Yesterday’s Times included a nice article about Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, who are promoting the new 2000 Year Old Man boxed set. (Apparently the HBO special reported this summer is no longer in the works, as there’s been no recent mention of it.)
The Times interview contains a lot of stories which are very familiar, from previous Reiner/Brooks interviews, but there’s a touching tidbit about the present. Mel and Carl are widowers now, Estelle Reiner having passed away last year, and Anne Bancroft in 2005. But it sounds like they have good company.
Q: Sixty years later it seems you see a lot of each other now.
REINER: Yeah, we got that big screen [gestures to incredibly large flat-screen monitor] to look at television.
Q: So you come here, Mel, and you watch TV together?
BROOKS: Almost every night. He’s got a wonderful housekeeper-cook and we decide on a menu and a movie.
Q: What did you watch most recently?
BROOKS: We watched last night The Peacemaker. With Nicole Kidman and, come on. [He gestures to Mr. Reiner.]
REINER: George Clooney.
BROOKS: Right. It was two and a half stars at the most. Good performances, very silly, you know.
REINER: We look for movies with the line “Secure the perimeter.”
BROOKS: Yeah, we like movies that say, “Secure the perimeter” and/or “You better get some rest.”
The Mark Twain Prize is for giants only. Its previous recipients, since the award originated in 1998, are Richard Pryor, Carl Reiner, Jonathan Winters, Whoopi Goldberg, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin, Lorne Michaels, Steve Martin, Neil Simon, Billy Crystal, and George Carlin. Last night, the program premiered on PBS (and you can see the whole thing online), and watching it I found myself drawing parallels between Twain and Cosby which hadn't occurred to me before. All humorists, at least in America, are descendants of Twain, but Bill Cosby must be our most Twainian comedian. What distinguished him, from the very beginning, was not a facility with jokes, but with stories. Bill Cosby is one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived, and his classic, still peerless standup routines were as artfully constructed and as packed with observation as Mark Twain's short stories. And in the wider scope of his career as a humanitarian activist and social critic, Cosby has shown a Twainian concern for the equality and welfare of all people, as well as a quickness to criticize those who he perceives as standing in the way of progress.
The broadcast was quite enjoyable, with memorable tributes from Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Steven Wright, Dick Gregory, and others. The highlights were the clips, a great assortment of film and television excerpts from Cosby's long career, some of which were new to me. One rarity, broadcast on television in the late Seventies and unseen since then, showed Cosby recreating his "Street Football" routine with a group of children on the streets of Philadelphia. There was ample evidence that nobody has more fully mastered the art of standup comedy: The dentist routine, the chocolate cake routine, the Noah's Ark routine. And there were moments from The Cosby Show, when he became not only an exemplar of upper middle class African-American life, but America's Favorite Dad.
The Mark Twain Prize section of the PBS website carries this quote from Twain: "Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever." Cosby is aware, as Twain was aware, of the power of laughter to transform lives. (Twain held in The Mysterious Stranger that "against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.") He's also aware that humor has to sneak its social significance in the side door, that no lesson is better learned than the one you didn't realize you were learning, because you were laughing so hard you couldn't breathe. Those are the moments we never forget, and it's hard to think of a comedian who has given us more of them than Bill Cosby. Forever doesn't seem like long enough.
Larry David continues to make us wait for the real substance of the Seinfeld reunion arc on Curb Your Enthusiasm, which apparently will dominate the latter two of the three remaining episodes in the season. Meanwhile, he's found plenty of ways to stretch the stylistic possibilities of Curb; last week's bizarre flashback to the Sixties is one example; this week's mob movie treatment of Larry's country club murder is another. Last week's installment, "The Bare Midriff," half-heartedly advanced the Seinfeld plot, and included a few golden scenes between Larry and Jerry. But the best thing about it was an element of religious satire, which was clearly successful, as it touched a nerve with the people being satirized.
"Why is it that people are allowed to publicly show that level of disrespect for Christian symbols?" sputtered Catholic writer Deal Hudson, who apparently has spent so much time reading the Bible that he never got around to the Bill of Rights. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League and enemy of rational thought, expressed similar outrage. There are a few Christian groups (and even one Muslim group) trying to get people to drop HBO. Right-wing radio moron Michael Savage, who says he detests Hollywood's image of the whiny, paranoid Jew, whined that Larry David "needs to be stopped before he brings terrible calamity upon the Jewish people."
It's hard to believe anyone could be that upset about a character in a television show accidentally urinating on a picture. (In the episode, Larry is taking a medication that intensifies his urinary stream and causes "splashback.") They'll tell you that Larry David peeing on Jesus is not funny, and they're absolutely right -- it wasn't funny. It wasn't supposed to be funny. It was the setup. The joke -- which was funny, and brilliantly so -- was that Maureen and her mother saw the urine on the Jesus painting and immediately assumed Jesus was crying and it was a miracle. That was great satire, and the way you can tell it was great satire is that the very people who think they see Jesus in their grilled cheese didn't get it. And boy, are they -- if you'll excuse me -- pissed off.
Their outrage, like their religious faith, is ridiculous, and it deserves to be mocked and criticized. Unsurprisingly, they don't even know what they're talking about. They characterize "The Bare Midriff" as a descent into sacrilege ("Was Larry David always this crude?" thundered Donohue), so they obviously haven't seen the wonderful third-season episode "Mary, Joseph, and Larry" (another hilarious and on-target satire of religious delusion). They also keep saying that everyone picks on Christians, whereas Larry David wouldn't dare make fun of Islam. Wrong again: The fourth-season Curb episode "The Blind Date" featured Moon Unit Zappa as a Muslim woman named Haboos, who has a decidedly unspiritual reason for keeping herself hidden under a burka. In other words, the people who are upset about the Jesus painting story are people who don't watch Curb anyway, who have defiled their psyches with so much mythology and superstition that there is no room left for a sense of humor.
It's been an amusing detour, but let's get on with the show. Next week's episode, entitled "Officer Krupke," will probably deal with Seinfeld marginally, but it's followed by two forty-minute episodes, entitled "The Table Read" (November 16) and "Seinfeld" (November 23). And I wonder if that will be the last episode ever of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Seinfeld reunion could be a perfect coda to the series, and except for the Seinfeld stuff (and the peeing on Jesus), the seventh season feels a little strained. Seinfeld ran for nine seasons, but Larry David left the show after seven. Now, once again, it might be time to move on to something else.
We're in the midst of two big comedy events on television, which deserve a word here.
First of all, we're three parts into the new six-part Monty Python documentary, Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut), airing on IFC. So far, the documentary is compulsively enjoyable, even though there have already been too many Python reunions, revivals, and retrospectives in the last decade. Since the Pythons themselves are so gleeful about exploiting their franchise, and since it's still such a thrill just to see them, I'm happy to go along for the ride again. This time, the supposed hook is the candor of the surviving Pythons in their contemporary interviews. But it's hard to imagine a devoted Monty Python fan who's made it to 2009 without ever hearing John Cleese belittle Terry Jones.
The Beatles Anthology is the obvious model for Almost the Truth, and it's at its best when it follows the Anthology example and concentrates on footage of, and interviews with, the artists themselves. The first two episodes, in my opinion, were much too full of interviews with non-Python people like Russell Brand, Steve Coogan, and Tim Roth, declaring their love for the team, but not adding much to the proceedings. Listening to Russell Brand explain why he thinks Python is funny recalls the time George W. Bush boasted, "I read three Shakespeares." But this is a minor quibble. Almost the Truth is worth watching, and the real treat is the Python festival with which IFC has surrounded it. Monty Python's Flying Circus is probably still the most inventive comedy on television.
The other big event, of course, is the paradigm-shifting Seinfeld reunion, which is happening not in our world but in the parallel reality of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The concept alone -- not doing a Seinfeld reunion in real life, but satirizing the whole idea by doing it on Curb -- is a stroke of meta-genius. But now, halfway into Curb's seventh ten-episode season, the thrill of Seinfeld Curbed is something we're mostly still waiting for. Of the five episodes which have aired so far, only one (the third) has directly involved the Seinfeld plot (though it's been mentioned, in passing, in three others). Episode three, "The Reunion," was exhilarating -- a gem, elevated by the crossed paths of Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Michael Richards. Glimpses of the old magic (and the old set!) delighted me more than I'd care to admit.
That third episode was full of golden moments: Larry's two fantasy sequences on the Seinfeld set, his new habit of saving people's lives by telling them they might have Lyme disease, and every second of footage which contained a performance by a Seinfeld cast member. Larry's battle of wills with Jason Alexander -- in which, essentially, two George Costanzas argue over a restaurant tip -- deserves a place in comedy history (alongside the existentially vexing David/Alexander encounter from Curb's second season; clip here). In the big two-scene between Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, there is a small and innocuous moment which made me laugh more than it probably should have: Jerry, not entirely convinced of the wisdom of doing a reunion show, gives in to Larry's uncurbed enthusiasm. He looks Larry in the eye and says, "I trust your judgment. I trust you!" I trust you! Jerry delivers this line with a hint of mania, slightly deranged. At this point, after six and a half years of Curb Your Enthusiasm, there's only one man in the world who would say that to TV Larry.
But who is that man? It's not TV Jerry -- who we got to know over nine years of the greatest situation comedy in television history. Nor did "The Reunion" show us Alexander as George, Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine, or Richards as Kramer. The four of them are playing themselves, but not really; they're playing fictional versions of their non-fiction selves, filtered through the sensibility of Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm. A lot of the fun of this venture comes from the competing layers of fiction and reality which these people have spent two decades constructing.
But at this point, we've only been teased. This season's other four Curb episodes have been fairly typical -- which is to say, painfully funny, cringe-inducing, and by now somewhat routine. There are five episodes left in the season, and early word was that the Seinfeld reunion arc would span five episodes, so most of the fun is still ahead. Next week's installment apparently returns to the Seinfeld story, and the season's final episode (which Jerry says "really belongs in the Seinfeld DVD box") airs on November 22 and will be an hour long. I'm looking forward to getting on with it. This addendum to Seinfeld is an event, but it has overshadowed the larger truth: Curb Your Enthusiasm itself has always been an addendum to Seinfeld.
The lack of recent updates to Noah's Comedy Palace can be explained in several ways -- increased activity on the Nero Fiddled political blog (including our new video, "Corporations Are People Too"), freelance work, and songwriting (for a forthcoming political project to be announced eventually). Also, I've been working on a book about comedy, and much of the writing effort I'd normally direct toward this blog has been going into the book.
The Comedy Palace shall reopen soon with new articles about comedians we have not yet featured. But in the meantime, there are three comedy events I wanted to acknowledge here.
First, there was the death, a few weeks ago, of Larry Gelbart. One of the greatest comedy writers of all time, Gelbart emerged from the legendary Sid Caesar writers' room, alongside Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Mel Tolkin, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, et al. (When Gelbart first met Woody Allen, then sixteen years old, he was told, "I want you to meet the young Larry Gelbart." Gelbart snapped back, "The young Larry Gelbart is right here.") The highest peaks of his achievement -- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, M*A*S*H, Tootsie -- are as high as anyone's, and his name belongs in any account of American humor in the twentieth century.
Secondly, two days ago I celebrated Groucho Marx's 119th birthday by watching two performances of his signature entrance song, "Hello, I Must Be Going" -- first as performed in Animal Crackers in 1930 (when Groucho was forty), and then as performed on the Dick Cavett show in 1971 (when he was 81). I've probably said it before, but there's never been a greater comic artist, and there's probably never been any greater artist. David Steinberg said, "The most influential people who have ever lived are Jesus Christ, Alexander the Great, and Groucho Marx, and not necessarily in that order." Happy birthday, Dr. Hackenbush.
And finally, there's tonight's episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm -- the third episode of the new season, and the long-awaited beginning of the Seinfeld reunion story arc discussed previously at the Comedy Palace. Needless to say, the web is rife with clips, scoops, and rumors, destined to make your eyes glaze over as you defiantly shut your laptop and wait to just watch the goddamn thing. But this heartwarming behind-the-scenes featurette is a nice way to whet your appetite without plumbing the shallows of entertainment news.
Yesterday, Larry David appeared at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, and answered some burning questions about the Seinfeld reunion which shall grace the upcoming seventh season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. David explained:
The context is that for years I've been asked about a Seinfeld reunion. I would always say, "No. There's not going to be a reunion show. We would never do that. It's a lame idea." And then I thought it might be very funny to do that on Curb. I kept thinking about it. I started to think of different scenarios and how we can pull this off. I called Jerry and Jerry was game. I said, "Well, I'll call the others." And I did and we did it. So we're doing a Seinfeld reunion show on Curb.
...We're going to see writing. We'll see aspects of the read-through, parts of rehearsals. You'll see the show being filmed and you'll see it on TV. You won't see the entire show. You'll see parts of the show. You'll get an idea of what happened [to the Seinfeld characters] years later. It will be incorporated into regular Curb episodes, so the cast members will be playing themselves on Curb while all of this is going on.
...The reunion is scattered through the season and I think the cast will be on five shows. All four won't be on all five shows. Jerry is on five shows; the others will be on at least four. The season finale will be about the reunion show. It could very well be [a one-hour episode], but I haven't finished editing it yet. But that's a good possibility.
David further revealed that "it's possible" there will be some reference to Michael Richards' deeply unfortunate racist tirade at the West Hollywood Laugh Factory in 2006. When a reporter asked if the Seinfeld reunion-within-a-Curb-episode would be any good, David replied, "You mean, as opposed to the finale?" Then the reporter asked what David now thought of the much-maligned 1998 Seinfeld finale. "Excellent show! Excellent show!" So what does he think of all the people who were disappointed with it? "Morons! Morons!"
The Seinfeld reunion material was co-written by David and Seinfeld, a process which was "surprisingly smooth," according to David, though "coming up with the right ideas of what’s happened in eleven years, that took some thought." At the end of the Seinfeld finale, you may remember, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer were sentenced to one year in prison. On some occasions (notably the "Scenes from the Roundtable" feature on the Seinfeld ninth season DVD set), they've discussed the possibility of filming one more scene, in which the Seinfeld four, having been released from prison one year later, trudges into the familiar coffee shop, and launches right into the old banter: "Boy, that was brutal!" There was no indication that the scene would actually be filmed, though in a 2007 Jerry Seinfeld appearance on The Daily Show (to promote Bee Movie), Jon Stewart spoke for all of us when he begged Seinfeld to do it.
Jason Alexander reveals that "the Jason on Curb feels differently about the Seinfeld show and about Larry David than the real Jason. The Curb Jason is a little more hostile, to put it in a nutshell." This we know. If there's any place to look for an indication of what the Seinfeld reunion might look like, it's probably the first episode of Curb's second season, in which David and Alexander attempted to collaborate on a new sitcom project together. In this darkly memorable exchange, the fictional Jason Alexander berates the fictional Larry David for having cast the real Jason Alexander, in Seinfeld, as a fictional version of the real Larry David.
A Rare Look at Woody Allen Performing Standup in 1965
Woody Allen's attitude toward his own work has always been complicated. He's utterly obsessed with a project while he's working on it, and completely dismissive once it's complete. He never watches his films after finishing them, and claims, for example, not to have seen one frame of Take the Money and Run since 1969. This unwillingness to browse his canon has become glaring in the digital era. The forty films of America's foremost auteur are available on DVD, but you won't find a director's commentary track, documentary features, or deleted scenes.
For the same reasons, Allen has always refused to authorize video compilations of his early standup comedy appearances. His audio recordings are out there (and you can listen to the two-disc compilation Woody Allen: The Nightclub Years 1964-1968 for free at archive.org), but video footage has always been hard to come by, not counting the brief standup bits in Annie Hall. The emergence of YouTube helped a little, bringing to light some of Allen's appearances on Dick Cavett (now available on DVD), Hot Dog, The Tonight Show, etc. Most of it is interesting, but none of it offers an extended look at the young Woody Allen performing long-format standup comedy.
Well, it's amazing what you can find on the Internet. In 1965, when Allen was in London working on What's New, Pussycat?, he appeared in a half-hour comedy special for Granada Television. It was produced by the great British impresario Johnnie Hamp, and broadcast only in the U.K. And now, here it is at the Comedy Palace -- in its entirety, with Italian subtitles.
It's strange to encounter something this familiar and also this unusual. Most of us have never actually seen Woody Allen stand there and entertain an audience for any significant length of time (in this case, thirty minutes, interrupted by a musical number from Danny Meehan). If you close your eyes, it's just like listening to his records, but the visual spectacle is slightly jarring. He bops and weaves and nods and leans on the microphone stand; he's in constant, nervous motion. Throughout his set, he incessantly swoops from left to right and back again, in an apparent effort to maintain eye contact with the entire audience. He is great, of course, but he's working too hard.
In Woody Allen: A Biography, Eric Lax describes Woody's reactions while watching some of his early television appearances on video. (This took place in 1989, during the production of Crimes and Misdemeanors.) "It was not a happy experience for him," Lax writes. Allen can barely stand to watch himself:
I'm doing all those things that I hate in people on those shows. I'm a little kindly disposed toward myself because it's me, but if this was another guy, I'd change the channel. I'm milking...it's leaden...I'm no better than any bad comic, any pushy comic. I'm pushy. I think I'm cuter than I am...It's mannered in the form of every comic...In those days it was a little less obvious as material. It's disgusting now. It doesn't hold up well at all. It's not about anything. I'm just a tummler, a guy up there making jokes...
Better that these things are never seen by anybody, because they're not a very flattering record of anything I did -- or what I did then was pretty terrible most of the time...I was absolutely convinced that as the years went by, if all else failed, I would always be able to listen to the records of my nightclub act and think, "That was very good stuff." But it sounds pretty terrible to me when I listen to it. I sound pretty repulsive and obnoxious and it just doesn't sound like anything to me. And I'm not being falsely modest here. I'm just trying to be honest about it.
And:
I hate what I stand for. All those stupid girl-chasing jokes and sex jokes and, you know, self-deprecating stuff. At the time it was probably just easy laughter. And I probably felt more like a child at the time and accepted those roles. I feel if I were to come out in front of an audience now, I'd come out as an equal to them and talk to them as an adult. But in those days I was currying favor. All that bullshit about being short and unloved. It would be easy for me to do this kind of work now. I would talk more as an adult to people. I'd still try to be funny but I would never do the same kind of material. I would not posture myself as someone who couldn't get women or someone who is short and unloved.
We can only wish that he would return to standup on occasion, "more as an adult." It's terrifically unlikely, though his surprising appearance at the 2002 Academy Awards was a treat. What's most interesting about the 1989 comments is his apparent rejection of the entire comic persona. Can you imagine the young Woody Allen bursting onto the scene and becoming an American archetype without the sex jokes and self-deprecating stuff about being short and unloved?
It's not surprising that he outgrew certain aspects of his early image. The figure he became -- an international artist who commands serious attention and respect -- is dramatically at odds with the schnooky loser he has always portrayed. It seems like a long journey from the jittery, thirty-year-old standup comedian on the 1965 TV special to the director of Match Point. But as a performer, he hasn't traveled as great a distance. The creative titan behind the camera is still at odds with the characters he assumes on screen, as recently as in Scoop (2006).
In another introspective monologue taken down by Eric Lax (and published in Conversations with Woody Allen, 2007), Woody expounds further on the problems of comedy and image:
It's a little bit of a conundrum. When you start out as a comic you are childlike. Many comics remain childlike their whole life, and many of them remain physically youthful into old age. If you look at Jerry Lewis and Milton Berle now, they're like kids, the way they behave. So comics are childlike and they are suing for the approval of the adults. Something goes on in a theater when you're fourteen years old and you want to get up onstage and make the audience laugh. You're always the supplicant, wanting to please and to get warm laughs. Then what happens to comics -- they make it and they become a thousand times more wealthy than their audience, more famous, more idolized, more traveled, more cultivated, more experienced, more sophisticated, and they're no longer the supplicant. They can buy and sell their audience, they know so much more than their audience, they have lived and traveled around the world a hundred times, they've dined at Buckingham Palace and the White House, they have chauffeured cars and they're rich and they've made love to the world's most beautiful women -- and suddenly it becomes difficult to play that loser character, because they don't feel it. Being a supplicant has become much harder to sell. If you're not careful, you can easily become less amusing, less funny. Many become pompous. You can think of some, I'm sure. if you're lucky you grow up in the roles you play, like Robin Williams, for example. He grew with success. A strange thing occurs: You go from court jester to king.
Once every so often in human history, a comic genius comes along with a mind that moves at the speed of light. Improvisational skill is not necessarily going to make you a great comedian -- and improv as a subgenre is, in my view, usually a lot more fun for the performers than for the audience -- and there have been plenty of great comedians who couldn't improvise at all. But among those who can, perhaps none have been as startlingly fast and inventive as Jonathan Winters and his creative heir, Robin Williams. Like possessed zealots speaking in tongues, they appear both deeply engaged and strangely absent. My theory is that they're consummate artists who are in full command at every moment. But it certainly looks like they're mere mediums, seized by ruthless comic spirits who cannot be controlled.
Winters and Williams are usually described as crazy people. Manic, wacky, and insane are the most common adjectives used in discussions of their style. This is reasonably accurate, of course, but their hyperactive antics would be nothing but grating if they weren't also supremely clever, insightful artists. If you pay attention to them, you realize that this special force they're tapped into is humanity itself. They bounce off the walls in every direction, but even so, as with more restrained comics like Chaplin or Allen, what we're really laughing at is ourselves. In the end, it really does come down to wit. I'm sure you can think of insufferable comedians who have all the craziness of Winters or Williams, but none of the wit.
Here are two clips which show their stupefyingly quick comedic thinking, and which nicely illustrate the connection between these two giants. In the first, from a 1964 episode of The Jack Paar Program, Jonathan Winters conjures numerous comic personalities and situations using a simple stick as a prop. In the second clip, from a 1994 appearance on Inside the Actors' Studio, Robin Williams performs similar wonders with a scarf.
I loved comedy as soon as I saw it, and my formative years were greatly informed by chance encounters (leading to passionate obsessions) with the work of the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen. But I loved comedy long before I knew who those people were. The Muppet Show was one reliable early vision of life as a tapestry of gags. It also gave me my first glimpse of such Modern Comic Heroes as Danny Kaye, Steve Martin, Zero Mostel, George Burns, John Cleese, Peter Sellers, Gilda Radner, and Victor Borge. Three days ago, with the passing of the great Canadian comedian Les Lye, I was reminded of another seminal comedy phenomenon of my childhood: You Can't Do That On Television.
If you watch You Can't now -- and there's plenty of it on YouTube, as well as on two elaborate tribute sites, ycdtotv.com and Barth's Burgery -- it doesn't really hold up as great comedy. (The clips which follow are examples of beloved comedy, not of comic genius.) To me, and to many people in my age group, the show was a landmark. It was our first exposure to a style of anarchic sketch comedy we would later find in Monty Python and Saturday Night Live.
You Can't Do That On Television originated in Canada. Most of us in the States saw it on Nickelodeon. The whole enterprise lasted from 1978 to 1990.
The half-hour show consisted of short sketches, mostly in recurring locations and formats: Barth's restaurant (which served disgusting food; each sketch ended with one of the kids disparaging Barth's cuisine, and Barth saying, "Diiii heard that"), Locker Jokes (a variation on Laugh In's Joke Wall), Blip's Arcade, school, home, the doctor's office. Then there were the Firing Squad scenes, where one of the kids is about to be executed and has to talk his or her way out of it ("There goes one sneaky kid") -- and oddly, standing before a firing squad seemed to fit right in with the show's other themes of school, homework, dating, and family life. And then there were the "Opposite Sketches," in which everything was the opposite of its norm. Suddenly Barth's food was delectable, parents encouraged kids to stop doing their homework and watch more television, and the schoolteacher instructed his students to play video games. All of this would be heralded by some of the kids exclaiming in unison that "it's just the introduction to the Opposites."
Each episode began with a satirical announcement about a pre-empted program ("Mr. T Goes to a Tupperware Party will not be seen at this time, so that we may bring you the following..."), followed by a short sketch establishing the episode's theme (some of the more daring episode themes included "Divorce" and "Adoption"). Then came the unforgettable intro: A Dixieland-flavored rendition of the William Tell Overture plays over a distinctly Terry Gilliamesque animated sequence, set at the Children's Television Sausage Factory.
If you remember one thing about You Can't Do That On Television, it's the repeated use of two celebrated running gags. If a member of the cast said "I don't know," green slime showered down upon his or her head. If they said "water," they were showered with water. It didn't make a whole lot of sense -- if "water" got you watered, why didn't "slime" get you slimed? -- and looking at it now, I wonder why they chose "I don't know" as the trigger phrase for a sliming. Were they trying to discourage us from professing ignorance? Probably not, because although these events were discussed in somewhat fearful terms, the kids always seemed to love getting slimed and watered. In most cases, when a You Can't kid gets slimed, he or she looks up, gazing into the torrent of green gook as though it's a baptism. The popularity of You Can't, along with Ghostbusters, made green slime an iconic substance to people who were children in the Eighties. To encounter little plastic eggs full of green slime in a 25¢ vending machine was a spectacular treat.
The cast, over twelve years, was large and varied, but certain long-serving cast members remain closely identified with You Can't, and the same core group seems to live on in the hearts of those who watched it: Christine "Moose" McGlade, Lisa Ruddy, Alasdair Gillis, Doug Ptolemy, Vanessa Lindores. (See ycdtotv.com's Where Are They Now section to catch up with them.) All of the adult characters were played by Les Lye and Abby Hagyard. One of the kids, during the 1986 season, was Alanis Morissette. Even if she hadn't gone on to become a distinctive musical artist, her status as an icon of our generation was already assured.
Les Lye's signature role was Ross, the sleazy producer of the show-within-a-show. But each of his characters was funny and well-realized; he was like a comedy sampler. Barth the chef, the Teacher, and the vaguely Latin executioner were all inspired creations. Lye's Father character was a forerunner to Homer Simpson. I didn't know much about the Marx Brothers when I first discovered You Can't, but I knew that Lye's Doctor character was a variation on Groucho, and this -- along with the drawings of Mr. Kaputnik's doctor in Dave Berg's "The Lighter Side Of..." comics in Mad magazine -- was probably my first exposure to the Groucho image.
I stress again: By posting these clips, I don't mean to suggest that they belong in the pantheon with the work of the Modern Comic Heroes we worship here at the Comedy Palace. But when I was ten, this was an early indication of comedic romances to come, and it brings back a crucial moment in my development. Maybe yours too.
Putting together yesterday's article about Stiller and Meara, it was hard to choose a Seinfeld clip representative of Jerry Stiller's work as Frank Costanza. Eventually, I allayed my frustration by tilting my head skyward and shouting at the top of my lungs, "SERENITY NOW!" Then I thought of my favorite Frank Costanza moment (Frank at the coffee shop translating a Korean phrase as "This guy -- this is not my kind of guy"), and remembered that that line was copped from the infamous Buddy Rich tapes.
Buddy Rich, one of the greatest drummers in the history of jazz, was as legendary for his volatile temper as for his musical virtuosity. After gigs, he would routinely subject his band to thunderous, profane tirades of visceral scorn. This was as funny as it was disturbing, and one member of the band got into the habit of keeping a tape recorder around, to secretly preserve Rich's rants. The now-famous Buddy Rich tapes are, in their way, as classic as his musical recordings. They're particularly cherished by comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, who paid tribute by inserting three lines from Rich's tantrums (slightly altered) into three episodes of Seinfeld.
Here, perhaps for the first time ever, are the pertinent excerpts from the Buddy Rich tapes, along with the Seinfeld clips which reference them.
In this first passage from Rich, listen for two lines which found their way into Seinfeld. In the first, at around 0:13, Rich disgustedly informs his band, "You all -- you're not my kind of people at all." Then, at around 0:47, he threatens, "I'll turn the motherfucker off altogether, and see what kind of a band you've got, up there, without all the assistance!"
BUDDY RICH TAPES - EXCERPT 1
Rich's "You all -- you're not my kind of people at all" became Frank Costanza's "This guy -- this is not my kind of guy" -- in my opinion one of the most inexplicably funny moments in the whole Seinfeld series. The exchange which includes this line begins at around 3:08 in the following clip (from the sixth-season episode "The Understudy").
In "The Butter Shave" (season nine), Jerry is resentful of rival standup Kenny Bania, who always performs his set after Jerry's and benefits from the afterglow. Determined to foil Bania, Jerry decides to take a dive, and exclaims, "Let's see how he does, up there, without all the assistance!"
This next excerpt from the Buddy Rich tapes includes Rich's distinctive expression of a physical threat: "Now keep your fucking mouth shut, or I'll show you what it's like!" The passage begins at 0:25 in the clip.
BUDDY RICH TAPES - EXCERPT 2
In the fifth-season Seinfeld episode "The Opposite," George decides that since his every impulse is wrong, then acting on the opposite of his impulses must be correct. In the following clip (at around 3:17 on the counter), he stands up and screams at some noisy patrons in a movie theatre. He follows his initial attack with, "And if I have to tell you again, we're gonna take it outside and I'm gonna show you what it's like!"
In this mini-documentary from the Seinfeld DVD series, the genesis of "The Opposite" is explained, and Jerry Seinfeld talks about the Buddy Rich tapes and their place in the Seinfeld mythos. (The Buddy Rich portion of the clip starts at 3:04.)
Incidentally, Buddy Rich crossed paths with another Modern Comic Hero, during the glory days of the Borscht Belt. Rich took under his wing a young aspiring drummer named Melvin Kaminsky, taught him how to play the drums, and acted as a sort of showbiz mentor. Melvin Kaminsky would never become a famous drummer, but he did change his name to Mel Brooks and become a famous comedian.
There's more about the Buddy Rich tapes, including audio files and transcripts, at Emmett J. Lentilucci's site.
This is a blog devoted to the comedy I love. I write about politics at Nero Fiddled, which is also the name of my theatre company. I'm a writer and performer in New York City. You can learn more about me here. You can also buy my book, 400 Years in Manhattan.
