Barry Sanders Interview

interview April 14, 1996 - New York City

 

MM

Let me ask you about the first time you, you saw Lord Buckley.

BS

I must have been about fourteen years old, only about fourteen or fifteen. Ah, and only today did I remember where I first saw him which was in Hollywood. I hung a lot in Hollywood because I went to Hollywood High School . So after school, lots of times, I would go to the Hollywood Library. It's a place where lots of amazing characters hung out. And many times I would just go to the library not to look at books but to check out the characters, you know, for stories that I'd want to write later on when I was forty. So, down the street and in the back alley, in fact the name of the alley was Cosmo Alley, was a little club, It was a place where guys with lots of hair and women with ponytails and black Capizzio shoes and black stockings and black tights would always go. There was music, you know, one could hear jazz. I convinced my father to take me down one night to see this guy Lord Buckley, this comedian. And I convinced the guy at the door to let this fourteen year old kid go in to see Lord Buckley on my, on my junior high school graduation night when all the other kids were going up to the Hollywood Hills and drinking. Three of us decided we were going to go to Sardi's and see Billy Holiday, when I graduated from junior high school. Which I thought was a pretty hip thing. And then we went up to the hills and drank, but at least we went to see Billy Holiday. So, I, I remember telling the guy at the door that this is what I did when I, you know, when I graduated junior high school. So, it must have been right at that point, , just about fourteen, fifteen transition between junior high school and high school that I saw Buckley for the first time. And then the second time was at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood. And that was 1959.

MM

So, how did you know to go see Lord Buckley in the first place?

BS

I knew to see Lord Buckley because I always wanted to be a standup comic. I mean that was my shtick. Other kids wanted to be firemen when they were younger, I wanted to be a standup comic. I grew up in the east coast until I was about nine, ten years and the place where one went was the Catskills, right? This was like the Jewish Borscht Belt circuit up in the Catskills, where one saw Buddy Hackett and Milton Berle and Jerry Lewis. So that's where I liked hang out, right? And my old man, at least one of the things he did, because he didn't do a whole lot, as an alcoholic. But, one of the things he did - he liked to tell stories, you know? Umm, fathers of his generation told lots of stories. Particularly immigrant fathers told an amazing amount of funny stories, off color stories. And he hung out at the steam bath a lot - this was something that Jews did a lot - they went to steam baths in LA and in New York.

MM

What was the function of the storyteller?

BS

The function of the storyteller? The function of the storyteller, I think, was to make sure that he could navigate - seriously, I mean, being able to tell a story is like navigating through the truth in a certain way. And storytelling for him was like having training wheels on a bicycle. It made it so he could walk, he could ambulate, you know, because he was always four sheets to the wind. He was always off to the side banging into stuff, running his car into various things. So, it's like hanging onto a big anchor to tell a story. I listened to a lots of comedy. I listened to comedy albums there. I listened to comedy on the radio. Somebody mentioned to me, a man, a friend of my father's, mentioned to me this name: Lord Buckley, right? But, I said, "How the hell could you have a name: Lord Buckley?" And he said, "You have to go see this person. If you want to be a comedian you have to go see this person Lord Buckley. This is a different experience. But, you have to be twenty-one to go see him." Because he plays places where alcohol is being served, right? In LA you just couldn't go in these places unless you had your old man with you or you pleaded with somebody. So, that's how I knew about Buckley first. And then I saw this little note, this little ad at the, at Cosmo Alley that Lord Buckley was coming and vaguely in the back of my mind it is, you know - it's sometime ago now but - he was only going to play one evening. Maybe two evenings but I think it was only for an evening as if somebody was coming through town - like Gypsy Davy going to play cards and was going to be gone the next day. And that was part of the mystique also for me, about Lord Buckley that he played two nights at the Ivar. So, if you wanted to go see him it wasn't that you were going to see a movie, you were going to see "Titanic" and it's going to be playing for forty-two weeks, right, and you can go any time you want to go see it. Or, even with Lenny Bruce - Lenny Bruce played at the Ivan House, this burlesque house, when I was a freshman at UCLA and he played for a month and a half. And that wasn't true about Lord Buckley. He was in and he was out, he was gone. He was like a mystery man.

MM

Impressions of that first show?

BS

I actually felt awkward. One of the things, it seems to me, about Buckley is that he could make you feel awkward in an audience if you're an adult. One gets to hear it, even on the records, when he begins - and he began that way about his little garden and "My Lords and my Ladies, would it embarrass you very much if I were to tell you that I love you?", right? And he did that and everybody tittered. I remember, I remember that distinctly because I told friends about it. Everybody giggled and tittered and sort of was nervous about things. And, umm, and I felt really nervous. And I remember thinking about that for a very long time that why, when he said that he loved us, why that made me feel real nervous, you know? That was my first impression. It was a very strong lasting impression, ahh, about Buckley. And I knew that I had been transported to another world. I love language - when I was a kid I went to regular school and then I went to Hebrew school for, after school for the next fifteen, sixteen years, until the time I was nineteen years old, or twenty years old. I mean I had these two languages going on, one with an alphabet and one with just characters, with just sounds, you know, no vowels, just consonants. And when I settled down into this place this guy was speaking another language. And I was totally entranced. And one of the most entrancing things, later on when I went to see Lenny Bruce was his voice, his language too. And it was very much an influence. I mean we talked about - Lenny Bruce and I talked about Buckley's influence on his voice - voice was real important and I think that Buckley's voice was very important in terms of mesmerizing, hypnotizing - a certain real sense of hypnotizing you and transporting you to a different rhythm. Most people have arrhythmia, you know? The kind of cultural arhythmia - without ritual, and, you know, without having, what he calls "swing", right? Decadence is a musical term, you know, decadence is a musical term. I think he provided, in a most amazing way, that sense early on, a way to breathe. And that first part of that was that it made me feel real awkward. It made me feel real strange. I was entering into some new planet, you know, some new, strange phase.

MM

Did you register that you were uncomfortable or were you just being uncomfortable?

BS

No, I knew. I was a real shy kid. I knew uncomfortable. I registered uncomfortable and said, "Wooh, you know, I hope nobody looks at me. I don't want anybody to be looking at me because I've been looking at myself." I wasn't sure when to laugh, you know? You do a routine like The Nazz, right? You're not sure, you're fourteen years olds, you've just been Bar Mitzvah'd, right? You don't know whether you're suppose to laugh at this Christian stuff.

WS

Did you understand what he was saying?

BS

Ahhh, I didn't understand everything, obviously. I can best answer that question without thinking about Lord Buckley. I recently wrote a piece about Tall Tales - exaggerated stories. When I was a kid I loved reading True Magazine. Young kids who were stranded on the top of a mountain and had to eat cockroaches to stay alive. True Magazine should have been called Lie Magazine, of course. But these were "true" stories, wild stories, right? And I loved those stories. And the reason I loved those stories, I think, is that, deep in my heart, and I think in every kid's heart, is the desire, as Buckley says, and later I want to add something to this, is the desire to swing, to be hip, to be really cool. To be really cool in that '50s sense of cool about walking a certain way and talking a certain way. And that sense of cool, is, no matter what it seems to me, is a black idiom, you know. This sounds horribly scholarly, but Ralph Ellison wrote this essay in 1970. Ellison wrote this book called "The Invisible Man" and he was an amazing guy. And it's called what would America be like without blacks, right? He says no sports, no Hemingway, no Fitzgerald, no Faulkner, right? He writes this essay in 1970 so he says no '60s, right? No liberation movements, no hip stuff, no cool stuff, no cool talk. So, when you think back at your life and you say, "What I wanted to be at 14 was a hipster. What I wanted to be was cool." Walt asked me this question about whether or not I understood all the things going on. Even today, when somebody's talking to you from "the ghetto", and says something to you, "You got any scrullo, bro?", It's still the sense of being cool. I know I didn't understand a whole lot of it. But I wanted to. And I wanted people to think I was doing it. And I think that's part of the move also. It's like, "We the people", it's like the Declaration of Independence, it's this inclusive "We" even though, you say, "What are you talking about, man? I'm black. I live in South Central!", but that's - the "We" includes all of us - when he says you're in this, in this garden, "My Lord and my Ladies", man, I be there! And the brother be talking to me, you know? So, he was talking to all of us and I wanted to talk that way. And I think that's real important part of Buckley. I think that's an amazingly important part of Buckley's routine is that to understand that the real liberation and the real swinging stuff was not coming from the white world, it was coming from black jazz hipster world. And he - I don't think those routines would be the same without that Lord Buckley voice, and argot. And he does tell tall tales. The Bear that's twenty-seven acres wide and seventeen feet tall is straight out of 19th century American tall tale. It's an American invention, you know, American distillation that has it's roots in Black oral story telling in this country. I mean Faulkner writes a story called "The Bear". Every one of our whoppers in the 19th century comes from either fish or game. "The One that Got Away" or "The Big Bear - you should have seen the size of that thing." So, he's [Buckley] right there - that story is right out of Black story telling in 19th century down in the, you know, the stories that Joel Chandler Harris gathers up in Uncle Remus stories. I'm pretty sure he knows it too.

MM

I'll bet he did. He wasn't educated even through high school I don't.

BS

Once I think you start telling stories, the way he told stories, anybody - you see, my shtick is that anybody who sits down to write eventually becomes a sit down comic, every author because, because you understand that language is so wonderfully plastic, you know? And you realize that you can change the world with it, right? "I can do magic!" with the thing. And anybody who stands up, I think, to talk, including rabbis, gradually get into the storytelling and wants to see "how much I can get away with". You move towards the tall tale, you move towards exaggeration. Bruce did exactly the same thing. Steve Martin does exactly the same thing, in those early routines. Think about Woody Allen - exactly the same kind of shtick, "Let me take you away!"

MM

Do you think it would it be fair to say that, in the case of Buckley he witnesses - he's a witness to - I want to bring the word salvation in somehow. Not like it's going to solve every problem but that the language has some salvation in it.

BS

It would take me a while to answer that question. And I don't know if you want the long answer or the short answer.

MM

Probably the short answer for the film.

BS

OK

MM

The long answer for me.

BS

The short answer, the real short answer is that laughter is basically holy. It's tradition and it's history is one of a gift from gods. In Hebrew, one vowel - it is basically, for the Ancients, it's the stuff that makes you a human being, it gives you your soul, right? So anytime that somebody is moving you towards it, it seems to me, moving you to that place, they're taking you towards salvation. The word religion in Latin "religio" means - it's the ligaments in your leg, you know, your muscles, that tie you, tie your muscles to bone. "Religio" means to tie you back up - retie you or reconnect you with the world. I can get you to forget every problem that you've ever had if I can get you to give a good belly laugh. In the sense of "whole", it's a holy experience. And this sense of removing language that's hidebound to grammar, the kind of grammar rules, and taking it out of that place and giving it some freedom and letting it breathe, is absolutely the notion of salvation for Buckley and for language. This is what happened with this debate over Ebonics just recently. And, not only that, but it gives you some sense of you, of your own identity, "This is the way I speak.", you know. "This is the way Michael speaks.", right? And, I think one of the things you need for a kind of sense of salvation always is also a sense of who you are and a sense that you have some problems that need to be solved. The actor makes you know - what it feels like when you don't have them. And Buckley's language takes you there, I think.

MM

That's a lovely answer. Let me start with my questions.

BS

Now he's going to start his questions? What was I doing making chop liver?

MM

Alright. Page thirty - page twenty-five [in the book "Sudden Glory"]. You talk about, "Laughter is the last sense to capitulate to authority." I love that idea.

BS

I don't know what the fuck it means, I like it too, but -

MM

Well, do you remember writing the book?

BS

It's the, ahh -

MM

I just wonder if you could connect it to - is there any connection you could, see between that and Lord Buckley?

BS

Here's basically what I'm interested in and here's what I think basically - - how the power of the world gets moved. For me the most powerful thing is also the most evanescent, invisible thing its breath. The human voice, articulation of the human voice. And the best thing, I think, that you can possibly do with it is to speak truth to power. Laughter is the Esperanto of the soul, right? I can laugh at a Nazi in the face, Stassi soldier in the face. I can laugh at a Spanish Fascist in the '30s in the face, you know? And, lock me up, right? Take away everything, right? You can try to brainwash. In that list of the ways that you can actually tell people off - you can flip them off, you can tell them off, you can, ah, kiss them off. You can write them off. But, one of the most humiliating things that you can do to somebody is to laugh them off, right? And it works the other way too. I think that it's a great leveler - that, if I were at the White House and Bill Clinton didn't know me, and he doesn't from Adam. I can still say, "Hey, Bill, did you hear the one about the -?" And try to get him by the collar. People always want to stop and listen to a good one. And so, I think that it's a real enemy of what the French call "esprit d' seriousness" - the spirit of seriousness. And authority needs seriousness, I mean one of the most frightening things for me in the '60s was the expression "All Power to the People." Because I had this picture of Ginsburg giving everything back over to the people - that Ginsburg would piloting a 747, right? And he'd say [imitates Ginsburg's voice], "Oh, man, we're flying, I don't know - twenty, thirty thousand feet. Does it really matter?", [normal voice]You want to hear that pilot. You want to know that he's six two, blonde haired and blue eyed and that he's in control. You don't want to hear that he has a Puerto Rican accent, right? You're going to go out the, out the door. So, it takes real seriousness - this is why, you know, with - in the bible, you, you - people - you know I teach the Middle Ages so people are these kind of apocryphal ah, they say "first hand accounts" of seeing Christ. They can describe his complexion, the way he walks, his skin color, the way he smiles and they all say he never, ever laughed, right? Laughter and authority are - sleep on opposite sides of the bed. There's only one image that anybody knows in all of art history of a laughing Christ. I mean you can think about praying to Christ and thinking, "Oh, is he going to laugh? You know, is he going to laugh at me? I may put my clothes on and pray to Christ, I can't do it in the shower, he'll see my schmeckel. You want seriousness. And the easy way to deflate that kind of sense of authority, I think, is through real laughs. I'll tell you the other thing that I think that's implied in that notion about capitulation to authority is that laughter always implies a great deal of hope, you know? Even - I think that if you can laugh it posits a future. People always laugh in the future tense because you think that it's going to keep going on, man, it's going to, you know - comedy, for me, is a higher form than tragedy, because comedy includes tragedy. You've had horrible things happen to your life and you've gone on. That's the wheel that comedy has in it, is to keep moving and try to laugh and keep on laughing.

WS

What do you think Buckley's place is in American comedic history?

BS

I'll tell you why I think it's real powerful and real important, his place in comedic history, because nobody much talks about it. [Barry laughs] You know, everybody wants to talk about Woody Allen or Steve Martin, but those guys, I'm convinced that those guys wouldn't have existed - you don't get those guys without getting Lenny Bruce and you don't get Lenny Bruce, I mean I have it from the horse's mouth, you don't get Lenny Bruce without having Lord Buckley. But, it's how the stock market works. As soon as soon as you hear the rumor it's too late. It's already done, the insiders know it. So, as soon as, you know, soon maybe, twenty years people will start articulating Lord Buckley's influence, right. But, I know that it's real powerful because people talk about in conversation but not in the heavy duty books. So, I think that people really understand him and really recognize him who are not consuming comedy but appreciating comedy. Who are there not at it's counter, but at it's feet.

MM

I was intrigued in your book by how, how much credence you give to the primary thing of breath. And I just wondered if you had a kind of a take on - I mean Buckley had tremendous pipes, they were -

BS

Oh! He was a musical instrument. I think he was a musical instrument. Absolutely. I'm real struck by - Can I answer the Buckley question with a Lenny Bruce example? When I went to see Lenny Bruce I went for thirty, thirty-five straight nights at a burlesque house when some guy told me, "You gotta go see this guy." I went every night. I watched his routines evolve. I went out after with, with him and we talked about it. He was working these things. And he was trying to find, just as a writer does, we talked about this, just as a writer does, his voice, his rhythm, his pace. Even how he walked across the stage was real crucial to him. "How did I look tonight?" he said. How many buttons he buttoned on his jacket was real important in terms of how he was going to breath, right? I was real struck when I listened to Lord Buckley over and over again of a routine done five, six, seven, eight times, how he had gotten the pacing down. While he might change a phrase or two, like in Black Cross. That rhythm and that pacing is absolutely extraordinary I think. The musical kind of improvisation that allows you, as I said before, to kind of breath with him, and in-breathing and an out-breathing with him. And I pay an awful lot of attention to, both to breath and to breathing in terms of comedy and it's opposite: chocking. And it's one of the phrases we use and in Latin all of the words that have, in fact, to do with choking are "A-N-G" words. They have that kind of prefix "angxiari" so you get "anxiety", you get "anger. Somebody heckles you, if you get anger you close your throat, you choke it, literally choke, right? Ah, you'll get angina, another one of those words. So, Bruce would do breathing exercises beforehand, just as people do when there are nervous and they're going to run - Michael Johnson's going to run a hundred yard dash, you sit and you get your breath, just as a poet does, just as you do in meditation. Standup comedy, of the kind that Lenny Bruce did and Lord Buckley did, is not something you just walk out of a seat and go up and do. You do it in your body, it's corporeal mime. It's in one's body and in the way one walks. So, for me, when somebody says, "Well, how was his act?" - I read that review of Buckley at the Ivar and talked about his act. For me it's not an act. For me it's a performance, you know? For me there's a sense in which those opening lines are real crucial about "My Lords and my Ladies," and being, of meeting people and not having any defenses and being right there for them, being right there for them.

MM

An invocation?

BS

Yeah, absolutely. "Invocation" is a voice word, "provocation" is a voice word too, right? So, all the "vocari" stuff, all the vocal stuff, it's an invocation. And there's a certain kind of sense, you know - when you go into a cathedral, right? Those that were built in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth centuries, they have a spire on top of them. This is how God "inspires" the building. He makes the building holy by breathing his breath through it, through this spire. When you come up for communion, what the priest does, in the middle ages, is blow a little puff of air into your mouth, which he gets from God. It's called "the kiss of conspiracy", the conspiratorial kiss. "Conspiracy": breathing together, conspiring together, really conspiring together. That means we're sitting in this room listening to Buckley or Bruce do this stuff that is always subversive. Good laughter, good humor, good comedy is always subversive and what we are doing is exchanging the most holy kind of heated breath there is: laughter. So, we are sitting in this room, holy place, made holy, you know, by our own breath, conspiring together.

MM

Buckley talks about "You're not in a nightclub,".

BS

No, you're not. And Bruce did the same thing, And the image that I remember, some forty years ago after seeing him. That we were in a garden and people who were sitting around were his little flowers and now he was going to nurture them. Now he was going allow them to grow. I remember quite vividly that kind of image. I heard it before from a priest as a religious image. A guy, a person that I know very, very well, who was trained at the Vatican, used that same image when I heard him give a lecture. Just as, I think, a good teacher's not in a classroom. A good teacher just transforms the place, right? When you go see a really great movie, it's been a long time probably since anybody in the room has seen a great movie. You're not in a theatre anymore, right? You're some place else. See, I always think that when you go into a theatre you walk in twice. You're walking into building and then you're walking inside your mind. And I think when you walk into see good comedy you walk into some kind of structure, but you're walking into it twice. You walk in once and then this person gets on and you forget about it, you walk inside your imagination.

MM

He did some pieces from the Bible: Jonah and the Whale, he did the story of Jesus. Do you have any take on those particular pieces that he did?

BS

I think that the interesting comment about pieces came from, I think it may have been Studs Terkel interviewing him. Maybe it was Studs. I remember - I play Lord Buckley quite a lot for classes. Young kids have a real hard time with it. I played The Nazz halfway through and I stopped and I asked kids what's it about. Fully three-quarters of them had no idea what was going on. And I asked why they didn't know what was going on. And we talked about it. They don't know the Bible. For a guy to be able to do that, it seems to me, that's a person who has ingested the stories. They're not stories anymore that lie flat on a page and folded away and crushed away, you know? It seems to me that they live for him inside himself. That's the only way - I think all of those stories are too important to take seriously [Barry laughs] I think you get it when you can play with it, right? You know that you've come to understand the instrument when you can play the melody line a tiny bit differently and you can start to improvise. Remember that these are not just stories he's telling to himself. If you think about Spaulding Gray, or think about some monologist. None of that works unless you get those people out there coming back to you, right? And it seems for me that those stories, as Buckley redoes them, are much more alive and much more religious than some kind of serious Bible thumper telling me about salvation. I think that when you can be playful with it, as I say before, when you can improvise and make it come alive I think you've got it.

MM

And part of the conspiratorial breath is that the audience would know the story as well.

BS

In those days I think the story - in the '50s I think people knew the Bible much better, as least through Charlton Heston, than they do now. I ask students - they don't - lots of them don't read, they don't read the Bible, the paper's too thin. No, you get sweaty palms, you know, you can't - [MM laughs]

MM

There's a good one on page 46 [of "Sudden Glory"], "The idea may be as outlandish as it sounds. First listen to sociologist Erving Goffman who comments so intelligently on wit and laughter in ordinary conversation in just a couple of short sentences:"

BS

Yeah, it's fantastic.

MM

"One of the heroes [of conversation] is the wit who can introduce references to wider, important matters in a way that is ineffably suited to the current moment of talk. Since the witticism will never again be as telling, a sacrifice has been offered up to the conversation, and respect paid to its unique reality by an act that shows thoroughly the actor is alive." Well, I was just thinking of it in terms of - Buckley took these stories that were, I forget the word, but they are, you know, part of a larger inventory of literature that Western people know. But then he ran them through this mind of his and brought them - what he would say, "into the pounce of now." [Barry giggles]

BS

But, you know, when you think about The Nazz, for instance, terms of a trajectory, a narrative, how it moves towards a climax, for me, the real moment in that story is walking on water. The moment in that story is a miracle. Right, I mean the climatic moment is, "Make it, Jude!" It's an amazing thing, you know? So, for religious people that's called an epiphany, this kind of moment of epiphany where you get to see that this person really is a miracle worker. The Nazz is a miracle worker. You know, you tell a joke to somebody, you offer up, as Goffman says, a witticism, you give somebody a punch line and give them the greatest pleasure that they can possibly, almost imagine, physical, bodily pleasure and real pleasure. People who write about comedy have said this before. But, there is a kind of miracle aspect about that I think. There is this miraculous aspect about it, in which, in the single word - Chaucer does it in a single word, people can do it in a single word with a punch line, bring you around to see the world differently. To see the world in a very different way as if a crack had opened, and you can see the light for the very first time. And this is what a joker does. This is what the jokester does. This is what, I think, a miracle worker does: brings you to that same kind of place. But, I think in both cases that, and I don't mean to be corny about this, but a person "dies" away from an old life to a new one, to a new way of seeing. And, and it's there in, in, in the word "joker", you know. It comes from a root that is about juggling, defying gravity in both senses, of gravity and of "graveness". And it comes from the root for juggler vein. People who - and Walt said it earlier, that "Go for the juggler." But there is a way that you can die laughing: "I'm keeling over.", "You slay me.", "You murder me." All of those have meaning in the sense of joke telling and miracle working. And I walked into the Ivar Theatre or into Cosmo Alley and saw Buckley every bit of the existing real world was gone. And he had transformed it into this religious place, this whole place, before the thing ever began. And elevated everybody in that place to lords and ladies, respected them as royalty, you know, in that place. Think about it in terms of the opposite side of that: going to see Don Rickles and, and having Rickles, which I've done, and having Rickles pick somebody from the audience and putting them down. I mean, think of the image of putting them down. And coming into a room and having a comic stand up and elevate everybody, right. So, all the put downs are done with. Now he's got a different kind of job on his hands. He's got a religious task on his hands to come through. Once he's elevated us to this place and I feel, "Wow, just do it to me." And then what he does, I think, is to show you the power of, the miracle power of laughter.

MM

Let's see, there's a thing, oh, I don't want to read the whole thing but - [quoting from Sudden Glory] "If the state is to be run effectively and efficiently however, the folk must know their place. Otherwise, when the body politics find something funny great groundswells of raucous laughter wash everything clean." What came to mind when I read that was - are you familiar with the "H-Bomb"? He talks in that about, "I'm going to start a great big campaign against the bomb. The gasser of all times, The Bomb. Billboards, this, that and the other thing. Slogans - so that when people, when people hear the word 'H-Bomb' they just collapse in laughter. [Barry laughs] They hear the word 'H-Bomb and 'Whistle your thistle, here comes a missle'." Would you say that was a fair reference - when you think about what you wrote.

BS

Absolutely. Talking about that Buckley routine on Steve Allen where he comes out dressed in this elegant way, in his tails and then rolls off his pants, takes off his shirt, right? Lowers his suspenders, takes off his cummerbund, takes off his shoes and he's an acrobat. And he does this weird piece. You were saying about this element of surprise that's involved in it. But, it's not just the element of surprise, but, it's a Buckley move too and that's an element of carnival. And one of the things that happens in carnival is that the world gets topsy-turvy. And you can even see it in that routine that he does on Steve Allen - people are turning cartwheels. It's contained, I think, in the physicality of the thing itself that things are turning over and over and over upside down. So, the real power of laughter would be that - if you could get the most serious weapon of mass destruction then, H-Bomb, and have people see that this is a joke, turn it upside down. That this bomb could come full circle to, what young people say today about something that's really cool, that they really like, "It's, it's the bomb!" Right, have you heard that expression?

MM

No

BS

People say, "It's the bomb.", you know. That's, that's a great Mardi Gras carnival spirit, in which you say goodbye to the normal order of things. In which you just kiss it goodbye. If you go to New Orleans, on Mardi Gras, you know that things will happen that you have no control - this great element of surprise. And you don't know who's a man or who's a woman. Men dress in women's clothes. It happened in the middle ages too in Mardi Gras. And this element in which you are moving from the fattest day, Fat Tuesday, to skinny Wednesday, Lent, right? There's this moment in the calendar where everything can happen - it also happens with that kiss that you get on New Year's Eve. So, these are the moments, I think, that comedians want. "Put me on Steve Allen where everything is scripted and worked out. And let me bust through the script." It seems to me that, that Lord Buckley did that and Steve Allen said, "I don't know what's going to happen." It happened to Ed Sullivan with Lenny Bruce and disinvited him from coming back. I don't know actually if it's possible to do anymore on television. I have a sense that's it's only happened twice that I know of. And it happens late night and it happens once when Madonna said a four letter word on Letterman. And, I can't remember her name, Barrymore - what's her first name?

MM

Drew.

BS

Took off her shirt. But, I have a feeling when she took off her shirt that everybody was primed for it because they had a camera on her back and were shooting it from the back, which I happened to see four or five times.

MM

Is it instinct do you think?

BS

I think it's desire. [Barry laughs] I do. Let's take the most rigid thing you can possibly think about, scripted television for most of the night and then you've got the Steve Allen Show where things were much looser. This is what the assumption is after eleven o'clock on our own television now with the boys, with Conan O'Brien and with Jay Leno and David. With this absolute, absolute, absolute script, so let me go into the place where it's the most rigid place I can think of and where people expect law and order and let me see what I can do with it. Let me see if I can kick out the jams. I think it's a great kind of desire to do that. It's that kind of spirit of - well, it's an American spirit too, it seems to me. Absolute American spirit where everything has to grow, everything has to really change: The GNP, the size of NFL linemen, the tallness of basketball players, the number of burgers that people eat at MacDonald's, it's all got to expand, right, it's all got to go. And I think it's true of Rock 'n' Roll, right?

MM

Yeah, definitely.

BS

It's really true of laughter. It's a way, I think, of taking the pulse of the country and seeing what kind of health it's got. That was possible on Ed Sullivan Show with Buckley. Think about somebody doing it now on Comedy Central it's ridiculous, it's absurd, absolutely absurd. It's very difficult to take the improvisational pulse of the country right now, it seems to me. Who would you point to? What would you say? Maybe it'd be these kids with firearms in, you know, Oregon and Arkansas and Mississippi. And surely that's not the kind of bang that you want to get out of life but -

MM

No. But -

BS

Right, it's a real big but.

MM

Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way but it's unpredictable.

BS

Right, it's real unpredictable, you make you make the front page but

- what we were talking about before, the kind of religious unpredictable were I might just walk on water, we don't get very much anymore. Lord Buckley's consigned to a club, right - ah, to a channel, to some cockamamie movie, you know. Even Saturday Night Live ain't much life in Saturday Night Live anymore. It's too much dough at stake, you can't take risks like that. But, one can realize how much we miss the spirit of Lord Buckley in this great land of freedom that we have, when you realize that you don't get that kind of free spirited imagination any place that I can see anymore.

WS

Dennis Miller. What do you think about him?

BS

What do I think about Dennis Miller? My son bought me the box set of Dennis Miller's rantings for Christmas because he knows I love comedy. Early on I thought Dennis Miller was doing it. And when you listen to Dennis Miller now it's homophobic, it's anti-black, it's real conservative and lacking in real spirit and humanity as far as I'm concerned. I don't think you can teach, and I don't think you can be a stand up unless you really dig people. Unless you really dig them. And I'm not convinced he does.

MM

You think he's latched on to the idea of comedy as a product so he's -

BS

Yeah, if you think about the emotion that been loosed on the world more than any other in the last - in our last ten or fifteen years, ten years anyway for us, in the last decade. For me at least, it's anger and meaness. It's, road rage, and flaming and all that. And people getting blown away with nine millimeter glocks and all, you know? But, I think that comics sometimes participate in that spirit in this kind of spectrum way - not that they're going out and assassinating people but they're doing it with, lines, comedic lines. I maintain that you get the opposite end of that kind of comedy with Lord Buckley. Think about the routines on Ed Sullivan, those mime routines he does on Ed Sullivan. And think about it in terms of it's form, where you get people, including Sullivan himself who's not filled with great yaks. I mean, people used to make [imitates Sullivan's voice] "really good imitation." I mean this guy holding himself. So, you get those people and [talking about Buckley's process] "Don't speak now, I'm going to give you a voice!" [Barry laughs] "I may even give you some gestures." And you watch these people, and they're get absolutely transformed once they get the spirit of Buckley inside them. And they're just having a great time and the audience is having a great time and even Sullivan's transformed, right? So, I looked at those in this kind of formalistic way about what he had in mind. It's the most subversive kind of routine on a certain level that you can imagine. If I take Michael's voice and implant my voice in him and the spirit, and pacing and all. It's unbelievable, actually unbelievable kind of routine when you think about it in terms of mentality and strategy and imagination.

MM

Yeah, I think they're brilliant, they really are.

BS

Yeah, and they're real simple. They don't require a whole lot. And they don't require making fun of anybody or -it's unbelievable kind of thing. It's, kind of pure, if one could talk that way, it's kind of pure comedy. Even Bruce had to have The Defiant Ones when it came out, in order to do his routine with the black jazz musician, with Eric Miller. You don't have to do this topical kind of stuff with, with Buckley.

MM

I don't know if you heard in one of the routines he throws in a couple things. He just tosses them away. He sets up: "It's a beautiful garden in Southern California. The moonlight."

BS

The moonlight. San Fernando Valley.

MM

San Fernando Valley. And then on this one routines he says, "They've all had a double shot of tequila and a brand new California drink, a Benzedrine float.

BS

A Benzedrine, a Benzedrine float.

MM

And then he just moves right through it. I found that phenomenal. And some people titter a little bit but I don't think many people actually even got it. And I think is that passive aggressive

BS

I think it's another piece of that little subversive shtick, you know? I think it's another one of those things. I registered that when I heard it,I said, "Wooh!" With that kind of hindsight about thinking about bennies in the '50s. It's like subversion on subversion. "What's this white guy doing talking with a black voice. What the hell's he doing? That's incredible. What's he doing giving these white people, sitting on this bench, on the Sullivan Show, black voices?" And then on top of that the black guy and giving him a black voice in one of those times he does it on, on the Sullivan Show. And then on top of that dropping this little Benzedrine line, it seemed to me a kind of subversion on subversion. By the time you get to Lenny Bruce he's already doing reefer jokes but he's doing whole routines about, [does Lenny Bruce voice] "being wacked out, man. And stoned." [normal voice] So, it's already the center part of his act and you can see that he's moving in an absolute different direction. But, Normal Mailer wrote an essay that was very, very, very controversial, a little kind of pamphlet in 1957 called "The White Negro". And that got lots of criticism. Here's this guy living it out, right? And the kind of living testament to this Ralph Ellison essay, which I mentioned, about how America actually covertly appropriated black culture in terms of spirit, in terms of music. In terms of speech, in terms of drugs, in terms of drinking, walking, and dressing. Right? In terms of kissing and breathing and did it covertly. But, I think there's a great deal of honesty in that kind of Buckley routine doing that - of being out there and being who he was.

WS

I was thinking back to the subversion again. You heard the last album "most immaculately hip aristocrat" were he basically makes the story of the Marquis De Sade and Prince Minsky funny."The rump of small boy" and the "I'm the baddest cat - done in my brother, I've done in my sister" that is out-

BS

Outrageous and outrageous at that moment too. Outrageous at that point. But, it seems to me that even the Supermarket routine is, you know, is pretty outrageous when you think about supermarkets at that moment and he being able to see that we're working for them. Alan Ginsburg picks it up years later, about the supermarket but - that's pretty incredible to see, and that's the kind of sense, of walking behind the scenes and being able to see from the back. Having you see differently - and that goes back to the sense about what he does in this religious way, it's having you suddenly, "Oh, yeah, that's what I'm doing: working for them! You know, these prices should be real cheap, right? So, I think, you know, I think you're right about Marquis De Sade, but I don't think you even have to go that far. He does Supermarkets that way. And not in any kind of pushing, pushing way, you know, I'll bump, I'll put carts into other carts.

MM

Yeah, and you're still pushing the mother cart. Prices go up, right and you're still pushing the mother cart.

WS

I wish I had the nerve to be a great thief.

BS

I know a guy who can put seven steaks down his pants.

MM

Seventeen.

BS

Seventeen steaks.

MM

Sirloin steaks.

BS

Chilly.

MM

As it turns out that was Prince Minkhead. It was a real guy - he was a circus guy who had hair like a mink.

BS

Whoa, really?!

MM

Prince Owlhead said, "Yeah, if you ran your head - hand over his hair, it felt like a mink.

BS

Prince Minkhead? [Barry laughs]

MM

He was a clown for Barnum & Bailey.

BS

Fantastic.

MM

Do you have any specific things that you remember, say, from the Ivar Concert?

BS

The only thing I remember from the Ivar Concert that's in my head because it was the beginning of The Nazz, was lots of squirming. I remember that pretty well because the reaction in the audience moved like the wave that you can see in sports events. You could see people start to get it and soon somebody else got it, somebody else got it, and somebody else didn't want to be left out and got it, but, that's kind of slow recognition about The Nazz but it was too far back for me to remember much. I remember The Cosmos Alley much better because it was so dramatic, you know. It's a small, tiny, dark place.

MM

Do you remember your impression of him physically?

BS

Oh, yeah. For me it was hard to take my eyes off of him because he had great bearing. He was a big person, he had a commanding voice. I remember as a little kid being intrigued by his moustache, you know. This little delicate thing. I mean it came to a little tiny end when I saw him. And this huge voice that would come out of him. I was always interested in impersonations. And I used to stand in front of the mirror and practice various actors and doing impressions, Brando and all the standard kinds of stuff. I remember trying to see if I could anticipate when he [Buckley] was going to go into a different personality. I was struck by the fact that I could not tell - there was this great kind of flow of one voice into another voice into another voice. And he knew how to do this really well. And I wanted to be able to do that.

MM

Did you practice doing that?

BS

I practiced a lot. Practiced a whole lot. I remember sitting and practicing, trying to do what he would do and how he would do that thing with his mouth, you know, that - the Island Bopper and then he would make this sound, right.

MM

Vrrrrpppppt!

BS

Yeah. Cabeza de Vaca the Island Bumper! I love that routine. I think that routine is just marvelous.

MM

What do you like about it?

BS

Oh, I just love the way he tells that story. History getting redone in this amazing, fascinating way.

MM

One thing that I love about all of his history pieces is that I can believe that these people existed. And I can believe that something really did happen three hundred years.

BS

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, they're alive. They come alive, sure.

MM

Yeah. Well, I have one more note here.

BS

OK

MM

It was the idea of [quoting from "Sudden Glory"] "Throughout the ancient world then laughter became useful because of it's ability to carry one beyond the moment, painful or pleasant, to a more enduring, serious point. Theories of laughter fit against dividing the emotions in these things that make us feel happy and those that make us melancholic." I guess I was again thinking about Buckley in that a lot of his routines don't have a big splashy ending.

BS

He apologizes at one point, when he's doing Henry Miller's birthday, when he said, " I thought that this would go a little bit better than it has." I forgot what routine it was actually.

MM

A lot of his stuff was funny but it was hard to say exactly why. Because it as if he were setting the audience up for a joke.

BS

Yeah, right. There is always seriousness about comedy. There is always a real serious truth about it. When in the ancient world, people, Plato even, talks about comedy, he always talks about the fact that there is this truth that runs underneath it. It's always called the "seriocomic." The comic is a reformer. I know a critic who says that nobody, who's worth his salt as a writer, writes except out of one emotion: anger. Even comic writers, because they want to reform the world. They want to change it. And they want not just to reform it and change it but they want to change it for the better. And I think it's the comic, and particularly Buckley, that recognizes the great potential in human beings and the great My own sense, after doing this book on laughter, is that the roots of serious literature, the roots of literature, good literature, great literature lie not in seriousness but in play. And in sport. It's why I think the earliest kind of literature that we have, from the ancient world, is called "play" or "plays" It's the same word "ludens." In Latin it's the same word for "play". And that the poets in Anglo-Saxon England, in the 9th century, are called "laughtersmiths", they forge laughter. So, it seems to me that what we do, as we grow up, is that we put aside this kind of laughter and do serious things and say "Get serious about this, man!" "Send down roots, get serious." And I think it's misguided. And I think, when you get to see a grownup, an adult, who behaves in this kind of regal way, and yet tells jokes, there is a great lesson for us there. That at the heart of our being together is this great playfulness that comes out of our soul. And it's expressed in the way we sort of hug and kiss each other with affection. And it's the way that we talk with each other. This great play that we have with language. And the height of that for me and the way that it gets shaped most beautifully for me is with a joke, is with comedy, is with laughter.

MM

Did you ever hear Lenny Bruce talk about Lord Buckley at all, that you remember?

BS

Sure. I spent many nights with him and Lenny Bruce did, in fact, talk about Lord Buckley, spoke to me about Lord Buckley and spoke to me about the influence that Lord Buckley had on him, and particularly in the way, that stories got told. When people did skits pre-Lenny Bruce, right? They would be - if you think about Vaudeville, they're very stick figure like. They're very "routine." They have very little of the improvisational feel about them, as a matter of fact. And what Lenny Bruce said to me that he was able to do about routines and skits that came out of Vaudeville and loosen them up and even play with time through them is because of Lord Buckley. Think of this dramatic: I'm a kid, I'm riding in the car and it's nineteen and sixty-three or something and I'm listening to LA radio at night: Hunter Hancock, an R & B station. And he said, "I'm going to play something different for you now." And he played The Ballad of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan. He gets done with that and he says, "You now what I did for you people just now? I went through three commercial breaks." LP, a song that was more than three and a half minutes was real subversion on the air because they are designed for having five commercials every twenty minutes. So he said, "You don't know what I did for you people now. I don't know if I'll be able do this again. I just played you a fourteen minute tale about Emmett Till by this guy Bob Dylan." About this black guy who's accused of -. So, the role that Lord Buckley played for Lenny Bruce was as an LP record. One of the most subversive things he could do was is play with time. Just as we were talking about surprise. When my old man took me to Vaudeville you knew that these were three minute routines and somebody else would come out. They were called blackouts. They'd do a blackout and two other guys would come out, or three other people would come out. Lenny Bruce's suddenly on the stage for like fifteen minutes. They're saying, "What the heck - what's going on? When is this going to stop? When is it going to be over? What's the point of this?" And then you come to something. That kind of playing in time, he attributed to Lord Buckley. You just don't know what the point is and how this thing is going to end, how many stories you are going to wind up or the climax is going to be.

MM

Did he talk at all about characterization?

BS

He talked a lot about voice and about being able to change voice. He talked about getting into character. He first starts out with Eric Miller because he needs a black voice. He does The Defiant Ones, Tony Curtis, right? So, he needs to have a black voice: Sidney Poitier. And then he does the voices himself. He does The Lone Ranger. He does Religions Incorporated. He can do God, he can do Moses, he can do Father Flotsky, he can do Barry Sullivan, Barry Fitzgerald. He can do whoever he wants to do now. But, he talked a lot about wanting to have that ability - because he didn't do this stuff early on. He had other people on the stage that he got from Buckley too I think.

MM

Anything that you want to say?

BS

It's getting hot under here.

MM

Yeah.

BS

No, I'm fine thanks. I really enjoyed it. I really appreciate it.

MM

Well, thank you, Barry, this is beautiful.

BS

I really appreciate you guys doing this. I mean it's incredible work of love, really, seriously.

MM

Thank you very much for your contribution.

BS

You're welcome.

MM

Alright.