Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [8]
Marlo: [Laughs] Right.
Jerry: You have the sock out on the street that’s gotten a few blocks . . .
Marlo: [Laughs] Right.
Jerry: Then you try to figure out the reason they would want to escape in the first place. Maybe it’s because of their horrible life in the shoes, with the smelly feet . . .
Marlo: Right, right!
Jerry: And if you can come up with enough examples, what you’ve done is taken an absurd idea, then laid it out, proving it with rock-solid logic. That’s the formula for that kind of joke. That’s what audiences love.
Here’s another one that I do in my act now. It’s about the piñata at children’s birthday parties. I explain how the piñata works, then say, “And then the parents tell the kids, ‘And after we’re done beating this animal senseless, we’re going to put a picture of his brother on the wall, and everyone’s going to get a pin and we’re going to nail his ass!’ ” So I’m basically creating this whole idea about some kind of donkey hostility at children’s birthday parties.
Marlo: That is so great.
Jerry: And, of course, everybody knows these two things—the piñata and Pin the Tail on the Donkey—but they’ve never put together the thought that they’re both donkeys, you know?
Marlo: Right, I never thought of it, either.
Jerry: In the end, you’re creating a false logic for fun.
Marlo: Most people credit you with doing “observational humor.”
Jerry: I think “observational humor” is a completely meaningless term. There’s no humor—no anything—that’s not based on some kind of observation. Every movie, every poem, every book—it’s all observation. And observing is nothing. The trick is, you have to know what to observe and how to present it. People also say, “Jerry Seinfeld just talks about real things.” Well, if I just talked about real things, believe me, I’d be still living in that studio apartment.
Marlo: Sometimes when I’m watching you, I think, if somebody else was delivering this material, it just wouldn’t work as well.
Jerry: But you could say that about any comedian.
Marlo: I’m not so sure. I don’t think that about every comedian, but it’s so apparent with you.
Jerry: I guess that’s because the audiences teach you what’s funny about you. One of the things that’s most important to learn as a comedian is to remember whatever you did that made them laugh one night, then replicate it the next night—exactly. Whether it’s some look, a hand gesture, a vocal inflection. It’s the audience that shapes all of these things.
Marlo: Are there things you’ve discovered you shouldn’t do? Do you have any rules you follow?
Jerry: Well, I do work clean. I don’t like to use curse words because it’s just not my technique. And not using them makes me create better things.
Marlo: The comics I grew up with used to say, “Anybody can get a laugh using a dirty word.”
Jerry: Yeah. And I always say, “I don’t want that bullshit in my bullshit.”
Marlo: You were born in Brooklyn, as were many comedy legends—Jackie Gleason, Jimmy Durante, Buddy Hackett, Mel Brooks, Phil Silvers. Obviously, your brand of comedy is a lot different from the rat-a-tat style of those guys. What’s in you that was in them?
Jerry: That’s a great question. For lack of a better answer, I’m going to have to say there’s a certain moxie. A sense that I belong up there. You know, you have to be born with that; and I think it’s, in many ways, kind of an ethnic, New Yorkish thing—this whole idea that I should be telling you what I think, and that you should all listen. I feel that connection with those guys.
Marlo: When George Carlin died, you spoke publicly about your admiration of him.
Jerry: Yeah, George had this amazing kind of jeweler’s acuity with an idea, the way he would dismantle a concept from so many angles. I learned a lot about precision from watching him. For example, we were talking about the sock thing. Two jokes is okay. But if you can get eight jokes out of it, well, now you’re really taking it apart and creating something that can go for a long time. That’s what George would do. To me, that