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Inside Comedy: The Soul, Wit, and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the Last Five Decades - Hardcover

Steinberg, David

 
9780525520573: Inside Comedy: The Soul, Wit, and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the Last Five Decades
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525520570 ISBN 13: 9780525520573
Verlag: Knopf, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

The world of comedy and comedians of the last five decades. By the man the New York Times calls "a comic institution himself," the only comedian (twenty-six years in stand-up) to have made Elie Wiesel laugh, as well as having appeared on The Tonight Show (140 times, second only to Bob Hope, but who's counting). From the director of TV comedy series Mad About You, Seinfeld, Friends, Weeds and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
 
Larry David:  “I’m lucky. I know and love David Steinberg. You don’t. Now's your chance. Don’t blow it!"
 
“David has always been a comedy hero to me. One of his many gifts is the ability to inspire funny people to be even funnier, as you will discover in this truly hilarious, insightful book.” --Martin Short
 

From David Steinberg, a rabbi's son from Winnipeg, Canada, who at age fifteen enrolled at Hebrew Theological College in Chicago (the rabbinate wasn't for him) and four years later, entered the master's program in English literature at the University of Chicago, until he saw Lenny Bruce, the "Blue Boy" of Comedy, the coolest guy Steinberg had ever seen, and joined Chicago's Second City improvisational group, becoming, instead, the comedian's comedian, director, actor, working with, inspired by, teaching, and learning from the most celebrated, admired, complicated comedians, then and now--a funny, moving, provocative, insightful look into the soul, wit, and bite of comedy and comedians--a universe unto itself--of the last half-century.

From the greats: George Burns, Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Lucille Ball, Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner, et al., to the newer greats: Carol Burnett, Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Billy Crystal, Bob Newhart, and the man for all comedy, Martin (Marty) Short; to the greats of right now: Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Wanda Sykes; and more . . .

Steinberg, through stories, reminiscences, tales of directing, touring, performing, and, through the comedians themselves talking (from more than 75 interviews), makes clear why he loves comedy and comedians who have been by his side in his work, and in his life, for more than sixty years.

Here are: Will Ferrell, Eric Idle, Whoopi Goldberg, Mike Myers, Groucho himself and the greatest of them all (at least of the last half century), Jonathan Winters . . .

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DAVID STEINBERG is a Canadian comedian, actor, writer, director, and author.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

DISGUISED AS A NORMAL PERSON

Insecurity combined with arrogance is good DNA for a comedian. So is anger, aggression, and sadness. If you’ve had a great life and a wonderful bar mitzvah and you’ve been given a lot of money, you’d make a lousy comedian. You’re better off being the comedian’s lawyer.

I’ve had, and continue to have, a great career in comedy, first in stand-up, and over the last few decades, as a director of television comedy series, from Designing Women to The Bob Newhart Show, Golden Girls, Mad About You, Seinfeld, Friends, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, TV movies, my series of interviews with comedians called Inside Comedy, with several stops in between. But there were also doldrums along the way—personal and professional. What got me through them was my love of comedy—life itself—and my friendship with, admiration for, and work with other comedians. I knew most of them. I interviewed, worked with, directed, kvetched with, broke bread with, opened for, headlined for, and directed the best of them.

This book is not just my story, it’s their stories.

Why me? Besides being there, there are things I’m too modest to tell you—that I may be the only comedian to have made Elie Wiesel laugh; that I was admired by the great New Yorker writer and humorist S. J. (Sid) Perelman, and by Philip Roth, Kenneth Tynan, and Harold Pinter. And that I was virtually adopted by Groucho Marx and many of the legendary old-timers (such as Jack Benny and George Burns) at Hillcrest Country Club. I also directed Burt Reynolds at the height of his considerable fame, before he self-destructed. Johnny Carson was my mentor and invited me to be a guest on or host The Tonight Show 140 times. I believe I am now at the cutting edge of comedy as one of the directors of Curb Your Enthusiasm, with my old friend and fellow kvetcher Larry David. And my series over the last few years, Inside Comedy, is a documentary interview show, a conversation with, if you will, more than seventy-five comedians and comic actors.

It’s a funny thing about comedy: when you give your life to it, it can become a serious business. I spent my life in and outside the comedy world, and it is a world, a universe unto itself. I was a popular stand-up comic for three decades. I was twenty-five when I first appeared at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. I usually prowled the tiny stage in a worn brown corduroy jacket—this was 1968—and I did things like improvising sermons based on the Old Testament. (That wasn’t too much of a reach, because I had been a pre-rabbinical student at Hebrew Theological College near Chicago before comedy found me.)

But this book is not just about my life in comedy—it’s about my life and comedy in the last half of the last century. I lived through a time when stand-up comedy was a poor relation to other forms of entertainment, when being on a successful sitcom was nothing to write home about. But I think I was one of a group of people—along with Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and a few others—who pushed stand-up forward as an art form and made comedy an important part of the culture. A comic hosting a television show used to be rare, but I hosted three—Music Scene, which featured artists like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Joe Cocker; Noonday, a half-hour midday talk show; and The David Steinberg Show, about making a TV talk show and thus a precursor to Garry Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show.

But being successful at something I loved didn’t always make me happy. Like many comics, I struggled with bouts of depression. And despite the affections of beautiful, accomplished women like Tuesday Weld, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Sarandon, and Carly Simon, I, too often, thought of the book of Job, when I should have had my mind on other things. It must’ve been my Talmudic training (I had the only little black book in Hollywood that was written in Aramaic). Unlike many comics of my generation, however, I did manage to avoid heavy drug and alcohol use. With some luck I was able to dodge the heroin that floated through Second City and Saturday Night Live, killing John Belushi; the cocaine that undid Richard Pryor; and the alcoholic demons that brought down Chris Farley and George Carlin. But I was there, and I saw it all. To paraphrase the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, I saw the best comedy minds of my generation destroyed by an angry fix.

Then I started to talk about my life. I had a little bit of the Lenny Bruce storytelling in me. On some level, that was hard and painful—you’re giving a lot of yourself, and you’re showing that your ego is bigger than anybody else’s. Still, the actual performing was enjoyable to me. I opened for jazz greats like Miles Davis, pop stars like Dionne Warwick and Frankie Valli, and folkies like John Denver. The musicians were fans of mine because they identified with what I was doing. I started out with audiences of five hundred people, and before I knew it, there were crowds of two thousand.

The kind of stand-up that emerged from Second City, from Lenny Bruce, and that had moved away from vaudeville was uniquely American. The early comics, who were mostly Eastern European Jews, gave way to the Irish, like George Carlin. Their comedy carried a whiff of optimism, and some of a madman’s tenderness. Robin Williams had it. Richard Pryor and George Carlin had it. Just consider, while Dostoevsky was writing Crime and Punishment, halfway around the world, Mark Twain was writing The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

Stand-up comedy in the ’70s was different from what it is now. Now, everyone wants to be a stand-up comedian. There were clubs, most of the comedians were close friends of mine like Richard Pryor, and all the other guys were just good friends. At all the clubs that we worked at in the ’60s in New York, we were opening for jazz or folk musicians, not comedians. I performed at the Bitter End, opening for Jerry Jeff Walker. I also opened for Miles Davis (we spoke for hours after each show we’d done, and I never understood a word he said, as he talked so quietly). Once, Miles did a benefit at Lincoln Center and asked me to emcee it. It was sold out because he was so popular. All he cared about was music, so he went onstage, with thousands of people there to see him, and he turned his back on them to experience the music with his band of six musicians. The music was incredible—it was so atonal, as he was so ahead of everything with abstract, obscure music. When, after the performance, I said, “Thank you, Miles, I’ll be humming that for weeks,” he took me offstage in a headlock. That was the atmosphere that I loved to be in, with artists. I also happened to love the storytelling atmosphere of the country western singers. You were always in a creative community, and what could be better than that?

What is hard and painful about doing comedy, for me? Well, the actual performing, the “doing”—no, that was enjoyable to me. I would sometimes get a little nervous, but I never had much stage fright. There is a tradition of a kind of Jewish angst explored kinetically by these mentors of mine. They didn’t mentor me by discovering me, but I was aware of them and read their stuff, and I realized that I was already in that kind of rhythm of talking about Jewish princesses and political stuff. And I held court every morning at the coffee shop, and after a while you just couldn’t get into the place.

I dealt with the only material I had, which was my life. I didn’t think it was an exceptional life, but it was the only way that I knew how to be funny and witty. I didn’t think of it...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525520570
ISBN 13 
9780525520573
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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