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

by Mike Sacks

  Were you always on call with him?

  At any time of the day or night. He'd call you up and casually ask if you had a valid passport ready, because you'd be going to London with him in a day or two — or Alaska or Berlin or Texas. I wrote jokes everywhere, all over the world. I wrote jokes in jeeps, huts, airplanes. It was fantastic training. Just the fact that I had gone to Korea with him during the police action was enormously helpful years later, when I got to do M*A*S*H.

  Were you with Hope when he made the transition from radio to television?

  I was.

  How did that go?

  Terribly. It was a very rough transition. The writers all thought that television was radio with funny hats. We'd send Bob out in front of the cameras with a funny fifty-gallon cowboy hat and a dozen six-shooters hanging from his belt. We weren't taking advantage of the things we could do for that medium. We'd end the sketches like we would for radio. Just some gunshots or another loud noise and then a fade-out to a commercial.

  Not long after that, I got a call asking if I'd like to work for Sid Caesar. It was like, “Would you like to come and pitch for the New York Yankees?”

  A lot of people might think that you wrote for Your Show of Shows, but you actually wrote for Caesar's Hour, which was a continuation of that show.

  It was the show after Your Show of Shows, which had previously been split into three different entities. NBC had said, Wait a minute. We have three very valuable assets here. We have Max Liebman, who was the producer. We've got Imogene Coca. And we've got Sid Caesar. They're all doing the same show. Why doesn't the network get three shows out of them? They gave Max his own chunk of prime time, Imogene a sitcom [The Imogene Coca Show], and Sid got Caesar's Hour.

  I spent two years at Caesar's Hour with Mel Brooks, Mel Tolkin, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris.

  The writing on Your Show of Shows and on Caesar's Hour was renown. Was there a sense at the time that what you were experiencing was special?

  We didn't tell ourselves, “Let's be a comedy classic.” We just thought, Let's write for ourselves. I didn't hear the word “demographic” until I was fifty. We were the decision-makers. Our sponsors didn't interfere. Affiliates didn't interfere. The network might have interfered, but on a level that we were not conscious of, because Sid was the show's owner/producer. Sid handled all of those affairs at that level. We just had fun. The writers didn't have to worry about anything except doing the best that we could do.

  We knew it was special, and we knew it with the kind of brashness that New York inspires and encourages. We knew we were different from anything else on television at that time. We had this powerhouse writing lineup. All kinds of strengths. You put half a dozen funny people in a room, and it's amazing what they'll come up with. We did the show on a Saturday, and we took Sunday off. Monday morning we said, “Okay, what do we do this week?” We had to have it finished Wednesday because the actors started putting the show on its feet, and sets had to be built. Costumes had to be sewn. Orchestrations had to be orchestrated. I am older now than the combined experience that was in that room. We were all so young, eager, and fresh. But we pulled it off, week after week after week, for three years.

  You've talked in the past about the frustration and the joys involved with the collaborative process, both for television and, later, for the movies. But I assume this show must have been a joy for you?

  A joy and a half. Each show seemed like an event. We had this guy to write for, Sid Caesar, who could do anything. I mean, Sid would do these parodies of Japanese movies that he had never even seen. We just wrote it, and he performed it. He was a wonder.

  He was a real break from the type of comedian who came before him, the stereotypical Borscht Belt comic.

  He was much more well-rounded. Sid couldn't do a club date to save his life. The toughest part of every episode of Caesar's Hour was Sid saying, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” He couldn't play himself. But with characters, he could do anybody and he could be anything.

  There's a famous story of Sid punching a horse in the 1950s. Did that really happen?

  In the nose. Decked him. It happened in Central Park. It was a rented horse.

  Why would he do that?

  Because the animal had the temerity to throw Sid's wife, Florence, to the ground, and Sid was not about to take any shit from a horse. Mel Brooks later put a similar scene in Blazing Saddles. Side's massive strength was legendary — and very real. And he had a temper to match. He once threatened to pull a taxi driver through the cab's window. Sid asked him, “Remember how it felt when you were born?”

  How was Sid as a boss?

  He was very good. He sat in the writers' room with us every second that we worked. How we actually got the script on paper will always be a mystery to me, because there was all this planned anarchy going on. Mike Stewart, who later went on to write the books for Hello, Dolly! and Bye Bye Birdie and a great many other Broadway hits, sat at the typewriter as the other writers pitched jokes. Mike would look at Sid, and Sid would nod, and Mike would type. If a writer said something really terrible, Sid would suddenly look like a gunner on an aircraft carrier, and he would mime shooting down the joke. So Mike knew not to type that. But as a boss, he was good. I mean, he would have liked to have kept us there every night until midnight, but we were very strict about going home at six P.M. Unless it was a real, real emergency.

  Sid was a workaholic?

  He didn't want to go home.

  Even to his wife? The one he so valiantly defended by punching a horse?

  A horse is one thing. Marriage is another.

  It's strange watching the DVDs of these shows. Sid looks much older than someone who was in his late twenties, early thirties.

  That's true. And he peaked so young. He had an unhappy career in a way. It was much too front-loaded.

  Why was it front-loaded?

  Do you know the competition that finally knocked Sid off the air? The Lawrence Welk Show. Sid got into television on the ground floor, when television was new. In the early years, most of the TV sets were owned by affluent people, and affluent people tend to be the most educated people. By the time Lawrence Welk came around, a lot of less affluent and far less-educated people owned sets. And these people would have much rather seen bubbles coming out of Lawrence Welk's ass than Sid Caesar doing a takeoff on Rashômon.

  The problem with Sid was that he was at the mercy of the decision-makers, the network people, who — yes, they respect talent, but they respect numbers a good deal more. If you don't cut it — if your time slot's not paying the rent — it doesn't matter how gifted you are. They would have canceled Michelangelo if no one came to the Sistine Chapel.

  Let's switch gears and talk about M*A*S*H. You said that you considered the show your favorite piece of work. Is that true?

  No.

  No?

  No, it's not. I don't know. I must have felt that way when I said it, perhaps because that show just keeps reverberating. M*A*S*H just hangs on and on. It just won't lie down.

  You know what's so interesting about M*A*S*H? When Twentieth Century Fox decided to issue it on DVD, they included the option of watching it without the laugh track. If you've ever watched it without a laugh track, well, that's the show as we intended it to be watched. We did not mean for people to be cackling throughout the show; it becomes so much more cynical and heartbreaking without all that cheap, mechanical laughter.

  Why did CBS insist on a laugh track?

  Because television executives at that time were largely people who had gotten their early training in radio. They were conditioned by that medium, in which there were always three- or four-hundred people sitting in a studio, who actually did laugh as they watched performers doing a live broadcast. These executives, conditioned to believe that that was what the American public expected — the one sitting at home — continued to fulfill that expectation with their television programming.

  What was your feeling when CBS
demanded it?

  Outrage. Anger. On a good day, mere frustration. It was a four-year battle that I lost over and over again. The one concession from the network was to permit us to never have the laugh track in any operating room scenes.

  The canned laughter on M*A*S*H seems to arrive almost willy-nilly, appearing at inappropriate times.

  There was no appropriate time. It was always wrong. We didn't write toward having those laughs in there. We didn't even consider those laughs until we were at the part of the post-production when we had to insert them. And it was painful, and it was wrong every single time we were forced to include it.

  When you take the laugh track out of the show, the characters seem different. The doctors don't sound like a bunch of stand-up comics. They don't sound like they're trying to knock each other out with every line; although I must admit that there was still a tendency for the writing to appear that way. It is a little overwritten, which I regret. But I always gave myself the license to write some of those lines; the excuse was that these were educated people. Except for Radar [Gary Burghoff], and, later, Klinger [Jamie Farr]. But pretty much everyone else in that show was a college graduate and had had medical training, which made their sophisticated comments plausible.

  Do you know the history of canned laughter? It's so pervasive, and yet most viewers — including myself — don't know a thing about it.

  I don't either, but it would be interesting.

  When do you think M*A*S*H really hit its stride? At what episode?

  Episode number seventeen. It's called “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” and it's about a friend of Hawkeye's who dies on Hawkeye's table as Hawkeye is trying to save his life. There's a subplot about a young Marine, played by Ronnie Howard, who lies about his age to get into the service to impress a girl. Much to the kid's outrage, after Hawkeye's friend dies of his battle wound, Hawkeye reports that the young Marine is under-age and should be discharged. We wanted something a little more hopeful, so we had one death possibly saving another life.

  Hawkeye cries at the funeral.

  Not at the funeral. He cries in post-op. We had our moments of seriousness up to that point in the first season, but I think that one really opened the door for us. We saw that we could be a bit more dramatic than we had been. We also took pains to let the audience get to know the guy who was to die in combat, rather than just have some extra wheeled out of the operating room with a sheet over his face. This was the same type of attitude we applied, years later, when we had Colonel Blake die [Season 3, March 1975].

  Tell me about that episode, “Abyssinia, Henry” [pronounced “Ah'll be seein' you, Henry”]. No one knew that the character of Colonel Henry Blake was going to die?

  Only Alan Alda was told. The rest of the cast was shocked. We shot that famous scene in the operating room, when Radar announces Blake's death. Gary Burg-hoff was brilliant. I was directing that particular episode, and after the scene was done, I turned to our cinematographer and asked him if everything was okay technically. His response was negative. He thought we picked up a shadow that we shouldn't have. Gary then had to enact the scene all over again, and he did it brilliantly. We got it in two takes.

  There was another accident with the second take. It was an off stage noise — a medical instrument dropping to the floor. But I loved it, because it was real and it was natural and it broke the silence. So it stayed. It reminded us that we were in an operating room. We panned over to Hawkeye and Trapper, and they're still working on another casualty. They can't stop just because Henry was killed. Life goes on. And so, indeed, does death.

  What was McLean Stevenson's reaction when he learned that his character, Colonel Blake, was going to be killed off?

  He was on the sidelines of the operating room set, watching the scene being shot. After the first take he went to his dressing room, and we never saw him again. He was supposed to come back for what was going to be the wrap party, because it was the last show of the season. But he couldn't do it.

  Was it your intention to kill him off because McLean was leaving for another show? Conceivably he could have returned for a guest spot down the line.

  He was leaving for a series of his own on NBC, The McLean Stevenson Show. I'm not going to say that there might not have been some anger in our act, but I like to think we were bigger than that. I had the feeling that his departure should mean something. I thought it made a bigger statement than just having an actor leave to get his own series elsewhere.

  What were viewer reactions like?

  Betrayal. Comments like, “You sucked us in. You made us think you were funny, and then you broke our hearts.” Since people took the time to register their reactions, I hand-wrote a reply to each of them.

  The same week the “Abyssinia, Henry” episode aired, a planeload of children taking off from Saigon crashed on a runway, and every one of the Vietnamese youngsters was killed. I responded to some of the letter writers with, “I can only hope that you are as upset by what happened in Saigon to a group of real children as you are by the fictional Henry Blake's passing.”

  Why did you decide to leave the show?

  After four years I felt that I had done my best, I had done my worst, and I had done everything in between. I just wanted to tackle something I knew absolutely nothing about — with subjects and characters I didn't know like the back of my hand. You start out vowing that you're not going to be clichéd, and then you find out that you've invented a few clichés of your own.

  The pressure to produce that show was tremendous, almost killing at times. It was time to go. Before I did.

  What did you make of the show after you left?

  I was as critical of the show after I left as I was while I was on it. Some of it I liked. Some of it I didn't. After I left, it was bound to become somebody else's show, and it did.

  There was some criticism in the later seasons that the show had lost its satirical bite, that it had become too mawkish. Was this something you felt?

  I'd be a cad if I said so.

  Did you enjoy the very last episode [“Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” February 28, 1983]?

  I'd be a cad if I said anything at all, wouldn't I?

  I think you just did. Let's talk about Hollywood. It seems that your experience with film has been —

  — spotted. Frustrating. When it comes to movies, in the beginning there was the face. It's not the word. In Hollywood, they hire writers by the six-pack. If you're not willing to do what the executive wants, then another writer can always be paid to be willing.

  It was very difficult for me with movies. In films, I wasn't a producer, I wasn't a star, and I wasn't the director. I was a writer. But it's not all bad. You meet a nice class of snail at the bottom of the totem pole.

  It seems that practically every writer I've talked with has expressed a deep frustration with Hollywood, and yet they still want to write for the movies. What is it about movies that appealed to you?

  F. Scott Fitzgerald wanted to write for the movies in a satisfying way, and never got to. It's a great way to tell a story, but writers are not allowed to tell the stories. The stories are just handed over to higher-ranking people. And that's especially problematic when you're talking about comedy. Humor is not an easily shared commodity. It's next to impossible for the writer's vision to end up on the screen.

  Was Tootsie a happy experience for you? Did your vision end up on the screen?

  Tootsie is my vision, despite Dustin Hoffman's lifelong mission to deprive anybody of any credit connected with that movie, except for his close friend, the writer and producer Murray Schisgal. I say that because Dustin appeared with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio in 2006 and declared that the Tootsie idea sprang from Schisgal's intestines. I don't know much about gastroenterology, but I do know that the central theme for Tootsie came from me. And the central theme was that Dustin's character, Michael Dorsey, would become a better man for having been a woman. That was the cornerstone of the film. All of the other
details are just floating around that idea.

  Without that central theme, Tootsie would have just been a movie about cross-dressing. It had to have some deeper meaning to it.

  When I was asked to work on this picture, I thought, Have I really got the chutzpa to try doing a better drag comedy than the classic Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond did? The answer came back, You may have the chutzpa, but you don't have the balls to do another version of Some Like It Hot. So I thought about what this picture had to reflect upon, other than the clumsiness of men in high heels, and that was the contemporary consciousness of gender and the roles each one plays. And Tootsie was my take on that.

  Are you frustrated with the finished product? Is it painful for you to watch?

  Always.

  Because of your experience? The script is famous for having gone through many rewrites with different writers, including an uncredited Elaine May and Barry Levinson. Or is it because of how the movie turned out?

  There is one sequence that was meant to take place over a one-day period, which, if my clock is right, is around ninety-seven hours long. It just goes on and on and on. Dustin Hoffman's character runs around the city, and then ends up back in his apartment, and then runs around the city again, experiencing scene after scene with character after character. That insane sequence — continuity-wise — just bothers the hell out of me.

  There were so many screenwriters and other people involved with that movie that it was almost like a lifeguard giving you artificial respiration in the parking lot. You haven't even put your swimsuit on and you're already being given CPR. It was just way more help than I ever needed, and certainly more than I asked for.

  So you feel the movie is stitched together? That it's not as smooth as it could have been?