by Mike Sacks
ABC had cobbled up a sleazy, chickenshit disclaimer about “possible offense” and inserted it into the show. Protests came in, but they were all about the “mealy-mouthed” statements you “made Dick read.”
That actually gave you hope for America — a hope that so long ago vanished. Or maybe not. Can I play you something? It's from an audio recording that someone handed to me the other day out in California. This man told me he got it from a woman who's a professional in the field of forensic archiving. I want you to guess who the main participants are:
[Audio recording]
First man: “What the hell is Cavett?”
Second man: “Oh, Christ, he's, he's … he's terrible. He's impossible …”
First man: “Nothing you can do about it, obviously?”
Second man: “We've complained bitterly about the Cavett shows.”
First man: “Well, is there any way we can screw him? That's what I mean — there must be ways?”
Second man: “We've been trying to.”
It's kind of difficult to make out. Richard Nixon and Kissinger?
Close. Think crew cut.
[Long pause] Nixon and H. R. Haldeman?
Go to the head of the class. Thousands of hours of Nixon's tapes were just released. I think this particular recording comes from the summer of 1971.
Assuming that the recording is indeed authentic, why do you think Nixon wanted to clamp down on you in the early seventies?
At the time, John Kerry had just been on my show as a guest — he had recently returned from Vietnam. I also interviewed John O'Neill, who would much later become the spokesman for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Charles Colson, who was Nixon's special counsel, later admitted to grooming O'Neill to represent the White House side of the Vietnam War issue. So I suppose both Nixon and Haldeman were none too happy that they had put all that work into O'Neill, and I wasn't buying what they were selling.
A kid from Nebraska, now being talked about by the most powerful man in the world.
It's very, very strange. I once upset Nixon on another issue — I had a White House representative on my show who was pushing for a certain treaty. And I said, “Well, it was nice to have you on, but I certainly hope the treaty is defeated.” Soon there-after, the I.R.S. audited my entire staff — from the secretary to the ashtray emptier. The “Wonder from Yorba Linda” was at it again.
I once attended an event at the White House, and I spoke to Nixon in the reception line. I remember being struck by the appalling width of his nose. I also remember him asking me, “Who's hosting your show tonight?” I responded, “Joe Namath.” And Nixon asked, “How are his knees?” Mr. Light Conversation. He'd been briefed, I suppose, and he knew to ask specifically about Joe's knees.
Then again, it wasn't just top government leaders who hated me. After I had Jane Fonda on the show in 1970, I received a telegram from Waco, Texas, which read, in part, “Dear Dick. You little sawed-off faggot Communist shrimp.” I wrote back, “I'm not sawed-off.”
The Dick Cavett Show is infamous for many highlights, but perhaps none more so than for an episode that never actually aired. Can you tell me about the Jerome Rodale incident, from the summer of 1971?
I saw a videotape of that show about a month after it happened. A lot of what occurred was already wiped from my memory. I had forgotten that Rodale, who was a fitness guru and health expert, as well as the publisher of Prevention magazine, had been bragging on the show about having “never felt better” in his whole life. He said that he planned to live to be one hundred. He also said that he was in such good health that he had fallen down a long flight of stairs the previous week and laughed all the way. A few minutes after telling this anecdote, he slumped over, dead.
Is it true, according to legend, that you then asked him, “Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?”
I don't know. I wonder about that. If I did, I couldn't hear it on the tape. You know, when Joey Bishop would be on a talk show with Buddy Hackett, one of them would invariably snore while the other was talking. It was kind of a standard gag. That's how it looked with Rodale, and that's how the audience took it.
They really did think it just had to be a part of the fun.
How long did it take for the audience to realize that this wasn't just part of the fun?
It didn't take long. It soon became very obvious. Watching that wave of awareness once the audience realized that something was wrong was a very curious thing. I never saw anything quite like that. It's strange to think about now, because traumatic moments are a difficult thing to remember. But I do remember getting up and holding Rodale's wrist and then thinking, What in the hell am I doing? I'm obviously in charge, because I have to be in charge, but I don't know what his wrist is supposed to feel like or what I'm looking for here.
Of course, that episode never aired — but a half-dozen people a year still believe they saw it! I think I own the master tape, although I'm not sure. I've said many times that I would check on that, but maybe after this interview I finally will.
The ABC version of The Dick Cavett Show went off the air in 1975, when you were only thirty-nine. Was there ever any sense from your standpoint that your gifts were tailor-made for the talk show? And that maybe your talents weren't sufficiently highlighted in other realms?
I was made for the talk show — too bad my tap-dance skills have had to take a backseat.
It was never my goal to host a talk show. My career was never — not even for one moment — planned. I often wonder what would have happened if I hadn't noticed the article in the Time office that mentioned Jack Paar being unhappy with his monologue. I don't remember standing there and thinking, I shall write him a monologue. I just went home and [snaps fingers] tapped out two pages of jokes. Then the odds against running into Jack at the studio, the odds of me even being let into the building … it's like the chance of any individual human being born — if any one of the other spermatozoa had somehow gotten into the egg, someone other than you would now be here.
When I was just a teenager back in Nebraska, I would often appear on a fifteen-minute children's show called Story Time Playhouse. One day, after the show was finished, I was leaving the theater and ran into a local radio star. He was a tall, good-looking blond man with a voice that I knew very well. His name was Bob Johnson. He stopped me in the hallway and said, “I was thinking about you the other day. You know, you're gonna get up and out of here.” I didn't know what he was talking about. Was he talking about where we were standing in the hallway, or out in the world? And he said, “No, it's true. I have a feeling that you're going to get up and out of here just like Carson did.” By this time Johnny was in New York and was already a bit of a success. I looked at this guy, this 50-ish man, and realized that he wasn't going to be Jack Benny's announcer, or another Carson, or any of the things he dreamed of becoming earlier in life. He had gone as far as he was going to go — and he knew it. It really hit me, and I've never forgotten that. I do realize how lucky I've been.
To misquote both you and Fred Allen, it's now time to stop this lumpy ball from rolling. Any advice for humor writers hoping to have a career as successful as yours? Beyond, of course, walking straight up to you and presenting you with a big ol' packet of their jokes?
[Laughs] Oh, god, the number of times that I've heard the phrase, “I am asking you for the same favor that you once asked of Jack Paar …” You know, it's such a different time now anyway. The savvy legal advice is to never even open one of these packages, for fear that they'd later want to sue you.
As far as writing advice, just put down anything you think is funny. Don't think about what purpose the writing has to serve — just put the words down. Write anything that you think is funny for any reason. You can then go back and make it perfect, if necessary.
Also, if you want to write for other comedians or anyone else, well, you can have a pretty nice career doing that too.
One more thing: when faced with the choice between a bowl of b
orscht and a threesome with Marlon Brando, always choose the latter.
Perfect advice for any young writer. Follow that and you can't go wrong. And write it up afterward. Good luck.
Famous Last Words (of Advice)
I receive letters from young writers asking for advice about a “career” in comics. If somebody asks me, I always say not to do it unless you can't not do it. If you need encouragement from a stranger, then you shouldn't do it.
Once you are a cartoonist, the best advice I ever received was from Robert Crumb. He told me to just get away from cartooning for a while. He told me he wished that he had taken up some other form of art, like sculpture; that it was important to do more than just sit at a desk and perform the same repetitive act over and over again. That it was fantastic just to be able to get away from the drawing board, to actually talk to other human beings and to gain some perspective on the many freedoms you take for granted as a cartoonist.
After fifteen years in a room alone, you can start to feel as if you've unwittingly sentenced yourself to solitary confinement. It's no wonder that pretty much every cartoonist over fifty is totally insane.
— Dan Clowes, Ghost World
Larry Wilmore
Historically, black comics have usually drawn a distinct line in the sand when it comes to racial politics. Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and countless others were brilliant at dissecting the absurdity of a racially divided country. But they clearly came from an “Us vs. Them” mentality. Larry Wilmore, the “Senior Black Correspondent” for Comedy Central's The Daily Show — a post he's held since August of 2006 — examines the ongoing rift between black and white with a slightly more ambiguous perspective.
During his numerous segments for the late-night news satire, Wilmore has mocked racial relations from every conceivable angle. He's argued that white people turned the jazz of Miles Davis and John Coltrane into the style of Kenny G.; that Disney is racist because “even The Lion King had no black people and it was set in Africa”; and he announced to “all three black viewers of The Daily Show … that it's now officially okay to tell white people you think [O.J. Simpson] is guilty.” One has to wonder: exactly who is he making fun of? When he speaks about new terminology like “Blanguage” (how black people, in a “secret language,” clandestinely put down white people) and the “Negrometer” (a black scale ranging from Thomas Jefferson to George Jefferson), is he poking fun at racism or the culture of oversensitivity that finds racism everywhere?
Like every great comedy writer, Wilmore is fearless. He's never hesitated to push the boundaries of good taste or potentially offending his audience. One of his most celebrated segments for the Daily Show was an investigative piece (along with fellow correspondent John Oliver) on a proposed ban of the “N-word.” While interviewing New York City councilman Leroy Comrie, the black politician who championed the ban, Wilmore asked if a voluntary censoring of racist words was similar to “renouncing sweets for Lent,” and detailed exactly how this “versatile” word can be used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, and an adverb.
Controversy like this is nothing new for Wilmore. Even before he stepped in front of the camera and became a semi — Daily Show celebrity, he was making a lot of people angry, usually because of his racially-charged comedy. The PJs (1999-2001), a stop-motion animation series that Wilmore co-created, with Eddie Murphy, was repeatedly attacked for its supposed racial insensitivity, primarily by critics in the black community, including director Spike Lee and writer Stanley Crouch.
The PJs followed the misadventures of Thurgood Stubbs (voiced by Eddie Murphy), the chief superintendent at the dreary and dilapidated Hilton-Jacobs housing project in an unnamed city. The series took an unblinking look at inner-city poverty, with jokes about firearms, crack dealers and Asian grocers. Like in an episode of The Simpsons, the best social satire was hidden in the background. In the pilot episode, there was a billboard in the distance with the slogan “HUD: Keeping you in the projects since 1965.”
Born in 1962 in suburban Los Angeles, Wilmore attended California State Polytechnic University as a theater major, but dropped out early to pursue a career as a stand-up comic. As he told The New York Times, he spent his post-college years auditioning for movie and TV roles, often reading for “the part of the fast-talking ex-con.”
His big break came in 1990, when he was hired as a writer for the groundbreaking Fox comedy sketch show In Living Color. From there, he went on to write for sitcoms such as Sister, Sister (1995) and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1995). He won an Emmy and a Peabody Award for The Bernie Mac Show (2001–2006), a series he helped co-create.
Wilmore was also an occasional producer and writer for the American version of The Office, and he appeared in the show's second episode as Mr. Brown, a diversity consultant for the fictional, Scranton, Pennsylvania — based paper company Dunder Mifflin.
The question remains: whose side is Larry Wilmore on? And more important, does it matter? Should a comedy writer pledge loyalty to a political or social agenda, or let his gags speak for themselves? Every time Wilmore smirks at the Daily Show audience, revealing nothing more than his delight in confounding everybody who'd fence in his opinions — or worse still, label him as a “black comic” — the answer couldn't be more obvious … or more perfectly vague.
I once heard you interviewed on the radio, and you described the exact moment you decided to devote your life to comedy. I found this interesting, because exact moments don't happen too frequently in life.
The anecdote sounded like it was made up, but it's not. I was a senior in high school. My parents had already divorced, and I was living with my mother. The situation was difficult and became even more difficult: There was a rainstorm one night, and our roof caved in. I remember turning to one of my two brothers, Marc, and saying, “I don't want to end up in this type of situation. I just can't.”
I decided to dedicate myself to comedy. I really had nothing to lose. Comedy made me the happiest. I became a stand-up comedian a few years later, and my brother Marc followed in my footsteps. He also became a stand-up comic, and is now a writer for The Simpsons.
I didn't voice all of this in that exact moment, but I did want to take control of my life — I definitely didn't want to be a victim of my circumstance. I felt like my mother was very unhappy and her situation was unfortunate, and I knew that I didn't want the same thing to happen to me.
After that roof caved in, I had clarity in terms of not being afraid of going after my dream. I had no fear. I already had nothing — it's not like I could achieve that twice.
What were your career plans before you experienced that humor epiphany?
I was very much into science when I was young, and I wanted to become an astronaut. But when I eventually attended college, I became a theater major. I was always working on a play, either acting or helping produce it. This was at Cal Poly.
Is Cal Poly known for its theater program?
Actually, no. It's a school better known for its agricultural and engineering programs. So it didn't really make sense that I would go there to study acting, but the school was close to Hollywood, and I could sneak onto the movie-studio lots and have lunch and soak in the atmosphere. I never graduated.
A lot of humor writers from the older generation never graduated college, either. Now it seems like a prerequisite — if not for the educational experience, then for the contacts.
I guess I'm old-school in that sense. Most of my contemporaries are Ivy League grads. I'm more of the leave-the-home-and-join-the-circus type of showbiz person.
I taught myself comedy, mostly just writing and then performing stand-up in front of any type of crowd I could find. I learned to write because I needed an act. I didn't graduate from Harvard and immediately snag a writing job for a television show.
I'm amazed when a 21-year-old graduates from Harvard and immediately thinks he should be creating a TV show. That just astounds me. The level of hubris that's involved! What do you know about life —
let alone about writing?
As a producer, I always try to hire writers who have experience in the real world. There was a young writer on The PJs who was very talented. But every time he'd pitch a joke he'd say, “Oh, you know, The Simpsons once did a similar joke” on such-and-such an episode.
I came very close to yelling at him. Instead, I said, “Stop pitching me what somebody else has already done. I'm not interested in that. Tell me what your grandfather did for a living. What did he act like?” I told him to write about behavior. Stop with the fucking ironic distance. Let David Letterman have that for himself.
Even Letterman had real-world experience.
Absolutely — and there's a lot of humanity in his humor.
I think this self-referential attitude is very limiting, and I think it's one of the reasons why comedy has fallen out of favor — too many writers aren't writing about anything that anyone cares about. It's all pop-culture references.
Television drama is almost Shakespearean compared with the comedies. I'll watch dramas more often than I watch comedies, because nobody's writing about real-world situations in comedy. It's infuriating to me.
A few years ago, I was lucky enough to hang out with Carl Reiner. We talked about The Dick Van Dyke Show, especially that first season [1961–1962]. He told me that every Monday morning, the writers would ask one another, “What happened to you this weekend? What did your wife tell you this weekend?” That's how the writing session began.
My friend Phil Rosenthal, the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, ran his writing room the exact same way. That's how he'd start his writing sessions: “Tell me what happened to you.”
And that makes a difference with the writing?