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MM
Anita O'Day, who we interviewed yesterday, said "Tell Steve Anita sent us."
SA
Oh, okay. Anita O'Day keeps the doctor away.
MM
Let's see, the first question I ask everybody, "Why did you do it?"
SA
You'll get a very unsatisfactory answer since I don't know what the Hell the question means.
MM
Actually the first question I wanted to ask you was in the one piece we've seen where you had Lord Buckley on the Tonight Show, you talked about him being a comedian, but in a very different way. You know, you never heard him tell a joke, but he still made people laugh. And I was wondering, what's that process when somebody doesn't tell jokes but they make someone laugh.
SA
The idea that you can make people laugh without doing jokes is surprising, I guess, only to people who don't know about comedy. The fact is quite common, in fact it's more common in today's comedy. It was rarer, therefore, in earlier decades, the 30's, 40's, 50's etc. But it is generally considered by comedy people, writers and performers, that what is called 'observational humor' is a higher form than joke humor. That is a generality and not a scientific classification, because some observational humor is pretty weak and some jokes are classically strong. But as a general rule, those routines that start with 'Did you ever notice that when a women gets" or whatever, that's better than a joke about my wife's cooking or traffic on the Hollywood freeway. So on that criterian, then, Buckley was a little higher in stature than the typical joke/joke specialist. First of all the joke/joke specialist tend very rarely to equate to the jokes that they deal with, whereas-although that's also sometimes true of the observational people too-in many more cases they have conceived that interesting thought.
MM
There is something, for lack of a better word, that comes out of their sense of humor?
SA
Yea, but then that"s true of everybody so then that's not an important distinction. To talk about Buckley more directly, he was individual to a degree that is uncommon, and again an underlying fact is that all comedians are individual, even the third rate ones. If you get the 100 greatest classical pianists in the world and you have them all play the same selection, or something of the sort, I personally, even thought I'm a professionally pianist, if blindfolded, cannot tell who the 100 are, in fact to me they all sound equally brilliant, equally competent. At that level my ears don't hear any distinctions, granted that they're all marvelous. But that's simply not true of the art of comedy. If you get a 100 very funny comedians, and let them all do a five minute monologue, no two of them are funny in the same way. The reasons we laughed at Groucho have nothing to do with the reasons we laughed at Jackie Gleason and the Honeymooners. It's almost as if one was a basketball player and the other a swimmer. Different sports, different arts. But the common fact is they make us laugh. And Lord Buckley certainly got laughs.
MM
Did he ever appear on the Tonight Show more times that just that one that we've seen the tumbling act thing ?
SA
I wish I could remember, but I can't. I would have been happy to have him back, and therefore during the about three and a half years I did the show I would guess he did come back, but as you may have heard, a cultural atrocity took place in the NBC storage facility in New Jersey, back in the late 50's, when the do-do who was in charge of that building noticed he was running short of shelf space and his solution to the problem was to burn everything he had on his shelves. We laugh at tragedy so I chuckle. But he burned hundreds of cans of 16 mm kinescope film of the Tonight's Show that I hosted. And many other programs too, so we don't know now whether Buckley was on other shows or not.
MM
You said also. . . I just wanted to compliment you on, I listened to your introduction of Buckley a number of times on that particular kinescope and I found it was fascinating. It was so compact. It was so condensed and it was a very rich introduction.
SA
Thank you, I wish I could recall it and in fact I look forward to seeing the film.
MM
Well, this is what you said: "Here's a fellow that appeared in most of the top night spots around the country. He's a comedian but in a very different way. He doesn't come out and tell -I don't think I ever heard this man tell a joke, now that it occurs to me. But he sure does make people laugh. He is, as they say at Charlie's Tavern, a pretty flip character. And I can never tell how much of him is serious and how much he's kidding, but I always enjoy his work and I like him personally too. Here he is, Lord Buckley. What's going to happen, I don't know. Let's welcome him."
SA
Great.
MM
When I read that, I went---it's immensely dense. You don't know what's gonna happen, you like him, you're not sure whether he's serious or not. A lot was said in that little introduction.
SA
Buckley was always somewhat of a puzzle to me and I suspect even to himself. Most people, if you meet them, you can pretty well size them up. Some people are better sizers-up than others. My wife generally is very strong on first impressions. I sometimes have to spend a little time with people before I can make a more meaningful evaluation. But he was always a little difficult to read. First of all, his basic character wasn't real. So that's quite a put-off. He spoke in that marvelous old British colonel sort of way, "Hello, flip.' You know, that kind of thing? That wasn't his natural voice at all. As the old saying goes, if you woke him up in the middle of the night, he would talk just like you and me.
Somewhere I've come across information as to apparently what was the first time he ever did that, he ever switched characters; he went from being, you know, Buckley that everybody knew: "Hey, how ya doing, good to see ya" - he went from that real Buckley to the British colonel of the old empire in India, or God knows what image was in his mind. A friend of his, according to something I've come across, was purchasing - a friend with money-was purchasing at greatly reduced prices, a small time circus, which had just fallen into bankruptcy. And the owners had to dispose-ordinarily you're trying to get rid of 14 Buicks or something, you can find quick buyers, but this was a very strange case: they had elephants, they had tigers, they had clowns and the usual people that frequent circuses, or work in them. So Buckley accompanied his friend on this exploratory mission to see what the guy had bought, or was planning to buy. And there were a lot of costumes in circuses, of course people have always worn dramatic, exotic costumes. So Buckley spied in a trunk or somewhere, a lot of colorful cloth: purple and gold with spangles and silver threads and so forth. Very glamorous. And he went up to it and draped it over him as if they were ancient Roman robes or something of the sort.
[there appeared to be a break in the taping so Mr. Allen graciously repeated the story]
According to a story I've heard, the moment when Buckley switched from the way he had talked for all of his life and became a British colonel in the old English Empire in India or something of the sort, came about when a friend of his with money had been asked to purchase, and apparently did purchase a small traveling circus that had just gone into bankruptcy. Now if you purchase a clothing store you're buying 800 suits and 300 tweed jackets, etc. -merchandise you can quickly dispose of. But what do you do with nine elephants? How the larger drama was played out, I don't know, but it was a very dramatic situation. Anyway, Buckley accompanied his wealthy friend to wherever the circus was located and began to look through the props. In circuses they always wear very dramatic, exotic, colorful costumes-the dancing girls, clowns, what have you. So he spied on a storage shelf, a lot of colorful cloth and he went over and picked up several yards of it and draped it about his shoulders, as if it were ancient Roman garb, and then looked at himself in the mirror and picked up some sort of Turkish kind of hat, or whatever it was, and put that on his head and studied himself-and suddenly began to speak as if he were some character in an old English drama, perhaps Shakespearean, Romeo and Juliet-whatever it was. And it's a pity that Buckley isn't still alive so that we could talk to him as to whether that was the moment or whether he'd been doing it in the bathtub all morning before trying it out in front of a mirror that afternoon-we don't know. But that was when he switched to this character.
Now there are many comedians who do characters and sometimes involving foreign dialects, etc. Sid Caesar, for example, who I think is the greatest comedian of television history, ah I spent an evening with Sid once when he was quite depressed because his show had been cancelled, and that entire evening he spoke as a Polish man, and I thought at first he was kidding. And he laughed - I went into a restaurant after the show to cheer him up because I was furious that NBC had cancelled his show, and he said, 'You good men, sit down with me. We break bread.' And he spoke like that all night as a Polish fellow. So comedians are a little strange sometimes in this way. And I say that as one of them.
But anyway, Buckley apparently stayed with the British thing for the rest of his life. He grew up, I don't know, in Chicago, whatever his hometown was. So it was not natural to him. And that was, to return to our question of about a half hour ago, ah what are the reasons: probably the main reasons was that he was impenetrable. If you came away from a couple of hours with him you weren't sure who the guy was that you'd just been spending all this time with. But he was always entertaining; he was very florid and dramatic and outspoken and very forceful. He never seemed to be hemming and hawing and wondering what his next word would be, as many of us do; he was very forceful and dramatic and because he was so eccentric, that was one of the reasons he seemed funny to us.
MM
Is it possible that, I mean you also mentioned in your introduction that he had worked most of the top night spots in the country, yet he really never made it in the same sense that you made it or Sid Caesar made it. Is it possible that eccentricity got in the way?
SA
Probably, yes. I once was in a jazz club in midtown Manhattan - I can't remember what nightspot it was - I remember that about 60% of the audience was Black. Now you might think that would be a perfect audience for him, especially when he was doing his hip versions of the children's stories, or Bible stories, as he often did. And in this case, the routine he did was something he called "The Nazz" by which he meant Jesus, the Nazarene. And again you would think that he would have wailed that night, but unfortunately he not only bombed, but there were very cold vibes in the room. As Lester Young used to say, 'I think I feel a draft'-you know the audience didn't like him or racists were out front, or whatever. And there was some, even a little hissing and a little booing - it got that bad. It may have been that many of those Black people who were Christian believers who thought there was something blasphemous about what he was doing; I don't know. Or they may have objected to his having worked with a kind of a Black dialect, which he did. So I don't know. But my point was that he was very special; he was not for every taste, by any means. There are many comedians of whom the same might be said: Ernie Kovaks was never for every taste, so Ernie Kovaks could never have become a Jackie Gleason or a Bob Hope or a Red Skelton, who was popular with everyone.
MM
Well you were certainly aware of his hip repertoire that he did, the Naz, Jonah and the Whale,?
SA
At a certain point, I became aware of it. Oddly enough after I had already come up with a similar idea, and I remember specifically the moment the idea occurred to me and at that moment I'd never heard of Buckley, or had I heard of his having done that. I was doing, before I did the Tonight Show, I did several years of television and radio for CBS, doing a roughly similar show. And one day there was a jazz guitarist, his name was Ernie, I forget his last name. He was up at the house; we were rehearsing some numbers. And he was telling me that his son, who was apparently five or six years old, had said something cute the day before - and I love stories about children, so I listened. And now I repeat that his father, the child's father, was a jazz musician, so obviously the boy had heard jazz talk around the house, jazz language. So he had said to the little darling, 'Jimmy, what did you work on at school today?'- ancient question at the end of a day, and Jimmy said "Oh the teacher told us about some cat named George Washington"' And I still laugh still thinking of that sweet moment. If the guy was 29 years old, it wouldn't have sounded a bit funny, but from a sweet little darling, it was funny. And I said hey that gives me a great idea. It would be funny to tell the story of George Washington and the cherry tree in jazz language. So I just noted that fact at the point. I was busy with the meeting so I didn't do the work. And a day or two later, I was writing a series of columns at the time for Downbeat Magazine, every month I'd write a funny column or a news-worthy column. So I wrote up one of the stories but I decided not to deal with Washington and the cherry tree, which is a very short story, and not that great a story. If it weren't George Washington nobody would care about it. So I went to the obvious source, the ancient European tales: Hans Christian Anderson, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Red Riding Hood, you know all that, and told them. And then several months later somebody told me that a guy named Buckley was doing something somewhat similar. I was not precisely the same; he had his own version of the language. But he was using that hip stuff in front of the Black audience the night I saw him and that audience didn't like it.
MM
I was doing the research on this one, to come here, and I ran across your Bop fables is what you call it, right? And I thought there's almost a Jungian synchronicity about that, that the idea of things just popping up simultaneously.
SA
Yea, there's a great deal of evidence of that sort in the history of ideas itself. If you're talking about technological inventions: the electric light, the film camera. It often has happened that somebody in Russian and somebody in Scotland had the same idea about the same time. And neither one knew about the other. So it was as you say, synchronicity.
MM
And it's interesting, too, what I find interesting is that to us, that-I was born in 1950, so the 50's were-I was just a kid; I really didn't think sociologically about it. But you know I look back and I think, well the 50's are really noted for being locked down, buttoned down, people going to work, the 2.8 kids and everything. And people like you and Buckley, it certainly wasn't anti-buttoned down, but it was , it seemed like a great expression about the other part of humanity that was. . . .
SA
Oh sure, the 50's were a very creative period. They were the period of Lenny Bruce: fresh; Mort Sahl: fresh; Lord Buckley: fresh; Ernie Kovaks: fresh; there were a lot of guys getting away from the Bob Hope-Milton Berle model of stand-up.
MM
What would you say stood out most about him, to you?
SA
It's hard to say. . . I just think of separate factors about whether. . . there were several things about him that were unusual. But I can't give you an order of priority as to whether item two was more important than item seven. I always had the feeling that - and I realize this is a rather unkind thing to say, but I don't mean it unkindly - some of my friends, I would say the same thing of. He was a little bit nuts-what, little bit, six and a half percent - who cares what the arithmetic is? He was that eccentric and of course philosophers have pointed to the difficulty of drawing a sharp line of distinction between any kind of genius expression and any kind of highly intelligent artistic expression and mental, emotional instability. The two sometimes even seem to go together. Some great painters, some great composers have had serious emotional problems. But nevertheless, given that philosophical background, Buckley did seem a little bit whacko some of the time. And part of it was, to return to point one - earlier, you were not always sure you were talking to him directly, in the way that you and I are now talking to each other - two guys on a park bench talking. We happen to have a camera, but that's all we're doing. In his case there was always something of a performance: 'My dear fellow. . .' You know, I laughed at that, I loved it, but it did kind of get in the way of the communication a little bit.
MM
Did it ever occur to you that it might be a defense, that that might be his sort of psychological, the way his armor for the world?
SA
It did not occur to me, but it does not seem an unreasonable hypothesis. Maybe that was why he did it. Pity that we didn't ask him these questions while he was on earth. But another instance that comes to mind, in the context of his, to use the word loosely, craziness, was - I don't remember who reported this, but somebody went to his house, having been invited to a rather casual dinner party - maybe 14 people were there. And he knocked on the door to the apartment in New York, and Buckley opened the door stark naked. Now that would have been odd if he had just gotten out of the shower and was alone in the apartment, but the party was already going on around him. So that was two odd factors in concert. I know some very extroverted comedians, we all know them, but I can't imagine them doing anything like that. I can, in certain contexts where they knew who was outside, they knew that the guy would laugh at the nudity factor, and it was just 'now pardon me while I put my clothes on;' but apparently Buckley just spent the evening like that. So that's certainly odd; I'm not putting it down or up or sideways, I'm just saying it's odd.
MM
Yeah. On the Tonight Show, when he appeared on your show, would you have considered letting him do something like "The Nazz"?
SA
I can't remember now whether at that time I knew about "The Naz", although I probably did. And it's significant, I think, that he himself did not ask to do that. And if he had, probably before anybody came to me about the request, it would have been voted no. Again, I'm not either defending that kind of thinking or attacking it, but it was not part of television. When Lenny Bruce, and this is a more apt case perhaps, who was certainly controversial and whose work I greatly admire. We were friends, worked on my show. The clip that's often shown now from our old Sunday night comedy show. What he did was not controversial at all. He didn't try to and was turned down. It never entered his mind, which is a more important factor. So my guess is that Buckley understood the rules of the TV game, which is - it goes into peoples' homes, which is not like going to a nightclub at one o'clock in the morning. And therefore would not have done that.
MM
It's probably not possible that he could have done something like "The Nazz" on television in the 50's?
SA
I don't think it's possible. I don't know of any show where that would have been permitted. Again I'm not at this moment saying whether he should have been permitted; we can leave that to another discussion or a book, but it simply would not have been permitted. The only chance, I think, would have been on some talk show, but then originally there was only one talk show, Tonight Show, so there was no"'Well, if you won't do it, I'll go over to so-and-so's and he'll let me do it." Come to think of it, and this is nothing to do with Buckley, but the only time my own comedy has been censored, a piece actually clipped out of it before it was telecast, was when I was a guest on the Tonight Show - this goes back a good many years. Johnny was the host at the time and I think he was off that night. Anyway, I did a routine where I dressed in a black kind of clergy-clerical robe and I portrayed a right wing, Southern fundamentalist kind of minister, a bit of a whacko case. And they cut out a little bit of my work, so I've seen the censorship thing from both sides. But even though the Tonight Show-especially at the time I did the monologue, was probably about five minutes after twelve at night-there were no children would have seen it, but even that much later from my Tonight Show days in the early 50's, that sort of thing was handled very gingerly.
MM
It's kind of still the collective unconscious at work; everybody knows that some things won't fly?
SA
Well, it has to do with the audience. Most comedians are able to adjust their work on the basis of what the audience is. And if, ideally, all comedians should be able to do that. And if you are a comic that works only dirty and there are some now in the business - well for the one thing, you're unlikely to ever be hired at a Baptist convention, or even just plain folks. I performed at a industrial convention, I don't know, 15 years ago, somewhere in the South - Tennessee or somewhere. And when the fellow who picked me up at the airport to welcome me to town made casual conversation on our drive in towards the hotel, he said "You know the main reason we've booked you for this convention?' and I said 'no'. He said, 'You work clean." And I said thank you but I've never claimed that as a distinction. In that day most American comedians worked clean, so to me it was about as uninteresting as if he had said, "Because you wear glasses" or "You're tall." It didn't seem like an important factor. Nowadays, it's a very important factor. Comedians, many of them are cutting themselves out of work from a lot of theaters, a lot of clubs, a lot of audiences because of the vulgarity of their work. On the other hand, they may say, "I don't care, there are a lot of clubs that want me to work dirty and I'm making a good living, so go jump in the lake."
MM
Do you remember the episode of him on your show?
SA
All I remember consciously, which is what remembering is, is the funny routine where he got four people at random out of the audience, sat them in four chairs facing the audience, and then crouched down behind them and told them to move their jaws as if they were puppets and he did all of the dialogue. He had the microphone behind him. Very funny routine. I can't remember a single word from it, but I do remember it being creative and funny and kind of daring. Many people, many comedians, I don't think would be willing to tackle an assignment of that sort. Some of us would, but most comedians wouldn't want to touch that kind of thing.
MM
Actually, I specifically meant the night he was on your show, with the kind of mad tumbling and having Skitch Henderson and Andy Williams in the routine.
SA
No, I have no recollection of that at all. I can't wait to see it.
MM
You were laughing hysterically.
SA
I'm a notoriously easy laugh. I did think Buckley was funny, so he deserved whatever laughs I was giving him.
MM
Do you think Lord Buckley was a throw-back? Certainly he looked like a cashiered colonel, or something. I mean was he from a different era?
SA
Yeah, but I don't really think he was a throw-back; I think he was - what is the term in the science of biology? Some word like sport or something. In other words, a freak occurrence.
MM
A chimera?
SA
Ah, I don't think that. But anyway, he was just a one of a kind, one of those odd characters who comes along. There are odd lemons on trees or chickens who have two heads or whatever. He was in that sense, and I don't say that in the pejorative sense, he was a freak, definitely one of a kind. Nobody's ever tried to copy him - it would be ridiculous. It would be obvious who you were copying, nobody should ever do that. Sometimes people will steal other peoples' jokes, what do I mean sometimes, it happens every day - and sometimes they will be bold enough to take whole routines. I have been the victim of that kind of plagiarism in a instances - no names please - but with Buckley, if you tried to do him, you'd be taking his whole persona, even his off-screen personal and that's probably why it's never happened, to my knowledge. I shouldn't say that so fast; I just recalled knowing of an instance in which a well known - oh, Jimmy Buffet-yeah, once did one of Buckley's routines verbatim. He switched a little bit and really made it Swedish instead of Jewish, or whatever those kind of switches - he took the whole routine, and when he was called to account for it, he said it's in the public domain. Buckley never put it into the public domain, so Buffet was guilty of an offense in that case. Whether it was a legal offense, it's not my business to say.
MM
He actually had to settle out of court for that.
SA
Ah.
MM
What would you say Buckley's significance in the field of humor is? If he was significant at all?
SA
I believe Buckley was significant; 10,000 people would give you 10,000 different numbers if you say to what arithmetical degree was he significant, so the numbers mean nothing. He was groundbreaking, he was fresh, he did new things. I only saw him on those few occasions in the early '50's, so how he was working in clubs ten years before that, I have no knowledge of it, nor did I see him much in later years, so I don't know how he ended up on stage, I mean. But the one that we know and the one that we have some evidence of in the form of recordings or old kinescope films, is the only one we can comment on, and that was very fresh.
SA
It was purely a social or creative accident that he and I did the hip talk about old stories, although it means more, I think, that our stories were totally different. In fact I can't recall that there were any instances in which we dealt with the same raw materia l- the European stories, etc.
MM
I don't think you did.
SA
Maybe not. But it was the idea of taking some traditional tale from scripture or your grandmother or whoever, and rendering it the way jazz musicians talk. Ah, an interesting aspect of that creativity was that most jazz playing comes, originates, I should say, primarily in the Black jazz player's language, which is different than the Black American street language itself. That in any event varies from city to city and even neighborhood to neighborhood; new phrases come along and seem hip for six months and you never hear them again. Other phrases seem no more or less hip but they're with us after fifty or sixty years, they're still around.
Ah, so I think people really have to see Buckley, as you are making it possible now for them to do, to evaluate them according to their own terms and interests, but he never got the wide audience that, according to my judgment, he deserved. But isn't it nice that there are films and tapes and recordings so he is not gone, as somebody once said, Fred Allen once said, from obscurity to oblivion.
MM
Do not pass go, right? Amongst many other things that you're known for, you're known for a high degree of musical prowess, really. Did you ever have any take on the sort of musicality of Lord Buckley?
SA
No, at this moment I draw a blank on that. If you have some evidence of it. . .
MM
Oh, just his cadences, he used his voice almost like a baritone sax, you know.
SA
Yeah, there was a tendency for him to, whatever it means, talk jazz. He seems to be doing that. But then, according to one definition of jazz,"'if it ain't spontaneous, it ain't really jazz" It's playing like jazz, but the essence, according to some definitions again, is that spontaneity again, that if you play "Honeysuckle Rose" a hundred times, you don't simply do your award-winning solo ninety-nine times; you create something each time. Audiences don't care about that. First of all, audiences, unless they hear performance A and performance B, don't know if you're creating and ad-libbing tonight or simply repeating the thing that got you a standing ovation three months earlier. So to audiences it doesn't matter a damn, which is nice for audiences. But he was not ad-libbing in those cases, as far as I know; those were written and planned routines, and very clever routines they were. And the fact that they were written and pre-planned should never be taken as a criticism, because most of the great jokes and routines in the history of comedy-comedy plays, comedy movies, comedy monologues are written. In fact if the performer himself is not competent to do that, he is supplied with writers very quickly.
I remember once I was in attendance at the Emmy telecast and I think it was, pretty sure it was David Letterman's writers won some award for best writing-late night, or whatever the award was; and so I applauded and we all looked over and, I think, eighteen guys got up. I don't know why I expected two, you know, 'cause when I started the Tonight Show I had no writers at all. After a few months I added a couple of guys: Dan Burns and Herb Sargent, but that's two guys and myself, so three of were writing what little the show required in the way of writing, because if you do a talk show it's possible to just talk and have nothing written. But nowadays lots of writers write stuff, so my point again is nothing wrong as having it written. As long as it's funny that's all that counts.
MM
Yeha. How would you describe Lord Buckley to somebody who'd never, ever heard of him?
SA
It is notorious difficult to make word pictures of anything which is not originally a word picture. Take the Mona Lisa. We can use that as a term, because we've all seen reproductions of it. But imagine a Black man, or somebody who got here from outer space with no prior knowledge whatever, and he said 'We picked up the term Mona Lisa, what does that mean?' What are you gonna say, it's a picture of a woman and she has a kind of an odd little smile. Have you said anything that will help him? Of course not. What you've said is accurate, but it's a tiny fraction of one billionth of a per cent of the reality you're commenting on. So again if people haven't seen Buckley, I don't think any of us could say, could really explain him. We have already made certainly factual statements about "The Nazz" and the funny routine with the four people from the audience and all that and the phony British accent and the grand manner, and what if they've seen him? They don't need my comments. And if they haven't seen him, my comments can't do much.
MM
Do either of you guys have a question?
RM
I was just wondering, if somebody like Professor Irwin Corey or Brother Theodore fit in these kinds of categories that you're. . .
SA
You know, to return to the point of the creativity in comedy of the 1950's, I don't know who - well some publicist came up with the term, "buttoned down" applied it to Bob Newhart, who was a very funny man and still is. The '50's were very creative time for comedy and considering that there was very little vulgarity, you might even say they were more creative than these days, or recent times.
But Irwin Corey, very a funny man with a very funny act, he basically did pretty much the same act all the time, but all that matters is do they laugh at it and I always did. We booked him for my show many times. Brother Theodore, who also appeared on the old Tonight Show and I think he appeared in one of my earlier shows, I never considered a comedian; he was what later today would be called a performance artist, which is a kind of a lame term that has been created when you don't know how the hell to describe what the person is doing on stage. He did, as I recall, a sort of Grand Guignol horror commentary. He looked ominous and he looked wild and he would talk about cutting off people's head, or God knows what he talked about. So that was entertainment club creativity, although not in my view, particularly comedy. But, ah, Irwin Corey was. Irwin Corey probably had the greatest opening line in the history of comedy. There are not many people competing with him for that honor. There are a few others, but I think his was the funniest. For those who have never seen him perform, although we have him on lots of films, he would dress like a raggedy kind of professor, wear black sneakers and clothes he must have been wearing for forty years. They all looked kind of ratty and he had a kind of ratty look to his face, and his hair was a little sideways. Ah, and he also worked in the same rather formal manner that Buckley did; and I believe he did it first, but the accents were quite different and neither was the real accent of the man. And he would, he was always introduced as a professor of some kind. He looked like one, and they would play solemn music when he walked on, rather than fine and dandy, something comedy club special. And he would raise his hand as if he had some great thought and then loose the thought and look in his pocket for some note,"'okay", except he wouldn't say okay. And he'd make this false start about six or seven times, no word would come out and it was hysterically funny. It was a pantomime. Then finally the great line, he would look at it again, stick it back in his pocket and say, "However" That one word "however" would put me on the floor every time I heard it. So that was 1950's creative comedy. And it was stuff that nobody else was doing and nobody else has ever stolen that particular routine.
MM
And pre-vulgarity, too, I think.
SA
Yeha, nothing the least bit vulgar.
MM
How did you - this is really an aside - but, Lenny Bruce - he was known for a dirty mouth and things like that, but it seemed to me it was in the service of something, it wasn't just for the sake of it.
SA
Yes. It's not simply because I was a friend of Lenny's that I don't like it. I fight against it. I protest when people equate him with people like Howard Stern. Oh, God. Howard Stern only talks dirty, that's what he does for a living. If you love it, then that's your problem, but let's not talk about in the context of comedy. Lenny Stern - he was funny too, he wrote for me-Lenny Bruce was a funny man. First of all if he'd lived thousands of years ago when they hadn't invented the word comedian, maybe everybody would say, "There's Lenny, the funny man." He was a comic philosopher and he did not use the vulgar terms in the way that they are used today, he was always making a philosophical point. There was always, sometimes, a moral lesson in what he was saying. Morality was important to him. He cared about social justice and you can't care about social justice unless you care about moral considerations. The two without each other don't even make sense. So, anyway he was also a brilliant impressionis. He started out in the business doing impressions. He would have been a fine actor. Today they take a comic and put him in movies right away. That didn't happen so much in Lenny's time. But there was a big talent there. He was a multi-talented man. So when guys who just now do filth for a living are compared with him, I wish that would stop.
RM
I wonder if you recall your reaction upon hearing of Buckley's death, and were you aware of the controversy about the pulling of his cabaret license by the New York Police Dept.
SA
No I don't recall any details about his death. I don't know where he was or what I was doing when that happened. And I don't have any knowledge about the cabaret license. I should, because I was active in the fight against the injustice of the cabaret licensing problem as it applied chiefly to musicians, which meant jazz musicians. It was supposed, somehow, to be a blow against the drug traffic, to make it impossible for Lester Young to make a living in New York. Stupid reasoning and finally the thing was abandoned. But I played some minor roll in the fight against that. Therefore, you would think I should know something about Buckley's case, but I don't recall anything.
MM
It seemed also that a cabaret coversc -cit was a great little side income for a lot of cops-they would. . .
SA
It probably encouraged corruption, yeah. It doesn't mean that all the cops that were involved were corrupt, but if there seven who are and fifty-seven who are not, that's still a crime.
MM
Yea. Steven, the last question, I think. . . you know we're not a big production company doing this. We're kind of doing this by the seat of our pants, really. I just wanted to know why you agreed to do the interview?
SA
I don't remember ever turning down anybody who wanted to interview me. It's in that large category. I've often interviewed others and been very grateful when they made themselves available. It's really that simple. If somebody wanted to interview me about something concerning which I know nothing, I wouldn't, you know, if they wanted to interview me about astrophysics or something, I'd say"'I'm sorry I don't know enough about that to speak coherently" but it's just a matter of being polite, receiving requests.
MM
Well, you're exceedingly polite and just for the three of us, if you ever want to interview us, we're here. Thank you very much.
SA
Thank you. I look forward to seeing the final result.
MM
Oh, we do too; it's been a long time coming.
SA
Great. |
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