Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [23]
Learning the Craft
Ben: Both of my parents were actors first, so I learned from them that you don’t approach comedy any differently than you approach drama. If the material is funny, you don’t need to play it up. You make your acting choice, and it just happens to be the more comedic one. That’s what I always saw my parents do.
Jerry: I remember when Ben and Amy were about ten or eleven, they created this pretend acting class. Ben played the teacher, and I was the student coming in to take acting lessons. I started to do my first line, and Ben stopped me in the middle and tore me apart. He’d given me a name—“Bernard”—and he said, “Bernard, why don’t you start the scene again, and this time think a little more about where you were before you came on stage.” I tried again, but Ben wasn’t very encouraging. He said, “Bernard, do not go into this business. It will only bring you heartbreak. You will bring humiliation upon yourself.” It was a riot.
Using the Craft—and Embarrassing Your Parents
Ben: The masturbation scene in There’s Something About Mary—yeah, I remember that day. That was a lonely scene. The directors, everybody, just sort of disappeared. Honestly, that was one of those things that, as an actor, I thought was very funny. I thought the movie was funny. And I was happy to have the job.
Jerry: When we got into the theatre, Ben was sitting about three rows in front of us, and he turned around and he said, “Dad, Mom, I hope you don’t get embarrassed by what you’re going to see.” He was very serious. So the movie starts, and . . . I never laughed so hard in my life. Ben kept turning around and looking at us to be sure that we were not embarrassed, but all he saw was me laughing. As for that scene, what can I say? That’s Ben. He really throws himself into a part.
Stillers: The Next Generation
Ben: I think what you learn when you have kids is that they come with their own personalities. My kids are so ridiculously funny to me. They love to do little characters. It’s like they channel it from somewhere, and it makes you realize that they’re born with it.
Jerry: Well, like all grandchildren, there’s something special about them, and you never know what’s going to happen. But I hope to God—and I really mean this—that they don’t go into this business. They’d have to live up to two generations already! If they do, I hope they can navigate through it all, which is not easy.
My father was a bus driver, the funniest bus driver in New York. He would have gotten me a job—he had seniority and all of that—but I said no, and went off to be a comedian. He never really thought much of my work. He wanted to be a comedian himself.
But, God Almighty, was he funny . . .
THE DANGERFIELD ZONE
Remembering Rodney
“My wife only has sex with me for a purpose.
Last night she used me to time an egg.”
“I was making love to this girl and she started crying.
I said, ‘Are you going to hate yourself in the morning?’
She said, ‘No, I hate myself now.’ ”
“Last night my wife met me at the front door.
She was wearing a sexy negligee.
The only trouble was, she was coming home.”
“If it weren’t for pickpockets, I’d have no sex life at all.”
“My wife is such a bad cook, if we leave dental floss
in the kitchen the roaches hang themselves.”
“My wife likes to talk on the phone during sex—
she called me from Chicago last night.”
Chapter 13
aka Orson
Where do you get your sense of humor from?
“I don’t think you can learn to be funny,” Larry Gelbart told me, “but you can grow up in an environment where you appreciate the surprise in a joke. You can develop a sense of humor.”
You know the old saying, there are two kinds of people—those who see the glass half-empty, and those who see it half-full? Well, there are three kinds of people when it comes to seeing the funny