Phoning It In

The telephone comedy routine is almost as old as the instrument itself. The hugely popular "Cohen On The Telephone" was one of the first big novelty records around WWI. It reputedly sold a million copies, an amazing achievement for the era:

Sequels and remakes of "Cohen" would be released until the end of the 1920s. Around that time George Jessel did a phone routine that, as it was addressed to his mother, gave the bit somewhat more emotional depth: "Hello, mom. This is Georgie, your son. Yes, the one from the checks…"

George Jessel phones Mama. Let's hope it wasn't collect. 

You might see brief variations on the telephone routine in the '30s and '40s -- the radio series Duffy's Tavern began each week with one, as the bartender Archie spoke to the never-heard bar owner Duffy:

There was also a comedienne named Arlene Harris who apparently did phone routines on the radio about this same time. How popular she was I don't know (I only know of her because she did a Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s).

Aside from these instances the telephone routine would essentially lay dormant until the '50s.

Shelley Berman had already failed as a dramatic actor when he hooked up with Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and other unknowns to help found Chicago's improvisational Compass Theater in 1955.

The Compass players c. 1955: Elaine May, Shelley Berman, and Mike Nichols in the back.

According to Berman his suggestion to form a three-person act with Nichols and May was rejected by the former. Perhaps as revenge/self-protection, Berman worked out his own telephone routines, which notably did not require other actors. This format also had the effect of distancing the performer from the audience, in opposition to the new postwar "personal style" of people like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.

This routine is much more about Berman's pain and suffering than the woman on the ledge, who during much of the routine is almost an afterthought. Even the official title, "Department Store" takes the emphasis off the ledge climber.

Berman included "Department Store" on his first comedy album, Inside Shelley Berman, in 1959.

Inside Shelley Berman was very successful and even won a Grammy. But Berman's time in the spotlight would be brief. Another Chicagoan, clean cut where Berman was neurotic, was waiting in the wings.

Bob Newhart was a former accountant and small-time radio joke peddler who had never done standup in his life when he recorded a comedy album for the new Warner Brothers label in 1960. It became the bestselling album of the year -- not just bestselling comedy album, bestselling album, period -- and won the Grammy for Album of the Year, the first time a comedy record had ever done that.

As with Berman, many of his routines were one-sided phone conversations. Berman himself was not pleased. Wikipedia:

In a 2012 podcast interview with Marc Maron, 87-year-old Berman accused comedian Bob Newhart of plagiarizing his improvisational telephone routine style, describing its genesis and saying it was a "very special technique that couldn't really be imitated. It could be stolen. And it was." He continued, "I was coming to work at night and a guy stopped his car, passed me by, and said 'Hey, Shelley! There's a guy [who] stole your act!'" When asked by Maron if it was done maliciously, Berman replied, "Maliciously? He wouldn't do it maliciously. Nobody does that. But he did it to make a living. And he became a star." Berman later added, "I thought it was a rotten thing to do. I thought the agents who sold him - I thought they were just as guilty as everybody else. But, my God, to go into a town and do my show, and the critics saying that I borrowed some stuff from Newhart..."

Sometimes Newhart's subject matter was also reminiscent of Berman. Here Newhart does his own take on a ledge bit (note he does not use a phone).

The subject is the same, but the style is completely different. Berman stresses his own masochistic discomfort and suffering, while Newhart emphasizes the absurdity of taking modern psychology to extremes.

Here's a similar routine with a phone:

 

The same basic setup as Berman -- calling in about an emergency to an authority figure. But Newhart doesn't suffer himself -- he accepts the insanity of the red tape as just another part of the job.

We'll take a more detailed look at Bob Newhart in our next entry.

If you're interested in exploring humor more thoroughly check out my book What's So Funny? Theories Of Comedy, available at Amazon.

In our last entry we explored Roy Huggins' fondness for con games. This time we look at another aspect of his career, his tendency toward noir.

In 1946 Huggins published his first novel, a Chandleresque private eye yarn called The Double Take.

The Double Take was quickly bought by  Columbia studios, and Huggins was hired to write the screenplay -- within a year of his first publication, he was in Hollywood, and in Hollywood he would stay.

I haven't read The Double Take, but it's apparently a very Raymond C. tale of sordid double crosses and tawdry L.A. ambiance. Hollywood gave the movie the jovial title I Love Trouble (probably inspired by the popular I Love A Mystery radio series).

Debonair Franchot Tone stars as private eye Stuart Bailey (remember that name). Instead of some seedy office Bailey does business in an attractive art deco suite. There are some noirish scenes -- especially when Bailey goes to Portland and deals with a gambling racketeer -- and we get some atmospheric shots of Long Beach (I think that's where they were -- I'm not an Angeleno) oil wells and a Venice Beach diner.

But I Love Trouble is most interesting for when it's not being noir. It's essentially The Thin Man, but this time about a hard-boiled dick instead of an amateur sleuth. The emphasis is mostly on repartee rather than mood.

Everybody banters in I Love Trouble. Even the brunette waitress (whose name I didn't catch) gets in a few sharp digs at star Franchot Tone.

Stuart Bailey has woman trouble, but so what? He loves it:

"I love beer":

Another Huggins novel was filmed in 1949, again with Huggins scripting.

The title Too Late For Tears sounds like a women's magazine novelette, and the film does have a female protagonist. It's kind of what Double Indemnity would be if we followed Phyllis rather than Walter. Restless housewife Lizabeth Scott stumbles upon a bundle of money and is determined to keep it, no matter who gets killed in the process. TLFT's serialized origins are very noticeable, as there's a  plot twist every ten minutes and a previously unmentioned major character shows up about halfway through.

But this is the flip side of I Love Trouble. There's occasional bantering, but it's never allowed to lighten the dark mood. Even the best lines have a menacing undercurrent to them.

In the early half of the fifties Huggins worked mostly in westerns, with a few notable exceptions like Pushover (1954). Around this time Huggins testified before HUAC that he'd been a member of the Communist Party in the thirties, and he named 19 former colleagues to the committee.

In 1955 Huggins moved into TV for Warner Bros, where he created the first hour long western Cheyenne. But his great breakthrough came in 1957, when Maverick made a household name of James Garner. The next year Huggins created 77 Sunset Strip, intended to be the Maverick of detectives. 77SS concerned a private eye named Stuart Bailey (I told you to remember that name) and the sometimes noir, sometimes comic cases investigated by himself and his cohorts.

Efrem Zimbalist, Jr as an especially suave Stuart Bailey in 77 Sunset Strip.

77SS really demands an entry for itself, and in any event I've only seen perhaps 20 episodes, mostly from the first season. One of these was an adaptation of a Bailey novel from the '40s, Lovely Lady, Pity Me.

Huggins left Warners in 1960, after he was denied creator's credit and royalties for 77SS. He ended up at Fox as the head of TV production. He didn't really accomplish much there -- aside from causing congressional hearings about an episode of his series Bus Stop, but that's another story -- though he did get his name on the Fox logo, the only time I've ever seen this happen:

Oh, and also around this time Huggins created a little thing called The Fugitive, which IMHO is the greatest TV series of all time. Maybe we'll discuss it later.

In 1963 Huggins moved to Universal, where he produced The Virginian and created the Fugitive knock-off Run For Your Life.

Roy Huggins in the 1960s:

In 1966 the Paul Newman movie Harper (based on Ross MacDonald's Archer character) revived the moribund private eye genre. Mannix debuted on TV the next year, and in 1968 Huggins took his own shot at the form with The Outsider.

Darren McGavin (who'd played Mike Hammer for MCA's Revue productions a decade earlier) starred as David Ross, an ex-con loner working as a private eye. The opening shows the Harper influence, as Ross burns his toast and debates drinking some possibly expired milk.

Even more than 77 Sunset Strip, The Outsider shows Huggins trying to combine his humor and noir interests into one style.

A shadowy Darren McGavin in The Outsider:

I've seen three episodes. The first, "One Long-Stemmed American Beauty", dealt in Chandleresque fashion with the movie business (a frequent Chandler target).  Two other Outsider episodes are currently on YouTube:



"I Can't Hear You Scream" is late '60s problem piece, as Ross tries to clear a black criminal wrongfully convicted of murder, and butts heads with the black cop (James Edwards) who thinks he's guilty. This episode however does feature a prototype Angel Martin figure, sleazily lurking around, giving Ross info. But significantly while Angel is Jim Rockford's best friend, this guy gives Ross the creeps:

"Periwinkle Blue" finds Ross investigating a comely new widow who may or not have killed at least one husband.

This has my favorite Outsider scene, where Ross orders fried chicken and finds he's missing a few pieces, so he calls up the chicken place and gives them a piece of his mind.

"What the...? There's supposed to be a whole chicken in this box."

Can't you just see Jim Garner playing this scene?

The Outsider lasted only one season, but when James Garner expressed interest in working with Huggins again, the latter dusted The Outsider off and reworked it into The Rockford Files.

Like David Ross Jim Rockford is an ex-con (wrongfully convicted like Dr. Richard Kimble) but he has a very warm relationship with his truck driver father, an important addition which significantly distinguishes Rockford from cynical loner Ross.

In its first season Rockford was heavy on the Chandlertown atmosphere but curiously took little advantage of Garner's comic abilities. For all the comparisons to Maverick it more resembles Marlowe, Garner's 1969 attempt at filming Chandler. Only with the second season and the classic episode "The Aaron Ironwood School Of Success" did Rockford find the light touch, which led to such memorable characters as Freddy Beamer, Gandolph Fitch, and the incredibly perfect Lance White.

Although Rockford was the crowning triumph of Huggins' career he had one more bit of noir left in him. In 1976 he produced City Of Angels, about a private eye in 1930s L.A.

Wayne Rogers as Jake Axminster in City of Angels:

This was the Outsider/first season of Rockford pushed back in time, with a little Chinatown thrown in, and some consider it a lost classic. I haven't seen it in so long I can't really comment. I do recall it did a three parter about the 1934 coup attempt General Smedley Butler warned against (though IIRC Butler himself is not seen). What has really stayed in my mind was Axminster's antagonistic relationship with a vicious cop (played by the wonderfully menacing Clifton James), who would love nothing more than to put him in San Quention. This cop's name was Lieutenant Quint, the name of the cop in I Love Trouble, allowing us to come full circle.

I hope you enjoyed this look at Roy Huggins and how he helped bring his own version of noir to TV. If you're interested in film noir check out my book Dark Movies, available at Amazon.

David Maurer was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville. His specialty as the jargon of underworld subcultures. In 1940 he published The Big Con, nominally an examination of the argot of confidence tricksters, but really a history, almost a celebration, of their special artistry.

Maurer clearly had a sort of grudging admiration for big time grifters like Limehouse Chappie and Yellow Kid Weil, who ran games like The Wire and The Red Barn with all the bravado of Ziegfeld mounting a Broadway stage extravaganza. Maurer's admiration was tinged with nostalgia -- he wrote that the golden age of the big con had already passed: improvements in communication and various sociological changes already made the 1900-1930 period seem like ancient history.

Maurer's book might have been forgotten by all but linguistics grad students, except for one thing: to give precise definitions for con game terms like "smack", "wipe", and "gold brick", it was necessary for Maurer to give fairly detailed descriptions of various cons -- thus (intentionally?) making his academic treatise something of a how-to book.

At some point in the 1950s The Big Con came to the attention of Hollywood. The earliest example supporting this I've found is an episode of the TV series Richard Diamond, Private Detective (created by Blake Edwards for radio, and TV's first "adult" private eye show) from 1957.

Richard Diamond starred 26 year old David Janssen in the title role, who was often Nick Charles debonair when bantering with suspects (especially pretty female ones) but could go full Mike Hammer when required.

In "The Big Score", Diamond takes on a gang of con men who've set up a fake bookie joint. Diamond poses as a pigeon and we see the gang perform the classic con The Wire.

Con men Peter Leeds and Don Keefer collect the payoff from the mark (David Janssen):

Interestingly, while Maurer presents his con men as stylish artists, the gang here is a bunch of colorless Dragnet-style cutthroats who have no qualms about murder.

Although Dick Powell's Four Star company (producers of Richard Diamond) was apparently the first to use Maurer as source material, it was Roy Huggins who would make The Big Con a (uncredited) part of the TV landscape.

In 1958 Huggins was riding high at Warners: his comedy western Maverick had invented a new archetype in the coward-hero while concurrently making a household name of James Garner, and his new series 77 Sunset Strip, intended as the private eye Maverick, showed signs of breaking out as well.

In November of 1958 Maverick presented "Shady Deal at Sunny Acres", often cited as the best episode of the series. Garner considered it his own favorite episode, which is curious as he actually isn't in it all that much.

"Shady Deal" has Bret Maverick (Garner) winning a big pot in a poker game, then depositing the money after hours with a banker (John Dehner) for safekeeping. But when Maverick goes for his money the next day Dehner denies having it and insists he's never seen Maverick before.

"What money?": John Dehner and James Garner.

Maverick of course determines on revenge. But rather than rob the bank like any other western hero, he instead sets up an elaborate (big) con game (a variant on a stock swindle called The Rag in Maurer) headed by his brother Bart (Jack Kelly) and involving various recurring Maverick characters such as Dandy Jim Buckley (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) and Gentleman Jack Darby (Richard Long).

While the game is being run, we occasionally cut back to Bret Maverick, sitting in front of Dehner's bank whittling. When asked how he plans to get his money back, Bret always replies, "I'm working on it".

Bret's working on it.

Huggins would prove especially fond of con artist plots, perhaps because it provided for larger than life characters, but also perhaps because con games are a lot cheaper to shoot than gunfights and chases.

Huggins left Warners shortly after this, due in part to his being denied creator credit (and royalties) on 77 Sunset Strip. He returned to television a few years later with Universal (more on all this in a future blog).

In 1970 Huggins wrote, produced, and directed a TV movie/pilot called The Young Country, in which several con artists try to flim-flam each other in the Old West.

 

The network (ABC) didn't buy The Young Country, but made a counteroffer: give us an imitation of the recent smash hit movie Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, and that we'll buy. So Huggins retooled The Young Country into Alias Smith And Jones, about two charming outlaws trying to go straight. Young Country star Roger Davis was not available, so Huggins replaced him with another Universal contract player, Pete Duel (who'd played "Honest John Smith" in The Young Country).

While Alias Smith and Jones has a healthy cult following today (the membership including yours truly), it must be admitted that Huggins could never quite decide whether it was about ex-bank robbers or reformed con men. As a result the boys pulled a surprising number of con games, more than you'd usually connect with western outlaws.

One of these games can be seen in "Dreadful Sorry, Clementine". The titular Clem (Sally Field, who'd co-starred with Duel on the Gidget sitcom) wants revenge against the banker (Rudy Vallee) who embezzled from his own bank and framed her father for the crime. The boys enlist a debonair grifter named Diamond Jim Guffey (Don Ameche) to aid them in the scheme, another replay of The Rag.

The crooked Banker (Rudy Vallee) gladly pays off Hannibal Heyes (Pete Duel) and Diamond Jim Guffey (Don Ameche):

After the others leave, Diamond Jim Guffey quickly exits the vacant office (the sign on the door says "Office for Rent"), a device previously used by Dandy Jim Buckley in "Shady Deal at Sunny Acres".

Alias Smith and Jones did not long survive the tragic death of star Pete Duel, but Roy Huggins had at least one more Big Con left in him. Huggins and James Garner, after some years of acrimony, had reteamed in 1974 for the greatest private eye show of all time, The Rockford Files. Once reunited, you just knew the old boys would take another shot at the Big Con.

"There's One In Every Port" (written by Rockford co-creator Stephen J. Cannell, which is a story in itself) aired in early 1977. Rockford is set up by a con artist and becomes the target of mobsters, forcing him to con the con man. Once again we see a Shady Deal go down, with yet another version of The Rag.

Rockford assembles the game crew: (L-R) Jack Riley (Mr. Carlin on The Bob Newhart Show), John Dehner (the crooked banker in "Shady Deal At Sunny Acres", here with the good guys for a change), James Garner, and Stuart Margolin as the inimitable Angel.

Dehner masquerades as a federal agent by walking out of a disused elevator, a reworking of the vacant office tactic previously used by Dandy Jim Buckley and Diamond Jim Guffey.

The year before The Rockford Files debuted, there had been another Big Con, a little thing called The Sting. Screenwriter David Ward had lifted innumerable details from Maurer's book, including the entire Wire con and the name Gondorff, from a con man who'd set up a Rag store in a stockbrokers office after hours. A key plot point involves a character saying "Place! I said it place it!", a bit which had been used in "The Big Score".

Huggins had the gall to accuse Ward of ripping off "Shady Deal At Sunny Acres"; I don't know if he ever mentioned Maurer.

Rumor of Best Picture Oscar winners must eventually infiltrate even ivory towers like The University of Louisville. After learning of The Sting Maurer sued Ward and Universal for $10 million; as far as I know he never sued Huggins or anyone else for the TV versions (he was probably unaware of them), eventually settling for several hundred thousand dollars.

Maverick was a Warners show. Alias Smith and Jones and The Rockford Files were Universal. How Huggins was able to get away with using the same story on all these shows, I don't know. Maybe that was really The Big Con.

More on Roy Huggins and how he helped bring his own version of noir to TV in our next entry. If you're interested in film noir check out my book Dark Movies, available at Amazon.

Maybe screenwriters wrote a bunch of self-centered screenplays in the '30s and 40s about screenwriters. Maybe. But if they did, they weren't produced. Sure screenwriters might show up in madcap farces like Boy Meets Girl, but apparently studios felt -- probably correctly -- that moviegoers weren't too interested in the problems of those who wrote the scripts for the films they enjoyed. Fiction about them got written -- What Makes Sammy Run and The Last Tycoon -- but neither of these was adapted by Hollywood until the live TV era of the '50s; even at this point they were still too dangerous for the screen.

Playwrights were occasionally acceptable, as they dealt with the sophisticated (code word for racy) world of the Broadway theatre. But for the most part screenwriters who wanted to explore their situation on screen had to use other artistic professions stand-ins. Composers and painters were the most popular, though there were others, my particular favorite being Blood and Sand, where matador Tyrone Power has to deal with a waspish bullfighting critic.

After WWII many things in American life began to change, and one of them was Hollywood's public attitude about itself. No longer the carefree world of Mickey and Judy putting on a show musicals, films about the film industry began to resemble the things Raymond Chandler was writing about it.

1949 saw In A Lonely Place, a film noir with a screenwriter anti-hero. But the film business is mostly peripheral to the action, which really could just as well been set in any big industry.

The true watershed of course was Sunset Boulevard, obsessed with Hollywood's history and its dirty laundry. Dealing with an egomaniacal star who eventually kills the poor sucker ghostwriting her blockbuster colossal extravaganza and finally goes insane, the film might as well have been titled The Scriptwriter's Revenge.

Coinciding with this change in attitude was the rise of Television, and what might be called the Second Age of Heroic Comedy (the First, according to the great comedy historian Joe Adamson -- who coined the phrase -- was the '20s and '30s, with larger than life personalities like the great silent clowns and anarchist like W.C. Fields and The Marx Brothers). This second age produced the live TV comedian, starting with Milton Berle and lasting until the '60s, by which time these stars had mostly been replaced by the filmed TV sitcom. But in their time Berle, Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar, Red Skelton and a few others ruled the roost in TV comedy. They were just as self-centered as the movie idols of Norma Desmond's time, but got a whole more press about it, perhaps in part because of a loosening of self-censorship in the industry, and perhaps the very nature of TV, in the home like a member of the family, made viewers demand to know more about the stars.

TV showed this as early as 1953, when CBS' Studio One produced a drama called "The Laugh Maker", about a Jackie-Gleason-like comedian. The kicker is that this Jackie Gleason-like character is actually played by Jackie Gleason.

 

The script is credited to A.J. "Andy" Russell, who'd started writing for Gleason a few months earlier. One must assume Gleason commissioned the project himself -- but why? Surely if he wanted to show he was a competent dramatic actor -- which any viewer of his show could have seen anyway -- there were other stories he could have chosen. Here Gleason plays Jerry Giles -- note the initials -- a conceited, obnoxious, ruthless loudmouth who will let nothing stand in his way to success.  His only redeeming feature is his J.J. Hunsecker-like devotion to his younger sister. Even if you grant that the character could be based on Berle, Gleason seems to be inviting us to confuse the character with him. This was a very curious attitude.

If you been paying attention, you'll note that the journalist from Manhattan magazine (i.e. The New Yorker), played by Gleason's usual sidekick Art Carney, represents the writer himself, in the Blood and Sand bullfighter tradition. Aside from showing Gleason's and Carney's dramatic talents "The Laugh Maker" doesn't really add up to much; it's more footnote/curiosity in Gleason's career than anything else.

About six months after "The Laugh Maker" Carney did another Studio One, called "Confessions of a Nervous Man".

Written by George Axelrod (future screenwriter of Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Manchurian Candidate), it's the story of his play The Seven Year Itch from the previous year and how he dealt with its enormous success. Axelrod himself appears in a brief prologue:

In the main action Axelrod is played by Carney, shown waiting for the reviews from Broadway critics Brooks Atkinson, Walter Kerr (later to write the classic book on early film comedy The Silent Clowns, which I'm sure we'll discuss one of these days), and John Chapman, all identified by name.

George Axelrod waits for the reviews of his new play:

"Confessions" comes from an age of Manhattan literati now as dead as La Belle Epoque, an age of The Algonquin Hotel and The New Yorker, of publication cocktail parties and waiting for the reviews at Sardi's restaurant. This era was already on its last legs by time of Truman Capote's infamous Black & White Ball of 1966 (to celebrate the publication of In Cold Blood -- somehow that seems appropriate), but memories of it were kept alive for years by TV panel shows like What's My Line, and through the '70s Dick Cavett's talk shows were a reminder of it. Until the end of his life Gore Vidal was something of a walking flashback to this more literary era.

A notable aspect of "Confessions" is Axelrod's use of fantasy sequences, a device he'd also employed in The Seven Year Itch. We see Carney fantasize about the aforementioned Atkinson, Kerr, and Chapman as Satanic villains gleefully writing their pans in a fiery Hell -- presumably CBS' lawyers got clearances from them; the very fact they agreed to be so depicted in the first place shows the insular nature of the New York literary world at the time.

The critics lovingly pen their slings and arrows against Axelrod's play:

We also see Axelrod's fantasies of success: Being interviewed by a charming TV hostess (played by no less than Jacqueline Susann, future author of Valley Of The Dolls), and a brief bit where Axelrod signs in as a mystery guest on What's My Line:

Axelrod would later appear as a celebrity panelist on What's My Line, which I'm sure says something significant about something.

My favorite fantasy was a joke concerning Studio One's sponsor, Westinghouse refrigerators, though at this late date probably few will get the reference.

"Confessions of A Nervous Man" is a neglected classic of the period. I'm surprised Axelrod never tried to rework it as a screenplay. The film version of Axelrod play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter bears some resemblance to it, but Axelrod himself insisted nothing in that film was his work and that his play was completely rewritten.

George Axelrod finally hears the New York Times review of his new play:

In 1957 Rod Serling, probably second only to Paddy Chayefsky as a celebrity TV playwright, wrote "The Comedian" for CBS' Playhouse 90:

Directed by John Frankenheimer, "The Comedian" starred Mickey Rooney as the title character, who makes Gleason's Jerry Giles look like Francis of Assisi.

Unfortunately, Rooney decided to play the role as if determined to leave for future generations the ultimate definition of the word "bombastic". While Gleason was able to modulate his performance playing basically the same character, Rooney is 95% outbursts with only occasional quiet. Frankenheimer either could not or would not tone him down.

More reasonable performances come from Edmond O'Brien (as Rooney's head writer -- needless to say he is the moral conscience of the piece) and crooner Mel Torme, acquitting himself quite well as Rooney's used-up brother (possibly based on Berle's relationship with his brother).

Mel Torme looks on while Mickey Rooney reflects on the man in the mirror.

Even this early on, the age of the great TV comedians was starting to wane: Berle had left the air the year before. and Caesar that same year. One reason was the rise of the filmed western (Bob Hope that same year: "Last night I saw a TV show where some cowboys killed an Indian and buried him. I thought cowboys only buried comedians"). The whole exercise seems rather pointless, as Serling has little to say about Berle-like stars, except that they can be unpleasant. He does however provides some interesting detail on rehearsals and writers meetings, and aside from Rooney Frankenheimer's direction is impressive. The rehearsals come across as memorably chaotic and slapdash, with some presumably complex logistics in the blocking. I especially noticed two moving shots where we see one character in close-up while action takes place in the background. That sort of shot was rare in live TV.

"The Comedian" was based on a story by former Broadway press agent Ernest Lehman, future screenwriter of North by Northwest but for our present purposes more significant as the author of Sweet Smell of Success. Like Success "The Comedian" features a sleazy columnist, and the climax is curiously reminiscent of another work about a TV star from the same year, A Face In The Crowd.

Writer Edmond O'Brien takes everything comedian Mickey Rooney dishes out.

Two years later Serling would explore the world of television again, in Playhouse 90's "The Velvet Alley" (the title evokes Serling's description of Beverly Hills as "the land of mink-covered swimming pools"). Sort of a dead-serious "Confessions of a Nervous Man" this also stars Art Carney, here as Ernie Pandish, a writer dealing with newfound success -- but this time in the world of television.

Unfortunately the entire "Velvet Alley" has not been uploaded to YouTube, but several sequences are there. In this first one a drunken producer (Leslie Nielsen) tells Pandish the Hollywood facts of life in a short speech that has become a minor cult piece, due to being included in the American Masters documentary on Serling (FF to 4:36):

The big dramatic moment comes when Pandish stabs his loyal agent (Jack Klugman) in the back. Klugman's exit line is a classic, with both Serling and Klugman deserving credit:

The age of live TV, like the age of the live TV comedian, was coming to an end. Serling would move into filmed production with The Twilight Zone, though the new era was perhaps best symbolized by The Dick Van Dyke Show: a filmed sitcom, about a writer, who works for an egomaniac TV comedian.

But an even more fitting coda came in 1960, when Ralph Nelson wrote and directed  a TV film called "The Man In The Funny Suit" for Desilu Playhouse.

"Funny Suit" deals with the production of Serling's "Requiem For a Heavyweight" on Playhouse 90 in 1956. Specifically, with the problems Serling and others had with the casting of elderly comedian Ed Wynn in a serious dramatic role as a boxing trainer. Wynn's son Keenan played the boxing manager; both Wynns play themselves here. Serling also appears as himself, as does director Nelson. Red Skelton even pops up for a cameo.

For all its technical improvements it lacks the spark of the original live TV production it depicts. It feels like nothing so much as a problem picture, a spiritual ancestor of the disease-of-the-week TV movie. Something was indeed lost when the live TV plays disappeared, but whether the era was really the "Golden Age of Television" is up to each individual viewer.

If Dick Shawn is remembered today, it's for his supporting parts in two 1960s comedies, It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and The Producers. But little of the individuality that made him a standup star in the first place is evident in those appearances, or indeed any of his film roles. Shawn was an important figure in the postwar comedy renaissance, but has never received the attention he deserves. The two most important books on the subject, Gerald Nachman's Seriously Funny and Kliph Nesteroff's The Comedians, mention him only in passing, if at all. One reason for the lingering neglect of Shawn may be he was so hard to categorize: if there is any other comedian he resembles, it's Andy Kaufman. Like Kaufman, Shawn did not see standup as comic tells joke followed by audience laughter. While most standups try their hardest to make the audience identify and connect with them, Shawn and Kaufman seemed to take the opposite tack, building an emotional wall between themselves and onlookers. The thing is, Shawn predated by Kaufman a good 20 years.

Born in Buffalo in 1923, Richard Shulefand got out of the army at the end of WWII and was determined to take over show business. Dick Shawn -- as he soon called himself -- was almost conventionally handsome, with piercing eyes and a bushy haircut reminiscent of the much later JFK  (the resemblance between the two is kind of uncanny -- Shawn reminds me of JFK much more than Vaughn Meader does). Although he could sing and dance, rather than go into musical theater he made the then-curious decision to become a standup comic, a field dominated by what Mel Brooks called the "Jackie Jackie" school. (Google Kliph Nesteroff's superb historical essay "The Schleppers" for a detailed look at this world). Of course this may have just been a stratagem for an end run to eventually reach Broadway and Hollywood -- Don Rickles, Dick Martin, and Shelley Berman, among others, all began as aspiring actors and only went into comedy when they couldn't get anywhere in straight acting.

By the mid 50's Shawn had established himself in nightclubs. He allegedly came very close to being cast in the title role of the hit Broadway musical Li'l Abner, but was replaced at the last minute.

Shawn shares the bill with stripper Lil St, Cyr -- but at least he got top billing:

By 1959 Shawn was appearing on major TV variety programs.  On the popular Dinah Shore Show he did  a fascinatingly "inside" routine about show business and a "humble" star named "Mr. Fabulously Fantastic":

While this wasn't the first such standup bit -- Lenny Bruce and Will Jordan can argue forever about who originated the "MCA signs Adolph Hitler" premise -- it was still quite unusual, and even more unusual to see this sort of thing on TV.

Three years later Shawn adapted his dance for a classic rock & roll lampoon:

In 1963 he reworked his "Humble Entertainer" routine again for The Judy Garland Show:

Also on the Garland show was this song from Bye Bye Birdie, "Honestly Sincere" (with that title it should have been Shawn's theme song), where Shawn teaches Jerry Van Dyke how to be a cool cat. (As for whether this number was intended to come off as homoerotic as it does, your guess is as good as mine).

Shawn's career seemed to take something of a wrong turn at this point, or perhaps there is simply a ceiling for a standup who intentionally disconnects from his audience (Shawn's spiritual son Andy Kaufman appeared to run into his own sort of wall -- his last years were mostly things like wrestling women on TV). Also Shawn allegedly had some sort of run-in with Johnny Carson, who blackballed him from The Tonight Show whenever Carson was hosting.

In 1967 Shawn was the guest star in a TV sitcom pilot, a western spoof called Sheriff Who?, in which he played "the fastest interior decorator in the west". As far as I know it has not aired since, and would be forgotten today except that those who saw it in its one and only airing claim it is one of the funniest things ever done. A few years later writer/producer Garry Marshall would rework the material into a pilot called Evil Roy Slade in which Shawn again guest starred, this time as a combination of Roy Rogers and Paladin called "Bing Bell".

In 1977 Shawn appeared an a low budget TV show called Celebrity Cabaret (so obscure it's not even listed on IMDb):

By this point Shawn no longer seems to care if his audience is at ease or not -- you'll notice the occasional uncomfortable laughter; they're never quite sure where he's going to go next. There is always something of a Kaufmanesque vibe about Shawn, as if he is a conceptual artist pretending to be a standup, rather than a standup itself.

In 1985 Shawn was on The Tonight Show with guest host Joan Rivers, doing a funny if somewhat conventional (by Shawn standards) routine about Jews and ethnic stereotypes:

If Shawn had ever had a feud with Johnny Carson it was patched up by the next year when he did The Tonight Show with Johnny:

In the 80s Shawn toured with his stage show The Second Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World, playing colleges and small theaters, giving him the freedom TV and Las Vegas could/would not. On April 17, 1987 Shawn was performing at the University of California at San Diego. He was in the middle of a routine in which he told the audience they were the only survivors of a nuclear war, and authoritatively cried out, "I will be your leader!" Then he fell down, lying on stage unmoving.  

For at least a minute -- an eternity in stage time -- the audience assumed it was part of the act. A stage hand appeared and took Shawn's pulse, then asked if a doctor was present. Still, some audience members wondered if it was part of the act, Shawn one-upping Andy Kaufman -- after all, with Dick Shawn, how could you be sure of anything? Only when paramedics arrived did the audience holdouts leave. Dick Shawn had indeed died on stage -- the ultimate troll job.

"I can't work places like Vegas or the Catskills where people are belching. Maybe I belong in colleges. At least if I die, I die in front of intelligent people who know what I'm talking about." -- Dick Shawn

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Suggested reading:

1. David B. Green, "Comedian dies onstage, audience doesn't get it", http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/this-day-in-jewish-history/.premium-1.652210

2. Mark Evanier, "Second Greatest", http://www.newsfromme.com/2011/03/23/second-greatest/