Make 'Em Laugh Read online

  Copyright 2008 © by Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Twelve

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  Twelve is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

  The Twelve name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: December 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55575-3

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  Chapter One: SLIP ON A BANANA PEEL

  Chapter Two: SOCK IT TO ME?

  Chapter Three: NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK

  Chapter Four: “WOULD YA HIT A GUY WITH GLASSES?”

  Chapter Five: HONEY, I’M HOME! BREAD-WINNERS AND HOME-MAKERS

  Chapter Six: WHEN I’M BAD, I’M BETTER

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  VIDEOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To our wives:

  To Kathy, who knows funny, but still loves me.

  —MK

  To Genevieve, three laughs a day, guaranteed.

  —LM

  INTRODUCTION

  So, these two Jewish guys go into a public broadcasting network …

  “Laugh, and the world laughs with you” goes the familiar adage, but around the world people laugh at different things and for different reasons. Make ’Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America explores what has made America laugh over the past one hundred years, and why. It’s not (necessarily) a collection of our favorite bits, nor is it an academic treatise on the nature of comedy; as the great essayist E. B. White once put it, “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” As early as 1931, Constance Rourke, in her pioneering study American Humor, wrote that “If the American character is many-sided, at least a large and shadowy outline has been drawn by its many ventures into comedy.” Make ’Em Laugh is an attempt to fill in that outline with the trends and tensions that have exploded onto the scene in the subsequent eight decades.

  What makes American humor particularly (or peculiarly) American? Different answers have emerged from the more than one hundred different artists and comedians interviewed for the series. Many of them pointed to the diversity of the “melting pot,” our cheek-by-jowl interaction with so many different cultures, each one straining, in some way, to become assimilated into the dominant culture. Roseanne Barr sees comedy as the key to acceptance: “If you can make fun of your own in front of the dominant culture here, you can live next door to ’em.” Other comedians look at the putative protections of the First Amendment; Jeff Foxworthy notes that “we have the freedom to talk about [issues] without fear of retribution. You can say, ‘Hey, isn’t this weird?’ or ‘Boy, I don’t like what the leader of our government is doin’.’ You can’t do that other places.” Norman Lear points to a larger cultural denominator: “Anywhere you look in America there’s a tremendous amount of excess, so of course comics are working their hearts out to audiences who are demanding louder, more vulgar, more interesting excess.” Comedy veteran Rose Marie echoes many comedians who, frankly, don’t even consider the question worth asking: “Funny is funny. No matter what language. No matter who says it.”

  Still, comedy in America has evolved over five centuries; it remains an amalgam of cultural influences and comedic forms—many of which are derived from European art forms, such as the commedia dell’arte—that have melded with more homegrown entertainments such as the minstrel show or the vaudeville stage to create something distinctly American. In Make ’Em Laugh, we have identified six different categories of American comedy. Three of them are genres that have been reshaped or defined by American comedic geniuses—physical comedy, satire and parody, domestic comedy—and the other three categories identify archetypes that represent our national character: the wiseguy, the outsider, and the groundbreaker. What’s truly fascinating is that, in each case, every generation and every new ethnic arrival to our shores absorbs the genre and adds to its complexion, evolution, and tradition.

  Comics’ comics: Jack Benny, Jonathan Winters, Richard Pryor.

  Comedians are among our bravest individuals. Some of them have spent decades refining one unforgettable persona; others derive their strength from their transformative abilities as shape-shifters. Still, every night (sometimes both for the ten o’clock and the midnight shows) and every episode and every film—armed with only a nimble mind and a supple body—comedians have to face the monster with a thousand eyes that crosses its arms in front of its chest and demands: make me laugh. Tough stuff. But comedians are also the most generous of artists; every comedian, writer, or director interviewed for this series expressed gratitude to and admiration for someone who came before them. (Interestingly, the three most cherished comedians—by comedians themselves—were Jack Benny, Jonathan Winters, and Richard Pryor.)

  Comedians, even the most misanthropic of them, are also optimists—“Well, if you didn’t like that one, maybe you’ll find this one funny”—and perhaps that, more than anything else, makes them quintessentially American. By telling their stories (and a few of their jokes), we hope to make you laugh.

  CHAPTER ONE

  SLIP ON A BANANA PEEL

  THE KNOCKABOUTS

  It is funnier to bend things than to break them. If one comedian hits another over the head with a crowbar, the crowbar should bend, not break. In legitimate drama, the hero breaks his sword, and it is dramatic. In comedy, the sword bends, and stays bent.

  —W. C. Fields

  THE BIG (GER) PICTURE

  It’s not surprising that the world of physical comedy should have its own physics. The very word slapstick—synonymous with physical comedy—comes from a mechanical object created for the commedia dell’arte players of the seventeenth century. These knock-about comics realized that an exaggerated physical movement deserved an exaggerated sound—a slap worked better than a punch—so they created a wooden bat with a blade down the middle that would smack against the base, thereby creating a great whopping whack! And, proving that experimentation is the name of the game in physical comedy, gunpowder was added to the blades of the slapstick in the nineteenth century.

  The vocabulary of physical comedy has not changed much since the commedia dell’arte: the pratfall, the kick in the pants, the tumble, the double take. What has changed, beginning with the American silent film comedies of the 1910s that revolutionized the world, is the relation of physical comedy to the world of modern mechanization. Henri Bergson, the French literary critic, wrote a famous essay, “Laughter,” in 1900 in which he held the relationship of man to machine as key to comedy. He felt that audiences laughed at two basically interdependent ideas: that we are amused when comic incidents reduce human beings to mechanized objects, and when mechanized objects seem to take on an anthropomorphic life of their own. The history of physical comedy in America since Bergson wrote his essay can, in some ways, be seen as the tension between those ideas; the comedians who have found ways to make us laugh by mechanizing themselves (bending, not breaking) and their manipulation of the various mechanisms created by technology (film, animation) in the service of laughter.

  A physical comedian is immediately divorced from the laughter of language; he carries his very best gag with him at all times, his own body. It’s rougher that way—and requires more of a pioneer spirit—but it has its advantages, as the modern clown, Bill Irwin, puts it:

  A s
tand-up comedian, or an actor in a play, has to wait for that laughter to crest, and then say the next thing. When you’ve got something rolling as a physical comic, you can sometimes just keep going because people are laughing, so you can take the next iteration without having to wait for that laughter to die down. Now, that’s useful when they’re laughing. When they’re not laughing, it’s every bit as terrifying as stand-up.

  While a verbal or stand-up comedian has to master content, the physical comedian has to master form. He or she has to know in which medium they are working, and how it can work to their advantage. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harpo Marx, and the Three Stooges had worked in live vaudeville for years before they ever got in front of the camera, so they knew what made audiences laugh; Lucille Ball just dove in, feetfirst. For some comedians, the short form has worked best—again, the Three Stooges were most comfortable in eighteen-minute segments, and luckily, that format was easily translatable to after-school television programs, thereby earning them an entirely new audience in the 1950s and ’60s. Harpo could get away with a series of three-minute bits spread out over ninety minutes; audiences welcomed his appearances as a pleasant respite from Groucho and Chico’s verbal assaults. But length would always be a challenge to these comedians—the sheer energy required of an extensive physical routine is enormous. When early silent two-reelers (about twenty-five minutes) segued to longer features in response to audiences’ tastes, it required a radical rethink of the content of film comedy. As historian Jeffrey Vance put it, “When you went into features your stories had to be believable, otherwise it just wouldn’t hold up, and that was true with all the clowns, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd. The cartoon gags, the impossible gags—gone. Everything had to work for the story.”

  Physical comedians have also been challenged by technology; they can either master it or be mastered by it. Chaplin preferred to keep the camera framed around him like a proscenium arch, so that his pantomime could be seen in its complete form; Buster Keaton was more interested in setting up gags that kept the strings hidden, as it were, in order to confound the audience. But just as the silent masters had figured out the transition to longer features, the technology of sound came in and asked them to rethink their comic strategies one more time. Harold Lloyd had a realistic assessment of the challenge:

  Silents did have a wonderful quality, in that there was a certain relaxation in the theater: you could go in there and do your own imagining of what they would say and how they would say it. It had its own attributes. But of course, we all talk, we see things in color, and we see things in dimensions. That’s progress. [Therefore], practically the whole procedure started to change. It was easier to sit down and talk, to make up verbal quips, to give dialogue instead of visual action, ocular business—gags, we used to call them, pieces of business. The spoken word seemed to be much simpler to get the laughs from, and much cheaper. They could make a picture for much less, because visual comedy is expensive. It takes comedy, it takes pacing, it takes rehearsal to bring it off correctly. As time went on, the comedians seemed to lose the art or knack of doing pantomime.

  Chaplin, famously, refused to give up his art of pantomime for years, claiming, “If I did make a talking picture, I felt sure that when I opened my mouth, I would become just like any other comedian.” He succumbed and recreated himself in a new and interesting way. For some comics, namely the Three Stooges, sound was a blessing—it enabled them to get away with the most violent slapstick, since it could be palatably denatured (oddly enough) by the addition of the most violent soundtrack. Jerry Lewis exploited his innate musicality by underscoring many of his most amusing sequences and letting his body language react and ricochet to the tune.

  Sound also proved to be a boon to the world of animation, allowing cartoons to exploit their visual audacity to the fullest by underscoring them with equally outrageous music and effects. Even the addition of color—intense, shocking color—enhanced the animated experience. The art of animation turned a corner in the mid-1930s when inspired artists like Tex Avery realized that the mere duplication of reality was the very least of what cartoons could achieve: “We found out early that if you did something with a character, either animal or human or whatnot, that couldn’t possibly be rigged up in live action, why then, you’ve got a guaranteed laugh.” Still, as technologically progressive as cartoons could get, they still needed the human factor to connect with an audience. Film historian Leonard Maltin notes that “every animator I ever interviewed or read about in the twenties and well into the thirties, and maybe even beyond, studied Charlie Chaplin. The artists at Disney revered Chaplin, including Walt. They even traced some of his movements in some cases just to see how he did it, because his body language was so extraordinary.”

  Perhaps the threat of being mechanized out of existence is what has made physical comedians extremely protective—of themselves, of their gags, and perhaps most of all, of their props. One of the great ironies of physical comedy is watching a master comedian transform into a complete incompetent when dealing with the props of daily life: Keaton with a boat, Lucy with a blender, Jerry Lewis with a bunk bed. We laugh helplessly to see them undone by the simplest of appliances—but of course we’ve been in the same boat, as it were, ourselves. The supreme joke is that, in rehearsal, these comedians must attain complete mastery of their props in order to unleash such hilarious chaos.

  Pratfalls, Inc: (previous) Chaplin in The Rink; the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis; Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein.

  JUST ASK SOMEONE TO “WALK THIS WAY” —AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

  Bill Irwin says that “Most of us physical comedians are prop comics. Most of us say, ‘Mothers, tell your children to stay clear of prop comedy,’ because it’s all about stuff, and it’s all about the stuff going well. And you’re dependent on stagehands, some of whom, you know, really don’t get it or really could care less sometimes.” Harpo Marx would trust only his own son, Bill, to load and unpack his property case, and trust is a big issue for the physical comedian.

  It makes tremendous sense. A verbal comedian can always get new writers, but a physical comedian writes his fate on his own body—he can’t really send it back for a revision. The great physical comedians were always uncompromising, always in control. They had to be; they are the only comedians who work—figuratively and literally—without a net. What Harold Lloyd had feared in 1927 has come to pass, in a way; there are fewer and fewer comedians left with the knack of pantomime. Some of that may be because our modern age is so complex and so skeptical that it requires the full bore of verbal humor to produce any kind of effect. Some of it may be due to technology, after all; what Pixar can do with toy spacemen and wisecracking donkeys is far beyond the ability of human reality. The current state of computer animation allows audiences and producers to have it both ways; you can contract the voice and personality of a major comedian—Eddie Murphy, say—and attach them digitally to the limitless physical potential of an animator’s imagination. And it’s no use pretending that we don’t laugh as hard at Robin Williams’s Genie in Aladdin as we do at Buster Keaton.

  But still, the pioneering work of the physical comedian lives with us every day. Maybe we don’t laugh at every line of a late-night comic’s monologue, but watching someone slip into an open manhole on the way to work in the morning is surefire. And it’s not as if physical comedy isn’t quotable, either.

  “THE BEST BALLET DANCER THAT EVER LIVED”

  CHARLIE CHAPLIN

  The American is an optimist preoccupied with hustling dreams, an indefatigable tryer. He hopes to make a quick “killing.” Hit the jackpot! Get out from under! Sell out! Make the dough and run! Get into another racket! Yet this immoderate attitude began to brighten my spirit. I began to regain confidence. Whatever happened, I was determined to stay in America.

  –Charlie Chaplin

  Charlie Chaplin sailed past the Statue of Liberty for the first time twice; the first was as a featured comic actor traveling from England
with the Karno American Company in the fall of 1910, the second time was as the Little Tramp in the spring of 1917, in the Mutual Films short The Immigrant. Within seven event-filled years, Chaplin had completely rewritten the Victorian rags-to-riches story for modern times.

  Chaplin’s goal in both of his American arrivals was to get laughs. With the 1917 short, it was immediate:

  Balls in the air: (clockwise from above): Leading actor in Karno’s company; monkeying around in The Circus (1928); The Pawnshop (Mutual, 1916).

  Figuring out what the audience expects, and then doing something different, is great fun to me. In one of my pictures, The Immigrant, the opening scene showed me leaning far over the side of a ship. Only my back could be seen and from the convulsive shudders of my shoulder, it looked as though I was seasick. If I had been, it would have been a terrible mistake to show it in the picture. What I was doing was deliberately misleading the audience. Because when I straightened up, I pulled a fish at the end of a line into view, and the audience saw that, instead of being seasick, I had been leaning over the side to catch the fish. It came as a total surprise and got a roar of laughter.

  His arrival in America in 1910 was part of a longer journey, and it wasn’t all filled with laughter.

  Charles Chaplin was born in London on April 16, 1889, in a working-class district, south of the river Thames. If his childhood was not exactly Dickensian, it was close enough to be miserable. His father was a second-rate music hall entertainer and his mother was an aspiring singer; neither parent’s career was successful and they split up when Chaplin was a boy. Chaplin and his brother, Sydney, had to sit by and watch as their mother slowly degenerated into madness and went in and out of mental institutions. The Chaplin boys were thrown into a spiral of poverty and separation, often being sent to charity schools while their mother was recuperating.