Make 'Em Laugh, page 38
“SO WHAT’RE YOU GONNA DO BUT LAUGH?”
ROSEANNE
ROSEANNE: Dan, how was work today?
DAN: Well, today was a special one for me. It was the 179th day in a row where I did exactly the same thing.
If you stumbled into Bennigan’s in Georgetown, Colorado—about twenty minutes west of Denver—sometime between eight at night and two in the morning, in, say, the fall of 1980, and you ordered a gin and tonic, you might be lucky enough to have it served to you by a saucy waitress the locals called Rosie. “That’s six bucks for the drinks, another three bucks for me to take them off the tray and give them to ya,” she’d say. Rosie, short for Roseanne Barr, a housewife with three kids, working the night shift to bring in some money for the bills, was a pistol, all right. “My best line was,” said Roseanne years later, “this guy, he kept coming and I guess he liked me or something and he said that he was looking for somebody who was married and wanted to fool around and, you know, didn’t want to get too serious. Did I know anybody like that? And I said, ‘I do. Your wife.’ ”
At Bennigan’s, Roseanne would get good tips for speaking her mind. Less than a decade later, she’d earn a million dollars a week for it. Her mouth would often be a liability, but commercially and comically, it was her greatest asset: “I have a big mouth and I want to use it as much as I can against what I think is wrong. Creative speech is a weapon against evil, so you gotta use it or lose it.”
Blue-collar blues: With John Goodman and family.
Roseanne knew what it was like to be in the minority from the moment she was born into a Jewish family in Salt Lake City in 1952. Her family was descended from Holocaust survivors, and she grew up in a frightened, neurotic household. She married at eighteen and had four children by the age of twenty-six. After her rounds at Bennigan’s, she turned to the local stand-up scene as a kind of spiritual salvation. Roseanne had immersed herself in feminist literature but hadn’t yet reconciled her politics with her onstage manner, and it was a rocky road at first. She used to close her nascent act by saying, “People say to me, ‘You’re not very feminine.’ Well, they can suck my duck.” As she told Playboy magazine, “I used to be the most foulmouthed comic. But I figured out how to take a radical thought and make it mainstream through wording and packaging. Men became the butt of my jokes, only I tried not to be mean-spirited. For packaging, I used the cover of being everyone’s fat mother, fat neighbor. I used a funny voice.”
By the time she made her debut appearance on The Tonight Show in 1985, she had refined both the wording and the packaging. Chewing gum, with a nervous laugh and a fluttery hand, she was actually charming. And incisive:
I’m a housewife. I never get out of the house. I sit home all the time; I never do anything. I hate that word. I prefer to be called Domestic Goddess—after all, it’s more descriptive. … Still, stuff bugs me. This bugs me the worst. That’s when the husband thinks that the wife knows where everything is, huh? Like they think the uterus is a tracking device.
“They didn’t want me to say the word uterus—it had never been said on late-night telly or something,” she recalled. “That was pretty symptomatic of what it was like to be a woman comic at the time.” It may have been Roseanne’s first encounter with the authority of network television; it wouldn’t be the last. Her appearance with Johnny Carson made her an overnight sensation, which led to an HBO special in 1987. It caught the attention of two producers, Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, who were developing a series about working-class moms called Life and Stuff.
At first, Roseanne and the new series seemed like a perfect fit—once, of course, the other two moms in the script were jettisoned in favor of Our Heroine. Debuting in October of 1988 on ABC, Roseanne showcased a new kind of family for television viewers: a real one. Roseanne Conner and her husband, Dan (played with an ursine amiability by John Goodman), lived in the blue-collar neighborhood of fictional Landford, Illinois, with their two girls and one son (which paralleled Barr’s own family structure). In the initial season, Roseanne worked an intensely boring job at Wellman Plastics and Dan was a building contractor, but as the eight seasons wore on, life affected the Conners much as it had affected many working-class families during the Reagan era: Roseanne was fired from her union job and worked double shifts to make ends meet (including a waitressing gig) while her husband tried starting his own business, only to watch it fail. Their kids got into puberty’s real predicaments, dated creeps, got depressed and locked themselves in their rooms, were embarrassed by their parents, and, of course, never put their stuff away. The Conners’ living room looked either like a megaton bomb had been detonated in it or looked simply like millions of viewers’ living rooms or both. Roseanne was referred to in the press as the exact opposite of The Cosby Show.
ROSEANNE: Hey! Black people are just like us. They’re every bit as good as us and any people who don’t think so is just a bunch of banjo-picking, cousin-dating, barefoot embarrassments to respectable white trash like us!
Unlike those in many sitcoms, the characters in Roseanne were aware how at odds they were with a typical sitcom; when Dan is about to make some paternal pronouncement, Roseanne sneers, “What is this, the Ward Cleaver speech?” Eldest daughter Becky wants a new dress for the school dance, but the one she wants costs $79.99 at the mall. A helpful mall worker suggests that the dress could eventually be worn by the younger daughter. “Yeah,” drawls Roseanne, “but for eighty bucks, it had better fit the whole family.” When some financial and logistical calamities back up against each other, Roseanne tells Dan, “Well, hell, it can’t get any worse. So, what’re you going to do but laugh?”
Millions of Americans did. The show catapulted to number two in the annual Nielsen rankings and remained in the top five for its first six seasons. According to Jeff Foxworthy, “Somebody said to me early on, when I first started trying to write the first redneck book, ‘Well, you’re talking about the lowest common denominator.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not, I’m talking about the most common denominator.’ And that’s who Roseanne appealed to. People watched that show and they saw their relationship with their kids and their relationship with their sister, they saw something in it that they made a connection with and that’s why it worked.” Roseanne increasingly modeled the show after her own style and preoccupations, including ongoing subplots with homosexual characters, mirroring her own gay brother and lesbian sister. And if the Conner family slung around put-down zingers like the best Catskills comics, that was okay, too. Roseanne increasingly became the text on which the real Roseanne rewrote her life story, but in the beginning, it maintained its crucial relationship to real life. As she said about the series:
If you really want to get big and philosophical about it, it was just life. It was a working-class woman. She lost her union job and it was about losing your union job and, basically, all the union benefits. So, it pretty much documented the destruction of the working class and that’s what I always meant to do.
Hear me roar: Many guises, versions, and series later, Roseanne still can work a room.
But, like Job, whose family was in even direr straits than the Conners, Roseanne was born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. The soundstage for her show quickly turned into a battlefield as she seized more and more control of the writing, the production, the direction of the material. Heads rolled faster than anything seen since the French Revolution, and even Carsey and Werner, the show’s producers, voluntarily exiled themselves from the set for fear of agitating their apoplectic star further. At one point, Roseanne was the most powerful woman in television, but by the time the show wound down in 1997, she had spent a good deal of her likability capital.
Still, likability, tolerance, and deference were never in her self-created job description. Her fierce commitment to the real world is what put her on top in the first place. “I think it’s the comedian’s job to be controversial and explode—to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” she said, compounding an earlier quote:
Look, I’m a comic. I’m not the fucking president. Everything comics do is to expose hypocrisy and dishonesty, so why wouldn’t I be honest, for Christ’s sake?
“I’M COUNTING YOUR SHRIMP!”
SEINFELD
Larry and I were at the cash register at one of those Korean delis, and there’s a lot of products that you don’t know where they’re from—they’re just wrapped in cellophane and sometimes there’s a Post-it note on it or something like “fig bar.” So we would talk about it and he said, you should do a show like this. And that was it.
—Jerry Seinfeld
The “show like this” that two stand-up comics, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, discussed in an all-night Korean deli one evening in New York at the tail end of the 1980s would evolve into “nothing”—a magical nothing that fueled the most popular television comedy of the next decade.
Seinfeld, born in 1954, was raised in the Long Island town of Massapequa (which, he claimed, was an American Indian word for “near the mall”) and grew up listening to the yarn-spinning albums of Bill Cosby. As soon as he graduated from Queens College, he was taking the subway or the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan, trying to make his name at the various stand-up clubs that had proliferated in the late 1970s. Seinfeld was a disciplined comedian, able to seclude himself for hours on end to develop his material, and he cultivated a genial gift for observation. As a teenager, Judd Apatow, a fellow Long Islander, also obsessed with comedy, used to catch his act:
I used to go see him at Caroline’s in New York and he was just one of those guys where the entire act was perfect and every joke was as strong as any observational joke you had ever seen and it seemed like your friend making observations. There was something very warm about it and it wasn’t angry, but annoyed.
Seinfeld himself concurred in an interview: “I’m annoyed. But if you’re not cranky and annoyed, you can’t be a comedian. Even I, though I might not seem to be, am constantly irritated.”
The most famous shirt in TV history: Seinfeld with Michael Richards as Kramer.
Seinfeld may well have been irritated that his career wasn’t moving ahead faster, but a debut appearance on The Tonight Show on May 6, 1981, put him in the express lane, when Johnny Carson gave Seinfeld a rarely conferred OK sign after his monologue. For the next decade, Seinfeld did the stand-up route in clubs across America, often working three hundred nights a year, but he and his managers searched long and hard to find the right vehicle for his gifts. The television sitcom Benson, however, wasn’t it. Seinfeld had the small part of a publicist but was fired after two episodes—a fact he discovered only when he showed up for work one day and everyone in the cast had a script but Jerry.
After that debacle, he returned to New York and hooked up with Larry David, and their wanderings through a Korean grocery store inspired a pitch to NBC. With Roseanne Barr’s success, there seemed to be a run on stand-up comics whose work could transform into a series. Seinfeld and David’s first idea was a TV special that would follow Jerry through his day and end with the nightclub material inspired by it, but it ultimately became a series, originally called Stand-up. Its concept was unique, to say the least; according to Seinfeld, “That was the concept behind the show: no concept.” The show would focus on the random peregrinations of Jerry and his three friends caroming around Manhattan in an unfocused search for love, fame, and a place that served good cold sesame noodles. The executives at NBC admitted they didn’t get it. Seinfeld’s case was not helped by David and his obsessive perfectionism; he refused to change one word of the material—even though the network hadn’t made the slightest commitment to the show.
Eventually a pilot was stitched together, but it was a hardly an auspicious debut. “Our test results were the worst test results in comedy history,” recalled Jason Alexander, who joined the cast as Jerry’s school chum George Constanza. “I mean, they basically said, ‘Now we have to throw out our TV sets because this was on the screen for a moment.’ ” Seinfeld concurred: “My favorite [test result report] was the one that said, ‘Contemporary, unusual, appealing to young adults—and therefore something we don’t want.’ ” The executives thought it might be salvaged if Seinfeld’s character married his friend Elaine Benes and ditched the loser, George, and the weirdo, Kramer, but Seinfeld and David stuck to their guns—not that anyone was particularly impressed by such integrity. Characteristically, only David was buoyed by the bad news. “Once the network said they weren’t gonna run the show, I just thought, ‘Oh, well, it must be very unusual for them not to run it,’ so it became a little more special in my eyes once they said that.”
Who’s waiting on line first? Modern-day Bud and Lou: Seinfeld and Jason Alexander.
Seinfeld’s manager, George Shapiro, kept badgering the network executives about getting what was then called The Seinfeld Chronicles on the air. NBC shrugged its collective shoulders and stuck the show in as a summer one-shot, then ordered a few isolated episodes, then a larger commitment in a rotten time slot. It was being crushed in the ratings by a detective show called Jake and the Fat Man. NBC president Brandon Tartikoff saw his worst doubts confirmed: “Who’s going to care about the four Jews running around New York City?” Comedian and director David Steinberg came to Seinfeld and David’s defense. “I ran into Brandon Tartikoff and told him, ‘You know these guys, they’re not doing the comedy that you expect on purpose. This was the only way that they know how to do their comedy.’ ”
Eventually, Seinfeld found its audience and its voice around its sixteenth episode in May of 1991, called “The Chinese Restaurant,” where Jerry, George, and Elaine (Kramer wasn’t leaving his apartment much at this point) wait unsuccessfully for a table at a local Chinese restaurant. The idea was David’s: “A show is what, twenty-three minutes? So, I thought, let’s have them wait for the whole twenty-three minutes.” The wait provided the kind of painful choices and solipsistic inequities that were uniquely characteristic of the show’s main characters. Jerry won’t leave because “I don’t want to go to a bad movie by myself. Who am I going to make sarcastic remarks to?” They reluctantly decide to bribe the restaurant’s recalcitrant host with a twenty-dollar bill, which only leads to more bickering.
ELAINE: Let’s just slip him money.
JERRY: Do they do that kind of thing? How do we split it? Three ways.
GEORGE: How about seven and seven and six–I’m not a big eater.
Jerry: I’m counting your shrimp!
For all of its innovative structure, Seinfeld followed a tradition that went back to The Jack Benny Program: Jerry Seinfeld, stand-up comedian, played a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld. According to Alexander, “Jerry always says that the strangest thing in his life was he would come to work in a pair of jeans, take off those jeans, put on an identical pair of jeans to play the character, and then take those off to go home as himself.” Like Benny, Seinfeld also surrounded himself with a memorable ensemble, a trio of gifted comic actors: Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Michael Richards. And also like Benny, Seinfeld was extremely generous with his playmates, giving away some of the best parts of the show, often because, never confident of his acting abilities, he thought they could be served up better by his supporting cast.
But where Jack Benny’s repertory company was composed of amiable wiseguys, Seinfeld’s friends were pathologically self-indulgent, capable of cheating not only innocent bystanders and small children but each other as well. Unlike other sitcoms, which were drenched in sentimentality, Seinfeld’s dictum was “no hugging, no learning.” In fact, there was no evolution at all on the show; like the movie Groundhog Day, each episode seemed to reboot the series. Yes, there were recurring characters that came, interacted as best they could with the leads, and then went their merry way, but they never appeared to have any effect on Jerry and his friends. That principle was in immense defiance of television sitcom rules, and that’s largely because there were never any children featured on the show—except, of course, Jerry, George, Elaine, Kramer, and the Bubble Boy.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the characters’ basic unlikabilty, Seinfeld became television’s most successful comedy over the course of nine seasons. Because of episodes like “The Chinese Restaurant,” the “show about nothing” moniker was frequently hung around the show’s neck, but as King Lear might have said, that nothing didn’t come from nothing. Actually, the show’s episodes became more and more intricately plotted, brilliantly weaving four or more plotlines together per episode. Often, the plots were so complex that a strand or two had to be resolved as the closing credits played—and there were still one or two left spinning in the air. Alexander marveled at the effect:
The reason people think the show is about nothing, which is so interesting considering how uniquely and intricately plotted each of those episodes were, is that, in any episode, regardless of what the story lines were, if there was a funny run, if it was tangential, we still did it. Because funny ruled the day. Is it funny? If it’s really funny, let’s do it. And if it’s not, let’s kill it.
A SHOW ABOUT NOTHING
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road When the series departed from the airwaves, it was a national event.
