Next up on the essays shelf:
The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)
The comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May casts a long shadow. They met at the University of Chicago in the 1950s (Nichols tells a very funny story about the first time he saw her: he was in some Shakespeare production, and he was very bad, and the show was bad, and he remembers looking out and seeing this girl in the front row with a gloriously contemptuous look of hatred on her face, hatred for the entire endeavor. That was his first sighting of the woman who would be his comedy soulmate.) They performed in the burgeoning Chicago comedy scene, with people who would eventually be legends, like Del Close. They performed in ensemble comedy teams, and trios, but it was immediately apparent that the two of them had a chemistry that needed no other characters. They were a natural duo.
The Chicago scene can be pretty macho (then and now), and women often found themselves on the periphery, playing support staff to the more aggressive males. Seriously: go to an improv show now in Chicago and you’ll see some of that going on. In her book, Tina Fey writes about her first season on Saturday Night Live and how, during rehearsal, it was decided that one of the male cast members would play a female in a scene. Tina Fey was like, “What is wrong with this picture. There are women in this cast. This has got to change.” It did. But stuff like that needed to be addressed, and still does.
In that world, Mike Nichols and Elaine May were drawn to one another like magnets, and what they were able to create together helped change the world of comedy. They were totally cool, first of all: a harbinger of what was to come in the culture. They were young, beautiful, and totally insane. It was modern, what they were doing. One would almost say it was ahead of its time, although that isn’t strictly true. Chicago has long and deep sketch-comedy roots and there was a whole community of people experimenting with form and structure (now familiar to all of us, because of things like Second City and Saturday Night Live). But there was something interesting, fresh, and modern about a male and female making comedy together. George Burns and Gracie Allen set the standard. Mike Nichols and Elaine May took it into the Modern Age.
They came up in the Golden Age of Television, when people like Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan highlighted comedians on their popular TV shows. Nichols and May’s sketches were character-based, rather than a series of one-liners. They set up situations and then let them play out and still, to this day, they are not only uproariously funny, but psychologically acute. They don’t make you think so much as they make you gasp, “Ohhhhh. I know this. This is so true.”
It’s perfect. A perfect progression.
In the late 50s, the duo appeared on the Steve Allen Show. They began touring. Their popularity grew. They put out one album, and then put together a show of all of their sketches called An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, which premiered on Broadway in 1960. It was a smash hit. The recording of that Broadway show was nominated for a Grammy.
This “Talk of the Town” piece is from 1960, during the Broadway debut of the comedy duo. John McCarten meets up with both of them at the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden. I’m posting just a small excerpt of what is a highly entertaining piece, where you can sense the loopy wit of these two, their irrepressible comedic sensibilities (every single moment is an opportunity for some wisecrack), and the appeal they must have had to the public at the time. I wish I had been around for that first wave. You must have sensed that something new, something fresh, was coming down the pike. Harbingers of the future.
For example: watch what happens in the excerpt below. It’s improvisational in nature: this is not scripted dialogue. But there’s a joke to be made, and Elaine May, watching, listening, responding, is aware that a “button” needs to happen on the little “scene”, and her final comment is that “button”. She was willing to wait for it. She knew her time would come.
The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Having read in the program of the show called “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May” that Mr. Nichols had represented the United States on an Olympic equestrian team, we suggested last week that the partners join us at a session of the National Horse Show, at Madison Square Garden. When we met them at the entrance to the place, Mr. Nichols was quick to inform us that he hadn’t been on any equestrian team in any Olympics, and Miss May told us that whatever interest she’d once had in horses had ended when she fell off one a couple of years ago on a Central Park bridle path and twisted all kinds of ligaments in her left arm.
“The horse was just walking,” Miss May said, “and I kind of slid off him, and you should have seen the hurt look he gave me.”
“Nobody ever falls off a walking horse,” said Mr. Nichols. “You could fall down on the floor more easily than you could fall off a walking horse.”
“Look,” said Miss May. “I fell off this horse, and he was embarrassed, and I was embarrassed, and so there. I had my arm in a cast for a long time.”
Mr. Nichols, a blond and most amiable young man of twenty-nine, conceded the fall, and Miss May, who is brunette, rosy, and ebullient, seemed pleased.
“Now, about this Olympic business,” we said.
“Oh, that,” Mr. Nichols observed. “You see, when the program said that Elaine is a distant cousin of Ed Sullivan – we’re all cousins if you take it right back to Adam – I thought it would be only fair for me to look pretty distinguished, too. Actually, I’ve known quite a few horses in my day, and I’ve ridden in horse shows in Chicago. I don’t want to put on any side, but I was an instructor at the Claremont Riding Academy, up on West Eighty-ninth Street, when I was going to high school in Manhattan.”
“It was one of those Claremont horses I fell off,” said Miss May.
