Here's some recommended comedy reading for those last few beach weeks of the summer.
Required Reading---
Neil Simon – Odd Couple (play)
John Kennedy Toole - Confederacy of Dunces (novel)
Recommended Reading --
John Vorhaus – The Comic Toolbox
Ken Levine – Must Kill TV
Woody Allen – Without Feathers
Woody Allen – Getting Even
Tad Friend - “What’s So Funny?”
John Morreall – “Historical Theories of Laughter”
Henri Bergson – Laughter, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
Steve Martin – Born Standing Up
Douglas McEwan -- My Lush Life
Tina Fey – Bossypants
Marc Maron – Attempting Normal
Andy Goldberg – Improv Comedy
Mike Sacks – Poking a Dead Frog
I want a ten page paper on one of these books from all of you by Friday.
50 comments :
"Confederacy of Dunces" is one of those books ("Lord of the Rings" and "Moby Dick" are others) that I have really really really tried to read, but I just can't. I've started it four or five times, and I can't get past the third or fourth chapter (with LOTR and Moby, I can't even get that far). I guess I have lowbrow taste.
Omitted "The Time Machine Did It" by Swartzwelder. Outrage pending.
The top Amazon review for "My Lush Life" certainly made me laugh.
(I'm assuming there's an in-joke here, as you also used a "k" the last time you posted this)
To those who only know Tallulah Bankhead from Batman, see "Devil And The Deep" (1932) during high tide.
People take "The Odd Couple" for granted, these days, but it's influence on popular culture is staggering. The play, the movie (plus a sequel), three television incarnations (including an all Black cast) in three distinct eras of television, and a second, gender-swapped stage version. Not to mention all the comedy that came after that emulated the central comic premise (Two and a Half Men?).
"The Dispensanator - Death Wears Overalls" - Rock Hardlin .
I love that you slipped your own book in!
I enjoyed Must Kill TV and thought it would make a great movie. Have you thought of adapting it for a streaming service? Dark humor is all the rage these days.
You might also add any column collection by Russell Baker or Art Buchwald.
More important do we get extra credit for reading it?
I enjoyed “Born Standing Up”. I didn’t find it funny.
Norm Macdonald’s “Based on a True Story” I find funny, especially the audiobook version. Repeatable.
Woody Allen’s complete prose is available in a single volume that I find delightfully funny. Funny in the sense of a Woody Allen movie, not in the sense of a Woody Allen marriage.
Anything by Donald E Westlake other than the Parker books.
Fans of "A Confederacy of Dunces" should know that the Doris Day movie he so enjoys hating is "Billy Rose's Jumbo". The final number defies even Ignatius J. Reilly's vocabulary.
Thank you, for the plug, for the spelling correction on my last name, and for inserting me into such sublime company. I love the idea of being sandwiched between Steve Martin and Tina Fey, with Steve as the "Top." Don't hold the Mayo.
"N. Zakharenko said...
The top Amazon review for "My Lush Life" certainly made me laugh.
(I'm assuming there's an in-joke here, as you also used a "k" the last time you posted this)
To those who only know Tallulah Bankhead from Batman, see "Devil And The Deep" (1932) during high tide."
Ah, you're referring to that attack review written by a disgruntled asshole! Yeah, really funny. It's followed by another quick hatchet-job reader review, then followed by a stack of rave reviews. May I refer you to Felix Unger's initials: "F.U."
"K" is my middle initial, so it gets into my name in the wrong places sometimes.
And my book is not about Tallulah Bankhead; it's about "Tallulah Morehead," a combination of Bankhead with Norma Desmond, and is 100% fiction.
There are people who know Tallulah B "only from Batman"? (Her final performance was that Batman) I certainly would have phrased that as "To those who only know Tallulah Bankhead from Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat" I would assume (and hope) that far more people remember her for that movie than for that last gasp of a dying actress on that wretched Batman series. Hell, I'd think more people would remember her appearance on I Love Lucy than Batman (But she has one moment on Batman that always makes me laugh: when she takes a sip from a white glass, shudders in revulsion, and and croaks out, "So that's --- milk!")
Earl Boebert, I stand beside you. Donald E. was wonderful.
Ken, a Friday question: What does it take for you to delete someone's comment from your blog?
Adding required VIEWING- VOLUNTEERS is streaming on Hulu. While I'm a Levine & Isaacs fan, I've never seen it. I paused it when I remembered I should post this comment...I'm only 6 minutes in, theres been brief nudity and I've been treated to Chick Heaarn on radio doing play by play of the 1963 NBA Finals - I already LOVE this movie
Oops- it's the 1962 NBA Finals, not '63. The film even gets the final score of game 7 correct (it even went overtime)
Since you didn't specify WHICH Friday, I will hand mine in on the first Friday of 2079.
The lack of PG Wodehouse on this list troubles me deeply.
Ten pages? Single or double spaced? Doesn't matter. My dog ate it.
@ Phillip
What? Why is another post repeated, with a racial slur? How does this get posted?
There was also a '93 TV reunion movie for the first TV series. (The "odd" thing about that reunion film?? They did not duplicate the apartment set from the corresponding TV show, but from the original'68 film!!!)
SCRIPTS ESSAYS NOVELS VERDE SGOFIES
Excuse Typos and Duplications
GEORGE ABBOTT
GOODMAN ACE
FRANKLIN P ADAMS
GEORGE ADE
MAX ADELER
SHOLOM ALEICHEM
FRED ALLEN
WOODY ALLEN
GEORGE AXELROD
ALAN AYCKBOURN
PHILIP BARRY
S N BEHRMAN
ROBERT BENCHLEY
CHARLES BRACKETT
HEYWOOD BROUN
MARC CONNELLY
ALAN COREN
NOEL COWARD
PETER DEVRIES
COREY FORD
BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN
STEPHEN FRY
GENE FOWLER
LARRY GELBART
WOLCOTT GIBBS
MOSS HART
BEN HECHT
JOSEPH HELLER
DON HEROLD
KIN HUBBARD
NUNNALLY JOHNSON
E J KAHN
GEORGE S KAUFMAN
GARRISON KEILLOR
RALF KIRCHER
NORMAN KRASNA
HARRY KURNITZ
RING LARDNER
STEPHEN LEACOCK
STANISLAW LEM
A J LIEBLING
HOWARD LINDSAY + RUSSEL CROUSE
ANITA LOOS
CLARE BOOTHE LUCE
DON MARQUIS
H L MENCKEN
SPIKE MILLIGAN
JOSEPH MITCHELL
OGDEN NASH
JOE ORTON
DOROTHY PARKER
S J PERELMAN
DAWN POWELL
TERRY PRATCHETT
SAMSON RAPHAELSON
CARL REINER
ROBERT RISKIN
PAUL RUDNICK
DAMON RUNYON
MORRIE RYSKIND
TOM SHARPE
JEAN SHEPHERD
NEIL SIMON
H ALLEN SMITH
TERRY SOUTHERN
SAM & BELLA SPEWACK
DONALD OGDEN STEWART
ED STREETER
PRESTON STURGES
JAMES THURBER
CALVIN TRILLIN
MARK TWAIN
PETER USTINOV
KURT VONNEGUT
EVELYN WAUGH
E B WHITE
BILLY WILDER
P G WODEHOUSE
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
MAURICE ZOLOTOW
@Mr Toole: A good list. Just off the top of my head the most egregious missing name is Nikolai Gogol.
Leighton, there's an anonymous troll who occasionally reposts someone else's comment but adds in a racist epithet or some other objectionable phrase. My guess is it's one of the Republican readers who usually posts under a different name.
Genius and The Joyous Season by Patrick Dennis
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
Feydeau, First to Last, one act plays
I'm also reading screenplays by Robert Riskin, very enjoyable
Friday Question:
Ken, did you ever meet or work with Lionel Stander? He was in an episode of Dream On.
Here is a question I always wanted to ask someone creative who has worked with a censor. Did you find working under those restriction harder or did of make you more creative by knowing how far you can go? Did the restrictions provide a roadmap or just obstructions? I feel that a writing staff is a team sport and rules need to be established and enforced, however for personal writing it should be totally different. Do you rely more on personal boundaries in your writing or suggestions from others? In these personal boundaries do you consider that a form of style?
Great list but incomplete without Phil Rosenthal's You're Lucky You're Funny and Jay Moriarty's Honky in The House. Required reading for any sitcom writer in the making or current.
Since Mr. Toole's list is alphabetical, may I take the lberty of putting at the front of the line the name of Richard Armour, my favorite growing up?
The It All Started With history books, the literature satires, the education satires (at least twenty years ahead of their times) (Armour's definition of Junior College: "High school with ash trays."), the light verse ...
Out of sight, out of mind, out of print ...
The Bergson inclusion is wonderful as it's important.
"The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde should be required reading.
Thomas Meehan's "Yma Dream" originated as a humor piece in the New Yorker and was performed as a sketch in an Anne Bancroft TV special in the early 70s. Ever since, it makes me laugh every time I think of it. I'm laughing right now. Is it the funniest thing ever? Yes. Definitely.
"Anonymous Spike de Beauvoir said...
Genius and The Joyous Season by Patrick Dennis"
YES! First editions of Genius and The Joyous Season sit pridefully on a shelf in my living room, next to my first editions of Auntie Mame, Around the World with Auntie Mame, Little Me and First Lady, all by Patrick Dennis, real name Edward Everett Tanner III. Beside them sits a first edition of Eric Myers's excellent bio of Dennis/Tanner, Uncle Mame. And on another shelf is a paperback TV-series-tie-in edition of Dennis's Guestward Ho. Patrick Dennis has been one of my top favorite authors since I was 12.
Little Me is the book my own My Lush Life is most-often compared to, as they are very similar in premise and tone. A review my book got in a San Francisco gay newspaper wrote "In the end notes Douglas McEwan acknowledges his debt to Patrick Dennis. This is respectful, but McEwan has updated this satirical genre for the 21st Century, and Tallulah Morehead deserves to stand beside Belle Poitrine and Vera Charles, as one of the greatest actresses who never lived, but should have." That review made me very proud.
"Mike Doran said...
Since Mr. Toole's list is alphabetical, may I take the liberty of putting at the front of the line the name of Richard Armour, my favorite growing up?
I have loved Richard Armour forever! His Twisted Tales From Shakespeare and English Literature ReLit sit on the Grab-A-Book stack outside my bathroom, where I keep books with pieces short enough that they can be read on the toilet. I've read many of his books, and have a signed copy of his book of verses on the American presidents. I got to meet him once, when I was a teenager and I attended a lecture he gave at our local library to help raise funds for the library. Talking with him afterwards, I found him genial, warm, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, and often sly humor slipped into whatever he had to say. That he is almost forgotten today is a terrible thing. Commentor "KC Dennis" above couldn't get through Moby Dick, but I bet he could laugh his way through Armour's hilarious deconstruction of it in his The Classics Reclassified, which is also in my Grab-A-Book stack.
After years of loving the movie Auntie Mame, I recently read the sequel Around the World with Auntie Mame. It was heaven. I need to catch up and read the rest of Patrick Dennis. I love his comedic sensibility.
I found a copy at Audible of the LA Theater Works' performance of "Die Mommie Die!" by Charles Busch, but am unfamiliar with it. Wonder if it's worth the three and a half bucks. :-)
Oops
In making my list of fun published humorists (off the top of my head) — many of them (dated) Algonquin-ites — I regrettably forgot a multitude, a few of whom were celebrated above——- Richard Armour, Douglas Adams, the Beyond the Fringe writers, Marshall Brickman, John Collier (His Monkey Wife), Patrick Dennis, Jules Feiffer, Herb Gardner, Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm), Russell Maloney, Joseph Mankiewicz, Thomas Meehan, the Monty Python gang, F Chase Taylor (aka Col. Stoopnagle).....
The final turn in the professional life of “Patrick Dennis” — as recounted in the bio — could hardly have been more surprising.
Oops part two
Nora Ephron
Charles Portis
Terry Southern
Of course, I've seen "Auntie Mame" (fantastic), and the less successful "Mame" with Lucille Ball. (I'm sure Angela Lansbury was excellent on Broadway.) I MUST read those "Patrick Dennis" books.
Another fun read is "The Long, Long Trailer" by Clinton Twiss (1951). I have a PDF of the novel on my Mac. The 1953 film with "Lucy & Desi" is fine, but the novel is much more humorous, and less slapstick-ish. It also doesn't skimp on details. You feel as if you are on that crazy, year-long trip with them. (Based on the author's own experience.)
Interestingly enough, the novel has some (brief) supporting characters, which would have been perfect for Vivian Vance and William Frawley. Considering that the film was capitalizing on the popularity of "I Love Lucy," I'm surprised the two actors weren't shoehorned into the script. (Those written characters actually don't make it from novel to screen.)
Correction, "The Long, Long Trailer" was filmed in the summer of 1953, but released in February of 1954.
David Nobbs.
I also enjoyed Ken's book. He even quoted my review on Amazon. When was the last time you read something fun?
@John
Yes, Around the World with Auntie Mame is heaven! Each chapter is a gem. I'm surprised that it's not as revered as Auntie Mame.
Tony is also a great Patrick Dennis novel if you can find it, darker and bitter but brilliant.
One of my favorite sequences in Genius is when all the characters pitch in to make the movie in Mexico. There's such joy in being immersed in the process, even the IRS guy gets swept up in the magic.
Uncle Mame is a great bio. I heard a while back that it was optioned by Kelsey Grammer, anyone know of updates on that? I enjoyed the anecdotes about the "real" Auntie Mame. So sad to read about Dennis's mental health challenges. Amazingly shortly after being released from the hospital he wrote one of his funniest books, The Joyous Season.
Another great humor writer: playwright and essayist Jean Kerr. Also cartoonists Nicole Hollander and Lynda Barry.
actually kurt vonnegut
"Anonymous Steve Lanzi f/k/a qdpsteve said...
I found a copy at Audible of the LA Theater Works' performance of "Die Mommie Die!" by Charles Busch, but am unfamiliar with it. Wonder if it's worth the three and a half bucks. :-)
Oh yes. It's worth it and more. Listen for my voice in the laughs, as I was in the live audience when it was recorded. I also saw the original stage production of it, and have the movie on DVD. But then, I love everything Charles Busch does, and over the last 20 years, we've become friends.
"John said...
After years of loving the movie Auntie Mame, I recently read the sequel Around the World with Auntie Mame. It was heaven. I need to catch up and read the rest of Patrick Dennis. I love his comedic sensibility"
Which edition did you read? I ask because there is a chapter which was entirely cut from its original publication, when Auntie Mame stays for a while in a Russian Commune. It was cut from red-scare fears, as though Mame utterly failing to grasp the concept of a commune, and driving about in a Rolls and wearing her furs, in any way promoted communism. That chapter was published for the first time only in a paperback reprint a little over 20 years ago, which is why I have that edition as well as a first edition.
"Mr Toole said...
The final turn in the professional life of “Patrick Dennis” — as recounted in the bio — could hardly have been more surprising."
He had one hell of a weird third act. To think of Ray Croc dying without ever learning that the man laying out his clothes and serving his meals every day had written Auntie Mame astounds and amuses me. And it is a measure of what a wonderful person he was that his wife so loved him that she took him back after he'd left her to go be gay, and she became his care-giver as he died of cancer. Basically, it seems that everyone who ever met him loved him.
"Spike de Beauvoir said...
Yes, Around the World with Auntie Mame is heaven! Each chapter is a gem. I'm surprised that it's not as revered as Auntie Mame."
I totally agree. It was the first Patrick Dennis novel I ever read. Given how successfully Auntie Mame traveled the road of Novel-to-play-to-movie-to-stage-musical-to-ghastly-Lucy-movie, I've never understood why no one has filmed its sequel. In particular, it is perfectly structured to make an excellent TV mini-series, with each chapter a separate episode, shot around the world.
There is one section of my book, My Lush Life, called Morehead Around the World, which I consciously based the structure of on ATWWAM, as I confess in the book's author's notes at the end. The section is seven chapters in which my Tallulah Morehead has adventures while making movies as she circumnavigates the globe, with semi-stand-alone episodic adventures in London, Paris, Rome, Cairo, Madrid and Tokyo. Yes, that's only six, but I violated the structure by breaking the Paris adventure into two chapters. There was a cliff-hanger mid-Parisian adventure that was so strong I had to put a chapter break there.
ATWWAM also showed me how to do a sequel to a book that could not really continue. ATWWAM does not take place after Auntie Mame; it takes place between two of AM's chapters. So I did the same thing. I left a gap in My Lush Life of ten years she does not remember (Because my book is narrated first person by Tallulah), a decade-long alcoholic blackout, and thus I was able to fit the sequel Tallyho, Tallulah!), into that gap.
And have you, like me, ever wondered why no one has ever filmed The Joyous Season? It would have been perfect for a '60s comedy movie, as it is less episodic than Auntie Mame and its sequel, or than Little Me or First Lady. It's plot would adapt for film very easily. It has plot similarities to Disney's The Parent Trap, sans the identical twins aspect, and that was certainly a hit.
Dennis's First Lady gets little respect, and Myers certainly is dismissive of it in his book, and sure, it does not rise as high as Little Me (What does? It's Dennis's masterpiece), but I'm very fond of it, and given what befouled our White House from 2017 to 2020, First Lady turned out to be deeply prescient. It's like Dennis/Tanner foresaw Trump.
I can't remember where I read this, but it seems Patrick Dennis was averse to writing the last chapters or conclusions to his novels and sometimes his editor wrote the last bits to make a publication deadline. I've reread The Joyous Season several times and the very last chapter is kind of flat and jarring compared to the style of the rest of the novel. So it may be true. Have any of you PD mavens noticed this or recall the anecdote?
Funny tidbit, I think recounted in Uncle Mame: During the photo shoots for Little Me, Patrick Dennis's father developed a hopeless crush on Alyce Pierce (from Bewitched) and pursued her relentlessly. She wasn't responsive and he was heartbroken.
It’s become increasingly clear my humor collection
is much greater than my humor recollection
Please allow me to add these authors whose
books I’ve treasured but whose names I’d not yet dropped
ROGER ANGELL
GEORGE S CHAPPELL aka WALTER TRAPROCK (Through the Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera)
IRVIN S COBB
FINLEY PETER DUNNE
IAN FRAZIER
VERONICA GENG
RUBE GOLDBERG
MILT GROSS
PHILIP HAMBURGER
WILLIAM HAMILTON
JOHN HUGHES
FERENC MOLNAR
MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE
P J O’ROURKE
ANTHONY POWELL
WILFRID SHEED
FRANK SULLIVAN
HUNTER S THOMPSON
TOM WOLFE
By any chance, is gottacook aware of Mots D'heures: Gousses, Rames, by Luis d'Antin van Rooten?
Basically, it's the French-ish version of his German outlier:
"Chacun Gille
Houer ne taupe de hile
Tot-fait, j'appelle au boiteur ..."
My French is nearly non-existent, so I can't really give you the translation; I'm taking it on faith from Mr. van Rooten.
It is worth the effort to seek out, though ...
Luis van Rooten was an American character actor, with a sideline in sharp wordplay.
Another of his books was Van Rooten's Book of Improbable Saints, which any Catholics in the crowd will really appreciate (especially if they grew up reading "lives of the saints" books in parochial school).
And if you'd like to get a look at Mr. van Rooten, watch out for "The Case of the One-Eyed Witness", an early Perry Mason episode in which he spends the opening act blackmailing Angie Dickinson ...
.
Yes indeed, I've heard of Mots D'heures: Gousses, Rames, but only because it's mentioned in the dust-jacket text of Mörder Guss Reims as a "comparable." In any case it would do me no good to seek it out, as I read French poorly. At least in German one pronounces the same groups of letters the same way every time, and there are no silent letters.
"Anonymous Mr Toole said...
It’s become increasingly clear my humor collection
is much greater than my humor recollection
Please allow me to add these authors whose
books I’ve treasured but whose names I’d not yet dropped
...FERENC MOLNAR
MICHAEL O'DONOGHUE..."
"Ferenc Molnar??? A comedy writer? Liliom is many things (I wrote a paper on it in college), but it sure as hell ain't funny.
Michael O'Donoghue has been an idol of mine for half a century, though a rare one I'm glad I never met. He was best admired from another room, 3000 miles away. Dennis Perrin's biography of Michael, Mr. Mike, is a great read.
Never been a fan of Hunter Thompson, but once, long, long ago, at three in the morning, I and some friends, just off work from our gigs as doormen at The Comedy Store, were dining at Cantor's. Along with Joe E. Ross, who was ALWAYS there, usually with a hooker or two at his table, at another table sat Hunter Thompson with Bill Murray. It was an effort not to stare. A year or less later the movie where Bill played him came out and we realized why they were dining together at 3 am.
"gottacook said...
Two outliers:
In One Head and Out the Other by Roger Price, an early-'50s book by the future co-creator of Mad Libs"
Oh yes. And the future creator of Droodles. In 1974, when I was producing an hour of talk on radio every day, I booked Roger Price on the show, and before he went on, I had an hour with him all to myself in my office. I was already very much a fan, and he was fascinating and fun to talk with, a delightful man.
Did no one mention Joseph Heller? Catch 22.
Phillip Roth is most famous for Portnoy. But check out his "Our Gang." His political satire.
Max Shulman has many funny books besides Dobie Gillis. Check out "Sleep Until Noon."
My father's favorite was Peter DeVries.
@Wayne
My mother's favorite was Max Shulman. I read most of his books as a teen, especially Barefoot Boy with Cheek.
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