Make 'Em Laugh, page 5
“WHY, I OUGHTA …”
THE THREE STOOGES
It’s going to be tough to give you a definition of a stooge in decent language, but here’s a go. A stooge is a guy who never has a light for a cigarette he is trying to borrow. A stooge always comes in handy when you feel like throwing something at somebody. Whenever I’m in doubt or feel mixed up, I always hit the nearest stooge. But my stooges ought to get along fine in Hollywood. They have lots of company.
–Ted Healy
In 1934, when Ted Healy imparted his linguistic wisdom to Movie Classic Magazine, he was America’s expert on stooges. Healy had been at the center of a vaudeville act that had been popular since 1922 called Ted Healy and His Stooges: a natty dresser with a brash charm, Healy has been superseded over time by the patsies and sidemen he always hit whenever he was in doubt, a conglomeration of various knuckleheads who would become legendary as The Three Stooges.
MOE: Is that a musical saw?
CURLY: Soitenly! It plays “I Hear a Ripsody.”
The eldest Stooge, Moe Howard, was born Moses Horwitz in Brooklyn in 1897, and he knocked around film studios, vaudeville, and even the Yiddish theater before playing second banana to Healy. Soon, Moe’s younger brother Samuel, or Shemp, joined the act, as did a talented violinist named Larry Feinberg. Healy’s antics with the Stooges made them very successful on the vaudeville circuit, and that led to motion pictures. A 1930 film called Soup to Nuts featured the Stooges as little more than comedic wallpaper, but they were far more appealing than Healy. The Stooges chafed under Healy’s leadership; he was an alcoholic and they were little more than indentured servants, paid out of Healy’s wages without a studio contract of their own. Shemp bolted from the act in 1932, only to be replaced by the youngest Howard brother, Jerome, who, in order to find some madcap identity, shaved his full head of hair and took on the moniker of Curly. After backing up Healy in some MGM features, Moe realized that the Stooges were going nowhere fast; they refused to renew their contract with Healy and went over to bargain-basement Columbia Studios in 1934 to start their own independent career.
Most comics would have been appalled to wind up at Columbia after the tonier studio halls of MGM, but the rough-and-ready studio was a perfect fit for the Stooges. Studio chief Harry Cohn enjoyed their knockabout humor and immediately assigned them to Jules White, who was head of Columbia’s short subjects division; Columbia and the Stooges would enjoy a relationship that lasted for almost twenty-five years and two hundred pictures. White’s job was to churn out dozens of shorts a year with the Stooges, so he hit upon a simple identity for their slapstick comedy: “I patterned the characters—the Stooges in particular—as living caricatures. … They weren’t for real, so you couldn’t take things seriously, like the eye-poking or the hand-slapping bits.”
If White saw the Stooges as human cartoons, that was fine—the Columbia short subject unit was the perfect factory for them. Other comic teams, like the Marx Brothers in particular, always desired to do their comedy their own way, far from the restrictive formulas of the studio, but the Stooges blossomed under the Columbia assembly line. First of all, their humor could not have sustained a full-length feature (as their awkward color attempts in the late 1950s prove); eighteen minutes of them every other month, sandwiched between a couple of cartoons and a B-feature, suited audiences just fine.
Clucks of a feather: Larry, Curly, and Moe with Stooge founder, Ted Healy, director Robert Z. Leonard, and Joan Crawford on the set of Dancing Lady (1933); all dressed up.
Far right: Spoofing the Third Reich in You Natzy Spy! (1940); boys will be girls, Nutty But Nice (1940).
Depending on which director from the Columbia stable worked with the Stooges, the violent mayhem quotient would rise or fall, but the major breakthrough for them was their use of sound. The emergence of sound in physical film comedy often made some gags uncomfortable, but the Stooges went in the opposite direction and ramped up their sound effects to accompany the myriad pie fights, eye pokes, mallet bashings, and nose twistings in their comedy. Sound editor Joe Henrie supervised the dubbing of their antics. White recalled that he and Henrie would “try to copy [the cartoons] as best we could. Cartoons had the greatest sound effects for many years. Anything in Columbia’s sound library was available to us. I sat there day and night with the mixers while we put in the effects we wanted and got them just right.” The pluck of a ukulele string when a strand of Larry’s hair was pulled; the clang of a bell when someone was shot in the ass; the bass drumbeat that accompanied a sock in Curly’s stomach; the bird twitter that signified a concussion—it was this silly symphony that made the Stooges’ infantile violence palatable and popular. Even when the Stooges made one of their many popular live appearances over the years, there was a sound effects man in the wings.
Life as a Stooge was not easy. Moe was their ringleader on camera and off, supervising their contracts (which were never very lucrative), but the Stooges rarely showed much more than a passing interest in their scripts or productions, partly because they trusted the Columbia unit, partly because, at eight short subjects a year, they were just too darn busy. Even the fun part of being a Stooge had its occupational hazards. Larry Fine recalled: “Sometimes we would run out of pies, so the prop man would sweep up the pie goop off of the floor, complete with nails, splinters, and tacks. Another problem was pretending you didn’t know a pie was coming your way. To solve this, Jules would tell me, ‘Now, Larry, Moe’s going to smack you with a pie on the count of three.’ Then Jules would tell Moe, ’Hit Larry on the count of two!’ So, I never got to three. …”
The Stooges could occasionally be quite brazen about their own Jewish background. They would frequently sprinkle their films with Yiddishisms, and comedian Robert Klein observed that “there is a direct link between the Three Stooges and Ellis Island—their shorts are completely awash in immigrant rhythms.” In 1940, inspired perhaps by the resemblance of Moe’s haircut to that of a certain fascist dictator, the Stooges became the first comedy team to parody Hitler and the Nazis in You Natzy Spy!, and they frequently bashed the Third Reich throughout the war. When the war was over, however, the Stooges faced their first major setback; the jovial nutcase Curly suffered a stroke in 1946 and retired from the team. He was replaced by Shemp, joining his brother Moe for the first time in years, but many fans felt the Stooges had lost their most gifted clown. Still, they clambered on for another six dozen short films and two more replacements, once Shemp suffered a heart attack in 1955.
We subtly, the three of us, always went into an arena of life which we were not supposed to understand. If we were going into society, the picture would open with us as garbage collectors. We would take a man with a high hat, a monocle, and spats and bash him in the nose with a pie, thus bringing him down to our level. We did stupid things, but they were excusable because we didn’t know any better.
—Moe Howard
Columbia was not quite through with them; they sold seventy-eight of their two-reelers to television syndication in 1958 and a whole new generation of kids grew up watching the Stooges after school. Although the Stooges were old men, and looked it, they kept making movies, cartoon, and stage appearances well into the 1960s. Stephen Cox remarks that “the Stooges mellowed when they knew their audience was kiddies. They had to tame their comedy because kids started emulating them and parents became furious.” The fact that those same parents probably laughed themselves silly in the movie theater when they were kiddies is one of the ironies that attends the Stooges. People either think they’re geniuses or an insidious form of torture—Lucille Ball, who had a tiny part in their 1934 Three Little Pigskins, said, “The only thing I learned from them was how to duck”—but Robert Klein gives them the benefit of the doubt: “A lot of people may not like them, and there are probably a lot of fractured skulls of children around the country because of them, but the Stooges have been around for eighty-five years and still going strong.”
“AND THEY CALL ME SUPERMAN!”
LUCILLE BALL
I am not funny. My writers were funny. My direction was funny. The situations were funny. But I am not funny. I am not funny. What I am is brave …
–Lucille Ball
Among Lucille Ball’s other considerable attributes, in addition to bravery, was ambition. Starstruck from a young age, Ball, born in 1911, dreamed of moving out of her upstate New York blue-collar dullsville town and making it big on Broadway. She moved to the city by 1928, and her early days were full of the pluck-and-luck clichés generated by the play Stage Door (Ball would eventually play a small role in the film version); she was an advertising and clothing model who was magically signed up in 1933 to be a Goldwyn Girl and shipped out to the West Coast. Ball’s ambition brought her far—out of the ranks of the chorus, where she became a featured player for Hollywood’s less grand studios—but not far enough. By her own estimation, she was “Queen of the B-pluses. I went from one-liners to these sorts of mediocre B-plus pictures. I would do anything.”
Lucy was a really brave comic because she always played the asshole—the person that has to be brought down—and that takes a level of skill that a lot of people don’t have. Maybe, like, four people can do that. To make you like ’em still.
—Roseanne Barr
There were small compensations. She had met a fiery young Cuban conga-drum player named Desi Arnaz on a picture together called Too Many Girls and married him in 1940. She had been befriended by two comedy veterans, Buster Keaton and director Eddie Sedgewick, who saw in Ball a potential comedienne of great scope, and they coached her and promoted her work. She landed the lead in a sitcom called My Favorite Wife during the waning days of radio, which allowed her to play a scatterbrained housewife. One contemporary review of a broadcast wrote that it was “too bad that Lucille Ball’s funny grimaces and gestures aren’t visible on the radio.” Ball’s two great passions in life were showbiz and her often errant husband; perhaps she could channel her ambition to bring the two together on a program for the new medium of television. It wasn’t glamorous and it wasn’t the movies, but it was a spotlight of some kind.
Ball, Arnaz (who had a fine business sense when he could concentrate), and producer Jess Oppenheim pitched a sitcom to CBS. There were many initial misgivings and false starts, but in October of 1951, I Love Lucy made its national debut. Although most viewers were hardly aware of it, the show displayed some important innovations. Since nationwide television transmission was a fragile thing, and since the Arnazes wanted to stay in Hollywood, they decided to put the series on film, shot by three cameras, in front of a live audience. According to producer-writer Garry Marshall, “Lucy said, ‘I can be funny and fall down on television,’ and Desi Arnaz said, ‘If you want it to be funny physically, you can’t do it more than once. Have three cameras—then the comedian can do the stunt once and you can record it from all angles and then it can be funny.’ ” Desi and Lucy, who had combined their names and fortunes into a studio called Desilu, also negotiated a deal with CBS to own the rights to all of the filmed episodes.
The premise of the show, centered around Ricky and Lucy Ricardo, was, as articulated by Oppenheim in an office memo, simple: “He is a Latin-American band-leader and singer. She is his wife. They are happily married and very much in love. The only bone of contention between them is her desire to get into show business, and his equally strong desire to keep her out of it.” There was nothing Lucy Ricardo wouldn’t do to have her way; likewise, there was nothing Lucille Ball wouldn’t do to make an audience laugh. With no real training on Broadway or even in vaudeville, Ball taught herself to be a comedian through sheer determination. “Anything you wanted to do with Lucy she could do,” recalled one of her directors, Herbert Kenwith. “She was very daring.” Another director, Jay Sandrich, recounted that “One time she had to make pizza so we took her to a restaurant, and she’d go there every day or every night after rehearsal learning how to toss pizza. She had to know exactly what she was doing and break it down bit by bit so she could do it for the audience.” Keaton continued to advise her, reminding her to take her comedy seriously and to get to know her props and treat them like treasures.
It was all good advice and the proof was in the ratings; I Love Lucy became one of the infant medium’s first phenomena. Lucy Ricardo’s weekly scrapes were eagerly eaten up by audiences across the country (perhaps because they were so beautifully captured on film and not on kinescope). Time magazine, in a cover profile on Lucy, put it very well:
This is the sort of cheerful rowdiness that has been rare since the days of the silent movies’ Keystone comedies. Lucille submits enthusiastically to being hit by pies; falls over furniture; gets locked in home freezers; is chased by knife-wielding fanatics. Tricked out as a ballerina or a Hindu maharani or a toothless hillbilly, she takes her assorted lumps and pratfalls with unflagging zest and good humor.
Part of her appeal was her beauty. It was rare for any clown to be so elegant in one scene and so gloriously spastic in another; for a female clown, it was nearly unprecedented. Joan Rivers points out, “Lucy knew you can’t be accepted in comedy as a pretty woman, and she made the pretty woman funny-looking. I think she had the courage because she knew basically she was pretty—‘Black out all my teeth, because I know when I go home at night I’m still gonna be a cutie-pie.’ ” Her physical anarchism was amusing enough on its own terms, but as a housewife in the 1950s, it was revolutionary. “Even though she was the well-meaning wife, she was rebellious,” said Lily Tomlin. “She was always out trying to create her own situation, her own freedom, and that appealed to me.”
RICKY: Lucy, this is the craziest stunt you’ve pulled in fifteen years!
SUPERMAN (George Reeves): Ricky, do you mean to say you’ve been married to her for fifteen years?
RICKY: Das right, fifteen years!
SUPERMAN: And they call me Superman!
I Love Lucy gave Ball the immense popularity she always craved, and even though she had to sacrifice her early dreams of glamour to get there, it was worth it. As she said herself:
Seeing redhead: (far left): TV’s most popular mom-to-be; (above) taking the plunge with mentor Buster Keaton; Queen of the B-pluses.
She’s an exaggeration of thousands of housewives. She has always done things I feel other ladies would like to do with their husbands, their children, and their bosses. She goes the limit but is always believable. She’s bigger than life, but just enough to make all her wild schemes seem perfectly understandable. While I was making pictures, I always had the feeling that I was waiting for something. I never found a place of my own and I never became truly confident until—in the Lucy character—I began creating something that was really mine. The potential was there. Lucy Ricardo released it.
But there came a point when she had to release Lucy Ricardo. Her marriage with Arnaz—always a tempestuous and tenuous thing—was falling apart, and for a while, they could at least enjoy their presence together on the set. The day after shooting the last episode of the series (actually, the hour-long comedy specials that evolved from I Love Lucy), in April of 1960, Ball filed for divorce. There had been nearly two hundred episodes featuring the loving Ricardos until the off-camera reality set in.
In the next two years, she bounced back in her own series, The Lucy Show, with her old partner in crime Vivian Vance as her foil, and it, too, shot up in the ratings. Now, nearly fifty, she was still rolling up her sleeves to reveal her inner clown. Garry Marshall, who wrote for the new series, recalled one day on the set:
With Lucy you started with the last scene: how can Lucy be funny? So, in this set piece, she came rolling in in a beautiful gown with roller skates because—there was some reason—she had the skates on. And the director had her roll in and two waiters were carrying a table, and as she was coming out, they lifted the table; she’d go right under the table—that was part of the entrance. And during rehearsal, the waiters carrying the table weren’t sure what to do, and she came and she hit her head right on the table. Knocked down, and it was a mess. I remember saying to my writing partner, “I think we just killed Lucy. That’ll be our reputation for the rest of our careers.” But they helped her up and we went over and said, “We’re so sorry! What stupid guys! What a dumb joke we wrote, that was no good.” She said, “No, no, it was my fault; I mistimed it. You just keep writing ’em, I’ll do ’em, don’t worry. This is what we do here.”
If she was tough on the set, she had to be even tougher off it. By the mid-1960s, she had bought out Desi’s controlling interest of the Desilu studio and found herself to be not only the first female studio executive ever but an executive of a studio worth tens of millions of dollars. She befriended another loose-limbed comedienne, the young Carol Burnett, and confided in her the trouble and the tension of that kind of responsibility: “She said, ‘I had a big talk with myself. And I knew that I could do it because I learned a lot from Desi. So, I went back and I became tough, you know. A guy can be tough but the woman being tough was a different thing then.’ She said, ‘But then, kid, that’s when they put the S on the end of my last name.’”
Seeking double: With kindred spirit, Harpo; braver than a speeding pratfall.
Lucy’s last two decades were not pleasant (she died in 1989), mostly because she desperately wanted to keep working and it was difficult for audiences to take their beloved Lucy cavorting around in harmful situations when she was obviously a grandma. Her immense capacity for disguise had been thwarted by age. But throughout the monochromatic decade of the 1950s, she had pulled off one of the great deceptions of television comedy, that of a beautiful woman who was one of the most powerful figures in show business pretending to be a beautiful woman who often disguised herself in the most outrageous ways simply to sneak onto the fringes of show business. A tricky balancing act, but Lucille Ball’s talents were forged out of an inner reserve of will power; for her to share her magic would require an awful lot of ’splainin’.
