And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft

by Mike Sacks

  You eventually left The Tonight Show in 1964 to try stand-up comedy. What made you want to give up writing to perform? Were you not happy strictly as a writer?

  I can't remember the specific moment when I decided to get the lumpy ball rolling, to borrow a Fred Allen phrase, by quitting my job writing for Johnny to go into nightclubs in the Village, such as the Bitter End, and brave the onslaught of stand-up audiences.

  It was always a big thrill when I heard Jack or Johnny get a big laugh with one of my lines. But I have to admit that it eventually dawned on me: “I wonder if I could have gotten that same laugh?”

  Was it a smooth transition — from writing for others to writing for yourself?

  I thought this would be the easiest thing in the world, because I was turning out material every day for comics. That turned out to be an inborn fallacy. You don't hear your own comic voice; it's much more difficult. Certainly, I could have written the same type of jokes for myself that I had written for Jack Paar or Carson — and I knew I would get some laughs with them — but it seemed like the wrong thing to do.

  Woody Allen gave me encouragement and advice. He said, “You know how to write comedy, but writing for yourself is different. I can sometimes go for an hour or more without being able to get a single joke out.”

  I thought, “God, if Woody has to sit there for an hour to think of a single joke …”

  What was your reaction when you first saw Woody perform his stand-up act?

  It was at the old Blue Angel in 1961. I had heard that Woody had written for Sid Caesar when he was just a teenager. I felt I had to meet this guy — quickly.

  When I saw him, I knew that this was an astounding talent, although the audience didn't realize it yet. They talked during his act. His great lines went literally over their heads, to me, standing in the back. It was just clear that his level of intelligence was great. Every line was a gem. There was not a single feeb. That's what we used to call a feeble joke — a “feeb.”

  Woody didn't have an easy time onstage, did he?

  No, he had a hard time. I don't know what made him keep at it. Somewhere in him was this desire to be a performer, but I'm not sure how he stood it. I'm not sure if he literally vomited before going onstage — it was reported that he did — but he struggled to get up there.

  One day, the legendary Jack Rollins, Woody's manager and mine, said that putting Woody onstage “may not be one of our genius ideas.” Rollins soon changed his mind.

  Did you enjoy the stand-up lifestyle?

  In some ways the life of a stand-up was better than the life of a writer. You could affirm that a joke was funny right away. You didn't get that sitting in front of a typewriter.

  I bombed horribly the first time I went onstage, at the Bitter End, in '64. But after that first time, it was always much easier to go on. Also, it helped to find a character, which I eventually did. I was sort of “the Rustic at the Ivy League.” Sample joke: “My Nebraska clothes set me apart. I remember I actually wore brown-and-white shoes. But they were impractical. The white one kept getting dirty.”

  You wrote a few classic jokes for your stand-up act, such as the Chinese restaurant joke.

  That joke was stolen so many times! It killed me. It showed up on Laugh-In once. That was the joke that went, “I went to a Chinese-German restaurant. The food is great, but an hour later you're hungry for power.”

  That was a really solid joke. If that joke didn't get a laugh in my act, nothing would. But that's the funny thing — you can have the same joke on any given night. One night it would kill; the next night, nothing.

  So, you don't believe that all audiences are created equal?

  No, you can easily get an audience full of dumb clucks. It's just them gaping at you.

  Is it true that you once told an entire audience to get the hell out?

  Yes.

  Did they comply?

  They didn't, no. But once, two women had their boots up on the stage, and I kicked one of them off. Both women stood up, and when they reached the door, one of them turned back. I said to her, “No refunds.” And she replied, “We'll take a chance.” She got the laugh, and I didn't.

  Eventually, I was lucky enough to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in the mid-sixties. And as I stood in the wings, it felt as if I had come through the looking glass. It felt like my younger self was lying down on a couch in the basement of my house in Lincoln, Nebraska, with some peanut butter and graham crackers, watching my older self perform on television. It was like an out-of-body experience.

  In the late sixties, you became the host of your own daytime and then nighttime program on ABC, The Dick Cavett Show. It's amazing to watch these shows now on DVD. You conducted real conversations with the guests, who weren't on the show merely to shill a new product or a new release.

  I've been reading some of the DVD reviews. A common theme seems to be that I had a genuine interest in the guests and that the conversations were evident of that. I think I can agree.

  I can remember early in the daytime show's run when I had James Mason as a guest. By the way, all of the videotapes for my daytime shows — not my nighttime shows — were erased to make room for the taping of Let's Make a Deal. Everything is lost. Anyway, James Mason and I were talking, and I suddenly realized, Oh my god! I am on the air, and they are signaling me something. The conversation had become so interesting and spontaneous that I almost forgot where I was. When something like that happened, it was really good; it was a real conversation. On the other hand, I could also fake that, too.

  Johnny Carson once asked me if I ever forgot who my guests had been on that day's show. He used to do that all the time. He would go home after a show, and his doorman would ask who his guests had been that day, and Johnny would forget. It happened to me sometimes. I went home one night after a taping, and there were some people over. One of them asked, “Hey, how did the taping go?” And I said, “Fine.” They said, “Who was on the show?” And I said, “Ummm …” They sat there waiting for my answer to bubble to the surface. I'm not sure it ever did.

  How could you possibly forget who the guests were from that very day's episode?

  Johnny and I sort of agreed on this later: that it's not really completely you who's out there in front of the cameras. At times, it can be — especially when the conversation is so damned interesting that you have to be frantically waved to do a commercial. But at other times, it's similar to those Broadway actors who do the same speech night after night and their minds just wander.

  So, it was almost as if you were playing the role of a talk-show host.

  Sometimes, yes. You become your own doppelgänger.

  It's fantastic to see some of the comedy greats who appeared on your show. It's a bridge to another time and place: Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx, Jack Benny.

  I received some criticism that went something like: how many times can you gush and say, “I can't believe it's you! I can't believe you're sitting here! I can't believe I've met you!”? I may have done that too much, but it was genuine. I mean, I really couldn't believe it. On my daytime show, during a commercial break, I once looked backstage and made sure that Bob Hope was really standing there. I was about to introduce him, and it all seemed like a dream.

  Years later, I got to be in a sketch on a Bob Hope TV special. I played a reporter, and Hope came out in some sort of costume. I can't remember what he was supposed to be playing, but I was just thrilled as he came out and did that thing he always used to do: walk a little to the right and then around in a circle, like a model showing off his outfit to everybody. We performed the sketch three times, each time to total silence. And I thought, I am in heaven. Nobody is laughing, but I don't care. Of course, laughter magically appeared when the sketch eventually aired.

  What was it about Bob Hope's style and comedic voice that you liked growing up?

  I have this childhood memory of Hope on the stage of the Lincoln Coliseum in Nebraska: “Now, here is the star of our show,
” and then the theme song. And my friend next to me said, “God! There he is!” Hope ambled onto the stage with that great Hope walk. And I thought, Jesus, there's that nose from the movies! After-wards I said, “Fine show, Bob.” And he said, “Thanks, son.” That was a formative moment for me. A large part of my life began right there.

  Hope happened to have a sound he was born with that became a part of him. It just said “comedy” in a mysterious way. It was the same thing with Groucho and Jack Benny. Almost anything Groucho said was funny. Almost everything Benny said was funny. Both had those voices of the “funny man” that always make you laugh.

  As for Hope, he was slick, and he was impertinent. He was glib in a hilarious way. He just seemed inexhaustibly funny. Just naturally funny. He could ad-lib very well. I once asked him if he was going to make another Road picture with Bing Crosby. And Hope instantly replied, “We gotta find somethin' that's downhill for Bing.” It was instant. I laugh every time I remember that.

  These comedy greats really seemed to have taken a liking to you. It was a genuine affection.

  They did, and I'm not sure why. They would tell me stories that I don't think they told anyone else.

  Like what?

  Groucho once told me about a nightmare flight from New York to L.A. He said, “I got to the luggage area to get my bag, and there's an old Jewish woman standing there. She says, ‘You're Groucho Marx, aren't ya?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and she said, ‘You know, you weren't very funny on the plane.’ And I said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’”

  Something similar happened with Jack Benny. I was riding down in the elevator with him, and the other passengers must have asked him seven trademark Benny questions: “Do you really not pay Rochester much? Do you really have a Maxwell? Do you still have your vault?” On and on. He smiled patiently and nodded. We all got off the elevator, and everyone rushed off to tell their friends that they had just met Jack Benny. Meanwhile, Jack put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You know, sometimes you just want to tell them to go fuck themselves.” Hearing him say that in the same voice that had come through our old Majestic radio, in Nebraska, well, it was surreal.

  Did you ever interview your favorite humor writers?

  I interviewed S. J. Perelman a few times. He co-wrote two of the Marx Brothers movies, Horse Feathers and Monkey Business, and wrote humor pieces for The New Yorker for many years. But Perelman was not totally at home in that sort of TV setting, truthfully. He once said that he would give anything to be able to run around a musical-comedy stage the way Groucho could. He was such a perfectionist when it came to writing humor. He was notorious for spending a lot of time re-writing his pieces. He used to call writing “lapidary work.” He saw writing as similar to polishing and shining gemstones. If you look at Woody Allen's writing, you can really see how deeply Perelman influenced him — attention to detail, the value of each word.

  One of my biggest regrets over the years is not having interviewed James Thurber, who was a hero of mine. I never did meet him, although I did once see him across the Algonquin Hotel lobby as he was getting into an elevator. I was too fucking dumb to go up to him then, or to later see him perform his own work in A Thurber Carnival when it was on Broadway [in 1960]. If you can believe it, I actually did see the show later — but after Thurber died.

  “Ladies, and gentlemen, James Thurber will not be performing in this evening's show. Taking his place … Tony Danza!”

  “But there's no reason to be disappointed. Please do not make your way to the exits; they have all been locked.”

  It's hard to imagine now, but when you befriended a few of these comedy legends, they weren't necessarily still being lauded. In fact, in some cases, they had almost been forgotten. I'm thinking of Stan Laurel in particular.

  I sought out Stan Laurel when I was a copy boy at Time. There was a big manila folder on him in the archives, and I took it out for some reason and read it.

  [Laughs] Did you ever get any work done as a copyboy at Time? It seems that you spent most of your efforts researching and then seeking out comedy legends.

  Actually, no, I never did get any real work accomplished. [Laughs] But the job paid off, didn't it?

  Back to Stan Laurel. I didn't even know if he was still alive, but I wrote him, and he wrote back. He invited me to his apartment, and I went to visit him.

  Just as easy as that?

  Yes.

  Do you think he was at all aware of the reverence people still felt for him?

  No. He knew that the young audience, or “the kids” as he called them, was aware of him and liked him. But he would tell me, “I'd hate for the kids to see what I looked like now.”

  That's why he didn't want to appear in the [1963] movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Stanley Kramer, the director, asked him to be in the film, but Stan didn't want his fans, especially the younger ones, to see how he looked. You could have passed him on the street and not recognized him, but once you knew who he was, you would know who he was. When I walked into his apartment, I checked his ears — his famous ears — and they were the same. The voice was also the same. He had that speech impediment on the letter “s.”

  This was at the Oceana apartment building in Santa Monica, California. The building is still there, by the way. I sometimes drive past it.

  I wonder how many people who are now in that building realize that Stan Laurel once lived there.

  How many people knew or cared then? I entered the building and asked a resident where he lived. “Mr. Laurel? Oh, I think it's apartment … Oh, where does he live? 2C? Or 5G? I'm not sure.”

  No one could convey to either Stan Laurel or Oliver Hardy how much they meant to people. Stan used to complain all the time about how his films were edited for television. That drove him mad. You know, he wasn't paid one cent for those films when they ran on television, even though millions of dollars were made from them. But it wasn't the money that bothered him as much as the cutting. The films were edited in such a way that they stopped, as he put it, “on the way to the gag.” That killed him. He actually wrote to one of the TV stations and asked if he could re-cut the films for them. He told me they never even bothered to answer him. Oliver Hardy was quoted once — this was in his later years, when he was hideously fat and unhealthy — as saying, “I don't really see that my life's amounted to very much. Just pulling some funny faces in front of a camera.” And he was an artist to his fingertip.

  By the way, Woody once had an interesting observation about Laurel and Hardy — Hardy was simply a better screen comic than Laurel. His delicacy of movement and gesture was the right size for the screen. Stan, who had come from the stage and music hall, often played a little too broadly for the camera.

  I never even thought about it until Woody pointed that out. It certainly didn't distract me from how much I loved Stan — but I agree.

  Speaking of Woody Allen, in preparation for this interview, I watched episodes of The Dick Cavett Show in which he appeared as a guest. In one episode I saw something I had never, ever seen before: Woody Allen laughed. In all of his films and in all of his appearances, I don't think I had ever seen him actually laugh.

  I remember that show [October 20, 1971]. Woody was very animated. It's a real eye-opener for so many people now. I mean, some of the younger viewers never dreamed that Woody was once a stand-up comedian. It's even more amazing for them to see how funny and likeable he was. By the way, he still is both.

  On another episode of your show, Woody came very close to performing a few push-ups at the suggestion of an audience member. That would be another thing I've never seen him do before.

  Oh, yes. Woody could have, but he was guarding his image. He was a first-rate athlete in school and in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up — with track, especially. We really did have fun together on the show.

  Did I ever tell you about the time I was almost in a threesome with Marlon Brando and a beautiful woman?

  Let me think about that. No.

&
nbsp; Marlon and I were eating dinner at the Russian Tea Room, in Manhattan. A young woman walked up to our table and said, “I'm just crazy about the both of you. This is just too much of a dream for me, and I want you to know that I'll do anything — absolutely anything — with the both of you. The only problem is that I don't have very large breasts.”

  Brando didn't see this as a problem. He delivered a monologue that went something like [in Brando voice], “Listen, honey. I've been to bed with girls with big breasts, little breasts, saggy breasts, breasts that you can tie together, cross-eyed breasts — it doesn't make any difference. You are just fine.” She was very happy to hear this.

  So did anything happen?

  No.

  Why not?

  We hadn't finished our meal.

  The only thing that came between you and a threesome with Marlon Brando was a bowl of borscht?

  It pains me to say this, but yes.

  Well, at the very least, that anecdote shall now provide a perfect segue to my next question: How troublesome were the censors for you?

  There was a censorship issue when John and Yoko appeared as guests on the show in 1972. They sang “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” and the censors were upset by the title. I mean, the song's meaning was so obvious that I just thought, Don't you get it? You have to ask yourself sometimes, Who is the target of the joke?

  The meaning of that song was the exact opposite of what the word represented.

  Absolutely. I mean, it was ridiculous. The network wanted it out, and I refused. Everyone was so afraid that there would be protests and that letters would come pouring in. And the letters did pour in. But they were mostly calling me a “copout” for having to read this disclaimer before the song. Things like, “Don't you realize that we are mature enough to not have to listen to a disclaimer like that?”