"Who Is It?"

It occurred to me sometime before I wrote about it – as it would be difficult for it have been the other way around – that comedians are largely successful because they are willing to say things – about others, about themselves or in an overtly crude manner (with its ever-narrowing parameters) – that regular people are notwilling to say, and most importantly to the current exercise in question, with seeming little discomfort concerning their public pronouncements.  (Please excuse the verbosity.  I am listening to an English murder mystery and its literary patois has unconsciously infiltrated my blogatorial approach.) (Maybe I should listen to funnier books with shorter sentences.)  

The next step in our investigation – there’s that murder mystery influence again – is the following, which arrives as two distinct possibilities:  

If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it 87 times, the most recent time, while watching CNN’s extended (though simultaneously cursory) series, “The History of Comedy.”  There’s comedian Louie Anderson, expounding on how he always instructs neophyte comedians, in effect because I have forgotten his exact words,

“To be a successful comedian, you have to know who you are.”

Clarifying Louie Anderson’s pronouncement (without his permission), Anderson does not specifically mean, “Who you are.”  What he specifically means is, “Who you are onstage.”  

Which turns out, in many cases – and perhaps all – to be two startlingly distinct personalities.

Years ago, I worked on a show in which the madly unpredictable comedian “Professor Irwin Corey” appeared. During his “act”, the “Professor” was borderline “out of control”, spouting brilliant non sequitors in a free-form display of manic hilarity. (His opening line was always “However…”  At one point, Irwin Corey accosted the nearest television camera, pressed his distorted face against its protruding lens, and, to the viewing audience at home, loudly bellowed,

“Are you inthere!!!”

I was watching Irwin Corey’s performance the monitor in the studio’s hospitality, “Green Room”, in the company his wife Fran, both of them diminutive and in, approximately, their mid-sixties. When Corey completed his performance, he returned to the “Green Room” and the first words out of his mouth were the meek and approval seeking,

“Was that okay, Fran?”

Her uncompromising response: “It was toomuch, Oiwin!”  

A deflating critique, from his essential “audience-of-one.”

The experience was unsettling to me.  It was like seeing two different people, both of them Irwin Corey,.  One, prowlingly bombastic; the other, painfully  needy.

Irwin Corey had a long and successful career.  

Why?

Because he had discovered who he was.

Onstage.

The offstage Erwin Corey was – disturbingly – somebody else.

Still, that “irrepressible lunatic” had to be partof him, or he would have been incapable of delivering him “on demand.”  There was nobody like Irwin Corey.  Other comedians idolized him.  Although all deliberately outspoken, they had self-imposed, limiting boundaries.   The “Professor”, by admirable contrast, was ferociously bold.  

But not with Fran.

Maybe I’m naïve.  But I was genuinely startled to learn there were two “Irwin Coreys.”

(I had a similar reaction meeting Larry David.  Nowhere in my encounter with this soft-spoken gentleman was the man who abruptly ended a marriage because his otherwise wonderful wife did not sufficiently “respect wood.”)

Circling back to make a clarifying point, it appears to me thatonereason comedians can say crude, cruel and personally embarrassing things is because they believe that the persona onstage is not actually them, and therefore, it is not they themselves who behave “unacceptably”, it is a facsimilized “character” they have deliberately contrived.  

So there you have it. The person performing for the audience – 

It’s you,

But it’s not you.

Or, now suggesting the seconddistinct possibility,

It’s you,

But you protectively pretend it’s not you.

I mean, it is “you” out there.

Who else would it be?

And yet, comedians are able to make – and believe – that insulating distinction.  How else could a comedian doing insulting “wife” jokes ever go home to his wife?

“That’s not me, sweetheart. That’s the jerk who paid for this house!”

(To which the sulking wife goes, “Ba-dum-bum!”)

I tend to side with the actress who, to me accurately, proclaimed,

“Those aren’t the character’s breasts up on that screen.  They’re mine.”

Other actresses believe differently.

As does every “Wild Man” comedian (Richard Pryor, John Belushi, Robin Williams) I have ever encountered.

I myself could never make that distinction.  I wanted to be the same “me” every place.  But I could not do 

Unable to believe, on the “bad” nights, that it was my “character” who was bombing.