Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [48]
Marlo: Sure. What do you want me to say?
Rickles: Tell him I’m a star.
DID YA HEAR THE ONE ABOUT . . .
An old Jewish man is walking along the beach when he sees something glittering in the sand. He picks it up—it’s a bottle. He brushes it off and a genie pops out.
“I will grant you one wish,” the genie says.
“One wish?” the old man says. And from his back pocket, he takes out a crumpled old map.
“You see this?” he says to the genie. “This is a map of my homeland, Israel, and right next to it is Palestine. They are neighbors and yet for years and years they fight and kill each other. My wish is that you bring peace to my homeland and Palestine.”
The genie says, “Oh, my, that is a very big wish you ask for. And though I am a very magical genie, I don’t think even I can grant that wish. Do you have any other wish?”
The old man says, “Okay. How ’bout that my wife Sadie should like the oral sex?”
The genie thinks a moment and says, “Let me take another look at that map.”
Chapter 24
The Two Dannys
My father had a thing about fear. He hated it. He would get angry with Terre, Tony and me if he thought we were afraid. Then he’d talk admiringly of his father.
“Your grandfather was fearless,” he’d tell us. “At funerals, he would kiss the corpse on the mouth!”
Why that was a good thing I never knew.
When Dad went to London to appear at the famed Palladium, it was a great test of his appeal. London audiences and critics were known for being very tough on performers, and though Dad was a household name in America, he wasn’t known in England. He was coming in cold.
He was also following Danny Kaye, who the London press adored. One of the newspaper stories heralding Dad’s arrival bore the headline “AMERICA HAS SENT US ANOTHER DANNY!”
The two Dannys couldn’t have been further apart in what they did onstage. Kaye was a lighthearted, aristocratic elf; Dad told stories of the struggles of his immigrant neighborhood, with all the colorful accents he had picked up as a child. The comparison was not one that gave my father an edge with the London crowd.
He’d had trepidation even before he left. He’d told Jack Benny that he was worried that the London audience might not get his material. Benny tried to put him at ease.
My friend Julian Schlossberg unearthed this treasure in a dusty little poster shop in London.
“You’re a great storyteller,” he said to Dad. “Just do your stuff and you’ll be fine.”
“But their humor is so different from ours,” Dad said. “What if they don’t understand me?”
“You’re going to do your act in English aren’t you?” Benny said.
“Of course,” Dad said.
“Well, the language was born there,” Benny said. “They’ll understand you.”
Dad said that on opening night, when he walked out on the Palladium stage, it was the first time he’d ever experienced that kind of fear. He actually felt his knees knocking together. He was terrified and he hated himself for it.
He looked up at the tiers of well-dressed, well-heeled Brits, and out of his mouth came words that were at once spontaneous and brilliant.
“I hear you’re the toughest, most discriminating audience in the world for a performer,” he said. “Well, I wouldn’t be in your shoes tonight for all the money in the world.” Olé.
The audience roared—he knew he had them.
My father told me later that he had no idea where that line came from—that it had sprung from a fight-or-flee situation. He had found himself cornered, then turned the dynamic around—which is crucial to a stand-up comic (or any stand-up person). He had taken the bully to the ground.
But no audience in the world was as appreciative of my father’s craft as I was. When I was a teenager, and out on a date, I’d catch myself checking my watch. Even if I was having a good time, I’d want to get home to the dinner table—or coffee afterward in the living room—when all the guys would gather with Dad, smoking cigars and telling stories. My friends were great, and I was always crazy about some boy, but Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers and George Burns were at my house. The laughter