Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [1]
Father-daughter evening out. Most dads take their kids to a movie. We went nightclubbing.
My father, Danny Thomas, was famous for telling looong stories. He would take his time setting up the story and the characters in it. There were always big laughs, and along the way some smaller ones that made you chuckle. And even in his shortest jokes, you could see the characters.
As the funeral cortege passed by, an old man approached
a cop on the corner.
Old Man: “Who died?”
Cop: “The gentleman in the first car.”
How did he know when to swing for the fences and when to just put the bat on the ball? What inner voice told him the best rhythm, the best sequence? He knew that the big laugh, the killer laugh, would only come if what came before was carefully, artfully built. But how did he know?
On February 8, 1991, my family occupied the front pew of Good Shepherd Church in Beverly Hills, inconsolable and in disbelief, unable to speak through the tears.
Daddy was the gentleman in the first car.
Since then, I’ve thought about all that I had the chance to witness. The performances, the love of the work, the banter of his friends. Growing up with all this, it’s no mystery where my sense of humor and my appreciation of the craft of comedy come from.
And it made me wonder: How did the seeds of humor get planted in the DNA of the comedians who fill our lives with laughter today? How do we explain the need that all comedians have—that childlike “Watch me!”? Why didn’t Seinfeld and Tomlin choose law? How come Conan and Whoopi didn’t wind up selling ties at Macy’s? What made Sid and Milton run?
So in addition to my own stories, I asked some of the men and women who make us laugh to open a window onto the funny in their lives. And they took me down the unpredictable and sometimes desperate road that led to their own unique brand of comedy. They shared some very honest personal thoughts with a little girl who once had a seat at the table with the giants on whose shoulders they stand today.
I asked my father once if he’d been in the army. He said not as a soldier, but he had spent a year behind front lines, entertaining the troops with Marlene Dietrich in North Africa, Europe and the Pacific.
“Oh, so you weren’t a real soldier,” I said.
“No, we didn’t carry the guns,” he said, “but we helped heal the boys who did. You know, Mugs, right after the Red Cross comes the U.S.O.”
—Marlo Thomas
New York City, Summer 2010
Chapter 1
Celebrations
Did you kill ’em, Daddy?”
“I murdered ’em, honey! I left ’em for dead.”
Dialogue from The Sopranos? No, just a call from my father, the morning after his opening night at the Sands in Las Vegas (or the Chez Paree in Chicago, or the Fontainebleau in Miami, or any number of other nightclubs around the country).
I didn’t realize until I was older how violent the language was for a profession that was so filled with laughter. It was life-and-death, all right—to all of them. But what a celebration when Daddy left ’em for dead. We were big celebrators anyway.
We celebrated everything in our family. My grandmother (the Italian one—my mother’s mother) never missed a holiday, and sent us elaborately decorated cards on every conceivable occasion, with all the good parts underlined, followed by exclamation points. Tucked inside the card was always a hanky and a dollar (or, as we got older, two dollars). What a character she was. She looked like a dark-haired, dark-eyed Sophie Tucker (her idol, by the way) and sang in that same kind of husky, raucous voice.
But Grandma did Sophie one better—she also played the drums. In her seventies, she was playing drums with her little band called Marie’s Merry Music Makers. In a beer garden in Pasadena. During the week she billed herself as “Danny Thomas’s Mother-in-Law.” On the weekends, to get the younger crowd, she billed herself as “Marlo Thomas’s Grandmother.” She was some entrepreneur, my grandma.
Grandma and her beer garden band. That’s her on the