On Television
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Kings Depart IN the early days of television, coinciding with my own years of professional peonage as an instructor in the evening session of one of the...
...There was a time—a decade or more ago—when his infantile yelping was part of the idiom of every adolescent...
...I just had my breakfast), and the sprilzing tactic in which the comic fires one joke after another...
...The first sketch was sheer lunacy with Kaye stumbling and staggering all over the place as the boat pitched violently, while Terry-Thomas, heedless of near-catastrophe overhead, regaled his guests with tales of daring on sea and land...
...For a while, at least, the automobile was virtually defeated...
...It may seem quaint today, but people actually built their week's activities around the TV schedule, particularly around the comedians...
...He also drew heavily on anti-marital jokes of which the following example should suffice: Q. I am thinking of getting married...
...And the listless, nervous comedy shows that have survived make it apparent that we have virtually closed the books on a whole era of show business...
...The problems of the halfway house of sophistication are best exemplified by Garry Moore...
...Some earnest social anthropologist should study why Jewish life—out of which so much Broadway and TV comedy has come—has spawned such virulent humor about marriage...
...The comedian was king...
...To be sure, the comedians are still around, their shows as flamboyant and noisy as ever, but the will to live seems gone...
...The 19th century pattern of home courtship was almost revived...
...This was Danny Kaye at the knife-edge of trouble, and that was delight enough...
...Lewis tried to rely on the assaultive tactics he learned in the Catskills, where he served his apprenticeship...
...On a recent program, the bum was upgraded to Sigmund Freudloader, a bindle-stiff who does quick therapy upon demand ("a twenty-minute brainwash...
...What was most striking about Skelton, however, was the dilution of his rather simple-minded buffoonery with a measure of sophistication...
...The old magic didn't work, the little boy charm was forced, the pixie antics were foolish...
...Anyway, the kings have departed...
...Clearly, this is humor in transition, and if it moves too far from its naive folk roots, it will also be in trouble...
...And in contrast with Jerry Lewis, his confidence in a time of declining comedy seems remarkably robust...
...There were the millions who rallied around Milton Berle, and on a somewhat higher level of sophistication, there were the battalions loyal to Sid Caesar whose Saturday night antics were, I recall, a staple activity for couples on dates...
...Those movies would be hooted off the screen today—even by youngsters who have no recollection of the War experience...
...It's astonishing how innocent and ingenuous the humor of the early postwar years now seems...
...His guest when I watched the show recently was George Gobel, and they both seemed to enjoy themselves enormously...
...It's just that the time may have come to sound the obsequies for comedy as we have known it...
...As a comedian, he is gray, neutral, taking on the color of his material...
...The interplay between his grossly irreverent ministrations and those of Dr...
...Their material was pretty thin: a sketch— little more than old-fashioned slapstick—in which Kaye played an inept waiter serving the Captain's table on a transatlantic liner, and a longish takeoff on the movie "The Great Escape...
...Moore, unlike the Jerry Lewises and the Red Skeltons and the Danny Kayes, has no comic persona at all...
...There were the inevitable anti-marital jokes (Straight Man: Describe your wife...
...In the old days of radio and early TV, comedy and writing for comedians were like prize-fighting—a quick way out of poverty and obscurity...
...A. Take two aspirins and lie down...
...When even the studio audience—those kept men and women of TV—came through with merely a feeble laugh, Lewis ad-libbed despairingly: "Tell you what...
...And it is appropriate that the joy Danny Kaye has afforded in the past should immobilize criticism—at least for the time being...
...What has happened is that Jerry Lewis has grown older, even wiser, and both he and his audience share a common embarrassment at the crude infantilism which is his stockin trade...
...Q. What's the difference...
...Red Skelton has suffered no such catastrophic decline...
...But there was also some psychiatric jargon rather accurately bandied about...
...Today, the kind of bright young man who years ago wrote lines for comics is working on his PhD dissertation...
...Perhaps the comedians on TV have already been superseded by the sick comics whose astringent humor, though rarely visible on the home screen, seems more relevant these days...
...King's material struck me as pitifully weak...
...His specialized argot, in fact, was one of the ways adolescents defined themselves in opposition to their elders...
...It may well be, too, that the real shortage is in new comics and comedy writers...
...How charismatic the comedians were in those days...
...but a comic, particularly a gimmick-ridden comic like Jerry Lewis, has no way of aging...
...There were, of course, the usual anti-psychiatric jokes, e.g., Q. How much do you charge...
...The old cast of characters is intact, but they keep some strange company...
...A. For $20 I listen...
...Everyone knows by now that the two-hour Jerry Lewis Show on Saturday night (ABC) has been taken off the air...
...Yet even with Danny Kaye, I could not help feeling some disquietude...
...One of Skelton's comic creations is that of a bum, Freddie the Freeloader...
...Strudel (George Gobel I, who is full of Germanic pomposity, is the source of the humor...
...It beat pushing a clothes rack in the garment center...
...During the last few months, I caught fragments of the Danny Kaye Show and could only feel grateful that his inspired madness is intact...
...And the television set, with the people next door in to watch, even restored an old-fashioned neighborliness...
...The maneuvers that comedians have performed to keep themselves visible, but not so visible that they become stale, have been more impressive than their wit or comedy...
...And it is not difficult to see why...
...He is, essentially, the suburban funster, crew-cut, unfunny in manner, helpless without his writers...
...In a recent show, he displayed his full range, and considering that he has to do this every week, he does very well indeed...
...One need only look at the War movies shown during World War II to perceive how shielded from reality one can be while engulfed in it...
...There was no development, no point—it was really a scrawny little skit—but it worked beautifully...
...Then there was the old Jackie Gleason, who was for a working-class audience pretty much what Caesar was for the emerging suburban audience...
...The trouble is simple: A comic artist is permitted to grow old—his comédie talents ripen with time...
...And his pristine glory only underlines his shabby estate on television today...
...Just before Christmas, on his last show, Lewis wistfully recited a little ditty he overheard his children chanting: "Twas the night before Christmas and everyone knew/About the twohour program our daddy blew...
...only their pale ghosts remain...
...The most striking example of the dying of the breed is Jerry Lewis...
...I discovered, to my amazement, that it was easy to identify students in terms of whether they chose a Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday sequence for their classes...
...Today Jerry Lewis is a rather good-looking, substantial man in early middle age, possessed, somewhat surprisingly, of a certain natural dignity...
...How long can one be funny...
...What shall I do...
...The viewer sometimes wonders if he is laughing in response to Kaye's current antics or out of the affectionate memory of past pleasures...
...Perhaps it was necessary for a corridor of years to intervene before the War experiences could really be assimilated and the old humor rendered obsolescent...
...There can only be an even more frantic pursuit of the evanescent laugh...
...His equipment as an entertainer is formidable: that marvelously rubber face and loose expressive body, the undimmed magnetism, the surprisingly good singer's voice...
...Not that his hand has lost its cunning...
...It's almost as if the War had not happened...
...A. $10 or $20...
...His descents, therefore, into stylized idiocy are all the more jarring and strained...
...Kaye did a charming little softshoe number with an eight-year-old Japanese girl and worked, in felicitous tandem, with Terry-Thomas, the English comedian...
...But like the good executive he is, he knows how to delegate authority...
...And his show is midway between the genuine comedy shows and the variety shows like Ed Sullivan's...
...I'll tell you a few jokes, and you pick one you like...
...Despite all the current sentimentalizing about the Golden Age of television drama— Chayefsky and Company—there were no fanatic legions reserving Tuesday or Thursday night for plays...
...His persona as a coarsely Chaplinesque clown has held up reasonably well...
...ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Kings Depart IN the early days of television, coinciding with my own years of professional peonage as an instructor in the evening session of one of the city colleges, TV emerged as a significant academic factor...
...Jerry Lewis: I'd rather not...
...Why has a decline set in...
...Exhaustion is one factor...
...The evening I watched him not long ago, he had as his guest comedian Alan King, a Catskill belter...
...The devotees of TV—they were generally more prosperous, they drove to school in cars, and they were straight C students—were unavailable for the Tuesday-Thursday sequence, because that conflicted with their Tuesday evening delight: watching Milton Berle, Mister Television...
Vol. 47 • January 1964 • No. 2
