THOUGH “Sergeant Bilko,” “The Honeymooners” and the first Ernie Kovacs vaudeville showed traits (lonely, abrasive, lower-than-lowbrow, morose, not too energetic) that predicted a comedy of desolation, TV’s most recent comedians have done an about-face. An Elegant Ego has taken over: In a medium that discourages physical comedy and robs experienced clowns (Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton) of fantasy and finesse, turning them into realistic rogues-gallery personalities, the newest stars consider tasteless any movement more earthy than Shelley Berman’s dainty crossing of legs while reaching for a make-believe telephone, Mort Sahl’s waving of a rolled-up newspaper, or Jack Benny’s princely, slow double-take.
The greatest assist to the new Ego is an ugly invention, Inside Humor, which allows the comedian to buddy-buddy his humor without actually committing himself in action or idea: i.e., chuckling at hidden jokes, playing snob-balls with names like “Needleman,” aiming words (“cool it, cool it”) and ideas at a mysterious group of superior characters who claque on cue.
While the professional funnyman still reaps the highest price and best TV time, the news in humor is being made by the satirical monologist, whose home is the chi-chi nightclub and whose goal is a place somewhere in the suburbs of High Art.
In its most likable form (the Canadian low-think team of John Wayne and Frank Schuster doing a faintly Jewish, contemporary blabbering of Great Works like “The Scarlet Pumpernickel”), egghead comedy is a revolt which starts by insulting audience intelligence with a contrived gag, and then, through semi-skilled pantomime (Skelton, Lou Costello) builds a hectic atmosphere that could be called laughably energetic, if not funny. At its worst, the cerebral, cruel or freethinking talker, in trying for trenchant comment on the current scene, uses words, tastes, dialects and subjects that have long been the ego-supports of Bohemian intellectuals and are now the property of bank-safe middlebrows.
As self-admitted as a guy who thumbs his nose at the tide, the make-them-think monologist is actually the most ferocious belonger and sect-worshiper in a business engulfed by mystic brotherhood stuff. Lenny Bruce, whose Beat Generation specialties are wrathful anti-bourgeois humor and self-devotion (“I find most of my satires on 42nd Street”), devotes part of his routines simply to listing passwords in upper Bop: “Nat Hentoff, Ralph Gleason, Jules Feiffer, Herb Caen, Miles Davis” (and manages at the same time to apple-polish the pop-art critics). When Mort Sahl’s raspy voice is in normal jet repulsion, the audience is inundated by generalized hates, loves, gambits that add up to stale anti-American swing.
The most celebrated of Serious-Blooming wits, Sahl has an interesting delivery, a rapid outpouring in which words are used for abundance, beat and ripple. The most curious gimmick (plagiarized by Lenny Bruce) is Sahl’s fake laugh, which sounds like genial surprise but is used as a fraternity button, to show that Sahl is inside the Group with a cynical word (“Right, it’s wild”), opinion (“The Man Upstairs, Henry Luce”) or topic (“We have Utopia with Byrd, Eastland, Faubus, all the Southern senators who want to hang the world”).
Despite a talent for swinging doggerel and brashness that probably developed in college bull-sessions, Sahl is only a slight improvement on Will Rogers’ safe political iconoclasm. Sahl’s flooding speech does occasionally turn up an insight, usually about night people—his picture of a restless figure who wanders out at 4 A.M. just “to see if Kantor’s Delicatessen is open,” and then the real confusion of Western Man: “Do I want a hamburger or fried eggs?”
The most engaging egghead comedian is Shelley Berman, an essayist usually found with imaginary telephone in hand, working with intimidation (an airplane passenger), badgering (delicatessen owner deflating his son’s acting ambitions), and small annoyance (the pornographic look of an emptied glass of buttermilk). Berman combines a number of unlikely comic talents: a writer’s knack for small-word humor (“I’m fine thenk you and how are you . . . fine, fine, thenk you very much”), an acting flair that indicates training in The Method and keeps the spectator glued to outrageously dramatic tricks of timing and correct tone, and a conceited-needling voice that creates a suspenseful mood that almost strangles the audience.
Berman’s essays, which play like Mozart with infinite control of rests, elongations, and tiny pointed notes, have brought TV audiences some enormously beguiling relationships, particularly a frustration-on-the-telephone skit involving a man badgering a Dennis-the-Menace child to call his mom to the phone (“If you put the telephone down, lightning will strike you, I’m God”). Though Berman is a persuasive, interesting, elegant raconteur in Jewish-toned anguish humor, he stays too far within average sensibility to escape sentimentality, backslapping, preciosity.
Despite a few stunning moments on TV spectaculars, the Mike Nichols–Elaine May team is often undone by a cheerless, frightened presence and a shallow dialect that backfires, suggesting Nichols-May are themselves as untough and pretentious as their victims in look-Ma-no-rehearsals conversation (“maybe you could be a boss and his secretary in a cocktail lounge”). While poking about populating their spontaneously created scenes with plagueable types such as the jazz-accompanied Beat poet (“You did it, you son of a gun . . .”) or the Trevor Howard dentist in an English movie abscess (“When you looked in my mouth and said it’s rotten . . .”), their humor soon sags in midstream of consciousness and Nichols-May become the two sad bunnies tracking through the darkest interior of David Reisman’s lonely crowd.
Their real talent, however, is in the delicate craftsmanship of fantastically light voices that seem spooked by inhibitions, a trick of building each dialogue to a pin-point of passion (“Oh Riba, Oh Riba, when you looked at me as if I were me . . .”) and a suspenseful comic format (faucet-drip dialogue of clichés in which the comedy never shows its face).
In its early period, TV hit roads which few in pop-comedy thought to travel: impressions of empty treadmill existence done with unbeguiling humor, created by an immobile, charm-robbing medium, and hack writers such as Nat Hiken (“Bilko”), who can anchor a story in the center of commonplace life without making philosophic promises. For the first time, the large audience saw a murderously dry infantry life (“Bilko”), a morbid, bickering slum series (“Honeymooners”), and a driveling Mr. and Mrs. (“I Love Lucy”), all of which were funnier in their depiction of the mirthlessness of daily existence than for their expected comic embroidery.
Recently there has been another turn in the direction of desolate, anti-chic humor. Where an Inside comedian (Jack Paar) spends a lot of time simply in boasting, savoir faire, explaining his comedy, and cementing himself with the esoteric flock, his opposite is a modern version of Buster Keaton playing into social outcast comedy, bucking the current with a negative streak that balances his artistic sophistication. While the chain of Insiders has been growing rapidly from Tom Poston to “Guido Panzini” to genial smiler Dave King, it is surprising to find lonesome (unpopular?) humor turning up in a variety of forbidden shades.
Joey Bishop (calculated) and Jack Douglas (madly wooden) are two fair examples. Perhaps the most authentic examples reside on TV’s outskirts—Howie Morris (in last summer’s “Pantomime Quiz”), Morey Amsterdam (a long-time horror who somehow lights up the “Keep Talking” panel), or Kaye Ballard (on a recent “One Night Stand”)—uncontrollable clowns who work within several levels of sophistication without the slightest pretense of belonging to the mysterious group of cohorts that succeed in alienating at least this reviewer.
June 22, 1959