My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [31]
After rehearsal, we broke for dinner. While we ate, the audience came in. Then we did the show. By that point, I knew it was good and couldn’t wait to get out there and show them what we had. Mary took a few weeks to get used to performing in front of an audience. She hadn’t done that before. But soon she was like everyone else—chomping at the bit, excited.
On taping nights, Carl always greeted the audience with some lighthearted banter and got them laughing. Then he brought out Morey to further warm them up. That was always dicey. Morey knew as many jokes as anyone I ever met, but if he saw someone in the audience of a distinct ethnicity, his brain turned to that page of jokes in his head and he rattled off one after the other without thinking that he might be offending someone.
Those were delicate times compared to today, so I would often be backstage with the others, wincing at some of his jokes and praying we didn’t have a problem. We never did. But we had other problems. Though it might seem quaint now, the network’s censors had a problem with Mary’s Capri pants. They thought they were too tight, and that turned into a bit of a battle, which Carl eventually won. Following the show’s October 3, 1961, debut, I am sure Mary helped to sell Capri pants across the country.
The attention that Mary got didn’t sit well with Rosie. She had come on board thinking the focus was going to be on the comedy writers and the TV show Rob worked on. She felt Mary’s part should be a more minor one, at least as the role of wife was thought of in those prefeminist days, meaning she should serve more as window dressing to Rob’s glitzier life in show business. However, Carl made it clear that the show was about both of Rob’s lives, work and home, and that the marriage was the foundation for everything else. Indeed, Rosie came to understand that the show worked just fine as it was.
From the outset, Carl envisioned a show that would be timeless. He wanted it to be fresh to audiences fifty years down the line. It was such a bold, confident vision, and correct. To that end, he made sure the scripts never contained references to the period. In other words, no politics, no slang, no mention of popular TV shows, films, or songs. In their place, he emphasized work, family, friendships, and human nature.
Carl was the master of knowing the difference between funny and not funny, but occasionally Sheldon took exception and the two of them got into a discussion that typically had them meeting in the middle, in agreement, and understanding that their difference of opinion came from their different approaches. Carl was a comedy purist, and Sheldon was all about the story, all about how the show was built.
I received a first-class education in comedy from listening to these two brilliant men argue with each other not about whether something was funny, but about what constituted funny, and what made something funny.
I listened to such discussions, but I stayed out of them, and avoided debates in general. My dislike of confrontation was so obvious that Rosie turned it into a joke. She dubbed me “the Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O,” and anytime it seemed like someone needed to speak with Carl about a line, a scene, or some other issue, she turned to me and said, “Let’s send the Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O.”
From the get-go, we cracked each other up all the time. It was part of the process, and out of all of us, Richard Deacon, who played Alan Brady’s brother-in-law Mel Cooley, was the worst at keeping it in. He started in the very first episode when he asked Rob if the writing staff could show him a little respect and Morey quips, “A little respect is all we’re trying to show you.” It was just zing—funny on the page and even funnier when we performed it.
And when Richard started to