So long old friend

When I was a little boy I loved Saturday nights because I got to stay up late and at 10 o'clock I got to watch The Carol Burnett Show with my mom. I liked that show because it I got most of the jokes even though I was only a shade under ten years of age. But mainly I liked Carol Burnett because when my mom watched she laughed like crazy and I loved seeing her laugh. Our life in Detroit was pretty bleak at times, especially so for her what with a husband who was in and out mental hospitals and 5 kids to take care of virtually on her own and the only money we had coming in was the monthly welfare check. So Carol Burnett was an oasis of laughter in our lives and we loved watching it.

I'd watch it each Saturday and I'd wait for Harvey Korman and Tim Conway to crack either up. To me that was the epitome of comedy, making another comic actor beak up while doing the sketch, and later when I did improv and the show was tanking my friend Todd would always grab me and say, "Fuck making the audience laugh, you and I need to concentrate on making each other laugh," and when we did the show invariably picked up.

As I grew up the kind of comedy Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman lost it's appeal to me and I became too hip for their bad jokes and reliance on sight gags. I shunned watching them and I drifted towards Monty Python and Saturday Night Live. I thought I was too cool for their old time Borscht Belt bullshit. However I did continue to enjoy Harvey Korman in most Mel Brooks movies. I loved him Blazing Saddles, quoting his line, "That's Hedley!" after someone uses the word 'heady' is always funny to me and I'll never stop doing it. The tracking shot where the camera goes through the window and into the staff dinner table in High Anxiety still makes me laugh every time I see it, and it was so funny the first time I saw it I had to rewind the film and watch it four or five times, Harvey's shocked expression is too damn funny for words. His French aristocrat in History of the World Part One is a scream as well. Some of his later performances in Mel Brooks films were a bit stale to me but his good stuff more than made up for his mediocre stuff. No one did movie comedy like Mr. Korman.

Harvey passed away late yesterday at the age of 81. I'll miss him and I'll always be grateful for the laughs he gave me and my late mom. So long Harvey, I hope you reincarnated real soon.

Comedy influences (the early years continued)

In our home when I was a child my mother put a great deal of emphasis on us all learning to read as quickly as possible, I suspect that she did it so we would stick our noses in a book and be quiet for a while so she could have some peace. Since I was the youngest of five children I read the hand me down books and magazines my brothers and sisters bought.

My favorite magazine when I was a young lad was none other than Mad Magazine. Weekly Reader sucked balls because it was so skimpy, I usually had mine read before the teacher finished passing them out to the other kids in class. Boy's Life really sucked ass because I was not in Boy Scouts, I refused to join them because of after you were a Cub Scout you were then forced into something called Weblos after you graduated from being a Cub Scout and even at a very young age I did not want to be in any group that said that it's members blew. Highlights magazine also sucked it was too "goody goody" for my tastes, hell I was already reading the Detroit Free Press by the time I was reading Highlights. And finally, I did not like Jack and Jill because they refused to publish the joke I sent in to them when I was 8 years old.

But Mad stood head and shoulders above them all. It was funny, topical, and it had cartoons in it. And not just any old cartoons but illustrations by Dave Berg (For a little while when I was young I was convinced that my father was secretly Dave Berg's alter ego Roger Kaputnik, the resemblance was, to me anyway, uncanny. Look at Dave Berg's drawing of himself as Roger Kaputnik and then scroll down and look at my Dad. You can see why I was a bit confused.), Al Jaffee, Mort Drucker, Sergio Aragones, the great Jack Davis, and Don Martin.

I read Mad as soon as it came through our front door, when my big brothers finished with it, that is. I devoured it and wanted more. I loved the movie parodies, the snappy answers to stupid questions, the crazy fold ins on the inside of the back cover, and every other thing they put in it with the exception of the letters to the editor. I learned tons of stuff from Mad about the politics of the day and our society in general. It was also the first place I learned about things like anxiety, drugs, alcoholism, and patriotism.

I remember vividly the time they stuck a folded poster in one issue. It was around the time when All in the Family was just becoming popular. On the poster written in that hippy dippy style of lettering was the Pledge of Allegiance and I proudly read it off to my Mom and a neighbor who was visiting at the time. I read through it and then I came to the end and it said, "And liberty and justice for all, even for Blacks, Jews, Wops, Spics, Chinks, and whoever else we got in this country now." They both busted out laughing as I read that part and I started laughing as well, as soon as I got the joke.

We gobbled up everything Mad put out. The monthly magazine, the annuals, which were nothing more than reprints of stories and stuff we had already read, and the paperback books they put out. The jokes were groaners sometimes but we loved them all.

I stopped reading Mad regularly when I hit my teens but sometimes I'll buy a copy and read it and it always takes me back to when I was a tow headed scamp. I got the nerve up a few years back and I sent in some story ideas and jokes but they never did publish them. Although I did get a nice letter from the editor in chief once telling me that they almost bought one of my articles. I was flattered that they considered buying it but I would have appreciated the cold hard cash more. It's all good though and like one of my childhood heroes always said, "What? Me worry?"