by Apatow, Judd
Judd: One of the things you originated was talking with the audience at the beginning of your show, which they do on other shows now. How did that come about?
Steve: I didn’t originate taking a hand mic into the audience. There were noncomic fellows who did that before me. Notably Tom Breneman and a fellow named Don McNeill. They were very popular on the radio in the mid-1940s chiefly. They were sort of genial masters of ceremonies. And sometimes Art Linkletter would go into the audience with some specific gimmick in mind. Like, let’s see who has the most outlandish thing in her purse. “All right, madam, will you stand up and open your purse? Oh, look here, it’s a dead mouse,” or whatever, you know. Except that’s a funny joke. They wouldn’t say that. They would just talk about whatever was really in the purse, and “Thank you, here’s fifty dollars” and sit down. So they had done that before. But I was the first comedian to do it.
Judd: And you had regular audience members that were there all the time.
Steve: I don’t know how that came about. I guess it was just that they were lonely people who had nothing much else in their lives and they could go to this party every night and have a few laughs and be given some recognition. I used to love to talk to the regulars, as they were called, on the old Tonight Show. The classic instance of this, which people over fifty still remember, was a woman named Mrs. Sterling. She was what we would call a bag lady. She usually had a couple of big paper bags with her, and she dressed quite poorly. She usually wore a man’s khaki army overcoat and tennis shoes. And she was in our audience every night. And I don’t think I ever saw her laugh at anything. It was all very serious for her. But you know, she would be given attention. Her motivation, chiefly, was greed. Because at the end of the interviews we used to give away prizes, toasters or a pair of silk stockings or salami or something. At the time one of my sponsors was Polaroid cameras. She never could get the name straight. I would interview her; the interviews were very much the same. She didn’t seem to hear my questions very well. But she knew that if she could get to talk to me at all, she was good for a toaster or a fan or a deep-fry pot or something. She must’ve had a room full of all these things. Probably sold them out on the street after the show. So she would resort to flattery. I’d say, “Good evening, Mrs. Sterling.” She’d say, “Mr. Allen, you’re wonderful.” I’d say, “Well, the degree of my wonderfulness is irrelevant, but how have you been?” And she’d say, “Oh, we love ya. Everybody loves you, you’re great, Mr. Allen. Give me one of them Palmeroid cameras.” She always called them Palmeroids. And she never knew why the audience was hysterical. I never even had to do jokes. I just turned around and it was funny. So, she was like a known quantity. I knew that I would get laughs if I talked to her, so I talked to her practically every time I went into the audience.
Judd: Didn’t you turn one of your audience members into a movie reviewer?
Steve: His name was John Fisher. He was—I guess now we would call him a hyperkinetic personality. He talked sort of uncontrollably fast and effusively. He was an upstate farmer type. And I asked him one question when I first met him one night. It was something like, “Hello, sir, what’s your name?” And most people say, you know, “Charlie Feldman,” and just hang there. Which is really more sensible, because I only ask that, I didn’t ask for their serial number, you know. And he gave me about a nine-minute answer. He just couldn’t stop his mouth. “I’m John Fisher, and I live up in Solo, New York, and I have a potato farm up there and I just come to talk, because I seen the movies, the one with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy.” And he sort of reviewed the whole movie for us. Obviously that’s hysterically funny and I have nothing to do with it. He’s the one that’s getting the screams, did not know why he was getting laughs. So when he finally shut up, I said, “Well, John, that was a very interesting movie review, would you like to come back and join us from time to time?” He said, “Yeah, sure,” and gave me another six-minute answer. So we signed him up and we would get tickets to the new movies and he would go see them and come in and give us these dumb reviews of them. You know—it’s funny. And he never knew why it was funny.
Judd: And you used to do remotes from the street in the beginning of the show?
Steve: I’ve always loved the idea of getting cameras right out into the street. Sometimes I was out there with them, but more often I was not. More often I was just onstage looking at a television screen. So I could see what the cameras were seeing, and just saying, I hoped, funny things about them. And there again, people would say, “Boy, you were funny.” It was nice of them to say that but what often was funny was the situation. My contribution may have accounted for only, you know, fourteen percent of the funniness. Some years back, when Dick Cavett was doing his talk show on ABC, he took a week’s vacation and asked me to fill in for him, so I did. And we did the camera on the street every night and had tremendous luck. First of all, you see different things on the streets of New York than you do in Hollywood. And you have the advantage in New York that you’re generally right on some street. Whereas at NBC Burbank, if you open the back door, you just see part of the parking lot. In this case Dick was—I guess up at Forty-eighth Street. Anyway, one evening, we punched up the camera, just at random. And just in time to see one of those city trucks that hauls away illegally parked cars. It was a mystery thing and the whole audience went, Whoa boy, who’s going to get hauled away? So I was doing a play-by-play and the truck stopped right in front of the theater and the guy jumps out and, you know, does the thing with the hook and the chain, and suddenly from the balcony you see a guy say, “Oh no”—it was his car that they were hooking the bumper up. I said, “Is that your car, sir?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, come on, run down!” And the band played chase music, and we had a shot of this poor guy running down from the top level of the balcony. And he runs out into the street, now he’s on camera and it’s like a silent movie and he’s pleading, you know. And the guy says, “No, it’s just my job.” He flicked his cigar all over him, and took his car away. Well, that was sad for him, but hysteria for the audience.
Judd: One thing I read was that they dressed you up as Superman in the street. And people just looked at you like you were just anybody and you just flew away and they didn’t even say anything.
Steve: That was when we were doing the talk show in the early sixties from Hollywood. We were opposite a crazy hangout for Hollywood eccentrics, an open-all-night place called the Hollywood Ranch Market. And we did our show late, so it was kind of a pretty zany neighborhood—perfect for our purposes. And I had done a number of Superman sketches over the years. Because anybody with glasses, dark hair, an old fedora, and a gray suit looks like Clark Kent. I never looked that much like Superman, but I did a great Clark Kent. However, as soon as I put on the Superman suit, it never seemed to fit trimly, it always looked like baggy underwear. So right away it was funny before I did anything. So I had the Superman suit and the Clark Kent attire over it. One night I ran out and the cameras were there and they had a phone booth set up across the street—you know, so I could change clothes like Superman. I ran in and I tried to change like I did in my dressing room, where I had plenty of room, but you don’t have much room in a phone booth. If you’re not Superman, it’s tough. I need a lot of elbow room. So I couldn’t get my pants off. I looked like a jerk. A man trying to take his pants off in a phone booth. At this point a guy walks by carrying a bag of groceries, coming out of a grocery store. So I say, “Hey, Mack, you got a minute?” He says, “What?” I say, “Can you give me a hand here?” He puts his bag down. He says, “What’s the problem?” I say, “I can’t get my pants down.” So I sit down on the little seat in the thing and I stick my legs out and this guy pulls my pants off for me. And then I stand up and I throw the hat off and now I’m dressed like Superman. I say, “Thanks a lot.” He says, “Don’t mention it,” and he walks away. Now, if that happened in Cleveland, the guy’d say, “Hey, what are you, some kind of a nut?” But in Hollywood and Ne
w York, they don’t even notice. Because they see craziness around them all the time.
Judd: They used to make you do those weird things all the time. I remember I saw one sketch where you were made into a human tea bag.
Steve: Yeah, they had a big—I don’t know where it came from—but they had this big plastic tank. See-through plastic. It was about maybe seven feet deep and six feet wide and four feet the other way. They filled it with warm water and then they attached about a hundred tea bags to my body, and so I made tea for the whole neighborhood. They would never let me know—by “they” I mean the production staff—exactly what was planned. Sometimes just at the last minute, you know, I’d have to find out because I would see what I was getting into. But whenever they could keep it from me, they would. Because they had discovered that I was much funnier if I did not know for sure what was going on. I would often have a hint that it would be messy. They would come to the dressing room and say, “Underdress.” So I would wear a pair of swimming trunks or a tight kind of a jockey short thing or something underneath. And sometimes they would say, “Wear one of your Hong Kong suits.” They meant, we don’t want one of your nice suits to get cream pie on it or dog food or mustard or whatever they were gonna hit me with. But beyond that, I did not know what the heck was up.
Judd: What do you consider the highlights of the show? Comedic highlights?
Steve: My weekly check was hysterical.
Judd: (Laughs)
Steve: I don’t know. It was funny every night, actually. Just recently, I was listening to one particular show, because we’re putting together the comedy albums. And it’s remarkable how many of them hold up, if you can just hear them. Often, we’re just describing what’s going on. Once we had a woman—a nurse—come in from the blood bank and just take my blood. The point of it was to show how simple it is and that all of us should give blood. That’s not an inherently comic notion—certainly there’s nothing funny about giving blood. But when you do it in front of three or four hundred people, it somehow becomes funny, especially if you’re a comedian.
Judd: What was it like having Lenny Bruce appear on the show?
Steve: Lenny was a brilliantly inventive and original comedian, as the world now does not have to be told. There was never any fear in my mind that he would say or do anything in poor taste, although at the time he was saying things that would’ve been construed as poor taste in a club. But he was very intelligent and we were friends, and he would’ve never done anything of that sort on the air. And in fact, he did not.
Judd: The last time he was on, didn’t they have to cut something out, something he was talking about?
Steve: I don’t know. Sometimes there would be discussions about production details, which did not come to my personal attention because I was usually busy enough the day of the show. What Lenny did do at the time—and nobody censored it because nobody knew what it meant—is a little routine about glue sniffing. This was probably the first time sniffing of glue was mentioned on a nationwide basis in the comic context. In fact, the nation as such knew nothing about that at the time. That there were just a few weird kids sniffing airplane glue. But anyway, Lenny did about four lines on that and nobody cut them out, because it would be like today somebody wrote a thing about spaghetti sniffing. You know nobody would cut that because they think, What’s the harm in sniffing spaghetti?
Judd: What kind of man was he?
Steve: He was neurotic and self-destructive, but absolutely brilliant in his comedy. A true original. He was the first guy—first comedian, I should say—to speak the language of musicians. Which is now common. Even squares now say “hip” and “cool” and “I dig” and “you know, baby” and all that stuff. But in the thirties and forties only jazz musicians used that language. And Lenny was the first of the comedians to do so in his performing. He had sort of a musician’s sense of humor. It was very hip and courageous. He would discuss politics or religion or sex or social attitudes. And he was a true pioneer.
Judd: How do you choose the subjects for your books, Funny People?
Steve: Very much at random. It’s all a matter of personal judgment. For the most part I write about people I personally think are funny. And that solves one problem, because the world does not need Steve Allen explaining why Joe Dokes is terrible when he does comedy. Therefore, when I write about somebody, it’s because I like their work and it’s very easy to make the appropriate compliments. There was one exception to that, but I did it only after the performer had died. He was a great performer, a great song-and-dance man. A very important figure on Broadway and in films, an old comedian of the 1920s and ’30s named Eddie Cantor. In my opinion Eddie was a cute, likable, lively, vivacious personality. But I never thought he was terribly funny. So I took about twenty-seven pages to say that. But again, since he was already dead, I couldn’t hurt his feelings.
Judd: You did the same with John Belushi. That wasn’t very complimentary.
Steve: On the contrary. If you’ll reread it you’ll find it was highly complimentary. But it gave both the bright and dark sides of it.
Judd: You said other performers were a lot more talented.
Steve: I considered Aykroyd funnier, I considered Bill Murray funnier. I considered Chevy Chase funnier. But there are a lot of compliments for John in the chapter. But I could not avoid discussing John Belushi, simply because Belushi himself sort of forced that on the public consciousness. It was not anything particular in my own reaction to him. I’d already discovered that, although I could laugh at what was funny in his work. I liked a lot of what he did in the Blues Brothers movie, for example. In this, I was very much alone in the over-fifty generation. Now, it is generally true that people over fifty don’t laugh that much at comedians, let’s say, under forty. Whether they should or not is a separate question. I’m simply reporting the fact that they do not. I, on the other hand, do. Some of the funniest people in the world are young guys in their twenties and women in their twenties. I don’t care how old a person is. If he’s funny, that’s all there is to it as far as I’m concerned.
This interview appears by permission of Meadowlane Enterprises, Inc.
STEVE MARTIN
(2014)
I don’t think anybody has made me laugh longer or louder than Steve Martin. When I was young, I loved him without even understanding the premise of his act. I didn’t realize that he was poking fun at the self-importance of showbiz personalities, or the clichés of comedy. There was this whole meta thing going on that was completely over my head. As a ten-year-old kid, I just thought he was insanely weird and funny, and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t want to know why, because it didn’t matter to me.
I can remember my dad bringing home Steve’s Let’s Get Small album, and then us listening to it for fourteen hours straight as we drove from Long Island to South Carolina on vacation. Okay, maybe we didn’t listen to it the entire time; I do remember hearing a lot of the Little River Band on the radio, too. But I remember laughing, as my parents laughed right along with me, and thinking, I am beginning to understand a little more about how the world really works.
As I entered middle school, my obsession with Steve Martin only deepened. I had a grandmother who lived in California, and when we would go visit her, I would beg her to drive by Steve Martin’s house. (Yes, I’d found out where he lived.) It was this solid white house with no windows. I imagined it as this bunker filled with light. I begged her to drive by not because I thought I would see him—although I badly wished that would happen—but because I just couldn’t believe there was a structure that actually contained him. It seemed impossible to believe he existed and was somebody you could talk to.
Then one day in the summer of 1980, as we drove by his house, I saw him standing there in his driveway. I can’t quite remember what he was doing; maybe he was washing his car, maybe he was raking leaves. All I know is I yelled for my grandmother to stop the car. My brother and I got out. I ran up to Steve and said, “Hey, can
I get an autograph?” And he said, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t sign autographs at my house.” “Well,” I responded, “then can you sign it in the street?” (Which, looking back, was not a bad joke for a thirteen-year-old.) No, he said, sorry, he didn’t sign autographs at his house, because if he did, then everybody would walk up to his front door and ask for things and that wouldn’t be good. I did not understand this logic at the time. (I understand it today, however: If you knock on my door, even if you are from a charity, I will call local security.) I wasn’t done yet, though. I started begging him, “Please, please, I’m from out of town, I won’t tell anyone where you live, I’ll never bother you again….” But he wouldn’t break. He smiled—and kept to his policy.