When I was a kid the local UHF station would show a Jerry Lewis movie every Sunday afternoon, and I loved them. Every weekday after school there was the Three Stooges marathon, but I realized Lewis’s humor was a much more mature, sophisticated slapstick, and getting the jokes made me feel grown up. He could also somehow take a punchline you’d see coming a mile away, like the setting up of chairs In The Bellboy, and make it hilarious. Some of his films, including Three Ring Circus and The Nutty Professor, could also get pretty dark, and I liked it that he could balance comedy and drama, that he wasn’t restricting himself to one or the other. I think I was also dimly aware that there was a connection between Lewis and the contemporary comedians I also saw, although it would be years later before I’d realize he was kind of a transitional figure between the old vaudeville comedians and the ones for whom a big break meant television or, if they were really lucky, film. Jerry Lewis, who wrote a serious book called The Total Film-Maker, really did appreciate film as a medium few comedians before him had. Unlike others he understood that comedy on film meant more than doing or saying something funny in-frame. He understood the value of the close-up, the cutaway, the edit. That he could also act while keeping every detail of the scene in mind is extraordinary.
While I loved Jerry Lewis’s comedies as a kid the film of his I enjoyed, and still enjoy, most as an adult is The King of Comedy. Granted it’s not really one of his films, but working with the tag team duo of Scorcese and DeNiro he really shows his full range and depth as a dramatic actor. In an early scene when he talks to DeNiro, who plays an ambitious comic who wants to jump straight to the top, about the business Lewis has a faraway look in his eyes as though he’s lecturing a classroom. It’s powerful in its subtlety and says so much about his character. Even in the back of a dark limo in front of an audience of one he’s still a performer. In other scenes with DeNiro he’s more direct and personal. These moments the fantasies of a possibly psychotic mind, but Lewis has no trouble playing them as completely real.
A short time later, after telling DeNiro he’s having dinner with “some people”, we see him sitting alone at a table eating. He’s not reading or watching TV or doing anything except eating. His posture and expression, though, still exude confidence and dignity. Even when he’s alone he can’t drop the mask.
Maybe there was still a lingering miasma from his “comeback film”, Hardly Working, released three years earlier, or a shadow from what would be his last film, Smorgasbord, which had a limited U.S. release in 1983, but Jerry Lewis deserved an Oscar for his performance in The King Of Comedy. Of course, it’s DeNiro’s character in the film who calls himself “the king of comedy”, but the irony is we all know who really wore the crown.
Baseball was desegregated in 1947, and on January 13th, 1961, a growing American pastime–standup comedy–would be too. Dick Gregory stepped to the plate at Chicago’s Playboy Club and hit it out of the park. It wasn’t exactly a planned moment. Gregory was still working a day job at a car wash when he was brought in as a last-minute replacement for that night’s scheduled performer. He then broke other barriers, refusing to go on The Tonight Show unless he could sit down and talk to host Jack Paar. This was something other guests routinely did, but only if they were white. Gregory was uncompromising but also simply asking to be treated equally. As comedian and actor Dr. George Wallace, who shared memories of Gregory on NPR tells it,
He’s going, hey, my jokes are just as good as theirs. Why can’t I get attention? Why can’t they treat me like they treat the white – equally. Bring me to sit on the sofa. I’ve got a few words to say. He first hung up on Jack Parr. That was NBC at the time. That’s what you call groundbreaking material right there, hung up on NBC.
And he was funny and his jokes were just as good as those of other comedians, and while he told some conventional jokes–like one about how he’d read so much about smoking and cancer he quit reading–his personal perspective as an African American gave greater depth to some of his jokes, like,
I sat at a lunch counter for nine months. When they finally integrated they didn’t have what I wanted.
While Lenny Bruce was doing a bit about how amazing it was that performers get paid so much while teachers get paid so little Gregory offered a more pointed perspective, saying,
I love America. Where else can I ride in the back of the bus, have a choice of the worst schools, the worst restaurants, the worst neighborhoods–and average five thousand dollars a week just talking about it?
He didn’t just talk about it either. He would drop a club appearance to attend a civil rights rally, although he’d always make it up later. As the sixties went on too he dropped the genial tone that originally made him a success and became a sharper, more caustic comedian, and not just a comedian. He ran for mayor of Chicago, getting 22,000 votes, then for president. He was shot in the leg during the Watts riots. He committed himself to working for the civil rights movement and while racism is an issue of moral health his concerns extended globally and he also became an advocate for physical health. In 1984 he founded Health Enterprises, Inc. and specifically addressed the health of African Americans which he felt was impaired by alcohol and drug abuse and also poor nutrition because of poverty. Although he continued working as a comedian his lifelong passion was making the world better through more than just laughter.
We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened.
—Huckleberry Finn
Nashville’s Charlotte Avenue has, for reasons I don’t understand, long been home to numerous car dealerships. Maybe this is because it runs more or less parallel to some of the city’s main thoroughfares—West End, Broadway—but Charlotte is also on the edge of the city and parts of it are still a little seedy in spite of rapid gentrification. Venture out that far and you’ll want to make sure you have a way to get back. The railroad also crosses Charlotte at one point, so whether it’s the right or wrong side of the tracks might depend on where you stand, although it’s increasingly becoming mixed. Pricey hipster restaurants rub elbows with Bobby’s Dairy Dip, a ‘50’s era remnant that still serves the best milkshakes in town.
The funny thing is the biggest dealerships, the ones that dealt in late model luxury cars, that have fared the worst while independently owned dealers of used cars—let’s face it, they’re not classy enough to get away with calling their flivvers and jalopies “pre-owned”—have stuck it out through thin and thinner.
Some areas around Charlotte Avenue are also thick with graffiti. The fence in front of one of the car dealerships is especially popular. I don’t know why this is or, for that matter, why the dealership has put up white plastic slats behind the chain-link fence. They might as well put up a sign that says “TAGGERS WELCOME!” Sometimes the tags get painted over but they come right back, as unstoppable as the trumpet vine that climbs over the fence.
Maybe there is no clear explanation for any of this. Maybe the way all these things were made just happened.
“You may be a doctor. But I’m the Doctor. The definite article, you might say.”
Andi was, and always will be, my oldest friend, even though cancer caused a parting of our ways on August 16th, 1997. She would say we knew each other from birth. This may sound like an exaggeration, but our parents knew each other before we were born, so even though I was a little more than a year older neither one of us could say exactly when it was that we first met. And I accept it because Andi was funnier, smarter, and always had the last word no matter how much we argued. And we argued a lot. Because our parents got together several times a week and because we were so close in age we were often stuck together with no one to entertain us but each other, but she was a girl and I was a boy and we’d absorbed the inane notion that our age the opposite gender was the enemy even though neither of us could say why. Over the years we became as close as two friends could be, in spite of, or maybe because of constantly annoying, provoking, and cajoling each other at every opportunity. Years later when we were co-counselors at a day camp the kids we herded around thought this was funny. When one of them asked, “Are you two brother and sister?” we glanced at each other and, in a rare moment of agreement, said, yes, brother and sister is exactly what we were. Andi quickly added that I was adopted. She always had to have the last word.
Andi is also the reason I’m still and always will be a Doctor Who fan. Let’s travel back in time three decades. Our parents were in some other part of the house doing whatever it was they did when they got together on Saturday nights and she and I were in the den. It was a little after nine at night. Saturday Night Live didn’t start for almost an hour and a half. What were we going to do?
“We could watch Doctor Who,” she suggested.
I’d caught glimpses of Doctor Who on PBS as I was flipping through the channels. It always looked stupid and confusing to me with its cheap special effects and a tall goofy guy with curly hair and huge teeth. I always seemed to tune in about three-fourths of the way through a story, though, so picking up what was going on was nearly impossible. Still I agreed because I couldn’t think of anything else. I turned on the TV. The Doctor Who episode was Four To Doomsday, a pretty terrible story, and yet I was fascinated. So was Andi. As the events unspooled, becoming increasingly ridiculous-don’t get me started on the Doctor throwing a cricket ball in space-we were transformed into hardcore Doctor Who fans. Peter Davison’s Doctor was friendly and approachable; for a quarter of a century he’d hold the record for the youngest actor to play the Doctor, although I think it was the Doctor’s strong desire to save the world and willingness to stick it out even when escape would be easy that appealed to us.
We became really big fans. I subscribed to two Doctor Who publications: the official Doctor Who Magazine and the fan-created Whovian Times and shared the issues with Andi. We went to local conventions where, while I was getting his autograph, Colin Baker made fun of me for wearing a Star Trek t-shirt. We’d also meet Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee. When our parents punished us by keeping us away from the TV on Saturday night we taped the episodes for each other. We also traded Doctor Who books, novelizations of stories from the series-or at least we did until I built up the complete collection of more than a hundred titles, in addition to some big hardbacks about the show like Doctor Who, A Celebration, a book published to commemorate the series’ 20th anniversary. I also had a complete set of Marvel’s Doctor Who comics.
I sold all of those things–the books, the magazine issues, the comics–in the late summer of 2016. They’d been stuck in a box in the attic for years and while I was still a Doctor Who fan it seemed like a good time to let them go. I took them to The Great Escape, the same comic and memorabilia store where I’d bought most of my Doctor Who stuff all those years ago. I got rid of them because I wanted someone else to have and enjoy them.
I’m glad I let them go then and not now because, even though my reasons wouldn’t be any different, context matters. I’m still a Doctor Who fan, and I’m excited that the BBC has just announced the first ever female Doctor. Well, second, if you count Joanna Lumley, but only if you want to argue about whether Doctor Who: Curse Of The Fatal Death is canon. Some are turned off by the fact that a woman is finally taking the lead. For me as long as the Doctor is still the Doctor at hearts that’s all that matters, but I also think it’s about time.
The Doctor becoming a woman has seemed like a very real possibility ever since The Master became Missy, but this is not the first time the idea of the Doctor becoming a woman has come up. In fact it’s an idea that goes back at least as far as when Sylvester McCoy was still stuffing ferrets down his trousers. It’s worth noting that Doctor Who’s first producer was a woman. If Verity Lambert hadn’t been guiding the TARDIS from behind the scenes the show might not have made it past more than a few episodes, an early ‘60’s curiosity erased from memory and the BBC archives. In 1986 the show’s creator, Sidney Newman, called for a woman to play the Doctor. Around that same time Doctor Who Magazine reported a rumor that Patricia Quinn might be taking over the TARDIS controls. Even then the idea of the Doctor being played by a woman, and the idea of the worlds of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Doctor Who colliding gave me some terrible thrills, but that’s another story. It’s even possible that Doctor Who is influenced by Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, about a young man who wanders through four centuries of history, becoming a young woman along the way. The idea of the Doctor being played by a woman has always spurred furious debate among fans, but whenever Andi and I thought about the possibility it was another one of those rare times we didn’t argue. We both thought, why not?
The Doctor Who roleplaying game—which I also had and sold with the books, magazines, and comics–was another way Andi and I immersed ourselves in the Whoniverse. I usually acted as Gamemaster while Andi was Androveritagenerorlandolipolis, distant relative of Romana, and generally known to friends and enemies alike as Andris, a brilliant, fierce, argumentative, strongly independent Time Lord–in other words, Andi, if she’d been born on Gallifrey–who traveled the universe in jeans, sandals, and a t-shirt that read, “I Still Love My Late Uncle Borusa”. We quibbled a little over whether she was a Time Lord or a Time Lady, but neither one of us cared that much about semantics when there were Daleks to be defeated, Cybermen to be stopped, Ice Warriors on Mars, and an infinite universe to explore.
The game, or just general talks about Doctor Who, sometimes led to longer discussions about life, about what we wanted, what we feared. What started as an escape from scary reality became a way to sneak up on it and surprise each other with what we shared. Andi and I both thought about being writers. She also considered a career in acting, and in the ministry. I could say Andi had some of the Doctor’s best qualities: a strong sense of right and wrong, a strong desire to help others, and an occasionally prickly personality. And if I could go back in time and ask Andi if she thought I shared any of the Doctor’s best qualities she’d roll her eyes and say, “You wish.”
I still have a poetry chapbook Andi wrote, called Blood Lines, and sometimes when I think about her I pull it out and read “A Hairy Lullabye”, a poem that begins:
“Close your eyes my pretty darling,
Or three of them at least.”
My humming is in tune with
Jon Pertwee–
And goes on,
You know? I should hate you, but you’re such a big part of my life
Andi really would hate me if I didn’t admit that one of the things we would still argue about year later was who first suggested Doctor Who. She remembered that long ago Saturday night very differently. According to her I was the one who said, “We could watch Doctor Who.”
I’ll argue that my version of events is the correct one, but even without time travel she still gets the last word.
There were nearly twenty of us packed into a a small hotel room, crowded around a television set. All of us held our breath. The drama unfolding on screen had us tightly gripped. There was deathly silence and then Batman said, “Some days you just can’t rid of a bomb!”
The room exploded with laughter and cheers.
This was of course the 1966 movie Batman with Adam West and Burt Ward, even more atrociously over the top than the TV series, although it lacked the BIFF!s and ZOCK!s the TV version splayed across the screen.
When I first started watching the Batman TV series as a kid, catching daily after-school reruns, I took it very seriously–too seriously, really. I had a very stunted sense of irony so I thought Batman and Robin really were climbing up walls, and I wasn’t educated enough for the celebrity cameos to mean anything to me.
As I got older I started to see the Batman TV series as idiotic, a show for toddlers that still insulted the intelligence of its target audience, not realizing that I still had a stunted sense of irony.
And then as I got older and better educated and read things like Susan Sontag’s Notes On Camp, I started to appreciate the 1960’s Batman, and especially how smart, funny, and even underappreciated Adam West really was. He was a leading man whose deadpan delivery could make almost anything funny, and heightened the humor of funny lines. By the time he and Burt Ward lent their voices to an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, playing younger, fitter versions of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy (normally voiced by Ernest Borgnine and Tim Conway), well, that was a celebrity cameo that I didn’t just appreciate. It had me literally rolling on the floor laughing.
A few years ago Charlie Murphy did a gig at Zanies Comedy Club in Nashville and I wanted to go. I don’t remember why I didn’t—it might have been that I was out of town, or it might have been that I only read about it after he’d come and gone. That still happens to me. I’ll pick up last week’s copy of The Nashville Scene and read about some event and think, hey, I’d like to go to that, oh, wait, it was yesterday, but that’s another story.
This was a few years after Chappelle’s Show and especially the Rick James episode made Charlie Murphy famous, and I wanted to see him do standup because as funny as I thought he was on the show I wanted to get past that. I wanted to know what else Charlie Murphy could do.
What else he could do included writing a memoir, The Making Of A Stand-Up Guy, that opens with this haunting statement:
Anyone who has given up will
never know just how close they
came to winning the game
And then in his introduction he talks about the challenges that came with his own fame, and says,
In order to steer clear of trouble in these new situations, I had to learn to ask myself, What would Rick James do? Then, if I knew what was good for me, I would just do the opposite.
Having a famous brother he must have also gotten some sense of both the benefits and pitfalls of fame, but he was determined to make his own way. And that’s what strikes me about Charlie Murphy: having a famous brother might have been a gateway to comedy, but he didn’t start doing stand-up until he was forty-two, and he was determined to make his own way. He was determined to find his own voice. In 2011, five years after the end of Chappelle’s Show and still working hard as a stand-up comic, Murphy did an interview for The Breakfast Club podcast. He talked about being booed recently at a small venue and said,
Every comedian does get booed and whenever it happens, you know, it’s your fault. Okay, you can never blame it on the audience. It’s your fault because as a comedian you’re supposed to be able to read what the situation is. And sometimes when you get booed even though it’s your fault that’s as far as it goes because you didn’t read it. It doesn’t mean that you wasn’t funny, it means that you didn’t read the situation and come with the right medication for the situation.
Unfortunately there was no medication that could beat back the leukemia that claimed his life at the age of fifty-seven, just fifteen years after he started in stand-up comedy, and I think about how I came so close to seeing him live.
In an episode of Tales From The Crypt, “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy”, Don Rickles plays a successful ventriloquist whose career was cut short by a terrible tragedy. After years out of the spotlight an aspiring ventriloquist, played by Bobcat Goldthwaite, asks him to come to a performance. After bombing Rickles tells him, “It wasn’t terrible. Okay, it was terrible. You had no technique, no material, no concentration, and you had no idea how to work the audience.” He then suggests that the younger performer consider another line of work. He seems genuinely pained as he says this, as though he really is speaking to an aspiring performer. Watching it I wonder if his performance came out of experience, if Rickles had to be so brutally honest to younger performers or if, when he was young, he’d been told he’d never make it as a comedian. If it were the latter maybe it would explain the origins of his act. Most comedians try to win audiences over. As the original insult comic Rickles was determined to make audiences hate him, and they loved him for it.
It helped that he so often punched up, going after the rich and famous–in particular Frank Sinatra, but other members of the Rat Pack too. When I was a kid I think my introduction to Rickles was hearing him say, “I don’t hate Sammy Davis Jr. because he’s black. I hate him because he’s a Jew.” He also punched down, too, going after minorities and calling out faults of audience members–he was an equal opportunity offender. It started as an accident, as he would say in interviews. One night, doing badly with prepared jokes, he insulted a man in the audience and got big laughs. And yet the insults were never meant to be real, never meant to hurt. As he says at the end of his album Hello Dummy,
“Will Rogers once said, ‘I never picked on a little guy, only big people.’ May I say to this entire audience, on a hectic night, you are pretty big and I do thank each and every one of you.”
And sometimes Rickles was on the receiving end which could be just as funny. Bob Newhart said they hung out together because “Someone has to be his friend.”
A lot has been written about the rise of stand-up comedy in the latter half of the 20th century, but where many of its innovators–Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce–and members of the generation before–Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Red Skelton–get a lot of attention Don Rickles has barely rated a mention. Gerald Nachmann’s Seriously Funny: Rebel Comedians Of The Fifties And Sixties only describes Rickles as “professionally obnoxious”.
Now that he’s gone I hope he’ll get a fuller, fairer assessment as a comedian and a performer, someone who had technique, material, concentration, and knew how to work an audience, even when he wasn’t in front of an audience, acting on TV shows and in movies ranging from Kelly’s Heroes to the Toy Story films. To simply forget him would be an insult.
Hail and farewell Don Rickles, ya old hockey puck.
A few years ago I was having lunch with my parents and my father mentioned that in his college days he booked a lot of acts, including standup comedians, to come and perform on campus. I asked him which ones he remembered and started rattling off names of standup comics I knew from that time.
“How do you know all these names?” he asked.
It’s because I’ve always loved standup comedy and a lot of the comedians who’d been rising stars in my father’s time were shining even brighter by the time I came along. And also I’m a geek who’s studied the history of standup because, hey, comedy is a serious thing. I’ve delved deep into it and I’m familiar with performers from the button-down to the wild and crazy and some pretty obscure ones. In fact I’m more fascinated by the obscure in part because fame is such a capricious thing but I also feel a lot of them lay the groundwork for the success of others. Comedians riff off each other which is why the overlooked often deserve to be looked.
Corey lived to be 102. He called himself “the World’s Foremost Authority” as a joke but let’s face it: some of us study history but he’d lived through most of it. You don’t get to be that old without learning some pretty important things, such as how to tell the Grim Reaper he wants the house next door.
It’s impossible to learn from history without the means to preserve records of the past and fortunately there are plenty of records of Corey’s work. Now if you’ll excuse me I have some studying to do.
In 1987 the novel Postcards From The Edgecame out and I thought, I’d like to read that, even though at the time all I was reading was science fiction and a semi-autobiographical story of a recovering drug addict was about as far from that as I could get. Except it was by Carrie Fisher, and that intrigued me. Sure, in my mind she was and would always be Princess Leia, but it was fascinating to think of her as a real person, independent of the part she played. Unfortunately I didn’t read it then; maybe I should now.
Like a lot of my generation I was a Star Wars fan. Like a lot of my friends I had, among other things, all the action figures, including Princess Leia. Most of my friends were boys and while in those days it might have seemed a little strange for a boy to have a female action figure in his collection Princess Leia was cool. Part of that was the way she was written George Lucas is a director who’s known for not giving his actors a lot of direction at least part of it is what Carrie Fisher herself brought to the role.
In fact one of the most disappointing things about the original Star Wars trilogy is the gradual decline of Princess Leia. She starts off a sharp, sarcastic, laser-shooting warrior princess, but by Return Of The Jedi, even though it’s revealed she’s got as much Jedi potential as her brother Luke, her personality diminishes even as her outfits multiply. The irony of Star Wars is that a light fantasy film about the defeat of an empire would become a sprawling empire of its own, and the tough, witty, “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” Princess Leia would be one of the first casualties.
I think I missed that partly because I was a guy and partly because I was such a Star Wars fan, but it hit me many years ago when one of the cable channels was running a marathon of what were, at the time, the only three Star Wars films. This was post-VHS, pre-DVD, and very definitely pre-Phantom. Between commercials there were segments of Carrie Fisher offering up comments. During a Jedi-break, just as Luke, Han, and Chewie were about to be tossed into the Saarlac pit, Fisher said on set she’d improvised a line: “Don’t worry about me guys! I’ll be fine!” She then smiled and said, “I’m really glad to see George left it in.”
That’s when I realized Carrie Fisher was funny. I should have realized it earlier. I remember staying up late to see her host Saturday Night Live–the only member of the main cast to do so. And I’d be reminded of how funny she could be when I heard about non-Star Wars things she was doing, like her one-woman show Wishful Drinking. The strong, independent, and funny Princess Leia from the first film seemed to be the closest to Carrie Fisher herself, and that would be the character who’d influence strong, independent, and funny women who followed, like Tina Fey who wrote a great tribute.
Even now I kind of have mixed feelings about it, and I wonder how she herself felt. She was extremely talented but nothing else she did ever matched that first success. And yet that amazing success is more than most actors will ever know. Princess Leia helped bring down an empire, but the woman who played her helped build one.
The life of a character actor seems like it would be hard but also rewarding. If you can accept the uncertainty and frustration, if you can accept rarely, if ever, being recognized, if you truly believe the saying that there are no small parts, or at least that having a part is its own reward, and if you love acting then being a character actor must be a pretty amazing job. Some character actors get around a lot–they get to travel from role to role, covering a wide range.
I thought about that when I heard about the passing of Bernard Fox, an actor who brought a big personality to small roles on the big screen and some big roles on small screens. Most remembrances refer to his recurring role of Dr. Bombay on Bewitched. He also had a recurring role as Colonel Crittendon on Hogan’s Heroes.
I was never much of a fan of either of those shows–I had no idea he had roles on them–but I remember him from two episodes of The Andy Griffith Show I first saw as a kid and which immediately became my favorites. I think I’ve always been an Anglophile but when the character Malcom Merriweather rolled into Mayberry he gave me an early impression of what British people were like. Okay, he was mostly a stereotype, but in his first episode he takes a job as Andy’s valet. Decades before Downton Abbey he gave a glimpse of what life downstairs, and upstairs, might be like as he tried to treat Sheriff Taylor like an English lord.
Yeah, it was pretty cheesy, and so was his return visit a year later when he steps up to assist Aunt Bea, but Fox was so charming he made it almost believable.
And what made the stories even more memorable to me is that Merriweather always arrived by bicycle, a freewheeling traveler seeing the United States and making money by picking up odd jobs in small towns–not unlike the job of a character actor.
It was an idea that made an impression on me too. I never did it but I always thought it would be a fun way to see the world–and get to know people, to go around taking up odd jobs. I sometimes rode a Greyhound bus between Nashville and Evansville and for some reason the bus took a lot of back roads, passing through the edges of small towns–what was normally a two hour trip by car took more than four hours by bus because of its strange route. And there were times I remembered Malcolm Merriweather, even though he was a fictional character whose travels were decades earlier, and I didn’t have a bicycle. Still I was sometimes tempted to step off in the middle of a small town and see if I could get a small job–and maybe move across the country that way.
Bernard Fox is also fondly remembered for his role in 1999‘s The Mummy as British RAF pilot Captain Winston Havlock, stranded and bored in Cairo, wishing for one more chance to fly, one more big adventure–also like any dedicated character actor, always in search of that next role, that next adventure, always moving to some new part of the world.
Hail and farewell Bernard Fox.
Update: Here’s “Valet”, the episode of The Andy Griffith Show that introduced Malcolm Merriweather.
