Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (26 page)

During an interview with
NPR: Morning Edition
in 2012, famed TV director James Burrows (
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
,
The Bob Newhart Show
,
Wings
,
Frasier
, and many others) shared what he called “one of the biggest laughs [he] ever heard.” The laugh in question came during an episode in the second season of
Taxi
, which aired in 1979, when Reverend Jim (played by Christopher Lloyd) attempts to cheat on his driver’s license written exam.

“What does a yellow light mean?” Jim whispers to his friends from the Sunshine Cab Company who are standing nearby. Bobby (played by Jeff Conaway) whispers back, “Slow down.” Jim considers this, and then responds, “What . . . does . . . a . . . yellow . . . light . . . mean?” The joke is repeated again and again—each time more slowly—until, according to Burrows, the “laugh goes on for forty-five seconds,” one of the longest in the history of television.

The script was written by two brothers, Glen and Les Charles. It was one of seventeen teleplays they wrote for
Taxi
and the beginning of a fruitful creative relationship with Burrows.

The brothers were raised just outside Las Vegas by Mormon parents in the 1940s. Both graduated from the University of Redlands with a degree in liberal arts, with Glen pursuing a career as an advertising copywriter and Les working as a substitute high school teacher. But one night in the early 1970s, while watching CBS on Saturday night—which, at the time had a legendary lineup, including
All in the Family
and
The Bob Newhart Show
—both brothers were inspired to try co-writing a spec script for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. They submitted the script to MTM Enterprises, the show’s production company, but never received a response.

Undeterred, they kept writing, finishing dozens of spec scripts. They were so confident in their abilities that they quit their respective day jobs, devoting themselves exclusively to writing. Les and his wife were living out of a Volkswagen bus when he and Glen finally sold a script, an episode of
M*A*S*H
, which they’d titled “The Late Captain Pierce” (it aired in October 1975). But then came more rejection.

Two years later, almost penniless, they finally heard back from MTM, who not only bought their original
Mary Tyler Moore
script (“Mary and the Sexagenarian,” which aired in February 1977) but also hired them as staff writers, where they contributed scripts to
Doc
,
The Bob Newhart Show
, and the
Mary Tyler Moore
spin-off
Phyllis
. This experience led to their friendship with director and producer James L. Brooks, who hired them as writers and coproducers on a new show called
Taxi
. And
Taxi
led to a friendship with James Burrows, a director on the show, who eventually lured them away to launch their own production company, Charles-Burrows-Charles, which resulted in the long-running series that Amy Poehler, in an October 2012
GQ
oral history, called “the best TV show that’s ever been”:
Cheers
.

Though ratings for the first season of
Cheers
were poor, both NBC chairman Grant Tinker and the network’s president, Brandon Tartikoff, were fans, and the show received critical praise and plenty of awards, earning 4 of its 117 Emmy nominations (it would eventually win a total of 28). Eventually, the world discovered it, and
Cheers
went on to run for eleven seasons, from 1982 to 1993. Nearly everybody in the cast—Ted Danson, Shelley Long, and Kelsey Grammer—became stars. For the final episode, which aired in May 1993, more than 42 million viewers tuned in, including thousands who watched on giant screens set up outside Boston’s Bull & Finch bar, the inspiration for the
Cheers
setting. It was a public event, the likes of which will probably never be seen for a final TV show again.

But the real stars of
Cheers
were the scripts. It could be argued that the script Glen and Les wrote for the premiere episode of
Cheers
—“Give Me a Ring Sometime,” which aired in September 1982—was one of the best, if not
the
greatest, premiere script ever penned for a sitcom. Megan Ganz, now a writer for
Community
, says, “What’s amazing about that pilot is how much exposition Glen and Les were able to do with the characters just sitting down and talking with each other. Nothing actually happens. They were able to do a great amount in a very small space and with very little.” When it came time for Megan Ganz to write her first script for
Community
in 2011, she says, “When I was writing that episode, I just kept thinking, Be like the
Cheers
script and it’ll be great.”

You grew up in the 1950s in Henderson, Nevada, just on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Did your father work in the gaming industry?

Les and I had a yin-yang childhood. Our mother, a very kind and sweet-tempered lady, was an elementary school teacher, a devout Mormon, and determined to get us all into heaven. Our father, a Mormon but an errant one, worked as a dealer in several Vegas casinos, the gambling dens in the City of Sin. Many are gone from memory. Actually, most of them are gone, period. They all deserve it—they never gave the man Christmas off.

By most measures, my father was not a good father. He certainly wasn’t abusive either physically or emotionally. Mostly he wasn’t there. Neither Les nor I can remember him ever playing a game of catch with us. He did take me fishing once. He kept telling me to be quiet. “Don’t talk to me. Or the fish.” I finally told him, “You’re the one doing all the talking.” Male bonding is an elusive thing.

I do remember Les and I watching comedy on television with our father. He had a great sense of humor and a great laugh. I don’t remember him ever telling a formal joke. He’d give wry offhand commentary on things. A cheery, “Come and see us again when you can’t stay so long,” was his idea of good-bye. He’d dismiss envy with, “I wish I had that car and he had a pimple on his ass.” I’m making him sound angry, but he was not. He was essentially a sweet man with no driving ambitions. He did dabble with a stamp collection. For a time he had a drinking problem.

Your father didn’t abide by the Mormon teachings of not consuming alcohol?

He was definitely a Jack Mormon, meaning that except for funerals he rarely saw the inside of a church. He was not religious. On his days off, he would go with a group of buddies and spend most of the day and night imbibing, and then come home, often just to clean up, change clothes, and then be on his merry way again. He changed jobs quite often. Not always his choice.

Not unlike the Norm character on
Cheers
.

Norm was a composite whose essential ingredient was George Wendt [the actor who played Norm], but yes, there was a lot of Dad in there. He would have loved to have found a bar like Cheers, and, for all we know, maybe he did. We of course never joined him on his convivial travels. He was an amiable guy who enjoyed being in his comfort zone with his own people. Of course my mother was mortified by my father’s drinking; she was so afraid that he would be arrested, that he would be involved in some kind of accident, and that all of us, the whole family, would have to change our identities, leave the area, and never show our faces again. And, in fact, one night my father was in a bar, and at closing time he got into his car and immediately backed into a Highway Patrol squad car. Occupied, by the way. Needless to say, he didn’t get off with a warning. He spent the night in jail. The good news is that he never drank again. And he later started going to church on a regular basis, although neither his heart nor soul was really in it. But his body in a suit and tie on a pew next to my mother was just fine with her. The problem for us, her sons, was that she could now go to work on us.

Did you ever have an opportunity to meet some of the characters your father hung out with at the bar?

A few. My mother was less than thrilled when Dad brought them home, so he rarely did. These were people who lived on the periphery of casino life and who would scatter when they heard a siren. Some of them I liked. I found them far more interesting than anybody I met in church.

The 1950s Las Vegas that you’re talking about was a city vastly different from today’s family-friendly tourist attraction.

Everything was adults only. I had a friend who was in the business of making fake IDs. When I got my first driver’s license at sixteen, I enlisted his help and suddenly became a very young twenty-one-year-old. I immediately gained access to casinos and shows and the world of [singer] Louis Prima and [comedian] Shecky Greene and, of course, Don Rickles. My first nightclub experience was a young Don Rickles in the lounge at the Sahara. It was so great. It was bright, it was loud, and here was this comedian mercilessly taking shots at everything that moved. This was something me and my buddies did with each other. The first night I saw Rickles, he did a running bit, exchanging double-talk Japanese with his Asian bass player, and they went back and forth bowing politely and jabbering. And Rickles finally said, “I shot your brother out of a tree!” And I thought, Geez, can you say that? During the course of the evening he insulted pretty much everybody’s race, color, creed, and wife’s looks. I realized then that comedy could be dangerous. So could falsifying your ID, by the way. We were let off with a warning.

Who were your favorite comedians on television at the time?

Jackie Gleason and Sid Caesar were two early favorites when we got our first television set. I watched their series fairly religiously. As I got older, I also was a fan of comedians who would appear on variety shows like Ed Sullivan. People like Nichols and May, Richard Pryor, Shelley Berman, and Bob Newhart. Newhart was a big favorite not just for his guest appearances but for his comedy albums. I wore out the grooves on the [1960 album]
The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.

Jack Benny was another big favorite. There’s never been another comedian like him. Jack Benny never told jokes. He was the joke. He let himself be the butt of other people’s sniping at his cheapness, his vanity, lousy violin playing, and lying about his age long past credibility. It’s been said that he made everyone around him funny, and he did. But you always laughed more at his response to these indignities than to the funny people in his stock company. The wait for him to respond to a thief telling him, “Your money or your life,” gets funnier the longer it goes. It’s supposedly one of the longest laughs in radio history. Underneath it all, I think I like Jack Benny because his persona was of a man who persisted in his vanity and illusions, no matter how often everyone he met would contradict him. Also, he established this comic persona in radio and translated it, intact, seamlessly to television.

Radio was a huge influence on me. Maybe not for Les, who’s younger, but I think it’s a great training ground for comedy writers. For all screenwriters, actually.

How so?

The great thing about radio is that the listener is an active participant. You’re given a soundtrack and the pictures are up to you. Some people said
Cheers
could have been a radio show. We didn’t consider that a criticism.

Were you aware, as a child, that there were writers for these radio comedy shows that you enjoyed?

No, not in any real sense. When the credits were announced, they would say “Written by” and “Produced by.” That had no meaning for me. When television later came along, I was amazed by the number of people it took to write comedy. A seemingly simple show like
The Honeymooners
, for example, had more writers than characters.

It would have been difficult for me to have fashioned a writing career without radio. It was a tremendous educational tool. It was very informative, but entertaining at the same time. It was all about the dialogue.

I’ve always loved listening to great dialogue and it seems we’re now becoming an entertainment culture where dialogue is not as revered as it once was. With a lot of films now, there will be a line, another line, and then a cut. You look at some of the films from the thirties and forties, and there were long scenes where it’s just two people talking. I don’t think we have the attention span to stay with something like that right now. We need continual visual stimulation to keep interested.