Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [63]
I can see why she made you laugh. Did you make her laugh?
Oh, sure, I would make her laugh. But I don’t think she understood how difficult this business is. I had a cousin who got his life together and landed a job that had full benefits. I was doing stand-up at the time, and had just started taking off. I got on Arsenio Hall and The Tonight Show, and my grandmother says, “Yeah, but your cousin has full dental and medical.” To her, that was more impressive than me being on TV.
Were you funny in school?
I wasn’t like a class clown. The class clown is the guy who grabs a girl’s sweater, puts it on his head and jumps around. I was more of a class commentator. I wasn’t silly, but my words were funny.
I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I’m an only child, and I was very suppressed. So when I went to school, I felt free for the first time. I had some good friends in the neighborhood, and I would do impressions of their fathers’ accents, or the way people in their families walked. But I wasn’t like that at home. When someone would tell my family that I was funny, they’d say, “George? But he doesn’t even talk!” It was only around my friends that I could be funny.
Was there ever a time in your life when laughter got you out of a jam?
Yes. In high school I had to retake an English class because I didn’t get what they called “the requirements,” so I had to write this paper in order to get my diploma and graduate with everyone else. I turned in the paper, but because my penmanship was so bad, the teacher couldn’t read it. So she says, “I want you to read it to me.” And as I’m reading it to her, I’m realizing that it wasn’t a very good paper—so I added things to make it funnier. And that’s how I got out of high school. I don’t know where this ability came from. But I trust it now, because it’s been with me forever.
What is it about your childhood memories that make them so accessible to an audience?
I think it’s because it’s real. It’s the same reason that some films hold up. There’s a certain humanity in them, a recollection of things that happened to all of us, regardless of what color we are. So if you can tap into that—if you can tap into the way your grandmother sounded, or the things that she said or the food that she made—you can make that connection with your audience.
And it’s not just things from my past. I have a daughter who’s twelve, and she’s hilarious. She eats fruit roll-ups but won’t eat a tortilla. I tell her, “Tortillas were my roll-ups—roll-ups with butter and salt!” Or she’ll toss something next to the trash can instead of throwing it away, and I’ll say to her, “Listen, my goal as a parent is to teach you to actually throw something in the trash.” And she’ll look at me and say, “Good luck with that.” Or I’ll say, “If you don’t do good in class, you won’t pass.” And she’ll say, “Why do you always have to be so negative?”
That’s exactly like my grandmother. My daughter is so sharp—sharper than I was at her age. It’s really kind of fun to see. I think that being funny is definitely in your genetic makeup, in your blood.
Time magazine once called you one of the most influential Hispanics in America. That’s pretty impressive.
Yeah, pretty good for a kid who couldn’t talk.
Chapter 32
Tony’s Pilot
I picked up the phone. It was Tony calling from L.A. His voice was filled with concern.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s Dad,” he said.
“What?! What’s wrong?”
Tony explained that he and Paul (Paul Witt, his producing partner), were about to shoot a pilot for a new comedy show they had developed called The