CHAPTER 105
Months earlier, Noam types what he’ll say,
Good afternoon. First on behalf of Ava and myself let me thank you all not only for coming today, but for the utter devotion so many of you showed to my father during the months of his illness. You truly were a comfort. We are all very sad today. My father, through the brute force of his talent, intellect and personality altered the course of so many people’s lives. He was many things, a gifted musician, a unique entertainer, a brilliant thinker capable of penetrating original insights. He was also extremely critical in judgments, but when he admired people, he went all out to tell them of it. And because there was no deception in him, his praise meant more than anyone else’s. How many of us would be the same today, in careers, in our families, in our knowledge, in our outlooks and beliefs if we had not encountered his life, and his creations. I, of course, can’t even imagine how I would be. I learned almost everything I know from my father. I had guitar teachers, but I learned to be a musician in our living room. I went to law school, but I had already been taught logical thinking at our dinner table. I’ve read countless books on business, but none of them has imparted anything more than my father’s constant adage, you give good, you get good. As my father liked to say, all the rest is commentary. My father also taught me to value my own happiness in life. He pressured me heavily to go to law school, but when it turned out that I didn’t enjoy the practice, he embraced my decision to give it up. He was flexible enough to recognize that my happiness should always come first. There were other lessons. A funeral is no time to avoid the truth, and as many of you know, my father never held his tongue, especially at funerals. So let me tell you that my father was fond of bragging that he had taught me by example to stay away from marijuana and having too many girlfriends. In fact, I think he tried to teach us all that. My father definitely did not believe in life after death or karma. He would dismiss those notions as flaky, or supernatural. But as I said, he did believe that if you give good, you get good, which, I think, is really as succinct a definition of karma as anyone has ever offered. Still, for many of you who might believe that a man’s fortune in life is impacted by his goodness, it should be very easy to deduce that my father was a very good man. He had success and happiness in everything he endeavored. He loved his life, and never more than in his final years, enjoying the enormous success of the Comedy Cellar, and sitting at the table with his adopted second family, his beloved comedians. Even in the nature of his death he was fortunate. He had almost no suffering. And, although cancer ravaged his body, it left his mind and amazingly his remarkable sense of humor intact. He was fortunate in that he did not die suddenly. He had time to have his final words with all his old friends and associates. He had the opportunity to fully express his feelings to his wife, Ava, and, most importantly for me, he and I had the time to settle our differences, which were minor, and affirm our love for each other which endures. He was able to die with a peaceful mind, and I am able to live with one. He thus left me with a precious gift which not every son receives. I think one can see the goodness and gain insight into my father’s character by hearing the things he worried about in his final months. Even when things like money could no longer make a difference to him, he worried about the health and vibrancy of his businesses. From his hospital bed, he worried about the hummus in his last week with the same intensity that he would have twenty years ago. Some of you may have never fully understood this about him, but making money was never important to my father. Never. It was his artistic creations, his businesses, that he worried about. Their health was an end in itself. Money, my father used to say, was a fortunate by-product, not a motivation. He worried about his dog Belle, and whether she had her step pillow that she needed to get on and off the couch without help. He worried about Israel and the future of the Jewish people. A recent conversation on the subject moved him to tears. Still, at the same time he took enormous pride in the devotion he was shown by so many of the Arabic people with whom he had worked. He loved them. They knew very well how my father felt about the most important issues in their lives, yet they adored him in return. This was also one of my father’s remarkable gifts. He worried about his integrity, about having done the right thing, this was very important to him. He worried about me and Ava, intensely. He made us take an oath that we would always stay together and care for each other. He spent almost no time worrying about himself. He was remarkably brave. They say there are supposed to be five stages to death, denial, anger, and so on. Not so. With my father there was only one, acceptance, and he reached it on day one. With him, human psychology was no match for the logic of the situation. Finally, if any more indication was needed of my father’s goodness, how else can one explain that he was able to earn the boundless love of someone as good as Ava? My father would never forgive me if anyone were to leave here today without knowing that Ava did not leave his side once, not once, not even for a short time during the last three months of his life. She took care of his most intimate needs, and, as he put it to me, did things which no one should have to do, and she did them happily, and she did them with love. I’ve tried to come up with the proper words to describe her devotion, but I really can’t. No one can. We tend to use the word love trivially and casually in even the most minor relationships. But there is simply no word in the English language to describe the self-sacrifice she has shown him. I had a thought, that just as the Eskimo language has ten words to describe the various types of snow, English needs a word reserved simply for this most unusual and selfless type of love, a love which is seen only rarely, like great genius is seen only rarely, a love in a sense defiant of nature, in that it develops not between a parent and child, not based on blood or biology, but between strangers, a man and a woman who meet by chance. When it comes to Ava, I think the English language falls short. The love between a parent and child is easier to understand. Still, no son could be more sure of a father’s love than I. Even as a small child I knew it was special. Many fathers with much more free time and much less responsibility routinely leave their children. My father swore never to leave me. While my father was sick, I was reminded bittersweetly of so many memories. When I felt his head for a fever, I remembered how he would check my head for a fever, and how his hand felt. When he was undergoing a painful procedure, I remembered how, when I was young, he had once intervened to prevent a doctor from hurting me, and to let me catch my breath, but this time I couldn’t protect him as he had protected me. And as New Year’s Eve approached I remembered how every year at midnight he would come over to the Wha to hug me and kiss me, and how during years we were fighting, I dreaded the arrival of midnight, because I knew he wouldn’t be coming. And I knew he must have been suffering as well. All those things are behind me now, and all of us. I mentioned, my father always claimed that he did not believe in life after death, but of course even he didn’t know for sure. Still, today, after the burial, many of us will come back to the Olive Tree to sit together and reminisce. We’ll sit in that beautiful room which he built, with its beautiful colors, the stained glass ouds and star of David, Ava’s wonderful drawings, Charlie Chaplin on the screen, and in the background we’ll hear the laughter of the comedians and his music playing, in essence an enduring mosaic of my father’s life and his interests, and we can take comfort that in this world, the existence of which we can all be sure of, he has in essence achieved his immortality. Thank you all for coming.
CHAPTER 104
Mohamed El-Taweel: He’s in the bed, I swear to god, he told me, ‘Take care of the chicken.’ Do you believe it? He said to take care of the chicken. The man’s finished. Tomorrow he dies and he still worry about the chicken.
CHAPTER 103
Noam: It had actually metastasised to his brain.
CHAPTER 102
Noam: But it started with lung cancer.
CHAPTER 101
Noam: He had been a heavy cigarette smoker until I guess he was fifty, around
fifty, so the doctors seemed to think that probably had the biggest impact.
CHAPTER 100
Noam: I remember saying to him that I thought the Comedy Cellar was going to go downhill. I said, ‘Well, Tough Crowd will eventually get cancelled.’
Author: How did you know it was going to get cancelled?
Noam: Everything eventually gets cancelled. And Seinfeld’s documentary was over and I just felt we’d had a lot of lucky breaks all in a row, and our luck was going to run out, and then the Comedy Cellar would dissipate.
CHAPTER 99
Author: You said there was a period when you’d fallen out with your dad, and at New Year’s Eve you hated it because you knew he wasn’t going to come over and say Happy New Year like you used to, but then you made up with him before he died. But I just wondered what it was that you fell out about?
Noam: Oh it was over some business stuff. Stupid stuff.
Author: Was he disagreeing with what you were doing at the Cafe Wha or was it to do with money?
Noam: It wasn’t to do with money. He was worried. He didn’t like for whatever reason that I was expanding at the Village Underground and Fat Black Pussycat. And to this day I don’t know why he took it to the extreme that he did. I don’t know, but it became very ugly between us. And looking back on it, it’s so stupid. It’s not like anybody ever did anything to anybody. There was never one of these stories of betrayal from one party to another. There was nothing like that. It was really just … I don’t know. It was just a small thing which got blown out of proportion. I don’t know why.
Author: Things like that happen in families don’t they. Did you literally not speak to him for a long time?
Noam: We were never not talking, but it became very, you know, very short, tense conversations.
Author: And in the end it seems to me you demonstrated that the Village Underground could succeed as a music club and Fat Black Pussycat could succeed as a bar, but was that before he died or did you never get to demonstrate to him that they were viable businesses?
Noam: Yeah, they were both viable before he died, especially the Fat Black Pussycat. Yeah, I don’t know. Ava could probably tell you better. I don’t know if she wants to talk about that. She had his ear at the time in a way that I didn’t and, you know, I don’t really go into it with her, so I don’t know.
Author: Before he died did he ever actually say, ‘Noam, you did well’? Was there any kind of making amends like that?
Noam: Just to be clear, I don’t think it’s because he didn’t think I could run the businesses. That’s what’s weird about it. He just didn’t like the idea that I had these businesses. He didn’t expect me to fail I don’t think. That wouldn’t have made him angry. So, no. When he was sick at the end he made remarks like, you know, it was clear that this didn’t matter at that point.
CHAPTER 98
Ava: He bought every newspaper because he liked to know all the different …
Noam: The Times, the Post, whatever news magazines.
Ava: And when he used to speak with the comedians when they talked about politics and stuff, he’d give them things to read.
Noam: Sometimes he’d buy them all a copy of the same book and tell them, ‘I want you to read this and then we’ll talk about it. You’re not ready to talk about this. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Ava: But he would talk about both sides of it, the Left and the Right side, so he wanted to see the whole picture.
Author: Can you think of a book he did that with?
Noam: Yeah, The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz. He must have bought fifty copies of that book.
Ava: And then on the other hand when a book came out … I don’t know if you remember, Benny something or other.
Noam: Benny Morris, Righteous Victims.
Ava: Which questioned the history of Israel, he was the first one to say it, and it upset Estee and a lot of people, because he was giving the other point of view.
CHAPTER 97
Colin: He’d be like, ‘Let me ask you something, why do you believe Palestine? Okay, now let me ask you this. What are you basing that on?’ So he’d be very logical. He’d be, like, ‘Well are you talking about …’ And you’d be like, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ And he’d go, ‘So if you don’t know then why would you come to that conclusion?’
CHAPTER 96
Colin: You’d come in and he’d be like, ‘Listen, I want you to read this.’ Noam does too with these young guys. ‘I want you to read this,’ it was before email really, ‘And I’m going to come back and I’m interested to see what you think of this, because I’ll tell you what I think when you read it.’ And then you read it and you sit around and have these, like, Socratic … He loved ideas.
Author: You said when you first came to the Cellar it was an amazing place. You loved it straight away and then it started to be like the Left Bank in Paris, these chain-smoking Israelis talking about deep stuff.
Colin: Right, it’s always what I envisaged the Village would be, you know.
Author: Did you read the stuff that he asked you to read?
Colin: Of course. We were very close. He liked to talk. He liked to make you talk. He was like that. That’s why I say, like, Socratic … He’s like, ‘What do you think about that?’ And that’s how Noam is too. ‘Okay, I understand that, what is the answer?’ And he’s just like his father in that way, he wants to probe, but he’s not trying to catch you. He’s not trying to win. He’s trying to find that essential truth to things, and if you have it then he’s more than happy to hear it.
CHAPTER 95
Author: What did Manny say?
Louis CK: He said, ‘You’re an idiot’. I said, ‘Why do you just say I’m an idiot?’ And he said, ‘Did you hear Bush say that we’re doing it for oil? Did he say that?’ I said, ‘No, of course he didn’t’. He said, ‘Then you’re just a fucking idiot because can you read inside of a person’s mind? Is this something that you know about him?’ ‘No, but look, he has an oil company and he invaded an oil country.’ He’s like, ‘Do you hear what an asshole and an idiot you sound like? You don’t know these things.’ He said, ‘Limit yourself to the things that you know about this person and things that he has represented. You don’t think you can argue there? You don’t think that you have enough?’ So I refocused my argument and I remembered that Bush had said that he was doing this war to promote democracy and the thing was that they weren’t letting any parties run in the elections really that they didn’t like, so I said, ‘I think it’s bullshit that it’s for democracy.’ And he said, ‘There you have an argument.’
Author: Right. So this was probably 2003?
Louis: So I think it was Bush, the second Bush perpetrating the war after 9/11, I think that’s what it was. But it informed my thinking because you can just drink a beer and talk shit, but if you really want to get to the bottom of something you engage with what people are actually saying, and it’s usually enough. And I wish people thought like that more. People create a fake person out of somebody like a politician, they create their own image, and then they argue with that, and it gets you nowhere. So anyway. And you could extrapolate that to a lot of things, not just politics. Having a little more civility to your thinking by dealing with reality.
CHAPTER 94
Jim Norton: Manny is the only non-comedian — he literally could have a table of comedians shut the fuck up and listen to him. It’s amazing. Everyone respected him, not because he was the owner, but because he was really funny and really smart, and he was very considerate in his arguments, and very, very ferocious, and he would yell. I saw him, one time I was at the table and Manny and somebody were talking about the Middle East. And Manny, he loved to argue about the Middle East. And good luck debating that with him. And somebody listening at the bar overheard. It might have even been me and Manny debating something, but not e
ven that passionately because I knew Manny knew way more than I did about that shit. I only played devil’s advocate. And the guy at the bar goes, ‘I don’t agree with that.’ And Manny goes, ‘What do you mean you don’t agree with it?’ You know, Manny was drinking, and the guy goes, ‘I just don’t.’ And Manny’s like, ‘Well, come over, defend yourself.’ And the guy’s like, ‘Nah, I don’t want to get involved.’ And Manny goes, ‘You’re a coward.’ And he starts screaming at this customer, it’s his fucking customer, this maniac is yelling, and then Manny goes, ‘Oh, I’ll buy you a drink. I own this place.’ And the guy goes, ‘Who the hell are you?’ ‘I own this place.’ So he gets the guy to come over and sit down and have a drink and in ten minutes they’re friends.
Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) Page 15