Some Notes on Funniness
Lessons in humor, from grade school to Johnny Carson.
Epiphany
In an interview some years ago, I was asked when I realized that on occasion I could actually make people laugh. Remarkably, I knew. It was in Sunday school. I think I was in sixth grade. I was a shy little boy and, up to that point, insanely well behaved. The story that exemplifies that level of decorum—the only story of my grade-school years in Kansas City that my daughters have ever enjoyed hearing—goes like this: In about third grade, our teacher announced on a Monday morning that there would be an extra recess period on Friday for anyone who had gone the entire week without a check mark for any sort of misbehavior or disturbance. When Friday arrived, I was the only one in the class with no check marks, so my reward was to spend an extra period on the playground all by myself—lonely, bored, and insanely well behaved.
In that Sunday-school class of my epiphany, the teacher, a rather pedantic and self-important man, was droning on about a passage in Psalms—“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” Suddenly, I found myself standing up. In a loud voice, I said, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning.” As I spoke, I extended my right hand from my body at a weird angle, dangling from a limp right arm. I finished the passage with my attempt to replicate the speech of someone whose tongue had cleaved to the roof of his mouth. The class exploded with laughter. The teacher simply exploded. I was ejected from the room.
Was I then transformed into the class clown—the kid who sneaks a whoopee cushion under the pad on the teacher’s chair and is regularly sent to the vice-principal’s office? No. For one thing, there were guardrails at home to prevent that. I’ve often mentioned that, as I interpreted my father’s aspirations for me, he wanted me to become the President of the United States and his fall-back position was that I not become a ward of the county. I’m certain that there were some callings in between that he would have considered acceptable, but none of them began with regular sessions in the vice-principal’s office.
I did, though, make some attempts at humor during my school days. For a high-school literary society, I wrote a few comic short stories, all of which, I devoutly hope, long ago disintegrated at the bottom of some landfill. In a speech to decide the presidency of the Southwest High School student council, I remember saying that more wastebaskets in the halls were needed and that I’d thought of making my campaign slogan “Get swept into office with wastebaskets in the halls.” Feeble? Yes, but it got a laugh. Also, another student and I briefly had a sort of standup act. My partner did foreign accents, the effectiveness of which was enhanced by the fact that most of the people in that audience of Kansas City high-school students had never met a foreigner. The one joke I can remember from the act was a weatherman saying, “Tomorrow will be muggy, followed by Tueggy, Weggy, Thurggy, and Frieggy.” My only defense for that one is that we didn’t make it up; we stole it from a radio disk jockey. At graduation, I wasn’t voted the Funniest Boy. That honor, as I remember, went to a classmate who acted out the records of Spike Jones and His City Slickers, a band that was to music more or less what the Harlem Globetrotters are to basketball. I was voted third Most Likely to Succeed. Third Most Likely to Succeed—now, that’s funny.
Casuals
Astickler for precise language would probably argue that the bookstore shelf labelled “Humor” should really say “Attempts at Humor,” since the word standing alone implies that everyone will be amused. (Describing yourself as a humorist, Ring Lardner said, would be like a baseball player who’d been asked which position he plays saying, “I’m a great third baseman.”) What strikes one person as funny might strike another person as not funny at all. If that scowling man at one of the near tables doesn’t think what the comic just said was funny, there’s no use trying to persuade him that it was. A reminder that the audience at the dinner show found the same joke hilarious wouldn’t help.
For those of us whose attempts at humor are mostly written rather than verbal, the audience is an editor—an audience we, unlike the standup comic, have to please without the tools of timing or expression. In the first decades of my time at The New Yorker, the pieces that we were trying to sell—the sort of light pieces that would these days run under the rubric of Shouts & Murmurs or possibly Personal History—were referred to around the office as “casuals.” Some of the people submitting casuals were, like me, reporters who thought of casual-writing as a sideline. Some were fiction writers drawing a small salary that was ostensibly for writing Talk of the Town pieces. Some were people with no connection to the magazine who simply thought they had come up with something funny. Burton Bernstein, a colleague who published a biography of James Thurber, the nonpareil producer of casuals, wrote once that the casual, which sounds like something tossed off, is actually “one of the more difficult and painstaking forms of writing known to humankind.” Contemplating casual-writing over the past fifty years or so, I’m reminded of how I began a talk I once gave to people graduating from Columbia with master’s-of-fine-arts degrees. “When I tried to think of an appropriate subject for people going into the fields you’re going into,” I said, “the only thing I could come up with was ‘Rejection.’ ” It’s not that we didn’t sell some casuals. But what stands out in my memory is rejection.
Burt Bernstein, for instance, worked for untold hours on a palindromic casual. It was in the form of a play called “Look, Ma, I Am Kool!,” and it had characters delivering lines like “Nail a timid god on rood. Door no dog, dim Italian.” The New Yorker passed. The alternative market for palindromic casuals was not large. Some months later, Burt showed up at my office to announce that he was compiling and editing a book of casuals written by the generation that followed the legendary era of New Yorker writers like Thurber and Benchley and White and Perelman. He asked if I had any pieces that might be included.
“If I may ask,” I said, “am I correct in thinking that this is essentially a scheme you’ve hatched to get ‘Look, Ma, I Am Kool!’ into print?”
“But of course,” Burt said cheerfully.
“In that case,” I said, “Count me in.”
For a time, the magazine had a policy of tacking on a bonus for anyone who sold six casuals in a calendar year. As I recall, the bonus was a higher rate for casuals sold during the remainder of the year, but I always imagined it as something akin to the pinball machine in the movie version of William Saroyan’s “Time of Your Life”: when the machine is finally beaten, lights flash and bells ring and an American flag pops out to wave while “America” is played. Toward the end of one year in what must have been the mid-sixties, Tom Meehan and I had both sold five, and our typewriters were burning up. Tom had written one of the magazine’s iconic casuals—“Yma Dream,” presented as his dream of hosting a party at which he has to introduce people with names like Yma Sumac and Uta Hagen (“ ‘Ona and Ida,’ I say, ‘surely you know Yma and Ava? Ida, Ona—Oona, Abba.’ ”) But he couldn’t come up with the sixth casual that year. Neither could I. When I think of that period, the visual metaphor that comes to my mind is Tom and I meeting on the stairs between our floor and the appropriate editor’s office, one of us carrying a rejected casual and one of us carrying a casual that is about to be rejected.
In the mid-seventies, Tom, a lovely man, seemed to be struggling. His wife was not well. Writing casuals and free-lance pieces was a chancy occupation for a man with a family to support, and the project he’d spent years working on otherwise, the book for a musical, had the marks of a nonpaying long shot. Then, in 1977, the musical actually made it to Broadway. It was “Annie.” It won Tom the first of what turned out to be three Tony Awards, and it seemed destined to run forever.
Not long after “Annie” opened, my wife and daughters and I had tea with Tom and some of the kids who appeared in the musical. I told Tom that everyone at the magazine was delighted about his reversal of fortune. He said that there had been a time when he was beginning to feel like that Woody Allen character in “Annie Hall,” who said life is divided into the terrible and the miserable.
“A Broadway hit can change a lot,” I said.
Tom smiled, and said, quietly, “Smash hit.”
That same year, Burt Bernstein’s anthology was published. It contained, after an astute foreword by Burt on the state of what he termed “literate humor,” contributions from a wide range of casual writers. (I contributed two of my favorites—both New Yorker rejects that had eventually found homes in other magazines.) The title of the anthology was “Look, Ma, I Am Kool! And Other Casuals.”
Here’s Johnny
An essential fact about being a guest on a late-night talk show is this: you don’t have to answer the question. It’s not at all like being interviewed on “60 Minutes.” If you’re asked about how you came to write your novel, and, knowing that a thorough answer could induce mass drowsiness, you tell an amusing story about your mother’s cooking, the host is perfectly satisfied. He’s in the business of entertainment, not information gathering.
During roughly the final fifteen years that Johnny Carson hosted the “Tonight Show,” I was a guest on the show a couple of times a year. I was almost always in what we called the authors’ ghetto—the final guest on the program, the guest who was fated to be bumped if the show went too long. By chance, I never did get bumped, and one time I was actually not last. I was followed by a man who played the saw—the rare guest who was, if necessary, as expendable as a writer.
Appearing on the “Tonight Show” was an odd and unexpected gig for someone whose main line of work was doing reporting pieces for The New Yorker—one evening, the guests were Mr. Rogers, Hulk Hogan, and me—but I enjoyed doing it. I found it easy to talk to Johnny Carson. Part of the reason, I always thought, was that we came from the same part of the country and had similar notions of what was funny. I admired his skill. He could extend a guest’s joke without taking the joke away, for instance, and he could enliven a flat remark with a quip or an expression. That skill was comforting to a guest waiting in the greenroom to go on: it greatly reduced the chances that your appearance would turn into a total debacle.
After the show was taped, the “talent coördinator” who booked me, Jim McCawley, and I would often repair to a nearby Mexican restaurant for a snack before I was picked up and deposited at the airport for the red-eye to New York. One evening, Jim said that Johnny (everyone called him Johnny) was interested in having more “civilians”—that is, non-show-business people—on the program. He’d recently been impressed with a chicken-plucker. (I neglected to ask whether that civilian plucked chickens on the air or demonstrated a new chicken-plucking machine or displayed a talent completely unconnected with his chosen profession.) When Jim asked if I had any suggestions, I said, “I know a remarkable smoke-ring blower—Harry Garrison, from Cincinnati. His personality takes a bit of getting used to—he can seem imperious, particularly when he’s demanding still air for his performance and says something like ‘I detect the sound of human breathing’—but he’s an absolutely brilliant smoke-ring blower. By far the best smoke-ring blower I’ve ever seen. Maybe the best there is.”
“What does he do for a living?” Jim asked, assuming correctly that smoke-ring blowing had to be a sort of sideline.
“He’s a player-piano dealer and calliope restorer,” I said.
Jim looked excited. “Where do I find him?” he said.
No more than three or four days later, Jim phoned to say, “Watch Tuesday.”
I couldn’t believe it. I assumed that there were movie stars who’d waited months or even years for a booking on the “Tonight Show”—perhaps demeaning themselves in a variety of ways in attempting to hurry along the process. Harry Garrison had been booked after one phone call from Jim McCawley.
Then I got busy finishing a piece of reporting and totally forgot to watch the show on Tuesday. The next day, I was having lunch with a friend who asked, “Did you happen to see Carson last night? There was the strangest thing—a guy trying to blow smoke rings.”
“Did you say ‘trying’?” I said.
Apparently, the air-conditioning system in the studio hadn’t been taken into account. Harry went through his whole act, imperiousness and all, but he produced only smoky clouds. I phoned Jim McCawley. “Well, I told you he wasn’t much of a smoke-ring blower,” I said. “Charming guy, in his own way, but not really a first-class smoke-ring blower.”
“Are you kidding?” Jim said. “He’s sure to be on ‘The Best of Carson.’ ”
I could imagine Johnny, arms folded, taking in Harry’s performance with the stare he’d use for observing, say, a man who’d come on to demonstrate a bubble-making machine he’d invented but couldn’t seem to start the two-stroke motor that powered it. The Harry Garrison segment was indeed on “The Best of Carson,” in a short section devoted to what Johnny called disasters. In the right hands, a man trying to blow smoke rings can be funny.
I don’t think Harry Garrison ever thought it was funny. He was, after all, a brilliant smoke-ring blower—a man known in magician circles as the Smoke-Ring King. He hadn’t intended to be the fall guy in a comedy routine. Still, when he died, in 2013, an obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer did say, without elaborating, that his career as a performer included an appearance on the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. ♦
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