Is British humor more sophisticated than American humor?
(unreleased material from "Glorified
Disasters" by Ashley Strand)
Glorified Disasters
Feb 3, 5pm
Crocker Memorial Church
1260 12th St, Sarasota, Florida 34236
Buy tix here:
https://www.sarasolo.org
Feb 3, 5pm
Crocker Memorial Church
1260 12th St, Sarasota, Florida 34236
Buy tix here:
https://www.sarasolo.org
“British humor is more sophisticated than American humor.” British people love to say this. For unknown reasons, so do the Irish. I’m willing to entertain the notion, and will happily listen to anyone who hasn’t had a wank to The Benny Hill Show, though I must recuse myself from the discussion.
The first and most reliable stage laugh I ever got was doing a hair bit in a Ray Cooney show called Funny Money at The Golden Apple Dinner Theater in Sarasota, FL. Cooney has been called “the British Neil Simon,” which is accurate to the extent that both men were prolific and successful playwrights. However, Simon wrote character-driven pieces filled with heart, wit, and meaning, whereas Cooney churned out carbon-copy sex farces by piling double-entendres, dropped trousers, and slamming doors on top of one another until he reached 60 pages.
I learned some important comedy lessons doing Funny Money, foremost being, if you are going to put the word “Funny” in the title of your show, you have to make sure the rest of the show, the whole “script” part, is actually funny. Funny Money tells the story of Henry Perkins (according to the dramatis personae, “an insignificant middle-aged, middle-class accountant”) who accidentally brings home the wrong suitcase, only to find it is filled with counterfeit currency that belongs to the mob. Sick of their humdrum lives, he and his wife Jean (“pretty”) decide to take the money and run*, but not before their nosey neighbors (Vic and Betty Johnson: “neighbor” and “also pretty,”), the police, and the mob get involved. A hilarious roller-coaster ride of wacky hi-jinks and tom-foolery ensues that will leave you breathless. Then again, a lot of our audience was on oxygen to begin with. Open flames were strictly prohibited in all Golden Apple Dinner Theater shows.
The big gag of the second act involves Jean taking too long to pack, despite Henry’s remonstrations that they can buy everything new once they’ve escaped. But the pressure overwhelms Jean, she gets drunk, and refuses to leave without her cat, which, perhaps sensing the household turmoil, has gone into hiding. The cat’s name is “Pussy.”
Drunken packing, vacillating about what to wear (read: “gradually stripping”) and tearful cries of “where’s my Pussy?” punctuate the second act, the rock steady comedy rhythm to which the plot always returns. Mr. Big, the mobster, comes in and threatens to kill everybody; Jean comes out of the bedroom with knickers on her head, “do you know where my Pussy is?” Slater, the copper, comes in and threatens to arrest everybody; Jean bursts into tears, “but I can’t find my Pussy!” Bill the cab driver comes in to complain that he can’t wait any longer, only to find Jean in her slip, searching under a chair, on hands and knees, down center, ass to the audience, imploring, “has ANYONE seen my PUSSY?”
The Golden Apple Dinner Theater was owned and operated by Bob and Roberta Turoff, who had met and fallen in love while performing in the chorus of The Golden Apple on Broadway. When Roberta got pregnant, they decided her career as a big time dancer was probably over, and they moved to Sarasota where they made a mint performing musical warhorses to generations of snowbirds, until they were snowbirds themselves. In the process, they probably had more consistent work and more satisfying lives than anyone they’d left behind on Broadway.
Their success in Sarasota, and the enduring cachet that attached to the Golden Apple Dinner Theater, derived from this long ago connection to the mythical world of Rogers and Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Harnick and Bock. Only at the Golden Apple Dinner Theater could you see plays produced, directed, and performed by real Broadway stars. This boast was also the source of the snide moniker by which their less accomplished competitors in the cut-throat world of Sarasota dinner theater referred to them: "The Flying Turoffs."
Roberta admitted to being 58, but at the same time, adorning the walls of the Golden Apple Dinner Theater, there was photographic evidence that she had been in the original Broadway production of South Pacific. A woman’s claim to fame and her modesty have an uneasy coexistence.
At any rate, Roberta was probably not who Cooney had in mind when he “created” the “character” of Jean, whose main function in the play is to get undressed and shake her ass at the audience.** Roberta was not originally cast in the role, the play, or even that season. She had been diagnosed with cancer the previous season, and had struggled to complete her performances. This was to be her first season ever without a role at the Golden Apple.
But cancer proved no match for Roberta’s desire to return to the spotlight; she astonished her doctors with the speed of her recovery, and by the beginning of the season, she had convinced Bob that she was well enough to take on the minor role of Vicky, who had been cast as slightly older than Jean anyway. Still, “slightly” necessitated bumping the woman who had been cast as Vicky into the role of Jean, and the woman who had been cast as Jean out of the show. By the time auditions started, Roberta had read the play, decided that she preferred the role of Jean, and was really feeling much better anyway. The actress who had briefly enjoyed a promotion from Vicky to Jean was now dismissed, and a third actress, who seemed like she might have been Roberta’s contemporary, was brought in to play Vicky.***
Roberta may not have been the ideal casting for Jean, but boy did she know how to milk a knickers-on-the-head bit! With every performance, her blind fumbling for a leg hole through which to poke a groggy eye became more elaborate, her drunken wobbling more unsteady, and her ad-libbed insertion of, “Puss-puss-puss-puss-pussee,” between the other actors’ lines more frequent, until finally it became the backing track to the second act, over which the rest of the dialogue had to be shouted. By the end of the first week, we’d added 20 minutes to the second act alone.
Own the theater and you can do whatever the fuck you want -- there’s a comedy lesson for ya. The other actors complained bitterly behind her back, the stage manager sighed impotently every night, as he turned dejectedly in the dressing room door and headed for the parking lot, having dutifully delivered pace notes he knew would be shamelessly flouted again the next night. None of it mattered, and not because Roberta owned the place, but because she was killing.
Roberta was unquestionably the most selfish, self-indulgent, stubborn, uncooperative, and shameless performer I have ever worked with. She was also hilarious. She was a Goddamn diva, and she deserved to be, because she filled the house every night and then proceeded to tear the roof off the place. Roberta wasn’t just signing our checks -- she was earning them, too! Earn your attitude and let everyone else complain -- that’s a good one.
Roberta taught me to love bits. Character, intention, motivation, background -- they’re all great in theory. But the reality is that most plays, even the popular ones, from the point of view of depth and meaning, are shit. They are nothing more than vehicles for bits: funny bits, action bits, sexy bits, crying bits. Bits are everything, because the rest is usually worthless. Actors who can identify the bits in a script, or the opportunity for a bit where none is written -- they keep the lights on. Yet it is not enough to find or create a bit. A bit must be milked. Oh, yes.
What is "milking?"
There is a school of acting that claims milking a bit is based upon a connivance between actor and audience, a tacit agreement to mutually acknowledge the theatrical contrivance of the moment and shamelessly mock it; and this connivance constitutes nothing less than the breaking of the sacred fourth wall and the irrevocable shattering of the spell of suspended disbelief upon which all serious theater depends.
There is another school of acting which says, “exactly!”
Method actors and their ilk, all the humorless emotional exhibitionists who deem themselves “serious actors,” have the gall to disdain bit acting as self-indulgent and insulting; then they turn around and ask us to sit through a breakdown they should have had in session, while asking us to believe that they really believe they are not in a theater with us watching, and their behavior springs solely from their characters’ needs, not the demands of a performance. What is worse, they suppose that bit acting requires no skill, and is the metier of that sad, imaginary character who has no other choice but to pander, or the recourse of the talented but lazy actor who lacks the “dedication” which they smugly attribute to themselves.
Watching Roberta pan her ass back and forth across the audience like it was mounted on a tripod exploded my more precious notions of what good acting is. You wanna talk about skill? She timed each sweep to her chant of "puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!" pushing and pulling the rhythm like John-goddamn-Bonham, dragging at the edges of the phrase, trotting in the middle, pausing at the end just a hair longer than you’d expect, and increasing the length of that improbable pause with every repetition, driving the audience to a frenzy of anticipation.
By the third swing the whole audience would be holding its breath during the pause, and then inhaling simultaneously with her as she launched into the next “puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!” during which all that breath would be released in a giant, unified roar. It was Tantric.
That’s milking. You wanna talk about dedication? How about the courage to take a bit too far, until you feel the audience saying, “no!” and then staying with it until they come along, and then going even farther, until the audience feels it must follow your every move, though in reality you could lose them at any moment! A misstep could ruin the beat and leave the audience feeling used and insulted (instead of used and grateful, which is how everyone wants to feel at the end of the night). A masterful milking is the seduction and ravishing of an audience who try to resist before and feel guilty and ashamed after … but still want more!
I observed all of this without understanding any of it.**** All I knew was Roberta was shameless and got big laughs. I had a scene near the end of the show where Slater comes into the flat after being hit by the escaping Mr. Big's car, and makes a final plea for cooperation. My entrance was announced by the cab driver, so everyone knew a sight-gag was coming. I was doing my best wild-eyed, disoriented stagger, with my hair (heretofore immaculately parted in keeping with the punctilious Slater's character) messed up as though I had been hit by a car ... but no one was laughing. That's not exactly right. Worse than no laughs, there were some halting laughs mixed with nervous titters, which meant that everyone recognized it was time to laugh, but no one was actually amused. It's not that they missed the joke ... they saw me miss it.
I thought for sure there was an acting solution, so I was surprised when Bob just said, "mess your hair up some more." I was skeptical, but tried it for the next show and got my first legitimate laugh on the bit. I returned to Bob triumphant, but when I smugly asked him how he thought it went he said, "I meant REALLY mess it up." At this point it becomes difficult to record our conversation, though the text is simple enough. Embarrassment at my own stupidity makes it hard to set down the following:
"But you don't want it to look ... unrealistic, do you?"
And paucity of descriptive powers makes it impossible to convey Bob's dismay.
"YEESSSS!"
I really didn't get it. Up to that moment, I think Bob just thought I was a little shy, not completely unaware of how farce works. I feel certain he went away and held his head in his hands somewhere out of sight. I had been cast because I had the least objectionable British accent among men my age in Sarasota who didn't come off as hopelessly queeny ... which is to say they were surprised when I walked into auditions and seemed like I could play straight. I know that now. At the time, my head was full of Stanislavskian notions, because I'd once flipped through the chapter, "Communion," in An Actor Prepares. I thought I was a real actor, and that I could address the challenges of Funny Money with character work. Bob was gracious, and probably didn't want to take on any counseling work on the side, so he didn't say anything, then or ever. But after that Bob was always very gentle and friendly with me, while keeping conversations brief.
What I did get, though, was laughs, and I was soon upset that I couldn't get my hair more messed up. The stage manager suggested hair spray (another revelation) and within a week I was walking on stage looking like a cross between Alfalfa and Yahoo Serious. I was also getting one of the biggest laughs in the show.
Roberta took notice.
I was starting to understand that I could milk the dazed staggering once I'd gotten the laugh off the sight gag. The time between my entrance and the delivery of my line was expanding, or as Roberta put it in the dressing room one night after the show, "we're waiting out there for fucking ever!" She was a flower. The other actors, happy to see Roberta swallowing her own medicine, defended me. The stage manager, who'd given me the idea to use hair spray in the first place, smiled and said nothing. Bob had moved on to the next project, and I was getting laughs, so I had license. To her credit, Roberta never pulled rank on me, probably because she considered it beneath her dignity (panties on the head notwithstanding).
The next night, I got an even bigger laugh, and I was delayed returning to the dressing room because an audience member wanted to congratulate me. On my hair bit. And I was proud. They were crazy times.
When I entered the other actors gave me a cheer that was entirely for Roberta's benefit, though I was fatuous enough to take it at face value. I was about to launch into a description of what I thought had really made the bit fly that night when Roberta said, "I don't see what the big deal is anyway, it's at two-part bit, at least, a three-parter if you do it right, and you only ever do the first part, I mean, do you even know what the other two parts are?" She delivered this to the mirror as she removed her eye make-up with workman-like efficiency, a masterpiece of dismissiveness.
Anyone with wit, or whose self-esteem wasn't pinned to others' opinion of a hair bit in a Ray Cooney show, would have shut up at this point. But I was so completely undone by this statement that I could only stupidly say, "no?" Which turned out to be the best thing I could have done, because Roberta couldn't resist telling me, thus reestablishing her authority on bits. This time she turned from the mirror to address me.
"The first bit is the sight gag, the second bit is composing yourself as you prepare to say your line, and the third bit -- which is really just a continuation of the second bit -- is not quite holding it together as you say your line. So it's two or three bits, depending on how you look at it, but either way, it's three laughs, and you only ever get one, and you get it with hair spray." Roberta turned back to the mirror, satisfied. The dressing room had gone silent, and no doubt the stunned look on my face resembled crushing defeat. But in my mind it was like the last ten minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Comedy caveat: be careful with whom you share your secrets.
Ashley Strand's Hair Bit Suite in Three Parts debuted the following night, to great acclaim. It wasn't perfectly executed, but the simple use of that magical three-part structure elevated the bit above mere mugging by giving it at least the appearance of skill. Comedy nugget: structure comforts and reassures an audience. They respond to the familiarity of something like the rule of three subconsciously, relaxing like a baby with a pacifier,***** while on a conscious level they feel like you're a professional, and they've spent their money well. This can give you license to fill that structure with pretty much whatever shit you want.
I chose hair spray, lip quiver, and high-pitched whine. Actually the lip quiver was an accident. I was just going for a classic, "unable to speak because I'm trying not to cry," with the usual false starts and huffing and puffing. But one night, I was imagining that I was actually upset, and my lip began to quiver, which not only got a great laugh, but caused one of the other actors to corpse -- a first for me. In spite of my Stanislavskian pretentions, the acting significance of this event was immediately lost on me as I became obsessed with the effect and completely forgot the cause. I had to do the lip quiver every night from then on!
This is not a talent I have. I can no more make my lip quiver on command now than I can do a standing back-flip. It was only through a sheer, obsessive focus of will that I managed to artificially recreate this physical stunt each night.****** I was so focused on that lip quiver I sometimes botched the lines that followed -- but Roberta didn't give a rat's ass about the script, why should I? And the lip quiver was the jewel in that three-part bit! Sure the hair set it up and the whine was the pay-off, but the lip quiver was the "wow" factor, the part that made people think, "how'd he do that?" Everything else could be sacrificed, but the lip quiver had to happen!
Roberta was enraged. "I can't wait till this fucking thing is over. I don't give a shit anymore. I mean I just don't give a shit!" I couldn't tell if she was more disgusted with me or herself, but I enjoyed the change in tone of her post-show monologue, and in the depths of my pettiness, took it as a personal victory.
"This piece of shit play! There's nothing to it, you know? Just completely empty, and you know what, it just exhausts me. I'm so exhausted." This was the cue for everyone in the dressing room to stop rolling their eyes, and the moment of relief for the poor woman playing Betty, who, because she sat next to Roberta in the dressing room, found herself pressed into service as Roberta's confidante, to whom the post-show monologue was regularly addressed. "Would you like some tea?" she'd say, and Roberta would say, "yes, thank you dear," and place her hand over her eyes while she waited for it.
The room would be silent then, and everyone would wrap up their changing pretty quickly and head for the bar. It was a strange little passage in each day's movement. On the one hand it was true that Roberta was impossible and manipulative and everyone was tired of her bullshit. But on the other it was also true that she was still recovering and pushing herself beyond her limits for a show that really was worthless. And having some arrogant PoliSci graduate -- who would never in his life even get called for the type of auditions she'd nailed when she was 20 -- having this schmendrick steal her focus to boot!
And on the one hand we resented the shots across the bow and the griping of the post-show monologue, the general purge of complaints that the rest of us, not beings owners, had to save for the bar (we modestly supposed we would disdain to indulge such complaints in the dressing room if we were owners). But on the other, we recognized the post-show monologue as part of a much larger monologue, one that probably began the moment Roberta got up, talking herself through each day's agenda. And in that sense, the monologue was not some habit we wished she'd drop, but something that amazed everyone who met her. Whether she was acting or dancing, designing her custom kitchen or the landscaping for the Turoff estate, planning a fundraiser or a social event, discussing politics or slinging gossip, Roberta was fully engaged with everything she did, and she processed it all by talking.
And all that talk had an extraordinary invocatory effect. Having seen it manifest in her life makes me laugh whenever I hear some dreamer talking about "The Law of Attraction." What The Secret doesn't talk about is the tremendous, non-stop output of energy required to shape the world to your plans, and that most people lack the capacity for it. While we went off to the bar to take advantage of the 2-for-1 deal the Turoffs gave cast members, Roberta would recover from her tea-break and go home to get work done. More than once I heard her daughter Kyle admonish her to go home and actually sleep for a change. "But working in bed is how I relax, for Christ's sake!"
Roberta exhausted everyone around her, and seeing her reach the point of exhaustion was devastating to her family and friends. And you couldn't work at The Golden Apple without being absorbed into one or both of those groups.
In the meantime, having employed a couple simple tricks I had nicked from Roberta to produce a reliable lowest common denominator laugh, I decided I was the second coming of Sid Ceasar. Since I had mastered the obvious and easy bits everyone else was doing, I thought it was time to bring in some of my own ideas. And since I had proven that I could play with the big dogs, I decided I had earned the right to do what only Roberta did: ad lib. I didn't think for a second the stage manager would give me permission, but I thought if I came up with a brilliant ad lib and it worked, he'd let me keep it.
I can't explain why, but I thought it would be hilarious if Slater, true believer that he was, sang a few bars of "Britannia Rules the Waves," to try and pull himself together after the lip quiver. "Think of the Queen" type of thing. Never mind it's not funny -- I was so clueless it didn't even occur to me that I was violating the three-part structure of the bit, destroying its rhythm, and adding a reference that, sad to say, was above the heads of many in the Sarasota audience. Sadder still, I thought it was a clever ad lib, one that gave a clue to character, and was therefore superior to Roberta's "puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!" which was nothing more than rank vulgarity.
Maybe the idea of someone so straight-laced that he soothes himself by singing patriotic tunes is funny, I don't know. But I didn't think about the joke in the context of anything around it: the other bits, the rest of the show, the audience -- nothing. I just kept imagining an audience roaring as I executed a kind of bit they'd never scene before: shameless but smart, and totally unexpected. I imagined how impressed the other actors would be, and how my success in Funny Money would lead directly to my conquest of the Sarasota dinner theater world, sending me down a path that would lead to international stardom within a few short years.
And so I sleep-walked my way through the next performance, anticipating the unveiling of my revolutionary bit, completely detached from the play -- enacting an ancient personal ritual where, in preparation for a real challenge I retreat deeper and deeper into fantasy. My poor performance was unnoticeable to the audience and cast alike, since I was neither good nor bad enough to alter the stunning consistency of Cooney's script -- it's a masterpiece of predictability which no one who remembers his lines can ruin and Larry Oliver himself couldn't have elevated above pleasant mediocrity.
Until I began to sing. The little sex farce that could had been chugging happily along, right through my famous hair bit. Then I botched the lip quiver -- for some reason it wasn't happening, and the look of concentration on my face didn't really read as upset. The hair laugh died out and the audience started to get confused ... had the fellow playing Slater forgotten his line? Why wasn't he speaking? The other actors began casting sidelong glances at me.
I hadn't expected to go into the song with no momentum. But I had been psyching myself up to do it all week. I couldn't accept not doing it, couldn't accept that I'd already botched it, that I'd killed my one big laugh, and I was going to have to go back to that dressing room with nothing to gloat about. Every instinct told me to forget the bit, just say my next line and get the Hell off. But of course my instincts were shackled by all my grand plans ... I sang.
"Oh Britannia, Britannia rules the waves ..."
There's a special kind of quiet that descends on a room when you completely lose an audience. When you can hear the hum of the stage lights you realize you've made the audience quieter than you could if you had explicitly directed them to be as quiet as possible. You have activated in them a stillness which is not subject to conscious control, but is connected to the same survival mechanism that makes a deer freeze when it senses the approach of a predator.
And when you are looking into the white lights, the audience, at the lower periphery of your vision, seems cast in blue. If they're with you, this blue seems warm and full, bouyant, rising to meet you like a thermal lifting a hawk. You can't wait to look down at them. But if you've lost them, the same blue seems cold, empty, and the audience seems a deep gulf beneath the precipice of the stage, and you don't dare look down.
I stared into the lights, my line lost, feeling as though the awful silence would never end. I hoped a helpful castmate would cover me with his or her own clever ad lib. Instead, Roberta, completely breaking character and dropping her accent, moaned loudly, "OH, JESUS WEPT!"
This brought my eyes off the lights at least, and I found Roberta glaring at me with her hands on her hips, looking like John McEnroe protesting a blown line call. The other actors looked down or away. In my only authentic moment of the run, I delivered my line directly to Roberta in a shaky half-voice and fled the stage. My action was "to apologize."
Here's a tough one: if you can't deliver, you deserve what you get. I knew I'd hear about the song, but I didn't expect to have the whole bit gutted. "No more milking! You gotta get through that entrance and exit about five times faster than you're doing it." The stage manager seemed like he'd been holding this in. But what about the lip quiver? "Just come in with the hair, act upset, say your line and leave -- we're 20 minutes over as it is. It's like Lawrence of Arabia out there!"
I think the post-show monologue became cheerier after that, but I mostly avoided it for the rest of the run by developing a new bit: getting changed and out of the theater faster than everyone else. Don't worry, I still got my drinks. In the years since, I've had more occasions than I would have liked to reflect on that show. How many bombs have I suffered through, thinking, "they'd rather be watching Cooney!" Telling my jokes to the lights. Wishing I could still "just come in with the hair." Funny is what makes people laugh, and sophistication (whatever that is) rarely enters into it.
Is British humor more sophisticated than American humor?
The short answer? Four words: Lee Evans Packs Wembley.
Screw.
The first and most reliable stage laugh I ever got was doing a hair bit in a Ray Cooney show called Funny Money at The Golden Apple Dinner Theater in Sarasota, FL. Cooney has been called “the British Neil Simon,” which is accurate to the extent that both men were prolific and successful playwrights. However, Simon wrote character-driven pieces filled with heart, wit, and meaning, whereas Cooney churned out carbon-copy sex farces by piling double-entendres, dropped trousers, and slamming doors on top of one another until he reached 60 pages.
I learned some important comedy lessons doing Funny Money, foremost being, if you are going to put the word “Funny” in the title of your show, you have to make sure the rest of the show, the whole “script” part, is actually funny. Funny Money tells the story of Henry Perkins (according to the dramatis personae, “an insignificant middle-aged, middle-class accountant”) who accidentally brings home the wrong suitcase, only to find it is filled with counterfeit currency that belongs to the mob. Sick of their humdrum lives, he and his wife Jean (“pretty”) decide to take the money and run*, but not before their nosey neighbors (Vic and Betty Johnson: “neighbor” and “also pretty,”), the police, and the mob get involved. A hilarious roller-coaster ride of wacky hi-jinks and tom-foolery ensues that will leave you breathless. Then again, a lot of our audience was on oxygen to begin with. Open flames were strictly prohibited in all Golden Apple Dinner Theater shows.
The big gag of the second act involves Jean taking too long to pack, despite Henry’s remonstrations that they can buy everything new once they’ve escaped. But the pressure overwhelms Jean, she gets drunk, and refuses to leave without her cat, which, perhaps sensing the household turmoil, has gone into hiding. The cat’s name is “Pussy.”
Drunken packing, vacillating about what to wear (read: “gradually stripping”) and tearful cries of “where’s my Pussy?” punctuate the second act, the rock steady comedy rhythm to which the plot always returns. Mr. Big, the mobster, comes in and threatens to kill everybody; Jean comes out of the bedroom with knickers on her head, “do you know where my Pussy is?” Slater, the copper, comes in and threatens to arrest everybody; Jean bursts into tears, “but I can’t find my Pussy!” Bill the cab driver comes in to complain that he can’t wait any longer, only to find Jean in her slip, searching under a chair, on hands and knees, down center, ass to the audience, imploring, “has ANYONE seen my PUSSY?”
The Golden Apple Dinner Theater was owned and operated by Bob and Roberta Turoff, who had met and fallen in love while performing in the chorus of The Golden Apple on Broadway. When Roberta got pregnant, they decided her career as a big time dancer was probably over, and they moved to Sarasota where they made a mint performing musical warhorses to generations of snowbirds, until they were snowbirds themselves. In the process, they probably had more consistent work and more satisfying lives than anyone they’d left behind on Broadway.
Their success in Sarasota, and the enduring cachet that attached to the Golden Apple Dinner Theater, derived from this long ago connection to the mythical world of Rogers and Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Harnick and Bock. Only at the Golden Apple Dinner Theater could you see plays produced, directed, and performed by real Broadway stars. This boast was also the source of the snide moniker by which their less accomplished competitors in the cut-throat world of Sarasota dinner theater referred to them: "The Flying Turoffs."
Roberta admitted to being 58, but at the same time, adorning the walls of the Golden Apple Dinner Theater, there was photographic evidence that she had been in the original Broadway production of South Pacific. A woman’s claim to fame and her modesty have an uneasy coexistence.
At any rate, Roberta was probably not who Cooney had in mind when he “created” the “character” of Jean, whose main function in the play is to get undressed and shake her ass at the audience.** Roberta was not originally cast in the role, the play, or even that season. She had been diagnosed with cancer the previous season, and had struggled to complete her performances. This was to be her first season ever without a role at the Golden Apple.
But cancer proved no match for Roberta’s desire to return to the spotlight; she astonished her doctors with the speed of her recovery, and by the beginning of the season, she had convinced Bob that she was well enough to take on the minor role of Vicky, who had been cast as slightly older than Jean anyway. Still, “slightly” necessitated bumping the woman who had been cast as Vicky into the role of Jean, and the woman who had been cast as Jean out of the show. By the time auditions started, Roberta had read the play, decided that she preferred the role of Jean, and was really feeling much better anyway. The actress who had briefly enjoyed a promotion from Vicky to Jean was now dismissed, and a third actress, who seemed like she might have been Roberta’s contemporary, was brought in to play Vicky.***
Roberta may not have been the ideal casting for Jean, but boy did she know how to milk a knickers-on-the-head bit! With every performance, her blind fumbling for a leg hole through which to poke a groggy eye became more elaborate, her drunken wobbling more unsteady, and her ad-libbed insertion of, “Puss-puss-puss-puss-pussee,” between the other actors’ lines more frequent, until finally it became the backing track to the second act, over which the rest of the dialogue had to be shouted. By the end of the first week, we’d added 20 minutes to the second act alone.
Own the theater and you can do whatever the fuck you want -- there’s a comedy lesson for ya. The other actors complained bitterly behind her back, the stage manager sighed impotently every night, as he turned dejectedly in the dressing room door and headed for the parking lot, having dutifully delivered pace notes he knew would be shamelessly flouted again the next night. None of it mattered, and not because Roberta owned the place, but because she was killing.
Roberta was unquestionably the most selfish, self-indulgent, stubborn, uncooperative, and shameless performer I have ever worked with. She was also hilarious. She was a Goddamn diva, and she deserved to be, because she filled the house every night and then proceeded to tear the roof off the place. Roberta wasn’t just signing our checks -- she was earning them, too! Earn your attitude and let everyone else complain -- that’s a good one.
Roberta taught me to love bits. Character, intention, motivation, background -- they’re all great in theory. But the reality is that most plays, even the popular ones, from the point of view of depth and meaning, are shit. They are nothing more than vehicles for bits: funny bits, action bits, sexy bits, crying bits. Bits are everything, because the rest is usually worthless. Actors who can identify the bits in a script, or the opportunity for a bit where none is written -- they keep the lights on. Yet it is not enough to find or create a bit. A bit must be milked. Oh, yes.
What is "milking?"
There is a school of acting that claims milking a bit is based upon a connivance between actor and audience, a tacit agreement to mutually acknowledge the theatrical contrivance of the moment and shamelessly mock it; and this connivance constitutes nothing less than the breaking of the sacred fourth wall and the irrevocable shattering of the spell of suspended disbelief upon which all serious theater depends.
There is another school of acting which says, “exactly!”
Method actors and their ilk, all the humorless emotional exhibitionists who deem themselves “serious actors,” have the gall to disdain bit acting as self-indulgent and insulting; then they turn around and ask us to sit through a breakdown they should have had in session, while asking us to believe that they really believe they are not in a theater with us watching, and their behavior springs solely from their characters’ needs, not the demands of a performance. What is worse, they suppose that bit acting requires no skill, and is the metier of that sad, imaginary character who has no other choice but to pander, or the recourse of the talented but lazy actor who lacks the “dedication” which they smugly attribute to themselves.
Watching Roberta pan her ass back and forth across the audience like it was mounted on a tripod exploded my more precious notions of what good acting is. You wanna talk about skill? She timed each sweep to her chant of "puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!" pushing and pulling the rhythm like John-goddamn-Bonham, dragging at the edges of the phrase, trotting in the middle, pausing at the end just a hair longer than you’d expect, and increasing the length of that improbable pause with every repetition, driving the audience to a frenzy of anticipation.
By the third swing the whole audience would be holding its breath during the pause, and then inhaling simultaneously with her as she launched into the next “puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!” during which all that breath would be released in a giant, unified roar. It was Tantric.
That’s milking. You wanna talk about dedication? How about the courage to take a bit too far, until you feel the audience saying, “no!” and then staying with it until they come along, and then going even farther, until the audience feels it must follow your every move, though in reality you could lose them at any moment! A misstep could ruin the beat and leave the audience feeling used and insulted (instead of used and grateful, which is how everyone wants to feel at the end of the night). A masterful milking is the seduction and ravishing of an audience who try to resist before and feel guilty and ashamed after … but still want more!
I observed all of this without understanding any of it.**** All I knew was Roberta was shameless and got big laughs. I had a scene near the end of the show where Slater comes into the flat after being hit by the escaping Mr. Big's car, and makes a final plea for cooperation. My entrance was announced by the cab driver, so everyone knew a sight-gag was coming. I was doing my best wild-eyed, disoriented stagger, with my hair (heretofore immaculately parted in keeping with the punctilious Slater's character) messed up as though I had been hit by a car ... but no one was laughing. That's not exactly right. Worse than no laughs, there were some halting laughs mixed with nervous titters, which meant that everyone recognized it was time to laugh, but no one was actually amused. It's not that they missed the joke ... they saw me miss it.
I thought for sure there was an acting solution, so I was surprised when Bob just said, "mess your hair up some more." I was skeptical, but tried it for the next show and got my first legitimate laugh on the bit. I returned to Bob triumphant, but when I smugly asked him how he thought it went he said, "I meant REALLY mess it up." At this point it becomes difficult to record our conversation, though the text is simple enough. Embarrassment at my own stupidity makes it hard to set down the following:
"But you don't want it to look ... unrealistic, do you?"
And paucity of descriptive powers makes it impossible to convey Bob's dismay.
"YEESSSS!"
I really didn't get it. Up to that moment, I think Bob just thought I was a little shy, not completely unaware of how farce works. I feel certain he went away and held his head in his hands somewhere out of sight. I had been cast because I had the least objectionable British accent among men my age in Sarasota who didn't come off as hopelessly queeny ... which is to say they were surprised when I walked into auditions and seemed like I could play straight. I know that now. At the time, my head was full of Stanislavskian notions, because I'd once flipped through the chapter, "Communion," in An Actor Prepares. I thought I was a real actor, and that I could address the challenges of Funny Money with character work. Bob was gracious, and probably didn't want to take on any counseling work on the side, so he didn't say anything, then or ever. But after that Bob was always very gentle and friendly with me, while keeping conversations brief.
What I did get, though, was laughs, and I was soon upset that I couldn't get my hair more messed up. The stage manager suggested hair spray (another revelation) and within a week I was walking on stage looking like a cross between Alfalfa and Yahoo Serious. I was also getting one of the biggest laughs in the show.
Roberta took notice.
I was starting to understand that I could milk the dazed staggering once I'd gotten the laugh off the sight gag. The time between my entrance and the delivery of my line was expanding, or as Roberta put it in the dressing room one night after the show, "we're waiting out there for fucking ever!" She was a flower. The other actors, happy to see Roberta swallowing her own medicine, defended me. The stage manager, who'd given me the idea to use hair spray in the first place, smiled and said nothing. Bob had moved on to the next project, and I was getting laughs, so I had license. To her credit, Roberta never pulled rank on me, probably because she considered it beneath her dignity (panties on the head notwithstanding).
The next night, I got an even bigger laugh, and I was delayed returning to the dressing room because an audience member wanted to congratulate me. On my hair bit. And I was proud. They were crazy times.
When I entered the other actors gave me a cheer that was entirely for Roberta's benefit, though I was fatuous enough to take it at face value. I was about to launch into a description of what I thought had really made the bit fly that night when Roberta said, "I don't see what the big deal is anyway, it's at two-part bit, at least, a three-parter if you do it right, and you only ever do the first part, I mean, do you even know what the other two parts are?" She delivered this to the mirror as she removed her eye make-up with workman-like efficiency, a masterpiece of dismissiveness.
Anyone with wit, or whose self-esteem wasn't pinned to others' opinion of a hair bit in a Ray Cooney show, would have shut up at this point. But I was so completely undone by this statement that I could only stupidly say, "no?" Which turned out to be the best thing I could have done, because Roberta couldn't resist telling me, thus reestablishing her authority on bits. This time she turned from the mirror to address me.
"The first bit is the sight gag, the second bit is composing yourself as you prepare to say your line, and the third bit -- which is really just a continuation of the second bit -- is not quite holding it together as you say your line. So it's two or three bits, depending on how you look at it, but either way, it's three laughs, and you only ever get one, and you get it with hair spray." Roberta turned back to the mirror, satisfied. The dressing room had gone silent, and no doubt the stunned look on my face resembled crushing defeat. But in my mind it was like the last ten minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Comedy caveat: be careful with whom you share your secrets.
Ashley Strand's Hair Bit Suite in Three Parts debuted the following night, to great acclaim. It wasn't perfectly executed, but the simple use of that magical three-part structure elevated the bit above mere mugging by giving it at least the appearance of skill. Comedy nugget: structure comforts and reassures an audience. They respond to the familiarity of something like the rule of three subconsciously, relaxing like a baby with a pacifier,***** while on a conscious level they feel like you're a professional, and they've spent their money well. This can give you license to fill that structure with pretty much whatever shit you want.
I chose hair spray, lip quiver, and high-pitched whine. Actually the lip quiver was an accident. I was just going for a classic, "unable to speak because I'm trying not to cry," with the usual false starts and huffing and puffing. But one night, I was imagining that I was actually upset, and my lip began to quiver, which not only got a great laugh, but caused one of the other actors to corpse -- a first for me. In spite of my Stanislavskian pretentions, the acting significance of this event was immediately lost on me as I became obsessed with the effect and completely forgot the cause. I had to do the lip quiver every night from then on!
This is not a talent I have. I can no more make my lip quiver on command now than I can do a standing back-flip. It was only through a sheer, obsessive focus of will that I managed to artificially recreate this physical stunt each night.****** I was so focused on that lip quiver I sometimes botched the lines that followed -- but Roberta didn't give a rat's ass about the script, why should I? And the lip quiver was the jewel in that three-part bit! Sure the hair set it up and the whine was the pay-off, but the lip quiver was the "wow" factor, the part that made people think, "how'd he do that?" Everything else could be sacrificed, but the lip quiver had to happen!
Roberta was enraged. "I can't wait till this fucking thing is over. I don't give a shit anymore. I mean I just don't give a shit!" I couldn't tell if she was more disgusted with me or herself, but I enjoyed the change in tone of her post-show monologue, and in the depths of my pettiness, took it as a personal victory.
"This piece of shit play! There's nothing to it, you know? Just completely empty, and you know what, it just exhausts me. I'm so exhausted." This was the cue for everyone in the dressing room to stop rolling their eyes, and the moment of relief for the poor woman playing Betty, who, because she sat next to Roberta in the dressing room, found herself pressed into service as Roberta's confidante, to whom the post-show monologue was regularly addressed. "Would you like some tea?" she'd say, and Roberta would say, "yes, thank you dear," and place her hand over her eyes while she waited for it.
The room would be silent then, and everyone would wrap up their changing pretty quickly and head for the bar. It was a strange little passage in each day's movement. On the one hand it was true that Roberta was impossible and manipulative and everyone was tired of her bullshit. But on the other it was also true that she was still recovering and pushing herself beyond her limits for a show that really was worthless. And having some arrogant PoliSci graduate -- who would never in his life even get called for the type of auditions she'd nailed when she was 20 -- having this schmendrick steal her focus to boot!
And on the one hand we resented the shots across the bow and the griping of the post-show monologue, the general purge of complaints that the rest of us, not beings owners, had to save for the bar (we modestly supposed we would disdain to indulge such complaints in the dressing room if we were owners). But on the other, we recognized the post-show monologue as part of a much larger monologue, one that probably began the moment Roberta got up, talking herself through each day's agenda. And in that sense, the monologue was not some habit we wished she'd drop, but something that amazed everyone who met her. Whether she was acting or dancing, designing her custom kitchen or the landscaping for the Turoff estate, planning a fundraiser or a social event, discussing politics or slinging gossip, Roberta was fully engaged with everything she did, and she processed it all by talking.
And all that talk had an extraordinary invocatory effect. Having seen it manifest in her life makes me laugh whenever I hear some dreamer talking about "The Law of Attraction." What The Secret doesn't talk about is the tremendous, non-stop output of energy required to shape the world to your plans, and that most people lack the capacity for it. While we went off to the bar to take advantage of the 2-for-1 deal the Turoffs gave cast members, Roberta would recover from her tea-break and go home to get work done. More than once I heard her daughter Kyle admonish her to go home and actually sleep for a change. "But working in bed is how I relax, for Christ's sake!"
Roberta exhausted everyone around her, and seeing her reach the point of exhaustion was devastating to her family and friends. And you couldn't work at The Golden Apple without being absorbed into one or both of those groups.
In the meantime, having employed a couple simple tricks I had nicked from Roberta to produce a reliable lowest common denominator laugh, I decided I was the second coming of Sid Ceasar. Since I had mastered the obvious and easy bits everyone else was doing, I thought it was time to bring in some of my own ideas. And since I had proven that I could play with the big dogs, I decided I had earned the right to do what only Roberta did: ad lib. I didn't think for a second the stage manager would give me permission, but I thought if I came up with a brilliant ad lib and it worked, he'd let me keep it.
I can't explain why, but I thought it would be hilarious if Slater, true believer that he was, sang a few bars of "Britannia Rules the Waves," to try and pull himself together after the lip quiver. "Think of the Queen" type of thing. Never mind it's not funny -- I was so clueless it didn't even occur to me that I was violating the three-part structure of the bit, destroying its rhythm, and adding a reference that, sad to say, was above the heads of many in the Sarasota audience. Sadder still, I thought it was a clever ad lib, one that gave a clue to character, and was therefore superior to Roberta's "puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!" which was nothing more than rank vulgarity.
Maybe the idea of someone so straight-laced that he soothes himself by singing patriotic tunes is funny, I don't know. But I didn't think about the joke in the context of anything around it: the other bits, the rest of the show, the audience -- nothing. I just kept imagining an audience roaring as I executed a kind of bit they'd never scene before: shameless but smart, and totally unexpected. I imagined how impressed the other actors would be, and how my success in Funny Money would lead directly to my conquest of the Sarasota dinner theater world, sending me down a path that would lead to international stardom within a few short years.
And so I sleep-walked my way through the next performance, anticipating the unveiling of my revolutionary bit, completely detached from the play -- enacting an ancient personal ritual where, in preparation for a real challenge I retreat deeper and deeper into fantasy. My poor performance was unnoticeable to the audience and cast alike, since I was neither good nor bad enough to alter the stunning consistency of Cooney's script -- it's a masterpiece of predictability which no one who remembers his lines can ruin and Larry Oliver himself couldn't have elevated above pleasant mediocrity.
Until I began to sing. The little sex farce that could had been chugging happily along, right through my famous hair bit. Then I botched the lip quiver -- for some reason it wasn't happening, and the look of concentration on my face didn't really read as upset. The hair laugh died out and the audience started to get confused ... had the fellow playing Slater forgotten his line? Why wasn't he speaking? The other actors began casting sidelong glances at me.
I hadn't expected to go into the song with no momentum. But I had been psyching myself up to do it all week. I couldn't accept not doing it, couldn't accept that I'd already botched it, that I'd killed my one big laugh, and I was going to have to go back to that dressing room with nothing to gloat about. Every instinct told me to forget the bit, just say my next line and get the Hell off. But of course my instincts were shackled by all my grand plans ... I sang.
"Oh Britannia, Britannia rules the waves ..."
There's a special kind of quiet that descends on a room when you completely lose an audience. When you can hear the hum of the stage lights you realize you've made the audience quieter than you could if you had explicitly directed them to be as quiet as possible. You have activated in them a stillness which is not subject to conscious control, but is connected to the same survival mechanism that makes a deer freeze when it senses the approach of a predator.
And when you are looking into the white lights, the audience, at the lower periphery of your vision, seems cast in blue. If they're with you, this blue seems warm and full, bouyant, rising to meet you like a thermal lifting a hawk. You can't wait to look down at them. But if you've lost them, the same blue seems cold, empty, and the audience seems a deep gulf beneath the precipice of the stage, and you don't dare look down.
I stared into the lights, my line lost, feeling as though the awful silence would never end. I hoped a helpful castmate would cover me with his or her own clever ad lib. Instead, Roberta, completely breaking character and dropping her accent, moaned loudly, "OH, JESUS WEPT!"
This brought my eyes off the lights at least, and I found Roberta glaring at me with her hands on her hips, looking like John McEnroe protesting a blown line call. The other actors looked down or away. In my only authentic moment of the run, I delivered my line directly to Roberta in a shaky half-voice and fled the stage. My action was "to apologize."
Here's a tough one: if you can't deliver, you deserve what you get. I knew I'd hear about the song, but I didn't expect to have the whole bit gutted. "No more milking! You gotta get through that entrance and exit about five times faster than you're doing it." The stage manager seemed like he'd been holding this in. But what about the lip quiver? "Just come in with the hair, act upset, say your line and leave -- we're 20 minutes over as it is. It's like Lawrence of Arabia out there!"
I think the post-show monologue became cheerier after that, but I mostly avoided it for the rest of the run by developing a new bit: getting changed and out of the theater faster than everyone else. Don't worry, I still got my drinks. In the years since, I've had more occasions than I would have liked to reflect on that show. How many bombs have I suffered through, thinking, "they'd rather be watching Cooney!" Telling my jokes to the lights. Wishing I could still "just come in with the hair." Funny is what makes people laugh, and sophistication (whatever that is) rarely enters into it.
Is British humor more sophisticated than American humor?
The short answer? Four words: Lee Evans Packs Wembley.
Screw.