fifty-five seconds and it’s a mom’s day,” says Renfroe, making sense of the video’s popularity.

  An easy laugher with three grown children, Renfroe, age fifty, lives outside Atlanta with her road manager and husband, John. Her new book is Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You: Kids, Carbs, and the Coming Hormonal Apocalypse. We caught up with her to ask about her experiences in the ’hood, as in motherhood and womanhood.

  Andy Simmons: Growing up, which TV mother did you want to be?

  Anita Renfroe: Olivia Walton, because she was the one least like me. She was calm; she had lots and lots of kids, and being an only child, I thought that was kind of romantic. Until I had one myself, when I decided it was incredibly, incredibly painful. [Laughs.] To paraphrase Robin Williams, it was like getting a bowling ball out of an exhaust pipe.

  AS: So which mother did you end up being?

  AR: My children would tell you that my ability to win any argument would make me more like Clair Huxtable. But my disorganization and lack of housekeeping skills put me squarely in the Roseanne camp. So a hybrid—a verbal, undomesticated goddess.

  AS: What pearls of wisdom did your mother pass down to you?

  AR: Moisturize your neck.

  AS: Excuse me?

  AR: [Laughing.] Women always put moisturizer on their face, but they never get it down on their neck. And the skin on your neck is the same stuff as on your face, but it ages twice as fast because you don’t ever put any cream on it.

  AS: Makes sense. What else?

  AR: When I was a self-conscious teen, she told me, “You think people are thinking about your zit or your large nose, but they’re not. No one else is thinking of you as much as you think they are, because just think how much you’re not thinking of other people.” And she was trying to cheer me up!

  AS: No doubt you imparted those bits of wisdom to your own children?

  AR: Of course—on many occasions. There is something that comes with the mother mentality where you lose your mind and become like every other mother. I call it compulsive counsel disorder—the inability to not give advice all day long.

  AS: The most famous mother in the world is Michelle Obama…

  AR:…And with the best arms, oh my God.

  AS: And she doesn’t mind showing them off, does she?

  AR: If my arms didn’t wave back when I waved, I wouldn’t mind showing them off, either.

  AS: Have any advice for her?

  AR: She’s doing a great job without anyone’s advice. I recall Michelle speaking to the press. One of her daughters interrupted. Michelle said, “Not right now, honey.” But she smiled when she said it, and I don’t think it was because there were a million cameras on her. I think that’s her default face to her children. I love that. It seems that every time she speaks to them, it’s with a smile on her face.

  AS: What was your own child-rearing philosophy?

  AR: I made it a point that laughter had to be a hallmark in our home. I wanted my kids to have a lot of funny stories to tell at my funeral. We didn’t have loads of rules at the dinner table like many families, so there was a lot of singing, cross talking, maybe some chewing with your mouth open. But there was also lots of laughter.

  AS: It sounds like mayhem.

  AR: My son’s friend once joined us for dinner, and he sat at our table horrified. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he said, “Does it occur to anyone that no one is listening?” We laughed because we, of course, were talking and listening. We thought it was normal behavior.

  AS: So you didn’t keep too tight a leash on your kids. How about now that they’re grown?

  AR: Oh, no. See, I got the memo that says if you do your job right, they’ll all leave. Woo-hoo! My hope was that my children would become independent, fully functional adults. But there is nothing more satisfying—or more heartbreaking—than to realize your child really doesn’t need you anymore.

  AS: You will say things most women won’t. What are so many mothers afraid of?

  AR: Mothers have been conditioned to believe that if we cop to a moment of weakness, it makes us less human or pleasant. It’s the opposite. Talking about these things shows how much we have in common. And some of those things are annoying. [Laughs.] One woman e-mailed me, saying, “If you gave your child twenty-five positive affirmations for every negative…” And I’m laughing, like, Who has time for twenty-five affirmations when we have four minutes to catch the school bus?

  AS: How do men react to your act?

  AR: They ask, “What about the dads?” So I wrote a song for them called “Dad-Sense.” It’s just two lines: “Ask your mom, ask your mom.” The guys don’t laugh much, but the women love it.

  AS: Your husband resigned from his post as minister of a church to become your road manager. Are you at each other’s throats yet?

  AR: John’s a very tolerant, patient man, and I’m an excitable, spastic woman. Between us, a lot of stuff gets done. But on the road, we’re together twenty-four hours a day, so on those days we’re home, he’ll go outside or to Home Depot to try to make me miss him.

  AS: Your faith informs your humor. But do you think that when some people hear the term “Christian comic,” they assume they’ll be preached to?

  AR: I’m sure some are wondering, Are they going to take an offering? But I can’t imagine that going to my show would be a much different experience than going to a club, other than the fact that my humor is clean and comes from a place of hope and joy, not anger. When you come to one of my shows, you pretty much get the same thing as if you sat down at a Starbucks with me—except, at the coffee shop, you wouldn’t get the big musical numbers.

  The Funniest Person I Know: The Office Writer and Actor B. J. Novak on Ricky Gervais, et al.

  So many people were the funniest person in the world to me at various points in my life.

  In college it was Mitch Hedberg, the late great comedian. I first saw him on Letterman with my girlfriend. He was rebellious and sweet. I remember one line: “An escalator can never break—it can only become stairs.” Or, “I’m sick of following my dreams. I’m just going to ask where they’re going and hook up with them later.” I quoted him for weeks on end until my girlfriend broke up with me.

  Peter, the caterer for The Office, is very funny. He believes that every item he has is there to increase your sexual prowess. He will create a narrative about who he thinks you’re dating and how his vegetable soup will increase your stamina.

  Ricky Gervais, the writer/actor who created the British The Office, is the most recent funniest person in the world to me. He gives me faith that you don’t have to be crazy to be a genius. And he giggles—a laugh that I would be embarrassed to have. It’s the most high-pitched squeal of delight. It’s another no-vanity sign of his comedy because it’s really an unpleasant sound.

  Your sense of humor changes over time. I’m lucky that I keep meeting new people that seem funnier than the last to me.

  Acknowledgements

  To begin with, I’d like to acknowledge the fact that my facility for concentration is nil. There I was, happily playing Minesweeper on my computer instead of working, when Neil Wertheimer, who was then a bigwig in the books department and is now an even bigger wig in our international department, asked if I wanted to put a collection of my stuff together. I was so excited I blew up.

  I would also like to acknowledge what most people know about me: I’m lazy. But my editors, Courtenay Smith and Katherine Furman, are not. They kept at me to rework the material until it was as smooth as my bloated stomach after eating an entire lasagna. They badgered and needled, then needled and badgered, then badeedled and needadgered until the book was completed and I was left a desiccated pile of dust gathered up by the winds and le
ft to tumble back to earth, where my wife collected me with a DustBuster, before adding a few drops of water, whereupon I was fully reconstituted, thus breaking the DustBuster because she’d forgotten to remove me first. And that’s what I have to show for all my hard work on this book—a broken DustBuster. And I blame Courtenay and Katherine and their insufferable insistence on doing their job conscientiously and exceedingly well!

  I would also like to acknowledge the obvious: My feet stink. Doesn’t matter what I do. I could walk on a mattress-size Dr. Scholl’s Odor Eaters pad and they would still reek. Nonetheless, a lot of talented RD editors have braved the stench long enough to foolishly encourage and edit me, before fleeing my little cubicle. This list includes our editor-in-chief Liz Vaccariello, Peggy Northrop, Tom Prince, Jackie Leo, Marcia Rockwell, Jody Rohlena, Lorraine Burton, Harold Clarke, and my cpoy etidor Ingrid Ostby. Thanks also to Bob Newman, George McKeon, and Jen Tokarski for making this book look so good, and all the others I’ve worked with at Reader’s Digest. A sweller bunch there ain’t!