Live From New York - James H. Miller [73]
BUCK HENRY:
I did a lot of material that no one else would do. They would save the stuff that other hosts wouldn’t do for me, because they knew I would do it. Except for one. Once I didn’t do it. It was a takeoff on First, You Cry, the TV movie about breast cancer. I didn’t do it — one, because the girl who wrote First, You Cry was a friend of mine, but also because I had a very close friend who was dying of it. And I just couldn’t quite see my way clear to do a sketch about it.
I don’t think anyone but me would do “Stunt Baby.” That was very notorious — a sketch about doing a movie on child abuse, and whenever it was time for a violent scene, they called in the stunt baby and it got batted around. Both “babies” were dolls, of course; Laraine did the babies’ voices. I liked the sketch so much, I asked them to do “Stunt Puppy,” which was equally rude. I heard they got more mail protesting “Stunt Baby” than anything else they’d done up to that time. “Stunt Baby” really offended people — and it was one of my favorites.
ROSIE SHUSTER:
I loved Bill Clotworthy, one of the censors. I used to always talk to him like Eddie Haskell and go, “That’s a really attractive tie you’ve got on, Mr. Clotworthy.” To me, comedy writing was all about flirting with taboos and seeing how far you could push it. Not just gratuitously, though; it had to be funny. It had to make you laugh. Beatts and I wrote a “nerd nativity” sketch and it all came down to that screaming thing. There was a meeting, I’m trying to remember — this happened twice, because it also happened with a sketch about “What if Jesus had gotten five to ten instead of a death sentence?” — where the censors were pulled out of bed and came running down to 8H right between dress and air. The question was, were they going to put it on or not. And the censors sort of defanged it, declawed it, took the balls out, and removed the spine and then sent it out there, kind of mushy.
ROBIN SHLIEN:
Audrey Dickman was the associate producer. She was English to the core and she loved to laugh. Audrey really was like a mother hen. I think she was very protective, certainly of the production department, and she really loved the cast and the writers — and Lorne. She didn’t ever want to say no to people. Someone would ask her a request sometimes and she would turn around and roll her eyeballs, but she would never say no.
So one time Danny sent me to the censor to try to get the word “muff diver” approved. We had a substitute censor that week, so he thought he’d try his luck. They were always merciless to the substitute censors. I considered not doing it, but Audrey taught us it wasn’t our job to say no, especially to the writers. So I waited until the censor was eating lunch in the control room. I opened my script in front of her and said, “These are the new lines,” trying to be nonchalant. She scanned the pages and pointed to “muff diver”: “What’s that?” Since the scene took place on a window ledge, I said the first thing that popped into my head: “I think it’s someone jumping out a window.” She nodded okay. But when the scene played in dress, as soon as Danny yelled it to Laraine — “So long, muff diver” — like four phone lines in the control room all lit up at once. Somebody knew what it meant. It was like instantaneous, as soon as he said the word. During dress the advertisers and other executives were watching from other rooms.
So “muff diver” never made it onto the air. Audrey never asked what had happened; there were some things she knew even she couldn’t control.