Collecting Himself

by Michael J. Rosen

  We all know that the theatre and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theatre, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves. The biggest problem of all three is to preserve honorable laughter in a comedy. If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

  Among the hundreds of adages that both help and hamper the theatre, one of the most persistent is “Only the audience knows,” or “Only the audience can tell you.” This is certainly true, but, in the case of a comedy, it is necessary to understand the quality of mirth in an audience.

  We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll-’em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

  This failure of discrimination on the part of so many panicky and high-strung theatre people accounts, more than anything else, for the deplorable decline of stage comedy during the last decade. “Louder and funnier” should often read “louder, but less funny.” There is a kind of mirth that brings forth a general audience sound a little like sighing, just as there is a kind of mirth that, in the true appreciator of it, can cause the welling up of tears.

  This last phenomenon happened to me, as I once reported on this page, during the wonderful “Rain in Spain” scene in My Fair Lady, in which comedy, song, dance, characterization, and progress of plot were all beautifully conjoined.

  The pre-Broadway road tour of a play is known as a “shake-down,” but a better name would be “shape-up.” The first term suggests shaking the holy bejudas out of it, while the second implies an effort at perfecting the “property,” as lawyers always call a play. Lawyers now have a great hand in the shakedown, I have discovered, for contracts and contract clauses are waved at one as frequently as suggested gags. Howard Dietz once said, “A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country,” which brought out of me one night, on the road with Carnival, this thought: “Seven weeks on the road with a play is like ten years with Harold Ross.”

  Beginning in 1921 with the road company of an Ohio State musical comedy club called “Scarlet Mask,” I have collected a vast amount of advice on how to write humor and comedy. I had written, thirty-nine years ago, the book for a musical show called 0 My Omar! and everybody then living in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Dayton told me how it should have been done.

  Since then I have been told, among other things: “You can’t bring a play to Broadway entitled The Male Animal,” “You can’t have a serious villain in a comedy,” and “You’ve got to keep too much charm out of a comedy.” The soundest critic of The Male Animal was Groucho Marx, who said, in Hollywood, “You got too many laughs in it. Take some of them out.” He meant we should take out irrelevant gags and stick to the laughter of character and situation, and he was, of course, right.

  When I tell this to the eminent authorities on comedy in our declining comic theatre, they yell, “Take laughs out of a comedy? That’s crazy. Keep putting more laughs in.” It means nothing to these experts that two of the biggest laughs in The Male Animal came on these two lines: “I felt fine” and “Yes, you are.” This brings us to what I call the Fourth Strike.

  The Fourth Strike grows out of the neurotic or just thoughtless conviction of many theatre people that if a line does not get a yell it isn’t getting a thing. Let me give an example of the Fourth Strike. One night, on the shakedown, in a fable that has since been eliminated from the show, the line “A thing of beauty is a joy for such a little time” was inadvertently spoken this way, “A thing of joy is a beauty for such a little time.” At least six friends of mine, or total strangers, shouted, “Keep it in!”

  I have most resented the application to what I write of such adjectives as “mild,” “gentle,” “pixie,” and “zany.” Having tried for four decades to make some social comment, it is something less than reassuring to discover that what a jittery America wants is the boppo laugh or nothing. In the section of this revue which deals with “The Pet Department,” it has been assumed by practically everybody that this is sheer nonsense. What I had in mind, along with laughter, was a sharp comment on one of the worst faults of Americans of both sexes, a hasty and thoughtless lack of observation and perception, and I have tried to present this by showing, with the use of symbols, that we often cannot tell a bear from a St. Bernard, a seagull from a rabbit, or a live dog from a cast-iron lawn dog.

  All through this road trip the item known as “The Owl in the Attic” has been put in and taken out and put back. I hope it will be in the play when it opens in New York, if only as a tribute to Robert Benchley, who must have been told by 10,000 people during his lifetime how to write and present comedy. He once wrote me, “I don’t laugh out loud very much, any more than you do, but I did at your line, ‘This is the only stuffed bird I ever saw with its eyes closed, but whoever had it stuffed probably wanted it stuffed that way.’” On stage, this does not get a belly laugh or wow; in fact, I have been told, thirty times, “It doesn’t get a thing.”

  It got a thing for the late Robert Benchley, so, again, I hope it stays in the revue. It is, I suppose, possible, since anything in present-day America is possible, that theatre people and audiences knew more about comedy than Benchley, Perelman, De Vries, Sullivan, White, and little old me, but I shall have to wait and find out. If they are right and we are wrong, I shall return to the dignity of the printed page, where it may be that I belong.

  The World Laughs with Them

  THURBER ON THE STATE OF HUMOR

  And the World Laughs with Them

  The New York Sunday Times, which keeps me in touch with the progress of everything, printed an article recently entitled, with elegant inversion, “Furiously Proceeds Radio’s Gag Hunt.” “Luckily,” says the author of the article, at the outset, “every joke can be twisted; some of them 1,000 times.” I think that is a purely American exaggeration (we always seem to exaggerate more than anybody else). I do not believe that any joke can be twisted a thousand times. For more than two hours, after reading the story, I tried twisting old jokes, beginning with “Who was that lady I seen you with last night?” “That was no lady, that was my wife.” To my surprise, all that I had when I counted up was twenty-seven twists, none of which was terribly funny; most of them were pretty labored, such as, “Who was that knight I seen you with last, lady?” “That was no knight, that was my husband.” The thing that surprised me was that I could have sworn I had at least seventy or eighty different twists, instead of only twenty-seven. I think that after you have twisted a joke twenty-seven times it must always seem like about seventy or eighty times, and I should imagine that if you heard a joke being twisted by somebody else, instead of twisting it yourself, the total would seem even higher. It was probably this illusion of multiplicity which led the Times writer to make the statement that some jokes could be twisted a thousand times. Of course, he pointed out that the crack brains of Radio, the star gagmen, have a clever technique of their own, which you and I don’t know anything about, for reworking old jokes. They have to have, because a joke can be told over the radio only once, the author says; after that it has to be twisted if you use it again. A joke that can be twisted a thousand times, or rather a gagman that can twist one a thousand times, is therefore extremely important to Radio. Take an expert who thinks up gags for a program that is broadcast three times a week—roughly, a hundred and fifty times a year. He could rework, for seven sol
id years, a joke that was used on the very first program. Most of us, even if we knew the technique, would go crazy long before we reached the second year. Radio gagmen do not go crazy. They always have before them the shining ambition of setting new world’s records in writing wisecracks, and this keeps them mentally fit and alert. Let one of them hear that a rival gagman has written 28,000 words of funny dialogue in one night, and he will sit down and try to write 30,000 in one night. What is more, he will probably do it. Let one of them hear that a rival has twisted a joke—say the mother-in-law joke—1,098 times, and he will try to reach 1,100. This furious competition is a boon to Radio and is the reason that Radio is more important than the periodical. Nobody who works for a magazine has the energy or the enthusiasm to try to outdo anybody else, and as a result Radio gets off more than four thousand times as many gags every week as all the weekly magazines in the country put together.

  Not content with twisting just one joke, I went on to experiment with some favorites of mine, starting with the lines from the play The First Year in which the lady says to her colored cook, “Did you seed the grapefruit?” and the cook answers, “Yes’m, Ah seed it.” I couldn’t get any twists to that at all, and it was pretty humiliating to realize that any one of seven hundred gagmen could have walked into the room and twisted it eight or ten times while I was mixing him a drink. Then, in a last attempt, I took Fred Allen’s line about the scarecrow that scared some crows so badly they brought back corn they had stolen two years before. I didn’t do so well with that one, either. For one thing, I am not sure of the rules; I don’t know exactly what constitutes a new twist, but I should think it would not be fair to change the two years to three years (and so on up) or to change the crows to sharks or mongeese or any other creature that does not normally steal corn. What I tried to get in my twists was something scaring something so badly it would bring back something it had, quite in the natural course of its habits, stolen. It was too much for me. I began with a beekeeper scaring bears so badly they brought back honey they had stolen, but that didn’t work because bears do not carry honey away with them; they eat it right at the hive, or the comb. I next tried scaring the beekeeper and then the bees, but both of those ideas became too twisted. If you have a bear scaring a beekeeper so badly that the beekeeper gives the bear honey that the beekeeper has been trying to keep away from the bear, that is a basically funny idea, but the story, in the telling, falls down of its own weight. There is too much explaining to be done; the thing loses the clearcut quality and the sharply defined point of the original crow story. I have no doubt that any gagman could straighten me out, but I don’t want to be straightened out. I want to go along through life believing that there aren’t any twists to the crow story worth making. I know, of course, that if everybody believed the way I do, Radio would go out of business in a week. But that’s the way I want to go along through life, anyway.

  The Times article went on to a consideration of the “two great reservoirs” of humor. The first is the mistakes that children make. Many “gems of humor that have rocked the house” have come out of these mistakes. The article cites one about a little child that came to its father with a newspaper and said that they’d have to hurry to the World’s Fair, because it was only going to last two days. The father said no, that the Fair was going to last all year, whereupon the child showed him a line in the paper reading “Fair today and tomorrow.” Thousands of such lines are taken over as their own by adult comedians every year. The second great reservoir consists of the “errors of foreigners who cripple and garble the language.” Take the gagman’s landlord, who was a foreigner and who said to the gagman one day (according to the Times), “I’ll give you one of two choices: either get out or move.” And who, on another occasion, when his tenant was complaining about the lights, said, “They’re all right, they’re 60-wops.” Unknowingly, says the article, the landlord supplied much comedy for the coast-to-coast audience of America. It seems that everything this landlord said was funny.

  Not all gagmen, of course, have children and foreigners to fall back on, but there are always the seven basic forms of jokes. The Times author went around asking various gagmen about these. The answer of one of them, Mr. Carroll Carroll, is interesting. “I suppose one [of the seven basic forms] is that ‘anything out of place is funny,’” said Mr. Carroll. “For example, false teeth in the pocket or on a table are funnier than in the mouth.” With a rule like that to go by, Radio gagmen have, of course, another practically inexhaustible reservoir. They can speak of crutches in a coffin, or wooden legs in a bed of roses. All such incongruities are ludicrous and serve to keep the coast-to-coast audience in stitches from day to day. Here again the Radio writers seem to me to be worlds ahead of the magazine writers because, although it is much harder to get over a story on the radio about false teeth on a table than it is to tell it in a magazine, there have been in the past year over three thousand more false-teeth jokes on the air than in the prints. Once more the Radio gagman’s enormous gusto and tireless energy win out over the pallid, lackadaisical nature of the magazine writer. And yet consider what the gagman is up against! If he is doing a sketch about the finding of a set of false teeth on a table, he has to have somebody come into the room (the studio broadcasting-room) and say, “Why, what is that lying there on the table?” and somebody else has to say, “What? I don’t see anything.” “Why, yes you do—there on the table.” The first speaker then goes over and picks up the false teeth and drops them back on the table. “Why, they’re false teeth!” he giggles. Now, the sound of false teeth dropping on a table is a very difficult sound to produce through a microphone. If you actually dropped a pair of false teeth on a table, it would sound like dropping a heavy glass paper-clip holder or a fragment of broken inkwell. The proper effect is gained by dropping two cigar-box lids which have been lightly glued together. It is not very easy to laugh at that, and therefore the actor who picks up and drops the lids must imagine that he is actually picking up and dropping a set of false teeth. In a magazine story, the whole thing could be accomplished much more simply: “There was a set of false teeth lying on the table. Romley looked at them for a moment, then he burst out laughing.” And yet, as I say, the Radio gagmen never flinch or falter. They think up such things as finding a glass eye in a robin’s nest and they write it out and the comedians put it on the air and the coast-to-coast audience rocks with laughter. It makes a magazine writer feel as if there were simply no reason to go on any longer.

  “He gave up smoking and humor the first of the year.”

  “There is no laughter in this house.”

  Groucho and Me

  More than twenty years ago my wife and I were entertained at dinner in London by an American diplomat and his wife. It was black tie, of course, and I had steeled myself for an evening of polite conversation. Instead, our host took us to see the smartest show in town and the hardest to get into, the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races. Two years later, in Hollywood, I met the protean author of Groucho and Me, and I’ll be darned if we were not, within five minutes, engaged in a serious discussion of Henry James’s ghost story “The Jolly Corner.”

  There is nothing ghostly or ghosted about Groucho and Me. The “Me” is a comparatively unknown Marx named Julius Henry Marx. Groucho and Julius are one, but not the same. The latter is a writer from away back. When The New Yorker was six weeks old, in April 1925, it printed the first of four short casuals that year, signed Julius H. Marx. In 1929 there were three more pieces in the magazine, this time signed Groucho Marx. I think Harold Ross had insisted that Groucho come out from behind his real name and admit, you might say, who he wasn’t.

  Julius-Groucho’s New Yorker pieces consisted of anecdotes, dialogues, jokes, and reminiscences. They dealt with vaudeville, Boston, the Middle West, and press agents, and there was one entitled “Buy It, Put It Away, and Forget About It.” It appeared in May 1929 and began like this: “I come from common stock. I always planned to begin my autobiography
with this terse statement. Now that introduction is out. Common stock made a bum out of me.”

  This is the way the autobiography of Julius H. Marx actually begins: “The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can’t fool around. If you write about some one else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself, the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.” Julius often cuffs himself about like that, and he takes Groucho in his stride. You learn about the comedian almost incidentally, for the book turns its brightest spotlight on the humorist, wit, essayist, philosopher, and man of many worlds.

  The twenty-eight chapters are, in part, a saga of the five sons of a Yorkville tailor and his wife, and of how they came out of the Nowhere into the Here, out of the small time into the big time, out of a dark obscurity and into a luminous fame. Well, there was one spark of immortality in the family to begin with. A maternal uncle of the Marx boys was Mr. Shean, who rode to undying fame in the company of Mr. Gallagher.

  In the song “Fine and Dandy” there is a line that goes, “Even trouble has its funny side,” but Groucho, as I shall call him from now on, shows not only the funny side of trouble, but also the troublesome side of fun. Before the Marx Brothers became an everlasting part of our great comedic history and tradition, they ran the hard gamut of everything. The purely autobiographical chapters, in the swift, expert, and uniquely witty style of the master, tell how the young Marxes—Chico, the eldest, was the only one to graduate from grammar school—survived the abuses, loneliness, crookedness, and cruelty of small-time vaudeville without becoming disenchanted by show business, although they had to fight for a livelihood, learned to carry blackjacks, and to hold their own with the monsters called theatre managers. The only hospitality they enjoyed in the awful early years on the road was supplied by sporting houses and pool rooms, for the actor was suspect, not glamorous, in those days.