Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (13 page)

The show had a very naturalistic tone to it, in terms of both plot and dialogue. It still sounds very modern.

It’s the little things in life that’ve always interested me. How people in relationships talk to one another. What they say when they really mean something else.

The jokes, too, are much more natural-sounding on
Ethel and Albert
than on the other radio comedies of the time. On
The Abbott and Costello Show
, Costello might say, “You have a cold. How can you keep the germs from spreading?” And Abbott would reply: “I’ll make ’em wear a girdle.” Whereas on
Ethel and Albert
, the joke would be entirely based on a situation: Albert heads off to work while still wearing his old Boy Scout hat that he had put on as a joke and had forgotten about.

When I started, I didn’t write well. I tried too hard to be funny. I was trying too hard to write a Gracie Allen type of character [the not-so-bright comedic foil to George Burns]. But it hit me eventually that I don’t have to try to be funny, for God’s sakes. Life is funny!

I never considered what I wrote for Ethel and Albert to be jokes. I didn’t write gag lines. All of the humor was based on everyday situations. The comedy came from character traits that we can all recognize and find funny.

For instance, I remember once eating dinner at a well-known restaurant in New York, and the waiter was too busy with the table of twelve next to ours to bother with us. I went home and immediately wrote a script about that. I called the restaurant’s manager and said, “If you want to know what level of service your restaurant gives, you can listen to
Ethel and Albert
two weeks from tonight on the radio.” So two weeks came and he had to go sit out in his car, because he didn’t have a radio in his office—I later learned this from someone who knew him. And he called me up after the show aired, and he said, “I apologize. Come back here and have a free meal.” And I thanked him very kindly and said, “I didn’t do it for that. I’m too busy to come around, but thank you very much.” But that’s how I got my ideas. From all over, at any time. Psychologically, it was useful. The show gave me a marvelous sense of freedom.

So, you never felt you wrote “joke” jokes?

No. I think I was certainly capable of doing that. I remember one joke I wrote that went: “How can you put your foot down if you haven’t got a leg to stand on?” But what I tended to write were funny situations tied to character.

I wanted it all to sound real. A few things bothered me about radio. I thought the sound effects were not realistic. The only sound effects I liked were the phone ringing, the doorbell, or just clatter. I hated footsteps. Always footsteps. Didn’t any of the characters on these radio shows ever walk in rooms with rugs in them? The footsteps weren’t realistic, you know? And I’m a very realistic person.

That’s how I ended up playing Ethel. We auditioned a lot of actresses, but they weren’t natural-sounding. They were too slow. They were too dramatic. They sounded too much like they were on the radio. Why couldn’t they just read the way they talked? Why couldn’t they talk like normal people in everyday settings?

Can you see the influence that your show had on subsequent radio and TV sitcoms? I’ve seen
Ethel and Albert
called the very first sitcom.

I’ve heard from various people over the years that the conversational style in
Ethel and Albert
is similar to a show I’ve never seen.
Siegfield?
Zigfeld?
Feigold?
Something like that?

Seinfeld?

Yeah, well, you know. I don’t have time to watch all these shows. But I think that show, too, was about the little things that happen in our lives. I realized when I first started that there were a lot of ideas all around me. I didn’t have to knock myself out trying to come up with funny situations. They were already there to be discovered.

Yes, but even if a show is based on real life and realistic situations, you still have to write the scripts.

I did, and I had to produce a lot of material over the years. I had to come up with an idea every day. Every single day.

Over the years, how many scripts did you write for
Ethel and Albert
?

More than twenty thousand.

Twenty thousand?!
How is that possible?

Well, listen. I wrote for the show for many years, first for radio and then for TV. This was off and on, but mostly daily. And we’d often broadcast two shows a day. They wouldn’t ever let me repeat an episode. Can you imagine? But it worked out well. I’ve always owned the rights to the show and could take it wherever I wanted. And I was also in charge.

Did the show have any writers besides you?

A lot of great writers submitted, but not a single person had a script that would’ve fit. [Novelist] John Cheever once submitted a script. He was a good writer, but it just didn’t fit. People never seemed to believe it was about anything. They all thought I wrote about nothing. No, it was always just me doing the writing. And I’ve always typed with two fingers, if you can believe it.

I wrote constantly. Every single day, nonstop. One night—and this was when I was living in New York in the fifties—my doorbell rang at three-thirty in the morning. I was up writing. I was
always
up writing. I said, “Who is it?” And I heard a man say, “Don’t open the door, please God, don’t open the door!” And I asked, “What do you mean don’t open the door?” And he said, “Don’t open the door! I don’t have any clothes on!” And I said, “So you’re naked?” And he said, “Yes. And you know me, I’m from downstairs.” And I said, “You don’t sound like you’re from downstairs. What is it you need?” And he said, “Could you get me a coat?” And I answered, “What, am I
crazy
? Opening the door at three-thirty in Gramercy Park? Well, just a minute.” And I opened the door a crack and handed a coat to him. I made him walk down to the end of the hall before I opened the door again. He had changed and was walking back to my apartment.

And I recognized him. I had screamed at him six months earlier because he was having a musical jam session in his apartment while I was trying to write. It was so noisy! I couldn’t get anything done. So I recognized him, and he began to tell me that he worked for
The New Yorker
as a cartoonist.

He was a
New Yorker
cartoonist? What was his name?

I’m not going to tell you. He later became a big seller in
The New Yorker
, but I’m not going to say things like that. And we sat there in my bay window overlooking Gramercy Park—I lived at 12 Gramercy Park—waiting for the police to arrive with a locksmith. I didn’t have a key to the guy’s apartment. He told me that he had been taking a shower and had locked himself out of his apartment by mistake. He’s sitting there in a raincoat and I’m in a bathrobe, and I said, “Do you like working at
The New Yorker
?” And he said “Yeah, but if I can’t get back in the apartment, I can’t work on my cartoons for tomorrow.”

I said, “Tomorrow, I have to produce a show, and I haven’t even written the script yet. So, thirty-seven million people will eventually be turning on their TV sets to watch and hear what I’m saying, and I haven’t even got an idea. And here you are, complaining to me because you can’t get into your apartment!”

He laughed and said, “Do you know Jim [James] Thurber? He listens to your show when he works, and so do a lot of the other cartoonists.” A few months later a group of
New Yorker
cartoonists sent me fan letters. So I’ve got a scrapbook full of those.

[Playwright and humorist] George S. Kaufman once said a nice thing about me. He saw a TV episode I had written, and he told a mutual friend that he liked it.

What was the episode about?

I had written a script where Albert returned home just as Ethel was getting herself ready for a Halloween party. There was a pumpkin on the front porch that she had scooped out and put a candle in. And Albert thought it’d be funny if he took out the candle and then put the pumpkin on top of his head and pulled a sheet around himself. He ran in—the silly way that people do to be funny—in order to scare Ethel. And he screamed, “Oooooh!” And she said, “For heaven sakes. Go upstairs and get that thing off! The guests are going to be here at eight o’clock.” But he couldn’t get the pumpkin off. [Laughs] He couldn’t get the thing off his head, and Ethel then had to drive him to the hospital to have a doctor try to surgically remove it. It was very realistic.

I heard from a friend that George Kaufman told her, “I saw the funniest damn television show. This writer guy had an idea that comes once in lifetime.” He said, “God, he did it so well. I don’t know who wrote it.” I ended up meeting Kaufman later, and I told him, “I was the one who wrote it. And that writer guy is a writer
dame
.”

When you created the television version of
Ethel and Albert
for NBC in 1953, you remained the show’s sole writer. Did you find any difference between writing for radio and writing for TV?

Not a bit. Not a bit.

A lot of radio writers had a tough time transitioning from a descriptive medium to an entirely visual medium. Many radio writers would tend to overwrite for television.

When we started our show on radio in 1944, there were about one hundred television sets in all of New York City. Think of it. One hundred. The medium was all radio. But that changed a little by 1950. But it was still so new. I once attended a taping of George Kelly’s [1924 play]
The Show-Off
, down in the RCA building, at one of the studios. It was horrible. The lights were so strong. It was incredibly hot. The men had great sweat stains under their armpits. The temperature was 115.

So, when it came time to shoot our show, I knew we had to shoot it in an air-cooled studio, which we did up in Schenectady [New York]. We nearly froze to death, but it worked. It was all so new and everyone was so nervous. The cameraman twisted up in the coils and fell off his feet. Two people in the control room got up to see what was going on and, in their frenzy, they bumped heads, and one knocked the other one out. And then the one who wasn’t knocked out came out of the control room and tripped over the cable. It was total shambles.

I have to say, though, that I was fine. I can’t talk for other writers, but the reason I didn’t have any trouble with the transition from radio to TV is because I always envisioned exactly where we were going and what we were doing. It was an easy transition. It was nothing.

But it frightened a lot of people. A lot of stage actors couldn’t make the transition. It terrified them. Performing live in front of millions, as well as a live crowd. It could ruin their timing.

I want to tell you a story about [Academy Award–winning British movie actor] Charles Laughton throwing up.

Please.

In 1952,
Ethel and Albert
was on
The Kate Smith Hour
as a ten-minute segment. There were other performers on the show. Musicians, actors, jugglers. On this night, Charles was going to read Shakespeare on the show. This was the first time he’d ever been on television, and he was nervous as a cat.

A few minutes before the show went live, the producer ran into the backstage area and asked me, “Can you make a two-minute cut in your sketch?” And I said, “No, I’m not cutting anything out. I can’t do that. I wouldn’t know where to do it.”

He said, “Well, we have to cut the Shakespeare thing,” which is what Laughton would be performing. “We have to cut it down.” The producer just drew a line down the Shakespeare script. He crossed off some sentences and wrote something else. He said, “Make the cut like that.” He then walked out of the room and, as he passed Laughton, he said, “Miss Lynch is going to make cuts in your script.”

I was putting on my makeup, and I could see, in the dressing room mirror, Laughton standing behind me in the doorway. I said, “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Laughton. Miss Lynch is not going to do any such thing.” But I noticed he looked strange. I said, “Are you sick? Do you feel ill?” He said, “I feel terrible. I wish I’d never done this damn thing. I usually never accept it, and I hate television. I think I’m going to throw up.” And he looked around and saw my bathroom, my tiny bathroom. He quickly headed toward it, and I said, “Oh, don’t throw up in the sink, please. All my makeup is there.”

He just kneeled down by the john, then he looked up at me and said something like, “My mother always held my head.” And I said, “All right,” and I got down on one side of him. He wasn’t quite as fat then, and I put my arm around his waist and held his forehead, and I said, “Go on now, throw up.” And he did. I thought, Here I am, kneeling in front of a toilet with Captain Bligh. He had played that character in [the 1935 version of]
Mutiny on the Bounty
.

Afterward, I grabbed a wet wash cloth and I wiped his face, and said, “Do you feel better? Now straighten your shoulders. You’re going on down to the studio and you’re going to do the show!” And he kept saying, “Television, I hate it!” I straightened his tie, I brushed his hair back, and I said, “Do you have any clean shirts? Get down there now and put on a clean shirt. This one is all wrinkled.”

He did perform and then afterward he said, “I didn’t like that. I’m never going to do it again.” And I said, “Yes, you will. You were
marvelous
.” Actually, I didn’t like it at all—he was fine, but I hated Shakespeare. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that he was bad after he had just thrown up!

The great Charles Laughton.

I never saw him again. He sent me three dozen roses the next day. And thanked me.

TV was very time-consuming. I went back to radio after six years of television. I had had it. I only got three and a half hours of sleep a night while doing the TV show. And it was a dirty business.

How so?

Ethel and Albert
was sabotaged.

What do you mean?

When the
Ethel and Albert
TV show was on the air, it had replaced another show called
December Bride
for the summer. The sponsor, General Foods, had invested $4 million into that show—a lot more than they spent on
Ethel and Albert
—and they wanted to force my show off the air, even though it was doing well; in fact, better than
December Bride
, and that was the problem.