Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [6]
Marlo: Did you ever doubt that you could make people laugh?
Jerry: Oh, always.
Marlo: Always?
Jerry: Sure. Still do. I think that’s been the key to my success. I’ve never been overconfident.
Marlo: So where do you get the guts to say, “Okay, I’m going to do it anyway?”
Jerry: It’s a very funny little mixture of humility and outrageous egomania. That’s what makes a good comedian.
Marlo: So when it gets down to it, laughter—
Jerry: . . . is the greatest thing there is. I mean it. Even if you’re not a comedian, if you say something funny or tell a joke and make somebody laugh, it’s a moment of pure joy, one of the best things I know. It’s cultural, it’s genetic.
Marlo: You once said that stand-up comedy doesn’t belong on the arts pages, it belongs on the sports pages. What do you mean?
Jerry: One of the things that drew me to comedy was that it’s a simple world. It doesn’t require the interpretation of any critic to tell you whether something is good or not good. If the audience is laughing, the guy’s good. If they’re not laughing, he’s not good. Period. And that’s the analogy to sports: You can talk all you want about how two teams played in a game. But we all know who won at the end. There’s no debate. It doesn’t require any perception.
That’s where comedy is different from the other arts. Stand-up comedy doesn’t require value judgments. If you get laughs, you work; if you don’t get laughs, you don’t work. It’s all about the score.
Put it this way. When you do a play, your friends come backstage afterwards and say, “You were great,” right?
Marlo: Right.
Jerry: And you say, “Really! Was I?” And they say, “Yes!” But all along you’re wondering, Are they telling me the truth?
Marlo: Right.
Jerry: Well, I don’t have to do that. No one has to tell me after a stand-up show whether I did well or not. It’s quite clear to everyone what happened.
Marlo: Okay, so running with your analogy, does comedy take the same kind of training as sports?
Jerry: Oh, definitely. I was recently talking to a baseball player who played third base, but his natural position—the one he grew up playing—was shortstop. So I said to him, “If you wanted to switch back to shortstop now, how long would it take you to get comfortable there again?” And he said, “Six months to a year,” because there are so many subtleties to playing that position.
Same thing with comedy. Stand-up has nothing to do with anything but stand-up. If you can do stand-up, that doesn’t mean you can do anything else. And if you can do anything else, that doesn’t mean you can do stand-up.
Marlo: Were there funny people in your childhood?
Jerry: Well, I think all kids are funny. But what was different in my life was how I valued it.
Marlo: I know exactly what you mean.
Jerry: Yeah, I’ll bet you do. So I thought being funny and making other kids laugh was the greatest thing in the world. Then again, I recently read that the average child laughs something like 75 times a day . . .
Marlo: Really?
Jerry: Yeah. And the average adult laughs like 12 times a day. So I think as I grew up, I wanted to maintain that 75 figure into adulthood. It was always the most valuable thing to me, so I developed it. I worked on it. I was completely focused on what was funny.
Marlo: So were you the class clown?
Jerry: Not really. I could make other kids laugh, but I didn’t think I had any real talent until I started doing stand-up in my early twenties. Any kid can make his friends laugh. That’s just being a kid. But could I make strangers laugh? That was the question.
Marlo: Who was funny in your life when you were a kid?
Jerry: My dad was a hugely funny guy—unbelievably funny.
Marlo: Really? In what way?
Jerry: Just by being silly and singing funny songs. When he was in the army, he used to collect jokes in a file. He was stationed in the Pacific, in the Philippines, and I remember him telling me that he had all these jokes stored away. He was a great joke teller.
Marlo: Do you remember any of