“Days and Nights at The Second City” by Bernard Sahlins

This book was a gift from my son, to expand my knowledge of his world, the world of comedy.

Sahlins is a lively memoirist! His writing is energetic and descriptive. He begins by discussing the cultural importance of theatre, then the importance of acting. He values theatre as a way to connect with great minds, and documents changes in American (and global) society from the time he participated in founding The Second City (1959) until he sold his interest in it (1985). 

What WAS The Second City anyway? It offered “theatrical review” in a cabaret setting (drinks served), a series of unconnected sketches about a topic. Sahlins is quite clear that “improv” (spontaneous theater) is something else entirely. Review sketches are scripted and carefully rehearsed. Second City offered cultural critique with lots of laughs. It was satirical, irreverent and subversive.

My favorite anecdote is as follows:

“A notable visitor was Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest, who attended one night with Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa climbing companion. Despite the fact that Tenzing spoke no English, he hugely enjoyed the show. I watched him from time to time, puzzled at his delighted reactions. Afterward he fell into a voluble conversation with the interpreter. It seems that Tenzing had constructed, from our unconnected scenes, a complete story, something like King Lear, about an old king and his two daughters, featuring an unsuitable marriage but with a happy ending.”

I love this! Art is universal, but that doesn’t mean it always survives translation. 

More seriously, Sahlins writes about a massive cultural shift America experienced in the Sixties. Before that time, “Most working writers, actors, and producers were past their youth. Their target audience was certainly not the very young.” But that changed! “Youth took over…sex, drugs, rock and roll. Their songs moved out of the drive-ins and reached everywhere, even into geriatric centers. Their watchwords…attitudes…anti-war message…love-ins…Woodstock…marijuana took center stage.” “…before we realized it, we were swept up in the rush to an adolescent world.” Sahlins regretted that Second City became more “commercial” as this change progresses.

Does this explain the question we sometimes ask… “Where are the adults”? If someone teaches a course in post WWII America, they should include this book. 

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“Ghostbuster’s Daughter – Life With my Dad, Harold Ramis” by Violet Ramis Stiel

This book was recommended to me by my comedian son, who lives in Chicago, home of the Second City Comedy troupe and, for a time, Harold Ramis and family.

But the real “hook” for me was Ghostbusters! The movie was released in 1984, the same year my older son was born. A huge hit! Wildly funny. Lots of ancillary products, like T-shirts. I can’t remember at what age we first took Ben to see it. It totally captured his imagination, and became his first “commercialized” passion. Our best purchase was Ghostbuster coveralls, with “Who You Gonna Call?” on the back. Both boys wore them. I’d have bought a pair for myself, if I saw them in my size.

Phrases from the movie worked their way into our daily conversation and have remained to this day. The best were “Back off, man, I’m a scientist!” and Ramis/Egon’s great deadpan line “I collect spores, molds and fungus”. We still refer to any deteriorated property as “a unique fixer upper opportunity” and remind each other “everybody has three mortgages”. “You really eat this stuff?”

So I have to tell you I was hoping for more details about Ghostbusters, which the book did not provide. The book moves sequentially through Steil’s life. I hadn’t known how many films Ramis was involved with as actor, writer, director and/or producer. Steil visited the sets of most of the movies, but her reminisces weren’t particular enlightening.

The personal chapters were more interesting. Violet Ramis Steil is a lively and perceptive writer. This wasn’t my first entertainment world autobiography. Bottom line, I don’t know how the children of celebrities survive! They are exposed to drugs and crazy adult behavior, and sometimes forced to grow up fast because their parents are irresponsible. Harold Ramis had his wilder moments, but settled down in his second marriage. He became wealthy and was generous towards his daughter and many other people.

Stiel’s discussion of her education and career choice was interesting. She knew she did not want to join the entertainment world. She wanted to help people, and went to graduate school to study social work, specializing in maternal and child health and welfare. Approving wholeheartedly, Ramis subsidized her so that she could live in Manhattan on a social worker’s salary. 

The chapters about Ramis’s death are terribly painful. In 2010, he developed diverticulitis, followed by infection and a brain damaging stroke. Thinking he might recover and return to the work he loved, his wife limited the information that was shared outside the family. Four years of terrible struggle followed. Ramis experienced painful and repeated complications, seizures, treatments, and rehabilitation. No one should suffer that way.

I can’t find out what Violet R Stiel has been doing since her book was published in 2018. After the reviews, she’s been relatively invisible – not in Wikipedia, minimally present on Facebook. (Maybe I just don’t know where to look.) I hope she’s writing. Maybe she’ll provide commentary on the pandemic! 

“Comedy Loses a Home: The Shuttering of the Upright Citizens Brigade” by Emma Allen, The New Yorker, April 22, 2020 – Covid19 #6

Comedy comes in many flavors. My Chicago based comedian son practices “stand up”, which is solo comedy performance. Improvisation (a team effort) ranks very high among aficionados!

The Upright Citizens Brigade was/is a “laugh factory” in the grand tradition of Second City and Comedy Central. The UCB “brand” grew to include a comedy performance group, theaters (in NYC and Los Angeles), a school, a television series, movies and a book, The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual. It was the closing of the theatres, on March 12 in the face of the pandemic, that inspired this wistful New Yorker article.

UCB provided training and community to many aspiring comedians and produced some highly successful performers.  Amy Poehler, one of the original UCB partners, said

“We all think we’re in control of our lives, and that the ground is solid beneath our feet, but we are so wrong. Improvising reminds you of that over and over again.”

In 2016, author/editor Emma Allen took an eight week introductory course at UCB and wrote about it, also in The New Yorker (Sept 5, 2016). The title was “You had to be there”. UCB has been described as resembling a cult or twelve-step program or even a pyramid scheme. Initially uncomfortable and embarrassed, Allen ended up enjoying her classmates and their activities. She said it was like going to summer camp, but you didn’t have to sleep in the same room with your buddies.

Her final comment, “I felt that the class had made me a more careful listener, and that I recovered better after doing something embarrassing in public, like falling on an icy sidewalk.”

I enjoyed these articles so much I looked up Emma Allen and learned that (at the young age of 30) she is the cartoon and humor editor of The New Yorker! On a site called The Gentlewoman’s Club, I found this from an interview:

Q: What’s it like to have a job in the humour business during perhaps the least funny moment in modern American history? 

Emma Allen: Well, first, you have to satirise power in order to chip away at it, and we’ve never had greater goons in charge, so you can either hide under the covers and despair or go after them with the funniest and most scathing lines you’ve got. And then, when every single second seems to bring even more depressing news, humour is a great source of relief.

This was written well before our present calamitous situation. Long live humor! The Upright Citizen’s Brigade will survive. Comedy is making a comeback!

Rumor reached me that a club in Kansas City plans to open TONIGHT. Activity will be scaled down. It’s an experiment. But live comedians will perform in front of a live audience! Good news!

The Synge Festival – Quintessence Theatre Group, October 2019

Last weekend I attended The Synge Festival at Quintessence Theatre Group. In one day, I saw all of John Millington Synge’s plays, with the exception of the unfinished Diedre of the Sorrows. Synge died at age 37, having published five plays and some poetry. Synge was so controversial that riots broke out after some early performances. In Philadelphia, authorities arrested actors and served an injunction against Playboy of the Western World in 1912, after Synge was dead.

Why was Synge controversial? Many of his characters are immoral or at least conniving, but Synge portrays them as comical and often sympathetic, not necessarily detestable. And Synge was wildly anti-clerical. His priests are clownish. Catholics and others found this offensive.

Synge’s best known work is Playboy of the Western World. It’s a sardonic comedy. The young farmer Christopher Mahon assaults his father and leaves him for dead. After more than a week on the run, he stops in a tavern, begging for shelter. The locals (especially the young women) are impressed and begin to compete for Christopher’s attention. Suddenly, his father turns up, unexpectedly alive, complicating the action. Soon father and son flee the outraged community.

The other plays were also comedy, except for Riders to the Sea, one of his first dramas. It is a snapshot of loss and grief, as if someone had told Synge to write the saddest play he could imagine. An old woman loses her last surviving son to the violent ocean. It’s a brief one-act play. Perhaps it would have engaged me more if we learned more about the characters, especially the sons.

Synge set his works in rural Ireland and wrote in an old fashioned rural northern Irish dialect which is almost incomprehensible to the modern, English speaking ear. The theatre program contained an extensive glossary of terms, but it’s helpful to follow a printed script if possible or to see each play more than once.

Synge loved the unrefined language of rural Ireland. In the theatre program he is quoted as follows:

When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen…I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.

Listening to Synge is a challenge, but, like listening to Shakespear, it’s well worth the effort.

“Kiss Me Like a Stranger” by Gene Wilder

This hasn’t happened to me before: a famous person dies while his autobiography is in my “write a blog post” pile. Gene Wilder died yesterday.

The book is subtitled “My Search for Love and Art”. Wilder talks more about love than art, and occasionally provided more personal detail than I wanted to assimilate.

My favorite of Wilder’s movies (by far!) is The Producers. It’s “over the top” in so many wonderful ways. Wilder and Zero Mostel are an amazing comic duo.

I didn’t like Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Too weird for me.

Some of the best writing in the book is about Wilder’s marriage to Gilda Radner. Her death from ovarian cancer in 1989 was tragic. Wilder’s subsequent accomplishments in fighting ovarian cancer and establishing the Gilda’s Club charities were notable. There’s a chapter of Gilda’s Club near me, and I took advantage of it when my best friend was stricken with pancreatic cancer in 2010.

Ironically, Wilder was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1999. It was successfully treated, and his death was attributed to complications of Alzheimer’s Disease. As Gilda Radner’s alter ego Roseanne Rosannadanna said, it’s always something!

“Last Words” by George Carlin (with Tony Hendra)

Published in 2009, 294 pages.

Another book brought to me by my son! Thanks for continuing to broaden my horizons! If you bring it, I will read…

I wish this book had been published with its working title (discussed in the introduction) of “sortabiography”. I like that. Last Words sounds Biblical, and not very Carlin-esque.

I like the early chapters of this book the best, when Carlin describes his childhood, with emphasis on his friends and neighbors. After all, I also come of Irish stock, though my family didn’t pass through New York City and wasn’t Catholic. (I envy the former, but not the later.)

George Carlin was a rebel from his earliest days. His mother had the strength and good sense to leave an abusive marriage, but his older brother had already suffered terribly and his mother’s efforts to get cooperation and conformity from George were completely unavailing. At age 17, with his mother’s consent, he entered the Air Force. He was discharged on vague grounds after two courts martial and other infractions. I’ve heard the expression “not suitable for regimentation”. Sounds like George.

There follow many chapters about Carlin’s family life and his evolution as a performer. I feel that his writing in this book suffered from lack of editing. Once you get famous, you don’t get edited. (I first heard this from a Pulitzer prize winning poet.) NOBODY was really going to edit George Carlin. His co-author Tony Hendra (listed on the cover in itty-bitty print) is a better writer than Carlin, at least based on Last Words. (I haven’t read Brain Droppings and Carlin’s other best selling books.)

What Carlin and Hendra have in common is the satiric outlook on life. In Carlin’s case, this can get pretty dark. At one point, he contemplated an HBO special to be entitled “I Love it When Lots of People Die”. This was changed due to bad timing – September 11, 2001, came and went, and even Carlin knew it wasn’t funny any more. But you know, in a weird way, I get it. I have a close friend who roots for every hurricane that comes up the Atlantic coast. It’s not that he really wants people to die, but sometimes he really wants the storm to win. Many of us root for the forces of chaos on occasion.

I have a particular fondness for Tony Hendra because of how much I enjoyed his book Father Joe: the Man Who Saved My Soul (2004). See my blog entry of January 21, 2014. A “sortabiography” of great wit and charm.

At the end of Last Words, Carlin circles back to consideration of his childhood and discusses his desire to write a musical about it, which he proposes to call “New York Boy”. A good idea, and I wish it had happened. I wonder if he was thinking of the book Boston Boy by Nat Hentoff. Hentoff was a jazz critic, scholar and political commentator, a decade older than Carlin, and still writing at age 90. “Boston Boy” could be the backbone of an excellent musical, but I can’t find evidence that anyone is working on it.

Carlin says that he identified more with the rebel musicians of the 1960s (and earlier) than with his comedy peers. He probably knew and admired Hentoff.

So… If you are a Carlin fan, a student of contemporary America or a comedy lover, read this book!

“A Carlin Home Companion – Growing Up With George” by Kelly Carlin

Published by St. Martin’s Press, September, 2015. 322 pages, with photos.

One of my favorite book categories is “books recommended by my son”!  And this was not an ordinary recommendation. Robert told me about Kelly Carlin’s book weeks before the publication date, which he marked on his calendar. When it came out, he went straight to the book store and bought it. He read it at light speed and handed it along to me. A high priority read!

This is a wonderful memoir! It reminds me of why I like non-fiction better than fiction. If you made this stuff up, it wouldn’t work. Kelly Carlin comes across as authentic, energetic and lively.

I’m amazed that George Carlin and his family survived the amount of drugs they did. His wife was an alcoholic who, after years of heavy drinking, went to rehab, got sober and stayed that way. George consumed marijuana and cocaine with abandon (and LSD on occasion), and the cocaine may have contributed to his heart attacks. Considering what happened to performers like John Belushi and Richard Pryor (not to mention the “27 Club” musicians), Carlin and his family dodged tragedy with intelligence and a good deal of luck.

So the first part of this book, about Kelly’s early childhood, is very sad. The cover photo is sad. Anyone who works in drug/alcohol abuse counseling knows the story – Kelly tried desperately to be the adult as her parents’ lives became increasingly chaotic. Amazingly, the adult Carlins managed to pull back from the brink.

Kelly Carlin writes engagingly about her struggles and adventures, including, in adulthood, her need for spiritual context and exploration. After her mother’s death in 1997, she says:

“Death was the scariest thing I knew, and I wanted to be able to learn to sit with it in a more conscious way. Zen and Buddhist practitioners had been facing death with great wit and aplomb for millennia. I was appalled at how mentally and emotionally checked-out I’d been with my mother during the five weeks between her (cancer) diagnosis and death. I wanted to do better when it came to my dad’s death. And I hoped to do better when it came to my own.”

This is a voice worth hearing.

In part due to her wealth and connections, Kelly Carlin was able to undertake graduate studies and professional training in Jungian psychology. Some of her happiest times were when she was a student.

What about George Carlin? (After all, who is this book about?!) I’m not a connoisseur of comedy, and Carlin didn’t particularly appeal to me, except for his “bit” about baseball versus football. But the man I met in the book was intelligent, loyal and intensely loving. The book made it much easier for me to understand the devotion of his colleagues and fans, and the emotion that surrounded his posthumous receipt of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded by the JFK Center for the Performing Arts.

The Wikipedia entry on George Carlin lists his “subjects” (look it up!) and I think he had lots in common with Mark Twain. Not Twain’s novels, but consider his short story “The War Prayer”, which was withheld from publication until after Twain died. Carlin, too, was a harsh critic of American politics and policy.

Of course, as I approach retirement, I resonate completely with one of Carlin’s most popular routines, “A Place for My Stuff”!

This book should be read by anyone one interested in comedy as an art form, or in contemporary American life.

Thanks, Robert, for leading me to this book. I just found a copy of Last Words by George Carlin and Tony Hendra, and I’m already several chapters into it.

“So, Anyway…” by John Cleese

This autobiography was recommended to me by someone who is much better informed about comedy than I am! But we agree that John Cleese is one of the funniest people on the planet. His “Fawlty Towers” TV series was the best British humor I ever watched, and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” is a classic film.

Cleese begins with some family history, then describes the various stages of his education. His family wanted him to move UP in the British class system, and undertook this by sending him to the best schools they could arrange. Ultimately, he went to Cambridge and studied law. To me, this was the most interesting part of the book. Oxbridge (as Cambridge and Oxford are called) is the pinnacle of the British educational system.

I’m fascinated by accounts of how young adults grow and learn. Cleese studied law but never practiced it, moving into comedy and comedy writing before he really finished his studies.

Cleese was part of the explosion of British satire that rocked the 1960s. Before that time, evidently NO ONE  mocked the English establishment. See my review of the autobiography of Tony Hendra (a friend of Cleese) in this blog dated January 21, 2014 (“Father Joe, the man who saved my soul”). Hendra’s life was changed by the inspired satire that Cambridge generated.

Cleese has a lively, informal style of writing and is fun to read. I hope he writes more, as he didn’t say much about “Fawlty Towers” and his movie making experiences.

“I Killed: True Stories of the Road from America’s Top Comics” compiled by Ritch Shydner and Mark Sciff.

This book is hilarious! And, to me, enlightening. The list of comedians contains many names I don’t recognize. My level of TV watching dropped off very fast after the age of nine, and never made a significant comeback. And I never went to many shows… I saw Bob Hope – once, Bill Cosby – once…

Surprise! I am the parent of an aspiring standup comedian. He’s aiming for a world totally unfamiliar to me. So he tosses me the occasional book to read. Comedy is a subculture (tribe?) with a history, values, leaders and in-jokes. And I’m not likely to go out and immerse myself in it. So the books add to my son’s stories, which are so far fairly tame, though homeless drunks and drug addicts sometimes get hold of the microphone in the clubs of Atlantic City.

So what was I looking for in this book? Laughs, of course. There were many! But I also kept my mother-eye open. What are the hazards to my own (unique, can’t live without him) son?

Drugs, sex and poverty…not necessarily in that order. Travel? The general bizarreness of human nature? Some of the stories are scary. A comedian being chased by…wolves?!

All the comedians in the book had their share of disasters – the worst possible bad joke at the wrong time – but they continued to work. So my son will probably have his share, and I’ll feel terrible when it happens, but he may get what he wants – his time on the road and on stage.

I can’t pick a favorite story – too many funny tales. One thing I hadn’t realized is the huge role played by hecklers. It would be a different world without them, but there they are, presenting their own kind of opportunity. As a person who never thinks of the “right” comeback until the next day, I admire (almost) all the ways comics handle the unexpected and sometimes really awful hecklers.

I originally read this book in March of 2013.

Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences by Richard Pryor with Todd Gold

This is a sad book. Pryor was lucky to have survived his childhood. He was never educated in a way that took advantage of his high intelligence. And he made the same mistakes (about substance abuse and relationships) over and over and over.

One of the most positive events in Pryor’s life was his trip to Kenya in 1979, instigated by a psychiatrist who wanted him to see Africa, “the origin of the world’s beauty”. He was bowled over by the people, the landscape, the wildlife. 

“I left enlightened…I also left regretting ever having uttered the word ‘nigger’ on stage or off it. …Its connotations weren’t funny, even when people laughed. To this day I wish I’d never said the word…And so I vowed never to say it again.”

This change was misunderstood and rejected, to the extent that he became the target of death threats. Only a year later, Pryor set himself on fire in a grisly suicide attempt.

I recommend this book to those who study addiction, to anyone seeking insight about race in America and to people interested in comedy and comedians.