Proverbs 1, Verse 26
"Some day you'll be in trouble, and I'll laugh! Mock me, will you? I'll mock you!"
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
Terry Gross did a "Late Night Week" thing on her show all of last week. She interviewed Letterman and whathisname with the chin already-- Conan and Jimmy Fallon, too. It started on Monday when she played an older recording of an interview she did with Fred de Cordova, the Executive Producer of "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson. This guy, as far as I can tell, was a legend, from a time where legends knew how to tie a Windsor knot and they all smoked and somehow lived to be 90, their skin was tanned and leathery as a handbag and they could get away with white socks and dress pants.
de Cordova lorded over "The Tonight Show" and the legend of whether a comic made it or not being determined by receiving a wink from Johnny turns out to be not so much-- it was really getting "the wave over" from de Cordova, as Jay Leno himself spoke of when he got the wave over in 1977, while wearing a suit that looked like it was made from a skinned lizard. That's how you knew your act killed and it was time to take a seat next to Johnny Carson. Kings were made, empires fell, who knows how many useless schmucks killed themselves after not getting that de Cordova wave over, but that's show business.
There was a lot of introspective navel-gazing (the technical term for this is: "omphaloskepsis", in case you were wondering-- and, hey-- save some dirty lint for me, okay? Bloggers gotta eat too, you know.) during these interviews about comedy-- what is it and how do you find it? Is it under a rock or inside your navel or does it grow in Brooklyn?
Jimmy Fallon was talking about how most of his humor is "nice", that he's "not too mean".
I like that. I respect that. But I don't particularly understand it. I don't know, I don't think, how to be funny without being mean. Dirty. Cruel. Harsh.
My meanness was honed at our family's dining room table. They say good things happen when families eat dinner together, and maybe that's so, but, when my family ate together, it was show time. There was no need for a tv or a radio, I was Johnny and the guests all rolled into one. Impressions, sarcasm, voices, songs, faces-- it was all there. Passover was the high point of the year for me, because it meant that
a.) I got a MUCH bigger house and,
b.) I got to dress up (Windsor knot and everything) and,
c.) My lines were already WRITTEN DOWN!
(You know, in the haggadah.)
In our house, the 4 Questions were done in Indian, Chinese, English, Scottish, and Irish accents, depending on the year and what films I had seen recently. Sometimes, they were done in the voice and manner of people our family knew-- friends, and doctors, mostly. Sometimes, I improvised a little. Sometimes, I got in trouble a little. But, for me, it was like being on tv, and I loved it.
But being funny at the dinner table as I got older got a little bit harder. It's easy to be precocious and get a laugh or two when you're impersonating your rheumatologist (yes, unfortunately, I had one of those, and he was Indian, and he was hiLARious) as a younger kid, and it's another to still be funny when you're a smarmy little fifteen-year-old that nobody likes, not even you. But I found that something usually worked, and that was meanness.
Being offensive, which I was sometimes inadvertently as a younger child and which was severely frowned upon (especially at Seder), was somehow not only okay when I was a burgeoning teenager, but something that was rewarded with a prize all boys, no matter how old, endlessly seek: their mothers' smile. Whether it was a cutting remark about someone we all knew, or some outrageous comment about something going on in the news or the family, the darker and more sinister it was, the louder the maternal laugh. And I didn't think too terribly much about trends I might be setting for myself or the family, I just knew what was working and, like any comic with half a brain, I kept at it.
Look, at dinner, I killed. Who could ask for anything more?
Of course, I sometimes wonder what I would have been like had I been encouraged to "be nice", or at least "nice-er". What would my personality have been like? Who might I have attracted, or turned away? What would my omphaloskepsis on comedy yield? I'll never know, and I suspect, unfortunately or not, that the kind of children I am going to rear are going to realize that what gets daddy going, what will win them the wave over, is raucous and unrefined, imitations of an unflattering nature and a heavy dose of envelope-pushing.
And I guess they'll roll with what works. And maybe, hopefully, they won't get quite as addicted to the results as I did.
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