user: The Jokes We Gave Away

“Didn’t you just hate giving your jokes away and seeing someone else get the laughs?”

It’s a common question to comedy writers. I still get it. And the answer is no. At least I didn’t, and my colleagues didn’t, and I could never figure out why people assumed gag writers for famous comedians felt like Cinderellas.

Or that they lurked enviously in the dark shadows of the wings — as their boss got laughs — filled with envy and dreams of usurping the crown.

Statistically, I’d say comedy writers are perhaps the sanest category of show people. And why not? They make BIG money, and although it’s not an easy trade — particularly when you’re at your galley oar five days a week — it’s easier on the nerves and the psyche than living with the brain-squeezing pressure and cares of being the Star.

You don’t have to pay a press agent, or if you choose, not even an agent. (My great friend, the late David Lloyd, who penned the comedy bombshell episode “Chuckles Bites the Dust” for Mary Tyler Moore, saw no virtue in paying someone for years — 10 percent of your earnings — for having made perhaps one phone call. David composed his own contract. Its short opening paragraph: Mr. Lloyd will not, at any time, be either asked or required to be associated in any manner, shape, or form with “Laverne and Shirley.” Other advantages of writer versus star: you can dress sloppy, work mostly at home, not obsess over your aging face, hair and body, not get sued or bugged by camera-wielders and tabloids and cranks who claim you stole their ideas, and not have your sex life and divorce displayed publicly in a variety of decorator colors. And you never have to risk flopping onto your butt, or face — or on bad nights, both — in front of an audience. That list of advantages could go on and on. And, surprising as it may seem, I never knew a staff comedy writer who yearned to be the Star.

As one writer put it, “Jack, Johnny, Jerry, Milton, they’re nervous wrecks from morn ’til dusk, wondering how long they’ll last. The only fun they have in life is the minutes they’re actually out there doing the show. [Painfully true of Johnny, I'm afraid.] I go home without a care and enjoy my house, my family, my lawn and my dog. And my lack of even a single ulcer.”

He might have added that he’s not plagued, while at the top, with disbelief at how high he’s climbed and nagging fears about just how long that precarious status and all that fairy gold will last.

People have assumed I was the exception. “Every time Jack or Johnny or Groucho or Jerry Lewis got a laugh with your line you died a little, right?”

The truth is I felt elated, fulfilled, successful and thrilled that a huge star just said what I wrote. I never dreamed of being the host of a show. My highest ambition in that regard was to maybe, some day, somehow, be a guest on a talk show. Even just once. (Talking about what? I hadn’t worked that out.)

Years later, blessed and saddled with my own show and the pressures, pleasures and pains thereto, I admit I would now and then recall a good line I’d written for others and wistfully admit that it would have been fun to get that particular booming laugh myself.

Example: The buxom beauty Jayne Mansfield was at the peak of her movie fame, and my boss Jack Paar was beside himself with the thrill of her appearance. On the day, he lined up the writing staff in his office and said her introduction had to be “extra special.” The five of us all went back to our Remingtons and tapped out flowery compositions attesting to Miss Mansfield’s looks, talents and knockout physique and presented our offerings to the boss. Jack wadded them up.

In my mind’s ear I can still hear our combined product hitting the dread wastebasket at Jack’s feet. And the assertion that we weren’t trying and hadn’t given him but scraps of material he could use in weeks. That was Jack.

Irked, I suggested in the hall that we all go get our carbons of the good stuff of ours he’d used in those “weeks,” but wiser, older heads prevailed.

We took another shot at our assignment of producing an introduction worthy of Miss Mansfield and her outstanding (sorry) attributes. And failed again.

Two of the older veteran writers, insulted, were on the verge of just going home. As the nonveteran kid on the staff, I was afraid that Jack’s snit bore just the hint of a mass firing.

So, not feeling the same job security Jack’s longtime writers enjoyed, I tried once more. Fired up by the mission of perhaps saving our collective arses, I typed briefly and quickly, ran down and dropped it on Jack’s desk and hurried away. He liked it. It’s only a little immodest to haul out the cliché, but it did all but stop the show.

Paar: “Ladies and gentlemen, what can I say about my next guest, except — Here they are, Jayne Mansfield.”

The line enjoyed a measure of fame, and once or twice it was accorded the honor of having its authorship claimed by others.

There were other such instances. If I had been the sort who suffered over giving his babies away, it might have been over a product of my brain that was in a category I don’t know the proper name for; “overweight spoonerised jeux de mot,” perhaps. For instance:

“The Tonight Show” in the ’60s. The front page of that day’s New York Times bore a large photo of crowds at the Met viewing Rembrandt’s famous painting “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.” (Bust seems to be the theme here.) It had sold for some fantastic seven-figure sum, and people were well aware of it from the massive publicity. Jack was off that night, and Hugh Downs was subbing. Hugh, an educated, literate man with a fondness for humor and wordplay, seemed the right person to either delight with — or fob off on – the odd, misshapen creature my strange brain had given birth to. I felt Jack probably would not have chosen it. Hugh did.

I often wonder who thinks up those sometimes amusing captions under news pictures in the paper. Just for fun, pretend your job is to come up with a caption for a certain photo that’s going to appear in tomorrow’s paper.

It shows the world-famous billionaire Onassis out in Hollywood, standing in front of a house he’s thinking about buying; a house that once belonged to a famous silent screen star named Keaton. I wonder if the right caption might be: “Aristotle Contemplating the Home of Buster.”

Whenever I’ve seen Hugh in years since, he’ll recall it and laugh. This oddball gag went ’round the world. I’m told there were attempts to translate it into other languages, which is hilarious.

Imagine the heads scratched in France, Germany or Japan, trying to figure out in Cherbourg what’s funny about “la maison de Buster’’; in Bremerhaven, “das haus de Buster”; or, in Yokohama, “Basutaru-san no homu.”

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assistant: Writing jokes for others to speak and take credit for wasn't as thankless as you might have assumed.