Lost in the Funhouse (15 page)

Dear Maharishi,

I realize that you are a busy man and probably don’t think about people’s personal problems very much, but I have one which I would like to tell you about. Please listen…. I will have to begin with a short “life story”: My life has been going in definite 4 year cycles…. It
seems that every 4 years, a few months are lived happily, then in around February things begin to drop and get worse and in that summer things are terrible and remain so for a few years until the good part comes around again in another 4 years. Things start picking up around the year before the good year…. The good part of the good year lasts only a few months. (I am referring to things in my mind and feelings.) … I began meditating in December 1968 and was due for a “good frame of mind” period in fall 1969. Things started climbing and the summer of 1969 was very nice and the fall and early winter were very good and I kept remembering that according to the pattern, things would go bad, but I didn’t think it would happen this time because I was meditating. However, in February, everything fell apart and things got progressively worse…. Now I feel terrible. I think I’m more unsociable now than when I didn’t meditate.

He stopped there and never finished the letter and never said anything to anyone about the things-in-his-mind-and-feelings, possibly because when he read the pathetic nature of what he had written he may have realized that it was his job—not that of Maharishi or anyone else—to address that which dogged him and to take responsibility and get on with it. Maharishi, who sat there waving his flower as he issued positive profundities, would have certainly told him as much. The point of life was, after all, to be happy and light and therefore success would follow. There was, as all meditators knew, no room for dark thinking. His father had told him that he would be heard
—You shall be heard!
—and Elvis Presley had admired his mind and there was nothing to do but to clear it of bad things-and-feelings. And so he got through his summer and through his autumn and stopped eating red meat (interfered with destiny, he felt) and completed his curriculum and performed stagecraft with renewed conviction to his future. (In November, he wrote a letter to his family and added in a postscript,
“Dad, thanks for the advice about keeping a stiff upper lip. Afterwards I wrote a story about a guy who kept a stiff upper lip. The
advice made me feel good.”
He also wrote that his mother’s sweet potato recipe had turned out well.) Boston felt more and more like home to him, largely because of the tether of TM; he had grown so proficient at meditation principles that he was now invited to become an instructor, which was very exciting. Teacher training and indoctrination would be overseen by the Maharishi in Majorca, Spain, beginning in February and continuing through May. He would go—at some expense—because it was what he needed to do and, by this time, no one except him could fathom the paths of his dreams.

His Holiness sat before them and wore his robes and held his flower and regarded his flock knowing these were those who would go forth with his wisdom and bring others to him and to the light. They had been in this beautiful place across the sea for just over three months, learning together, plumbing their quiet spots for sustenance, searching for truths and asking questions at the microphone which recorded all of this advanced-training congress. And so it was on May 5 that the one who wished to eventually entertain in an extremely accomplished manner stepped forward to hemhaw and inquire about what it was that he would do in life and divine the spiritual methods and the meanings of what was to be. Because the Maharishi had never before been deposed on the workings of show business, his governors decided to take the resulting exchange and archive it under the heading of Maharishi on the Value of Entertainment—although the inquisitor would not be named in the records. Among TM scholars, however, the exchange would become minor legend precisely because of who it was that asked the questions. He began:

“Um … what is the value of entertainment? Is there a good value of entertainment—like comedy, tragedy, literature, television, and
going to the movies and nightclubs? Also, if everybody was enlightened, would there be any need for entertainment?”

The holy one, ever mystical, thus somewhat inscrutable, replied that there would always be such a need in a changing world of relativity. Entertainment, he continued, should have an energizing value. Any entertainment that does not revitalize our mind and body, he said, is not entertainment. And anything that is derogatory to energy or intelligence or vitality, he also said, is not entertainment but something opposite. Maharishi went on to suggest that Knowers of Reality—his term for TM teachers—should also avoid keeping late hours in which to be entertained, since it may tire them and inhibit the experience of Being. Good night’s rest, very important.

The inquisitor then wondered whether people in an enlightened world could still go to movies and watch television and there is some beseeching and some desperation in his voice. The Maharishi replied that there would still be room for such, but only happy programs would exist, never sad ones.

“There won’t be any sad programs? There won’t be any need for tragedy?”

Sad programs are not entertaining, he was told. The purpose of entertainment was to enliven life, to create delight, to instill more vigor and energy and intelligence!

“Any more programs where the hero dies at the end?”

The bliss people laughed nervously and the Maharishi seemed perplexed and the inquisitor knew well that if Elvis had not died at the end of Love
Me Tender
he could not have sung from the clouds before the closing credits, which would have made the movie not so great. He and Michael once watched
Lassie Come Home
on television in Great Neck and, throughout the film, they took turns leaving the room to cry, then took turns teasing each other about it, which was a happy brotherly memory for both of them.

“I like to watch programs that make you want to cry at the end. Will there still be programs like that?”

Mass nervous bliss laughter again. (Such persistence, this inquisitor!) Maharishi told him that as society became more positive, there would be
more comedies and fewer tragedies. Then the inquisitor mentioned the sort of comedian who does darker things, unpleasant things, yet funny things, and the Maharishi said that such a comedian has a low level of consciousness and could clearly benefit from a little elevation.

“I wonder if a crazy man—”

They laughed—never had an inquisitor inquisited quite like this—while Maharishi interrupted to say that crazy men tend to be unreasonable and not the best examples of positivity.

“No no, a crazy man, a crazy man, somebody, for instance … he isn’t exactly crazy … like some of the old comedians who were looked on as odd. But they were naturally that way and that was their career…. What I’d like to know is if a comedian who is, let’s say, naturally kind of an oddball, looked upon as an oddball, and he’s a comedian because of that, because people laugh at his oddness, but he
likes
it and everything—”

Maharishi responded that people don’t like oddness, that it was not the oddness that creates delight for people, but rather something in between two extreme oddnesses—a field of silence—that creates a thrill….

[—this was what he had come for, this part, this would tell him everything that mattered and he would learn to do everything just as it was being explained—maybe he had been doing it this way all along; it seemed like he had—but now it became a little clearer to him, so he listened hard as the holy one parsed the ephemeral wisdom—]

Oddness, according to his holiness, was simply a tool with which to create contrasts for an audience. He offered an analogy for the inquisitor—the comedian’s craft, he said, was akin to building two walls side by side and leaving a space in between. The mere presence of those two walls then creates a contrast based on an awareness of the space. And by building such contrasting walls of oddnesses, the comedian is implicitly calling attention to the length and the depth of the silent space that connects the two. And within that space, said Maharishi, lies the harmony that thrills the soul and appeals to the heart!

[—um—]

The comedian, said Maharishi with beatific patience, must first say one thing and then say another thing and these two things will usually
contrast—but what makes the contrast so evident is the journey in between, which is the journey through a field of silence. And it is the experience of this journey—from, perhaps, the gross to the subtle—that creates delight. The silence, then, is the very impulse of life!

[—actually, he was confused about the walls and needed that part repeated and crystallized—which was that if a comedian does one unexpected thing and waits before he does another unexpected thing then he will receive a better sort of laughter, which was not unlike what Uncle Sammy had always said about things called Set-Ups and Punchlines, but Uncle Sammy had never dwelled on the part about Silences and certainly Silences were something that he (Andy) personally had great ability to produce, having heard his share of them during a life of creating Oddnesses, so this was all most inspiring—]

So then the Maharishi went on about this phenomenon and then the inquisitor inquired about whether the comedian makes this all happen consciously and he was told that the comedian must be conscious of building the walls but the silences are for the audiences to locate. Still, there was one dire and personal consideration/worry to finally clarify here
—

“So if a crazy man who everybody laughed at because he was crazy started meditating, then he’d be a better entertainer?”

If he likes to be an entertainer, Maharishi replied, then he will be better.

“He won’t become more serious and not be crazy anymore, will he?”

[—because that would not be very good at this point—]

Maharishi replied that if seriousness will entertain the environment, then he will be necessarily serious. If lack of seriousness is required, he will embody this lack as well. Whatever way he wishes to work, he will remain an entertainer, in the largest sense, to his environment. He will feed others with life, create thrills of joyfulness in their hearts. Through Transcendental Meditation, his holiness said, the entertainer is able to radiate more of life and this—he emphasized—is the purpose of an entertainer.

[—so then he would be, um, fine—]

He arrived for national consumption three years later and the how of his arrival—on something called
Dean Martin’s Comedyworld
(happy-happy-program!)—was certainly predicated on the teachings in Spain. It was also the product of blithe tedium, penniless persistence, and iron will. But, upon arrival, his silences would be majestic and deafening, thus thrilling. (It was unheard of to be as unheard as he permitted himself to be—the brazen manipulative awkwardness of it!) And his walls would be impossibly fortified with constructs of quicksilver—shuffled personae, sly juxtapositions, imbalances never imagined by other mortals. He would still be considered a crazy man, no less crazy for having found enlightenment. He was crazy and also more wise about his craziness. He worked onstage as no one ever had before; he never told the truth; his material asked no one to relate (and inadvertently made fun of those peers whose material did); he most often heard the appraisal
original,
sometimes in a bad way, then more and more in a very extremely good way. This Dean Martin program on which he would debut—and on which Dean Martin never appeared—was a temporary summertime replacement for the very popular NBC-TV Dean Martin program on which Dean Martin actually did appear. Both shows, however, were produced by Greg Garrison, who conceived
Comedyworld
to be an ambitious cavalcade of comic enterprise, old and new, featuring classic film clips, bits of some recent British nonsense called
Monty Python’s Flying Circus,
interview montages with very famous comedians and, more saliently, a wellspring of fresh material from young stand-up performers—“the kids of today who will be the stars of tomorrow!”—who were videotaped at various nightclubs around the United States. (The show would pluck from the vine such smartass punks as Jay Leno, Jimmie Walker, Freddie Prinze, et al.) Garrison had smelled a boom coming
—suddenly kids wanted to be comics instead of rock singers!
—so he went to New York in April 1974 to audition talent and it was at the Improvisation on West Forty-fourth Street that he first saw the foreign kid do the Mighty Mouse—“He just knocked me out. I said, ‘Put him
on the show.’ They said, ‘Well, he’s never done television.’ I said, ‘He’s done enough. Put him on!’” He went on, in fact, twice—on the first and third installments of the program, broadcast June 6 and 20—and he appeared each time immediately after snippets from Charlie Chaplin films,
Modern Times
and
The Great Dictator,
respectively. (His was deemed the only performance material feathery and innocent enough to complement the golden swoons of Chaplin.) For the first shot, taped at the Improv on April 26, he was introduced to viewers—almost with a disclaimer—by “Roving Comedy Correspondent” Nipsey Russell—“Our most recent immigrant to
Comedyworld
has just passed through customs at the Improvisation…. He’s just here from a little island in the Caribbean, and possibly you won’t understand him too well. But let’s give a listen to Andy Kaufman!”