Read Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny Online
Authors: Marlo Thomas
Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny
Growing Up
Laughing
My Story and the Story of Funny
Marlo Thomas
WITH GUEST APPEARANCES BY
Alan Alda • Joy Behar • Sid Caesar • Stephen Colbert
Billy Crystal • Tina Fey • Larry Gelbart • Whoopi Goldberg
Kathy Griffin • Jay Leno • George Lopez • Elaine May
Conan O’Brien • Don Rickles • Joan Rivers • Chris Rock
Jerry Seinfeld • Jon Stewart • Ben & Jerry Stiller
Lily Tomlin • Robin Williams • Steven Wright
For Terre and Tony,
who lived it all with me
in the house on Elm
S
ometimes in the wee hours of the morning I’d hear that funny sound of an audiotape being rewound. Running backwards it sounded like a Swedish movie. I’d get out of bed and go into Dad’s study. And there he’d be—listening, taking notes, going over his act from his last engagement and getting it ready for the next.
“You hear that, Mugs?” he’d say. “That’s a big laugh, but the one after it is weak. See, they’re tired. You have to pace the laughs. I’m gonna put a song in here. Then I’ll come back with the
Whoopee
routine.”
He had an ear for the rhythm, the music of the comedy.
“You can never lie to the audience,” he’d tell me. “They’ll follow you down any yellow brick road as long as you don’t lie to them. Once you go off that road, you’ve lost them.”
My father’s respect for the audience was his compass. When he hunched over the tape recorder like that, he was shaping the act for
them
—not for himself, not for the critics. And when I went to Las Vegas and saw the act working the way I had watched him put it together, it was exciting. I felt like a co-conspirator, a rooting section, a student—not only of his, but of all of the funny guys he hung out with and with whom I grew up.
I was a lucky kid to have a seat at the table (often our dinner table) with those comic warriors who had the audacity to stand up in a room full of strangers with the conviction that they could bring them all together in laughter. The stories of those times have been humming in my head all of my life, and I decided at last to write them down. They also bring back the many wonderful performances I have seen.
Father-daughter evening out. Most dads take their kids to a movie. We went nightclubbing.
My father, Danny Thomas, was famous for telling
looong
stories. He would take his time setting up the story and the characters in it. There were always big laughs, and along the way some smaller ones that made you chuckle. And even in his shortest jokes, you could see the characters.
As the funeral cortege passed by, an old man approached
a cop on the corner.
Old Man: “Who died?”
Cop: “The gentleman in the first car.”
How did he know when to swing for the fences and when to just put the bat on the ball? What inner voice told him the best rhythm, the best sequence? He knew that the big laugh, the killer laugh, would only come if what came before was carefully, artfully built. But how did he know?
On February 8, 1991, my family occupied the front pew of Good Shepherd Church in Beverly Hills, inconsolable and in disbelief, unable to speak through the tears.
Daddy was the gentleman in the first car.
Since then, I’ve thought about all that I had the chance to witness. The performances, the love of the work, the banter of his friends. Growing up with all this, it’s no mystery where my sense of humor and my appreciation of the craft of comedy come from.
And it made me wonder: How did the seeds of humor get planted in the DNA of the comedians who fill our lives with laughter today? How do we explain the need that all comedians have—that childlike “Watch me!”? Why didn’t Seinfeld and Tomlin choose law? How come Conan and Whoopi didn’t wind up selling ties at Macy’s? What made Sid and Milton run?
So in addition to my own stories, I asked some of the men and women who make us laugh to open a window onto the funny in their lives. And they took me down the unpredictable and sometimes desperate road that led to their own unique brand of comedy. They shared some very honest personal thoughts with a little girl who once had a seat at the table with the giants on whose shoulders they stand today.
I asked my father once if he’d been in the army. He said not as a soldier, but he had spent a year behind front lines, entertaining the troops with Marlene Dietrich in North Africa, Europe and the Pacific.
“Oh, so you weren’t a
real
soldier,” I said.
“No, we didn’t carry the guns,” he said, “but we helped heal the boys who did. You know, Mugs, right after the Red Cross comes the U.S.O.”
—Marlo Thomas
New York City, Summer 2010
D
id you kill ’em, Daddy?”
“I murdered ’em, honey! I left ’em for dead.”
Dialogue from
The Sopranos
? No, just a call from my father, the morning after his opening night at the Sands in Las Vegas (or the Chez Paree in Chicago, or the Fontainebleau in Miami, or any number of other nightclubs around the country).
I didn’t realize until I was older how violent the language was for a profession that was so filled with laughter. It was life-and-death, all right—to all of them. But what a celebration when Daddy left ’em for dead. We were big celebrators anyway.
We celebrated everything in our family. My grandmother (the Italian one—my mother’s mother) never missed a holiday, and sent us elaborately decorated cards on every conceivable occasion, with all the good parts underlined, followed by exclamation points. Tucked inside the card was always a hanky and a dollar (or, as we got older, two dollars). What a character she was. She looked like a dark-haired, dark-eyed Sophie Tucker (her idol, by the way) and sang in that same kind of husky, raucous voice.
But Grandma did Sophie one better—she also played the drums. In her seventies, she was playing drums with her little band called Marie’s Merry Music Makers. In a beer garden in Pasadena. During the week she billed herself as “Danny Thomas’s Mother-in-Law.” On the weekends, to get the younger crowd, she billed herself as “Marlo Thomas’s Grandmother.” She was some entrepreneur, my grandma.
Grandma and her beer garden band. That’s her on the drums—flowers in her hair and a big smile on her face.
Of course, everyone tried to get her to act her age and give up the drums—or at least the beer gardens. My mother wished she would just retire to babysitting and making pasta. My father wished she was Bob Hope’s mother-in-law. I adored her.
In a family of celebrators, there is always work to be done, and the work was divvied up. My sister, Terre, was the cake committee (she still is, to this day). I, being the oldest—and having a bike—was in charge of buying the cards. I’d ride over to Beverly Stationers on Beverly Drive, where Gladys, the ever-present, ever-dependable proprietor, helped us pick out school supplies each fall. She was also the maven of the card section. Sometimes she’d have a few already put aside for me. I’d pick out something clever and funny for my card; something with a sweet princess and a loving message from Terre; and one with a picture of a lion or a puppy from little Tony.
One year on Father’s Day, Terre had gotten Bailey’s Bakery to create an elaborate cake with pictures in frosting of all the characters on Dad’s TV show. I had done my job of choosing a custom card from each of us, and after dinner the ceremonial opening of the gifts began.
My present was first. As was the custom, Daddy would read the card aloud, and since mine was always a funny one, we’d all laugh. If it was really funny, he’d read it aloud again, and the laughter would start all over.
Then came Terre’s card. Daddy read it aloud. Inside, the saying was beautiful—Hallmark had outdone themselves. It was about how Dad was “the best father in the world,” “caring and loving,” a man who would sacrifice anything for her, who guided her and who was always there for her. Quite beautiful. Tears all around. I was very proud. But then Daddy looked up from the card.
“Terre, do you believe all of this?” he asked.
“Yes, Daddy,” Terre said.
Daddy paused. “Because if you really believe what’s written in this card,” he said, “you’d do the things Daddy wants you to do, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Like right now. Where is your retainer?”
“It’s upstairs, Daddy.”
“Upstairs?! I didn’t spend my hard-earned money for you to put your retainer in a drawer upstairs. It belongs in your mouth!”
His voice rose. “I bought it for you so you would grow up to have beautiful straight teeth, with a smile to be proud of.”
His voice got even louder as his body began slowly rising out of his chair. Suddenly, the festive room had become very quiet.
Terre looked at me accusingly and said, “You couldn’t have given me the other card?”
Within seconds, the tense standoff in the room had dissolved into what was more customary under the Thomas roof: laughter.
This still makes me laugh.
And my father? She murdered ’im.
Terre—looking angelic (without her retainer) on the day of her First Communion.
