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      Sarah Silverman on Her Family Show About Divorce and Depression

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      “Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable,” the comic said of “The Bedwetter,” her new musical comedy.When the comedian Sarah Silverman was maybe 8, her father gave her a joke book. This was no childhood compendium of riddles and rhymes. It was a collection of “tasteless” humor, and on the very first page, she recalled, it contained a zinger about Little Red Riding Hood getting it on with the Big Bad Wolf.As a child, Silverman was mystified by these punch lines. As an adult, she said, “I went, oh my God, what is wrong with my father?” And then she wrote the whole bit into “The Bedwetter,” the new Off Broadway musical based on her memoir of the same name. It’s one of many R-rated episodes that were inspired by her beloved dad, who taught her to swear when she was 3, unwittingly setting her on the path to becoming a comic.The family life she has memorialized onstage was short on boundaries and weighted with despair. “The Bedwetter,” which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater, centers on a 10-year-old Silverman, who suffered from the embarrassing condition of the title. It deals frankly with divorce and depression — but it’s a raucous comedy.“Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable, and sad,” she said. “I really hope people bring their kids.”Silverman and cast members in their Times Square rehearsal studio, preparing the show (again) after a two-year pandemic delay.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAn Atlantic Theater Company production originally scheduled for the spring of 2020, the show lost one of its original creators, the musician and Emmy-winning TV and stage composer Adam Schlesinger, who died from complications of the coronavirus on April 1, 2020. His death and the two-year pandemic delay deepened the meaning of the production, its creators said, even as it sharpened the jokes. Seeing the show through became a mission for some of his collaborators.And it arrives as Silverman, 51, has reached an unexpectedly beneficent phase of her career, and a new level of maturity in her personal life. As the cultural lines around “appropriate” humor are repeatedly redrawn, she is one of the few performers who has, seemingly genuinely, all but renounced the early work that put her on the map.For decades a convulsive and taboo-busting top comic, she has transformed into a still bitingly funny and progressive feminist voice who advocates for earnest connection (even with Republicans). With a huge, cross-generational network of comedy friends and a pandemic-era podcast that doles out gentle advice, she’s become an unlikely moral center of the comedy community: a Gen X Mr. Rogers, with a topknot ponytail and a profane streak.“Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of her 2017 Hulu series “I Love You, America.” Erin Simkin/Hulu“She’s able to take audiences into shadowy, tricky places because we all trust her and know she’s a force for good,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of “I Love You, America,” the 2017 Hulu series that showcased her efforts at bridge-building humor. “Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart.”The confluence of darkness, dark humor and love is the key to “The Bedwetter,” which began when Schlesinger, the witty Fountains of Wayne power pop bassist, read Silverman’s 2010 best-selling memoir, and decided that chapter headings like “My Nana Was Great but Now She’s Dead” and “Hymen, Goodbyemen,” were the seeds of great comic songs. Silverman and Schlesinger began working on the project a decade ago, becoming friends in the process. “We started going to this piano bar karaoke every other Friday,” she said, noting that she still can’t strike the standing get-together from her calendar.Some of the reference materials for the show in the rehearsal space.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesPhotographs of Silverman and her family from the ’70s and ’80s.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesShe was speaking over lunch recently at a bustling restaurant near Union Square. She’d arrived on foot and alone, looking not AARP age but like the early ’90s N.Y.U. student she once was, in jeans, a Santana ringer tee and a backpack. (“I always say, you should live well below your means — you don’t need a purse, get a backpack.”) Her conversation was generously detailed and inquisitive; she acted out her stories, but not enough to draw much attention in the room. Almost no personal detail was too embarrassing to share, anyway. “I learned disassociation at a very young age, as a bedwetter who had to go to sleepover camp,” she said.Having known that abject social terror — she wet the bed well into her teens — Silverman leans into compassion. She even had empathy for a guy at Comic-Con who, years back, suddenly punched her in the face while wearing a Hulk fist. “I could tell he just didn’t know what to do with all his feelings.”But she also knows how to cackle her way out of the depths. She mentioned a friend’s death. “Suicide, I think, is sometimes so — ” Silverman began, when she clocked the waitress dropping by our table.“So whimsical!” she concluded, in purposeful earshot. “I don’t know, it’s the one thing you really should put off till tomorrow, every time.”When the pandemic cut off her stand-up tours, she started a weekly podcast, and professed surprise about the number of callers in real need, with problems both personal (depression) and cultural. “Are we Jewish?” asked one woman, befuddled by her family history. “Being Jewish is a state of mind!” Silverman replied. (One of her three sisters is a rabbi, but Silverman herself is not religious.)Silverman in the Times Square rehearsal space. “Sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it was a formative example for me,” the actress Ilana Glazer said of Silverman’s work.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I thought it would be silly and dumb, and then I’d talk politics,” she said of the podcast. “Then I get people so earnest, and — I’m my mother — I think I can help. But so much of the time I’m talking out of my ass; just the classic someone-who-does-a-lot-of-therapy thinking they’re a therapist.”Still, she added, there “are just things I’ve learned, because I’ve lived a long time, and I’m curious.”HER INFLUENCE IS WIDELY FELT. “I look up to Sarah,” the actress and writer Ilana Glazer (“Broad City”) wrote in an email. “She can hold the nuances of the big picture, socially, historically, personally — and process those complexities spontaneously” in her work. Silverman is not the only comic to reveal her struggles, but she may be the most honest. “The idea of sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it,” Glazer wrote, “was a formative example for me.”Silverman has dipped into dramatic roles (she played a lesbian who died in childbirth on the Showtime series “Masters of Sex”) but mostly has a side career as the funny, smart friend in movies; she’ll next host “Stupid Pet Tricks,” a takeoff on the old Letterman bit, as a variety series for TBS. And after a decade of condo-tower living in Los Angeles, she just bought her first home, to the relief of friends like Chelsea Handler.“I ran over to take a look at it, concerned she bought a one-bedroom bungalow tucked underneath the Griffith Observatory,” Handler, the comedian and author, wrote in an email. “When I saw she had bought herself a big-girl house, I thought, well, there we go, she’s accepted adulthood.” Silverman’s boyfriend of nearly two years, Rory Albanese, the showrunner for Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” has moved in; the first time she’s cohabitated with a partner in over a decade, and the very first time on her own turf.For a musical about a bedwetter, you need a bed. It’s a central piece of the set for the show, which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSilverman, who said she has been on Zoloft since 1994, is open about her mental health. She was clinically depressed as a kid and, back when doctor’s orders were rarely questioned, was prescribed a dosage of Xanax that would hobble a SoundCloud rapper. Also, her first psychiatrist hanged himself. It’s all in the musical, along with her mother’s debilitating depression which, in the show, leaves her largely bed-bound. (But remember, it’s a comedy!)The Covid shutdown and Schlesinger’s death came as the musical’s creators were in New York, ready to start rehearsals for their imminent run. Instead they began gathering on Zoom to check in. Eventually, they brought in as a creative consultant the musician and composer David Yazbek, a Tony winner for best original score for “The Band’s Visit” and a nominee for “Tootsie.”At that point, there was a surreal and palpable sense that someone was missing, Yazbek said. “Being able to laugh was not just sort of healing and important, but actually kind of vital — for us, I’m not even talking about any audiences.”That sentiment did go in the show, buoyed by Silverman’s own experience with loss. Her mother, Beth Ann, who recovered from depression and went on to become a successful theater director in New Hampshire, died in 2015; as did the 30-year-old writer Harris Wittels, who worked on “The Sarah Silverman Program,” her Comedy Central series; and Garry Shandling, the comedian and a mentor, in 2016.That year, Silverman suffered a near miss of her own, when she had a rare case of epiglottitis, a swollen abscess around her windpipe, and was rushed into emergency surgery. After her discharge, in withdrawal from pain meds, “I was chemically suicidal,” she said; she had not been given her anti-depressants during the hospital stay.“It will be familiar to so many people,” Silverman said about how the musical explores the emotions raised by divorce.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesGoing through these traumas and emerging laughing, “I don’t think a lot of people do that with such finesse,” said Anne Kauffman, the director of “The Bedwetter.”IN THEIR TIMES SQUARE rehearsal studio, there were inspo pictures of the Silverman family circa the ’70s and ’80s; Sarah inherited her eyebrows from her dad, Donald, who owned a discount clothing store. The cast, which includes Darren Goldstein and Caissie Levy as the Silvermans and Bebe Neuwirth as Nana, cycled through a kaleidoscope of anger, anxiety and silliness. It was very funny. Ganged up on by some fifth-grade mean girls, who taunt her with “You’re short and dark and strange and ooey,” Zoe Glick, who plays Silverman, is enthusiastically self-deprecating: “I couldn’t agree more!” she sings cheerfully. “I’m the type of kid that’s too Jewy to ignore.”The music is as sticky as the best pop song — Schlesinger’s touch. Both Yazbek and Henry Aronson, the musical director, said they tried to channel him as they finished the project. He worked in a Beatles pop tradition, Aronson said, “a certain deceptive simplicity, harmonically.”Silverman, taking notes at a table, popped up to sub for an absent actor, sweetly singing a jingle for “Crazy Donny’s Warehouse (for Your Messy Divorce).” If it was initially bizarre to watch her family’s emotional upheaval recreated — her parents split when she was around 7 — “I’m also so thrilled, because I feel like it will be familiar to so many people,” she said.Kauffman, the director, said Silverman has illuminated her history — “What was your mom like in this moment? Would your dad have cracked a joke?” — with what works dramaturgically. “She just has this incredible memory and ability to articulate exactly what she was experiencing, which is like a director’s dream. Her as a 10 year old is very viscerally present.”And she punches up the jokes. When Glick was doing a scene that involved making fart noises, Silverman advised her: “Point to your mouth, to really focus” on the body part it’s standing in for, she told her, in less PG language. “It will be funny.”Silverman has moved on from the incendiary language she used at the beginning of her career. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesA word — OK, a paragraph — about farts (and also a sentence I never expected to write in The New York Times). If you thought Silverman might’ve outgrown her affinity for juvenile, scatological humor after a half-century, you’d be wrong. “She has an inability not to laugh if you fart,” Yazbek said. During rehearsal, I caught her giving Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews,” “Prayer for the French Republic”), who wrote the book with her, a demo in fart noise technique, her hands cupped around her mouth.She has never not wanted to be a performer, said her sister Laura Silverman, who recalled that when she had friends over as a kid, Sarah would pop out of a closet, doing costumed characters, to entertain them.And her family was supportive in creative ways. “I would pick up the phone and call the operator and have her sing ‘Tomorrow,’ from ‘Annie,’” said Laura, an actor and writer. “I would say, I didn’t want her to be scared to sing or perform in front of anyone, at any time.” When Silverman, as a very young child, unleashed the string of curse words that her father taught her — a cherub with inky curtain bangs, working blue — “I would get this wild approval from adults, despite themselves,” she said. “It felt so good, made my arms itch with glee, and I became addicted to that.”Only when she wrote her memoir did she connect the dots between that feeling and her comedy: “So much of my standup, especially early on, was shock, shock, shock,” she said, “and totally trash.” She used racist epithets, misguidedly, to prove a point, which she now says she regrets — she’s gladly left that language behind. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.The only word that Silverman whispered, in our three hour lunch, was “menopause.”When pressed — no, pleaded with — she said she would write about that topic, though she’s still working out the terms. (“There is not a female word for emasculating, but that’s what menopause is.”) But talking about her body and her needs, is “how I learned to be vulnerable and honest,” she said. “It’s an incredible revelation some people don’t even realize they can do. The truth! It’s really wild.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Sarah Silverman on ‘The Bedwetter,’ Her New Musical Comedy

      by

      “Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable,” the comic said of “The Bedwetter,” her new musical comedy.When the comedian Sarah Silverman was maybe 8, her father gave her a joke book. This was no childhood compendium of riddles and rhymes. It was a collection of “tasteless” humor, and on the very first page, she recalled, it contained a zinger about Little Red Riding Hood getting it on with the Big Bad Wolf.As a child, Silverman was mystified by these punch lines. As an adult, she said, “I went, oh my God, what is wrong with my father?” And then she wrote the whole bit into “The Bedwetter,” the new Off Broadway musical based on her memoir of the same name. It’s one of many R-rated episodes that were inspired by her beloved dad, who taught her to swear when she was 3, unwittingly setting her on the path to becoming a comic.The family life she has memorialized onstage was short on boundaries and weighted with despair. “The Bedwetter,” which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater, centers on a 10-year-old Silverman, who suffered from the embarrassing condition of the title. It deals frankly with divorce and depression — but it’s a raucous comedy.“Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable, and sad,” she said. “I really hope people bring their kids.”Silverman and cast members in their Times Square rehearsal studio, preparing the show (again) after a two-year pandemic delay.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAn Atlantic Theater Company production originally scheduled for the spring of 2020, the show lost one of its original creators, the musician and Emmy-winning TV and stage composer Adam Schlesinger, who died from complications of the coronavirus on April 1, 2020. His death and the two-year pandemic delay deepened the meaning of the production, its creators said, even as it sharpened the jokes. Seeing the show through became a mission for some of his collaborators.And it arrives as Silverman, 51, has reached an unexpectedly beneficent phase of her career, and a new level of maturity in her personal life. As the cultural lines around “appropriate” humor are repeatedly redrawn, she is one of the few performers who has, seemingly genuinely, all but renounced the early work that put her on the map.For decades a convulsive and taboo-busting top comic, she has transformed into a still bitingly funny and progressive feminist voice who advocates for earnest connection (even with Republicans). With a huge, cross-generational network of comedy friends and a pandemic-era podcast that doles out gentle advice, she’s become an unlikely moral center of the comedy community: a Gen X Mr. Rogers, with a topknot ponytail and a profane streak.“Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of her 2017 Hulu series “I Love You, America.” Erin Simkin/Hulu“She’s able to take audiences into shadowy, tricky places because we all trust her and know she’s a force for good,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of “I Love You, America,” the 2017 Hulu series that showcased her efforts at bridge-building humor. “Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart.”Inside Sarah Silverman’s WorldThe convulsive and taboo-busting comic has transformed over time into a still bitingly funny and progressive feminist voice.‘The Bedwetter’: Sarah Silverman’s new musical, based on her 2010 memoir, deals with divorce and depression, but it’s a raucous comedy.Defining Moment: When A.O. Scott, our film critic, panned her comedy in 2005, it hit Silverman hard. Years later, they revisited that episode.Talking Politics: In her late-night talk show, “I Love You, America,” she experimented with the limits of political comedy in the Trump era.‘I Smile Back’: Silverman stretched in an unfamiliar direction by playing a suburban mom in the harrowing drama. Here is what she said of that role.The confluence of darkness, dark humor and love is the key to “The Bedwetter,” which began when Schlesinger, the witty Fountains of Wayne power pop bassist, read Silverman’s 2010 best-selling memoir, and decided that chapter headings like “My Nana Was Great but Now She’s Dead” and “Hymen, Goodbyemen,” were the seeds of great comic songs. Silverman and Schlesinger began working on the project a decade ago, becoming friends in the process. “We started going to this piano bar karaoke every other Friday,” she said, noting that she still can’t strike the standing get-together from her calendar.Some of the reference materials for the show in the rehearsal space.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesPhotographs of Silverman and her family from the ’70s and ’80s.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesShe was speaking over lunch recently at a bustling restaurant near Union Square. She’d arrived on foot and alone, looking not AARP age but like the early ’90s N.Y.U. student she once was, in jeans, a Santana ringer tee and a backpack. (“I always say, you should live well below your means — you don’t need a purse, get a backpack.”) Her conversation was generously detailed and inquisitive; she acted out her stories, but not enough to draw much attention in the room. Almost no personal detail was too embarrassing to share, anyway. “I learned disassociation at a very young age, as a bedwetter who had to go to sleepover camp,” she said.Having known that abject social terror — she wet the bed well into her teens — Silverman leans into compassion. She even had empathy for a guy at Comic-Con who, years back, suddenly punched her in the face while wearing a Hulk fist. “I could tell he just didn’t know what to do with all his feelings.”But she also knows how to cackle her way out of the depths. She mentioned a friend’s death. “Suicide, I think, is sometimes so — ” Silverman began, when she clocked the waitress dropping by our table.“So whimsical!” she concluded, in purposeful earshot. “I don’t know, it’s the one thing you really should put off till tomorrow, every time.”When the pandemic cut off her stand-up tours, she started a weekly podcast, and professed surprise about the number of callers in real need, with problems both personal (depression) and cultural. “Are we Jewish?” asked one woman, befuddled by her family history. “Being Jewish is a state of mind!” Silverman replied. (One of her three sisters is a rabbi, but Silverman herself is not religious.)Silverman in the Times Square rehearsal space. “Sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it was a formative example for me,” the actress Ilana Glazer said of Silverman’s work.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I thought it would be silly and dumb, and then I’d talk politics,” she said of the podcast. “Then I get people so earnest, and — I’m my mother — I think I can help. But so much of the time I’m talking out of my ass; just the classic someone-who-does-a-lot-of-therapy thinking they’re a therapist.”Still, she added, there “are just things I’ve learned, because I’ve lived a long time, and I’m curious.”HER INFLUENCE IS WIDELY FELT. “I look up to Sarah,” the actress and writer Ilana Glazer (“Broad City”) wrote in an email. “She can hold the nuances of the big picture, socially, historically, personally — and process those complexities spontaneously” in her work. Silverman is not the only comic to reveal her struggles, but she may be the most honest. “The idea of sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it,” Glazer wrote, “was a formative example for me.”Silverman has dipped into dramatic roles (she played a lesbian who died in childbirth on the Showtime series “Masters of Sex”) but mostly has a side career as the funny, smart friend in movies; she’ll next host “Stupid Pet Tricks,” a takeoff on the old Letterman bit, as a variety series for TBS. And after a decade of condo-tower living in Los Angeles, she just bought her first home, to the relief of friends like Chelsea Handler.“I ran over to take a look at it, concerned she bought a one-bedroom bungalow tucked underneath the Griffith Observatory,” Handler, the comedian and author, wrote in an email. “When I saw she had bought herself a big-girl house, I thought, well, there we go, she’s accepted adulthood.” Silverman’s boyfriend of nearly two years, Rory Albanese, the showrunner for Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” has moved in; the first time she’s cohabitated with a partner in over a decade, and the very first time on her own turf.For a musical about a bedwetter, you need a bed. It’s a central piece of the set for the show, which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSilverman, who said she has been on Zoloft since 1994, is open about her mental health. She was clinically depressed as a kid and, back when doctor’s orders were rarely questioned, was prescribed a dosage of Xanax that would hobble a SoundCloud rapper. Also, her first psychiatrist hanged himself. It’s all in the musical, along with her mother’s debilitating depression which, in the show, leaves her largely bed-bound. (But remember, it’s a comedy!)The Covid shutdown and Schlesinger’s death came as the musical’s creators were in New York, ready to start rehearsals for their imminent run. Instead they began gathering on Zoom to check in. Eventually, they brought in as a creative consultant the musician and composer David Yazbek, a Tony winner for best original score for “The Band’s Visit” and a nominee for “Tootsie.”At that point, there was a surreal and palpable sense that someone was missing, Yazbek said. “Being able to laugh was not just sort of healing and important, but actually kind of vital — for us, I’m not even talking about any audiences.”That sentiment did go in the show, buoyed by Silverman’s own experience with loss. Her mother, Beth Ann, who recovered from depression and went on to become a successful theater director in New Hampshire, died in 2015; as did the 30-year-old writer Harris Wittels, who worked on “The Sarah Silverman Program,” her Comedy Central series; and Garry Shandling, the comedian and a mentor, in 2016.That year, Silverman suffered a near miss of her own, when she had a rare case of epiglottitis, a swollen abscess around her windpipe, and was rushed into emergency surgery. After her discharge, in withdrawal from pain meds, “I was chemically suicidal,” she said; she had not been given her anti-depressants during the hospital stay.“It will be familiar to so many people,” Silverman said about how the musical explores the emotions raised by divorce.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesGoing through these traumas and emerging laughing, “I don’t think a lot of people do that with such finesse,” said Anne Kauffman, the director of “The Bedwetter.”IN THEIR TIMES SQUARE rehearsal studio, there were inspo pictures of the Silverman family circa the ’70s and ’80s; Sarah inherited her eyebrows from her dad, Donald, who owned a discount clothing store. The cast, which includes Darren Goldstein and Caissie Levy as the Silvermans and Bebe Neuwirth as Nana, cycled through a kaleidoscope of anger, anxiety and silliness. It was very funny. Ganged up on by some fifth-grade mean girls, who taunt her with “You’re short and dark and strange and ooey,” Zoe Glick, who plays Silverman, is enthusiastically self-deprecating: “I couldn’t agree more!” she sings cheerfully. “I’m the type of kid that’s too Jewy to ignore.”The music is as sticky as the best pop song — Schlesinger’s touch. Both Yazbek and Henry Aronson, the musical director, said they tried to channel him as they finished the project. He worked in a Beatles pop tradition, Aronson said, “a certain deceptive simplicity, harmonically.”Silverman, taking notes at a table, popped up to sub for an absent actor, sweetly singing a jingle for “Crazy Donny’s Warehouse (for Your Messy Divorce).” If it was initially bizarre to watch her family’s emotional upheaval recreated — her parents split when she was around 7 — “I’m also so thrilled, because I feel like it will be familiar to so many people,” she said.Kauffman, the director, said Silverman has illuminated her history — “What was your mom like in this moment? Would your dad have cracked a joke?” — with what works dramaturgically. “She just has this incredible memory and ability to articulate exactly what she was experiencing, which is like a director’s dream. Her as a 10 year old is very viscerally present.”And she punches up the jokes. When Glick was doing a scene that involved making fart noises, Silverman advised her: “Point to your mouth, to really focus” on the body part it’s standing in for, she told her, in less PG language. “It will be funny.”Silverman has moved on from the incendiary language she used at the beginning of her career. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesA word — OK, a paragraph — about farts (and also a sentence I never expected to write in The New York Times). If you thought Silverman might’ve outgrown her affinity for juvenile, scatological humor after a half-century, you’d be wrong. “She has an inability not to laugh if you fart,” Yazbek said. During rehearsal, I caught her giving Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews,” “Prayer for the French Republic”), who wrote the book with her, a demo in fart noise technique, her hands cupped around her mouth.She has never not wanted to be a performer, said her sister Laura Silverman, who recalled that when she had friends over as a kid, Sarah would pop out of a closet, doing costumed characters, to entertain them.And her family was supportive in creative ways. “I would pick up the phone and call the operator and have her sing ‘Tomorrow,’ from ‘Annie,’” said Laura, an actor and writer. “I would say, I didn’t want her to be scared to sing or perform in front of anyone, at any time.” When Silverman, as a very young child, unleashed the string of curse words that her father taught her — a cherub with inky curtain bangs, working blue — “I would get this wild approval from adults, despite themselves,” she said. “It felt so good, made my arms itch with glee, and I became addicted to that.”Only when she wrote her memoir did she connect the dots between that feeling and her comedy: “So much of my standup, especially early on, was shock, shock, shock,” she said, “and totally trash.” She used racist epithets, misguidedly, to prove a point, which she now says she regrets — she’s gladly left that language behind. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.The only word that Silverman whispered, in our three hour lunch, was “menopause.”When pressed — no, pleaded with — she said she would write about that topic, though she’s still working out the terms. (“There is not a female word for emasculating, but that’s what menopause is.”) But talking about her body and her needs, is “how I learned to be vulnerable and honest,” she said. “It’s an incredible revelation some people don’t even realize they can do. The truth! It’s really wild.” More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Library of Congress Acquires Neil Simon Papers

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      The collection of approximately 7,700 items, donated by Simon’s widow, includes dozens of unfinished shows, including a screenplay written for Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg.As Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library of Congress, was digging through the playwright Neil Simon’s manuscripts and papers earlier this year, he made a surprising discovery.Simon, the most commercially successful American playwright of the 20th century, could also draw. Like, really draw.“They’re almost professional,” Horowitz said in a recent phone conversation of some of the pen-and-ink drawings and paintings he found tucked among the scripts. “There are two watercolors in particular that are quite beautiful landscapes.”More than a dozen notepads filled with drawings, cartoons and caricatures by Simon, who died in 2018, was just one of the surprising discoveries Horowitz made in the trove of approximately 7,700 of the playwright’s manuscripts and papers (and even eyeglasses), a collection that the library on Monday announced had been donated by Simon’s widow, the actress Elaine Joyce.An event on Monday at the library in Washington, which will stream live on its YouTube channel at 7 p.m., will include a conversation with the actors Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, who are starring in the Broadway revival of Simon’s 1968 comedy “Plaza Suite,” as well as remarks by Joyce.The collection includes hundreds of scripts, notes and outlines for Simon’s plays, including handwritten first drafts and multiple drafts of typescripts — often annotated — as well as handwritten letters to luminaries like August Wilson. There are more than a dozen scripts (sometimes many more) for some of his most celebrated shows, including “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “The Odd Couple” and “Lost in Yonkers,” Simon’s dysfunctional-family comedy that won a Tony Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991.Sometimes, Horowitz said, it took some detective work to identify a famous play, which existed in an early version under an alternate title. (An early script for “Lost in Yonkers” has the title “Louie the Gangster,” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs” was once “The War of the Rosens.”)“Sometimes you’re not sure when you open the title and then you realize, ‘Oh, this became that,’” he said.The collection includes materials from the 25 screenplays Simon wrote, including “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” “The Heartbreak Kid” and “The Goodbye Girl,” for which he won a Golden Globe in 1978. There are also several scripts for shows never completed or produced, such as one titled “The Merry Widows,” written for Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg, and a musical that uses the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, called “A Foggy Day.”“Every time you open a carton, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to be in here?’” Horowitz said.Beyond dozens of unknown works in progress — some comprise just a few scenes, while others have multiple drafts — the archive also includes Simon’s Pulitzer Prize, his special Tony Award and at least two Golden Globes, as well as photographs, programs, original posters and even baseballs signed by several Hall of Famers, among them Tommy Lasorda, Eddie Murray and Tony Gwynn. (Simon was a noted baseball fan.)Dozens of spiral notebooks are also packed not just with revisions and “miscellaneous attempts at plays,” as Simon wrote in one, but drafts of speeches and tributes Simon delivered. In one case, a script for a show called “202 and 204” is interrupted by handwritten letters to cast members of “Lost in Yonkers” for opening night — plus the set designer, lighting designer, even the casting director, Horowitz said.Horowitz said that, once the library finishes combing through the items and putting scripts in alphabetical order, it plans to develop a digital tool similar to the ones they have to search other collections of work by theater professionals like Simon’s close friends Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, with whom he collaborated on the musical “Sweet Charity.”He also hopes that not just researchers, but also producers, might dive into the archives — and that some of the unproduced works might be staged, and the unfinished ones perhaps completed.“It’s so frustrating,” he said, laughing. “I desperately want to know how they end.” More

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      Robert Morse, Impish Tony-Winning Comedy Star, Is Dead at 90

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      He dazzled as a charming corporate schemer in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” His later triumphs included a memorable role on “Mad Men.”Robert Morse, whose impish, gaptoothed grin and expert comic timing made him a Tony-winning Broadway star as a charming corporate schemer in the 1961 musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” who later won another Tony for his eerily lifelike portrait of the writer Truman Capote in “Tru,” and who capped his long career with a triumphant return to the corporate world on the acclaimed television series “Mad Men,” has died. He was 90. His death was announced on Twitter by the writer and producer Larry Karaszewski, who worked with Mr. Morse on the television series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” He did not say where or when Mr. Morse died.Small in stature but larger than life as a performer, Mr. Morse was still a relative newcomer to the stage when he took Broadway by storm in “How to Succeed.” Directed (and partly written) by Abe Burrows, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, and based on a book by Shepherd Mead, the show, a broad satire of the business world, was set in the headquarters of the World Wide Wicket Company, ruled by its peevish president, J.B. Biggley (Rudy Vallee). The plot revolved around the determined efforts of an ambitious young window washer named J. Pierrepont Finch, played with sly humor by Mr. Morse, to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. Among the show’s many high points was the washroom scene in which Mr. Morse delivered a heartfelt rendition of the song “I Believe in You” while gazing rapturously into a mirror.“How to Succeed” ran for more than 1,400 performances and won seven Tony Awards, including one for Mr. Morse as best actor in a musical, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The 1967 film adaptation, with Mr. Morse and Mr. Vallee repeating their roles, was a hit as well, and the show has been revived on Broadway twice. Mr. Morse always seemed more at home on the stage than on the screen. Five years before “How to Succeed” opened, he made an uncredited and virtually unseen Hollywood debut (his face was swathed in bandages) in the World War II drama “The Proud and Profane.” With no other screen roles in the offing, he returned to New York, where he had earlier studied acting with Lee Strasberg, and where he auditioned for the director Tyrone Guthrie and was given his first Broadway role in “The Matchmaker,” Thornton Wilder’s comedy about a widowed merchant’s search for a new wife. Ruth Gordon played the title role, and Mr. Morse and Arthur Hill played clerks in the merchant’s shop. Mr. Morse would reprise his role in the 1958 film adaptation. From left, John Slattery, Mr. Morse and Nathan Lane in the 2016 Broadway revival of “The Front Page.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Morse’s Broadway career continued with the comedy “Say, Darling” (1958), in which he played an eager young producer, and “Take Me Along” (1959), a musical based on Eugene O’Neill’s play “Ah, Wilderness!,” in which Mr. Morse was a doubt-ridden adolescent, Walter Pidgeon his sympathetic father and Jackie Gleason his hard-drinking uncle. Then came his star-making turn in “How to Succeed.”His success in that show led to movie offers, but not to movie stardom; he rarely had a screen vehicle that fit him comfortably. “The parts I could play,” he observed to The Sunday News of New York in 1965, “they give to Jack Lemmon.” When he co-starred with Robert Goulet in the 1964 sex farce “Honeymoon Hotel,” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, “It is hard to imagine good actors being given worse material with which to work.” He fared better, but only slightly, in “The Loved One” (1965), a freewheeling adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s scathing novel about America’s moneymaking funeral industry in which he was improbably cast as a British poet who finds work at an animal cemetery, and “A Guide for the Married Man” (1967), in which Mr. Morse gives a fellow husband (Walter Matthau) advice on how to cheat on his wife. Television proved more hospitable. In addition to guest appearances on various shows in the 1960s and ’70s, he co-starred with the actress E.J. Peaker in the 1968 series “That’s Life,” an unusual hybrid of sitcom and variety show that told the story of a young couple’s courtship and marriage through sketches, monologues, singing and dancing. Perhaps too ambitious for its own good — “We’re producing what amounts to a new musical each week,” Mr. Morse told an interviewer — it lasted only one season.Mr. Morse returned to Broadway in 1972 in “Sugar,” a musical based on the Billy Wilder film “Some Like It Hot” about two Chicago musicians — Tony Roberts in the part originally played by Tony Curtis and Mr. Morse, appropriately, in the Jack Lemmon role — who flee from local mobsters by dressing as women and joining an all-girl band en route to Miami. It brought Mr. Morse another Tony nomination and was a modest hit, running for more than a year.But his next show, the 1976 musical “So Long, 174th Street,” based on the play “Enter Laughing” — with Mr. Morse, still boyish-looking at just shy of 45, as an aspiring actor roughly half his age — received harsh reviews and closed in a matter of weeks. It was Mr. Morse’s last appearance on Broadway for more than a decade.He kept busy in the ensuing years, but choice roles were scarce, and he battled depression. He also had problems with drugs and alcohol, although he maintained that those problems did not interfere with his work; looking back in 1989, he told The Times, “It was the other 22 hours I had a problem with.”He starred in a number of out-of-town revivals, including a production of “How to Succeed” in Los Angeles. He was a familiar face on television in series like “Love, American Style” and “Murder, She Wrote” — and a familiar voice as well, on cartoon shows like “Pound Puppies.” But he longed to escape a casting pigeonhole that he knew he had helped create.“I’m the short, funny guy,” he said ruefully in a 1972 Times interview. “It’s very difficult to get out of that.” Eight years earlier he had told another interviewer: “I think of myself as an actor. I happen to have a comic flair, but that doesn’t mean I plan to spend my life as a comedian.”It took him a while to find the perfect dramatic showcase, but he found it in 1989 in “Tru,” Jay Presson Allen’s one-man show about Truman Capote. Almost unrecognizable in heavy makeup and utterly convincing in voice and mannerisms, he was Capote incarnate, alone in his apartment in 1975 and brooding over the friendships he had lost after the publication of excerpts from his gossipy novel in progress, “Answered Prayers.” Mr. Morse’s performance brought him his second Tony Award. A television adaptation of “Tru” for the PBS series “American Playhouse” in 1992 also won him an Emmy.Robert Alan Morse was born on May 18, 1931, in Newton, Mass. His father, Charles, managed a chain of movie theaters. His mother, May (Silver) Morse, was a pianist.In high school, Mr. Morse earned a reputation as the class clown; a sympathetic music teacher helped him transfer his energy from the classroom to the theater. He spent a summer with the Peterborough Players in New Hampshire, came to New York and, after trying and failing to get an acting job, joined the Navy in 1950. After his discharge four years later, he moved back to New York and enrolled at the American Theater Wing.Mr. Morse in an episode of “Mad Men.” “I said I’d be happy to be Bertram Cooper, chairman of the board, and sit behind a desk,” he said of being offered the role, which earned him five Emmy nominations. “It looked like the road company of ‘How to Succeed.’”Jaimie Trueblood/AMCMr. Morse’s first marriage, to Carole Ann D’Andrea, a dancer, ended in divorce. They had three daughters, Robin, Andrea and Hilary. He and his second wife, Elizabeth Roberts, an advertising executive, had a daughter, Allyn, and a son, Charles.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Morse’s success in “Tru” guaranteed that he would no longer be thought of as, in his words, “an aging leprechaun.” A wider variety of roles followed, including, in 2016, a return to Broadway in a star-studded revival of “The Front Page.”“In the small but crucial role of a messenger from the governor’s office,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, “Mr. Morse, who made his Broadway debut more than 60 years ago, proves he can still steal a scene without breaking a sweat.”But for the last three decades of his life, he was mostly seen on television. He appeared in more than a dozen episodes of the 2000 CBS series “City of Angels” as the unpredictable chairman of an urban hospital. And in 2007 he came full circle when he was cast as the eccentric head of an advertising agency in the acclaimed AMC series “Mad Men,” set in the same era as “How to Succeed.” The role brought him five Emmy nominations. “I was quite elated when Matt called me and said, ‘We’d love you to do this show,’” Mr. Morse told The Times in 2014, referring to the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner. “I said I’d be happy to be Bertram Cooper, chairman of the board, and sit behind a desk. It looked like the road company of ‘How to Succeed.’”Although Bertram Cooper was a straight dramatic role, Mr. Morse got to return to his musical-comedy roots in his last episode, aired in the spring of 2014, when the character died — and then reappeared, in a fantasy song-and-dance sequence, to croon the old standard “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”“What a send-off!” Mr. Morse said. “The opportunity to shine in the spotlight that Matt Weiner gave me — it was an absolute love letter. Christmas and New Year’s, all rolled into one.”Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      ‘¿Y Cómo Es Él?’ Review: A Fraught Buddy Comedy

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      A jealous man tries to exact revenge on his wife’s lover, but ends up taking a road trip with him instead.“¿Y Cómo Es Él?”, a Mexican love-triangle comedy by the Argentine director Ariel Winograd, translates to “And What’s He Like?”“He,” we find out immediately, is Jero (Omar Chaparro), a taxi driver and businessman, who is the lover of Marcia (Zuria Vega), who is married to Tomás (Mauricio Ochmann).The film opens with Tomás, our edgy protagonist, scrutinizing pictures of a dashing hunk while on a flight to Puerto Vallarta.Tómas, unemployed, jealous and insecure, tells Marcia he’s traveling for a job interview. He’s actually on his way to kick Jero’s butt — or tase him, or blow him to pieces with a machine gun. These violent fantasies play out in comic bursts, but when faced with the opportunity to exact revenge, Tómas gets cold feet. Then, he accidentally stabs himself, passes out, and wakes up in his nemesis’s back seat.It turns out that Jero is a pretty nice guy — he even offers Tomás a ride back to Mexico City.Cue the fraught male bonding, which (predictably for this kind of straight guy buddy comedy) includes a trip to a brothel and run-ins with thuggish debt collectors.The film, a remake of a 2007 Korean film bluntly translated as “Driving With My Wife’s Lover,” will seem retrograde to contemporary viewers. In addition to homophobic quips, the premise relies on the idea that an adulterous wife is the greatest offense to a man’s dignity. As such, it caters to an older, more traditional Latino audience who might still be tickled by such a conceit — and for whom the cast, which includes Chaparro (a prolific comedian and singer), along with several other popular Mexican personalities, will be a draw.Though Winograd questions the film’s gender biases in the conclusion, he does so unconvincingly. At a quick 95 minutes, at least the whole thing zips by, however brainlessly.¿Y Cómo Es Él?Rated PG-13. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jerrod Carmichael Wears the Truth in His HBO Comedy Special

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      The comedian’s latest HBO special, which explores family secrets and sexual orientation, is as much a therapy session as a stand-up show.Of all that’s remarkable about Jerrod Carmichael’s latest comedy hour — the storied intimacy of the venue (the Blue Note Jazz Club), the spectral aptness of the lighting (kind of blue), the titanic silences, dental work that would thrill any neat freak — two aspects of this HBO special are especially exceptional. One is a matter of carriage. Carmichael is a stand-up comedian. But all he does in this new show is sit. The opening long shot follows him in the snow, headed toward the Blue Note, where he removes his coat and hat and promptly takes a seat upon the stage before a modest, expectant, engaged gathering of what Carmichael wants to feel is a family and what I can only call community support, because winter isn’t all he braves. For one thing, his long body is on a metal folding chair.Maybe these people have assembled for what they think is a typical Carmichael show — penetrating observations about being alive. They get those. But under the direction of Bo Burnham and a promise that there’s much to discuss, Carmichael goes deeper this time. “I need you,” he says. His theme is secrets. He’s kept his birth name one, more or less. His sexual orientation, too. The show gets its title from secret No. 1: “Rothaniel.” Secret No. 2 is trickier. Carmichael does some ruminating about the men in his family and their double lives — a family of whole other families. He maintained both his father’s secret and his own from his mother. So it’s also a show about shame.The secrecy had become a way of life. As had the shame. They’d been eating at him. And now — with cool humor, a masterfully straight face, disbelief that he’s doing this, disbelief that’s he actually gay — he’s rethinking what it might have cost and, by extension, how it feels to be that much closer to free.Through all of this, Carmichael’s in complete control of his digressive mind. In the middle of recounting a scheme to prepare his mother to learn about his father’s betrayal, he throws in a bit about being disappointed anytime his hibachi restaurant dinners are performed by anybody other than a Japanese chef. He feigns wonder that no one expects a gay child: “Look at his cheeks. I bet he’s going to be a top!”For most of the show, his legs are apart. Not a detail I’d mention in something with enough close-ups of its star to qualify as portraiture. But with about 20 minutes left, I’d noticed something that struck me, at least, as profound: Carmichael’s legs had gone from spread to crossed.Bo Burnham directed “Rothaniel,” in which Carmichael performs at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York.HBOOrdinarily, one might argue that this sort of adjustment was a sign of discomfort. It hit me as discomfort’s opposite. Carmichael is funny about what a shock he finds his homosexuality to be. That myth that hard dudes from the ’hood don’t succumb to gayness — he’d subscribed to it. But by the time he’s sitting there in one of this country’s primo landmarks of improvisation, innovation and artistic introspection — of incandescence and intensity — Carmichael no longer seemed to be doing a routine. He appeared to be thinking aloud, doing a kind of jazz, playing quietly through the changes, and all of that. The mere crossing of legs felt like a deeply felt gesture of relaxation — of release. The people in that room are witnessing his masculinity shift from shield to sponge.Well, they’re more than witnessing it. These people are here to help. Carmichael had come to them with stories that are still unfolding around and within him. He’s already told his devoutly Christian mother and doesn’t know, for instance, whether she’ll ever warm to this part of him. His candor here certainly elevates the degree of that difficulty. Why, he wonders, is she so cold? And some unidentified person in the ambient dark of the Blue Note asks, why not give her a little time to absorb his revelation? He considers that. Earlier, he absorbs a different spectator’s crack timing after he tells the room that he’s not hiding anything and someone blurts out: “But your name.” “Whoa,” he says. “Now you guys are too much like my family.”I watched this show on HBO Max in the wake of the clash at the Oscars. And the intimacy here between this audience and this comedian differs from the national shock therapy from a few weeks before. This was group therapy, a session as much as a show, but also a dinner party. The evening was as much about his biological family and this live, makeshift one as it was his professional kin. I didn’t need Carmichael to make that connection. It was there in what he wore.Eddie Murphy sported a red leather suit in the 1983 concert movie “Delirious.”HBO/Everett CollectionThat was the evening’s other remarkable detail. It’s just a red, long-sleeve polo sweater that he wears with a pair of gold chains, black loafers and dark slacks that are all but tucked into a pair of creamy-looking socks. He looks simultaneously ready for bed, the office and “The Santa Clause 5.” It’s soft, this sweater, light as a T-shirt and maybe a size too big, yet it hangs on his svelte frame like it’s on sale somewhere chic. You want one. But who’s going to wear it better, or more evocatively?The sweater’s the color of outfits his forefathers donned, in 1983, doing standup at and near their zeniths. Richard Pryor spends “Here & Now” in a drab green suit whose pants karate-belt in the front. The red shirt he pairs it with has two white buttons; the shoes match. The vibe here breaks radically from Carmichael’s. Pryor has to contend with a rowdy New Orleans audience that he enjoys taming. The interruptions never stop. And Pryor expertly, hilariously, fields so many incoming two-cent interjections that he’s as much a fountain as a superstar.But what Carmichael’s red shirt really brought to mind was Eddie Murphy’s red leather suit in “Delirious.” Murphy has the jacket unzipped to his navel, inviting you to take in the chained medallion that decorates his hairless chest. A black disco belt hangs unlooped so that the metallic arrowhead tip sits down at his crotch and doubles as a penis. It’s pure ostentation, as if a Ferrari had at last gotten its wish to become Rick James. Murphy prowls the stage like a lion — and mauls like one, too. “Faggots” are his opening move. He fearfully imagines servicing a gay Mr. T and acts out what kind of lovers the best buds on “The Honeymooners” would make. There’s more. But also less, judging, at least, from the stupendous droop of my mouth.I must have watched “Delirious” a dozen times before I was 10. I knew what my deal was and that “faggot” seemed to sum up and toxify it. I remember finding the middle section, about Murphy being little, a riot. (It still is, in part because he’d located something about the moments of joy in poor, Black childhoods that felt true for lots of other children.)The umbrage taken over “Delirious,” in some sense, is settled. Murphy earnestly atoned for his homophobic arias 26 years ago and called that material “ignorant” in 2019. But a memory’s a memory. And mostly what I remember is the suit, the red of it, the fire, the warning, the alarm: Don’t be like Mr. T in Eddie Murphy’s porno. And yet, it was never lost on me that, in a sense, all Murphy’s doing in this bit is offering a literal description of the sex men can have with each other. But in 1983, at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the alleged grossness of that intercourse — of gay people — is a rambunctious given. Murphy plugs his electric bewilderment into a packed concert hall’s socket. He presents his targets in their regular, manly personas — growling, gruff, goofy. He was 22 at the time, and what brings down the house during this spree of jokes is a panic about a virus of gayness and how it could infect someone as certifiably macho as Mr. T, a man awash in feathers, gold and vests.I DON’T KNOW how many times Carmichael has watched “Delirious.” I don’t know if he’s ever seen it, although the odds feel high that he has. (In his special, Carmichael permits us to laugh at the idea that his lips could be locked with another man’s while they whisper “no homo” to each other, in a state of prophylactic denial. The irony still blows him away.)Either way, his choosing such a passionate red for his televised coming-out sounded a different alarm for me. Murphy’s live-in-concert repulsion fantasias belie a tenderness that resides at the core of some of his work. To watch the early scenes between him and James Russo that set up the plot of “Beverly Hills Cop” is to wonder if the movie knows it’s a love story.Carmichael’s show makes the news because of the tender artistry at its core, but also because that repulsion remains pervasive enough in the culture — of comedy, of sports, of pop music, politics and movies — that the gay major-league baseball drama “Take Me Out” is somehow back on Broadway two decades after it opened, making its protagonist the country’s only openly gay professional baseball player. Again.Carmichael is 35, more than a dozen years older than Murphy in “Delirious.” He couldn’t have done this show at 22. Not with this much poise and self-fluency. Not with this much quiet. That sweater would have been wearing him. Now, it’s a garment of happiness and love, control and comfort. He is living up there in that sweater. (As remarkable: The armpits remain dry, and there’s no detectable undershirt, either. Has anyone ever left the Blue Note stage as sweatlessly?) The sweater’s also a tasteful rejoinder to Murphy’s high-voltage tastelessness, to the infernal scourge of inherited shame, a traffic sign of truth that says, “This has to stop.” More

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      Only Gilbert Gottfried Could Be So Dirty and So Heartbreaking

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      He turned shocking jokes and “Howard Stern” appearances into something of an art form, one he practiced even when the occasion was a school fund-raiser.Some comedians unfurl yarns in the unhurried mode of a jam band, others display the taut rhythms of pop or hip-hop. Gilbert Gottfried, who came of age in a fraught New York City and died on Tuesday at 67, always felt like punk in the classic CBGB mold: nervy, artful, deceivingly intelligent, a tad unhinged, and blissfully — beautifully — obnoxious.The juiciest moments of his decades onstage crackle with impish grandeur. Some bits are renowned, especially his appearance at a Friars Club roast in the weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, where he dared crack a 9/11 joke. Greeted with boos, the comic pivoted to a standard bit known as “The Aristocrats.” It proved so dementedly randy, in his giddy telling, that it seemed to levitate the crowd, Gottfried’s potty mouth momentarily washing away the tension and grief.Other times, he brought opportune lightning bolts to dopey TV fare. In one notorious clip from “Celebrity Apprentice,” the silky host tells the comedian, “Gilbert, I’m proud of you.” Gottfried stares down his latest mark. “Thank you, mein Führer,” he responds, characteristically more concerned about landing his joke than his odds in that season’s competition.Better still is the episode of “Celebrity Wife Swap” in which Gottfried — a notorious miser — parades around town with Alan Thicke’s horror-struck wife, treating the set more like a Marx Brothers film than a reality show. At one point, his date balks at being forced to eat a gratis meal in the Friars Club kitchen. “What are you, the queen of England?” Gottfried charges.Along with his strangely endearing stand-up act, the comedian found his mightiest platform through his years as a guest on “The Howard Stern Show.” These are tapes that should be rocketed into space to alert the galaxy of the brassy attitudes that lurk in our neck of the woods — perhaps they will scare any hostile aliens away. With the simpatico host, Gottfried is Rodney Dangerfield on “Carson” or Andy Kaufman on “Letterman”; his every appearance offers a glimpse of a berserk, quick-to-boil New York of yore.Remembering Gilbert GottfriedThe gravel-voiced comedian, whose credits ranged from the family-friendly “Aladdin” to the unfettered vulgarity of “The Aristocrats,” died on April 12.Obituary: Gilbert Gottfried’s manic, loudmouthed stand-up routines mixed old-fashioned borscht-belt shtick with cringeworthy vulgarity.An Appraisal: The comedian could bring opportune lightning bolts to anything from dopey TV fare to school fund-raisers.The Dirtiest Joke Ever Told: A Times columnist recalled Mr. Gottfried’s notorious 2001 performance of “The Aristocrats” not long after 9/11.Offstage Life: The world knew the comedian for his abrasive style. But to his wife, Dara, he was a “gentle genius.”Gottfried’s perhaps most fabled minutes on the show occurred one late-’90s morning when he wasn’t even scheduled to appear. A German-accented woman called in from Los Angeles. She explained that she worked as a babysitter for the filmmaker Amy Heckerling, who had dispatched her to pick up Gottfried from the airport. (He was too cheap for a cab.) The woman furiously recounted how, during the car ride, she had informed the comedian that her parents were Holocaust survivors. Is it any surprise that Gottfried immediately began cracking Holocaust jokes? Such was his superpower.Stern got Gottfried on the line. The comic sounded as if he was still in bed — but, like a samurai who has been attacked in his sleep and leaps to battle, he gamely began peppering the poor woman with more Holocaust jokes. Eventually, horrifyingly, the comic invoked the child the caller was babysitting: “Can she sit on my lap while you tell her about the Holocaust?” he queried. Like his later “Aristocrats” recital, it is a brilliant double negative: Gottfried follows one ghastly subject with something even more distasteful. The world thus gets contorted into a joke, the punch lines batting away our deepest woes.A few years ago, I wrote about these Stern show segments for my comedy zine, The Lowbrow Reader. The essay grew from a chance encounter I had with Gottfried at the home of Professor Irwin Corey, the anarchic comedian and the other subject of the piece. Corey was deep into his 90s but, like Gottfried, emitted riotous humor in his every step. It struck me that Gottfried provided the rare connection to the fabled funny men of a much earlier era: unrestrained, uproarious and often Jewish comics who were set on gaining a laugh at the expense of all else.The Lowbrow Reader was moribund at this point — we had recently published a book anthology, neatly ending our little run. But I so yearned to write about Gottfried, Corey and Stern that I revamped the magazine and essentially assembled an issue around the essay. Most thrillingly, Gottfried consented to let us publish two of his wonderfully eccentric drawings, which brimmed with devilishly grinning ogres, Dracula, a tiny Hitler and penises.I was fully aware that nobody cared about my stupid comedy zine’s rebirth, but it was a huge deal for me. I nervously picked up the issue from the printer, then went downtown to sell some copies to a record store, only to find it closed for the night. I headed to an event lugging a backpack full of zines — never a suave look — then walked home, depressed at having unloaded precisely zero copies.It was late at night on a misty Memorial Day weekend, and the city had emptied out. At 13th and Sixth, I waited for the light to change, sharing the corner with the only other pedestrian in sight. I side-eyed the man to make sure that he was not preparing to stab me. Then, I did a double take. It was Gilbert Gottfried.He didn’t know me from Adam, but I hurriedly thrust a copy of the publication in his confused face. “Great,” he said. “I long for somebody to write a big article about me, and then when it happens it’s in … this.”We slowly walked up Sixth Avenue to our mutual Chelsea neighborhood. His famous stage bray was muted, replaced by the oddly calming cadence later familiar to listeners of “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast,” his whipsmart showbiz series with Frank Santopadre. The roaring jokes and generous laughter remained. I like to think I can be funny enough when talking to my family and friends; walking with Gottfried, I felt like a weekend guitarist trying to jam with Hendrix.As we approached West 18th Street, a group of young women spotted the comedian and instinctively began laughing and, oddly, cheering. The comic gave a wave as he passed them. “Must be your article,” he said.Years later, my daughter enrolled in the same public elementary school as Gottfried’s two indisputably charming children, briefly overlapping with his youngest. Gottfried’s wife, Dara, was a P.T.A. hero — at her last meeting, she received a standing ovation — and she oversaw an annual comedy show to raise money for the school. Naturally, Gottfried would always perform.Although the show took place at a grown-up comedy club, the audience was essentially the crew from school: parents, some teachers, the principal. In a secular society, this can feel like one’s congregation. I had witnessed Gottfried’s club act. Surely, he would not be reciting his sex jokes for these gentle souls?Yet that would be like asking Pavarotti not to sing, or perhaps a dog not to bark. And so, Gottfried stood before his community, proudly screaming his fiercely idiosyncratic material. There were surrealist rants, crooked bits that gazed at the world in childlike wonder, and bizarre jokes that answered to their own logic. And, of course, there was riotously filthy, inconceivably revolting humor. It was all so irreverent it could break your heart. More

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      Let Him Entertain You: Billy Crystal Returns to Broadway

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      The comedian is starring in “Mr. Saturday Night,” a musical version of his 1992 movie about an aging performer who won’t accept that his time in the spotlight is up.“The worst nightmare is, do you wake up one day and you’re not funny anymore?” Billy Crystal, 74, said of the anxiety that comes with being an aging comedian. “Do you wake up and you’re not relevant?”Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesA funny thing happened in the rehearsal room of “Mr. Saturday Night” a few weeks ago. Billy Crystal was performing a scene from this new Broadway musical in which his lead character, an aging, out-of-touch comedian named Buddy Young Jr., has learned that he was mistakenly included in an in memoriam segment on the Emmy Awards.Invited to appear on the “Today” Show to correct the error, Buddy sees an opportunity to reclaim the spotlight he once commanded. With that motivation, Crystal turned to his co-star David Paymer, who plays Buddy’s endlessly loyal brother, Stan, and he began to sing a song about his deep yearning for a crowd’s attention:What I was, way back thenI could have that back againI could be — still could beThat guyIt’s an essentially comedic song, delivered in the warm, warbling voice we heard Crystal employ each year when he was a ubiquitous comedy star and a reliably genial Academy Awards host.“Mr. Saturday Night,” which opens April 27 at the Nederlander Theater, is a throwback to the era of Crystal’s hegemony in the 1980s and early ’90s, when he straddled the cultural landscape with his standup specials and hit films like “City Slickers” and “When Harry Met Sally…”Crystal as the out-of-touch comedian Buddy Young Jr. (who is mistakenly included in an awards show’s in memoriam segment) and Randy Graff as Buddy’s wife, Elaine, in the new musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe film version of “Mr. Saturday Night,” which Crystal starred in and directed in 1992, felt like a strange misstep at the time. Far from the eager rib-ticklers he was known for, Crystal — then 44, under layers of old-age makeup — played Buddy as a selfish curmudgeon who has alienated his family and refuses to accept that his career is over.Now 74, Crystal is not that guy — if he doesn’t enjoy the outsize dominance he once had, he doesn’t share Buddy’s desperation to reclaim it, either.Still, as Crystal told me a few days before the rehearsal, there is a certain pleasure he finds in revisiting this singularly disagreeable character: “To play him 30 years later, they actually have to make me younger,” he joked.But seriously, folks: Crystal explained that when he performs as Buddy in the stage musical, he isn’t weighed down by elaborate prosthetics or an aura of likability, and it brings a newfound ease to his performance.“When he’s cantankerous and edgy with people, it’s in front of a live audience,” he said excitedly. “I feel them get upset with him and I hear them go, ‘Ooh.’”Having lived long enough to match the character in age and to experience the kinds of setbacks and regrets that shaped him, Crystal understands that Buddy is not a bad guy. “He’s misunderstood and confused, bitter and regretful, and time is running out,” he said.This is the point where Billy Crystal and Buddy Young Jr. really intersect: at the realization that there is more life behind them than in front of them, and the anxiety that they might never again be as good as they once were.For himself, and for any comedian who cares about the art, Crystal said, “The worst nightmare is, do you wake up one day and you’re not funny anymore? Do you wake up and you’re not relevant? When does that happen?”He added: “There’s a magic about when it’s good, and when it’s bad, it’s really something incredible. There’s a terrible feeling of, I’m losing them.”“It’s not an Ahab thing — it’s not his white whale,” the screenwriter Lowell Ganz said of why Crystal is revisiting “Mr. Saturday Night.” “He has a real affection for the character because he loved those guys.”Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesNot that Crystal lets this fear keep him up at night — “I’m a bad sleeper, anyway,” he said. “I don’t need to worry about more than I’m worrying about” — but the best solution he has found is to focus on projects that put him to the test, like “Mr. Saturday Night.”“You’ve got to keep pushing ahead and not let anybody leave you behind,” he said.In early March, I met with Crystal at his spacious penthouse apartment in downtown Manhattan. Dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, he was a subdued but still quippy host as he showed off some of his artifacts: a desk nameplate for Dr. Benjamin Sobel, his “Analyze This” character; an enlarged photograph of celebrity guests at the 1937 Oscars. (“Even then, the show ran too long,” he said.)Crystal’s love of nostalgia and showbiz history helped inspire the character of Buddy Young Jr., a Don Rickles-like insult comic he played in segments on HBO specials and “Saturday Night Live” before giving him a full life in “Mr. Saturday Night.”That film, which he wrote with the “City Slickers” screenwriters, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, was Crystal’s feature-directing debut. Back then, becoming the wizened entertainer required five hours a day to put his old-age makeup on and another two hours to take it off: “They’d cut a hole in my bald cap and you’d hear, whooooosh,” Crystal recalled. “It was like Jiffy Pop.”Paymer, who also played Stan in the film, received an Oscar nomination. But the movie was a commercial dud, grossing just $13 million domestically. (“City Slickers,” by comparison, made $124 million.) “It was the biggest disappointment that it didn’t do well,” Crystal said.His film collaborators said that Crystal was especially stung by the failure because he had intended “Mr. Saturday Night” as a tribute to the tenacious golden-age comedians he grew up admiring.“It’s not an Ahab thing — it’s not his white whale, and I don’t think he deals in that kind of neurosis,” Ganz said. “But he has a real affection for the character because he loved those guys.”In the years after “Mr. Saturday Night” was released, Crystal entered a foreseeable cycle of hits and misses. (“Analyze This,” yes; “City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold,” no thank you.)This is Crystal’s first Broadway musical (he took voice lessons during the pandemic lockdown). His previous Broadway outing, the autobiographical one-man show, “700 Sundays,” won a Tony Award in 2005.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesHe had seemingly hosted his last Oscars in 2004, until he got called in to pinch-hit in 2012 — an act meant to bring some dignity back to the show after its co-producer Brett Ratner resigned after making offensive public remarks and his chosen M.C., Eddie Murphy, exited after him.Rather than coast to his own emeritus status, Crystal has lately appeared in projects that have paired him with younger stars: the short-lived FX series “The Comedians” with Josh Gad; modest existential comedy-dramas like “Standing Up, Falling Down” with Ben Schwartz; and “Here Today” with Tiffany Haddish.He remained on the lookout for new projects to engage him. In 2017, he toured with the actress Bonnie Hunt, at appearances where she interviewed him about his life and career. Though he was planning to shape this material into a new show, Crystal said he backed off the idea: “One word came to my mind that pulled me away from it — easy. It’s not a challenge.”He had already starred in his autobiographical one-man show, “700 Sundays,” whose original Broadway run won a Tony Award in 2005. At that time, he said Mel Brooks had approached him about being a replacement cast member in his musical “The Producers.” (As Crystal recounted the story, “I said, ‘Do I really want to be the eighth guy to play Max Bialystock?’ He said, ‘You won’t be — you’ll be the 12th.’”)Crystal in the 1992 movie.Entertainment Pictures/AlamyBrooks also raised the suggestion of a “Mr. Saturday Night” musical, which Crystal said he’d do only if Brooks starred in it. (A representative for Brooks’s production company confirmed their conversation.) This casting didn’t come to pass either, but Crystal continued to reflect on the idea for another decade.Around 2015, Crystal said he got serious about the musical. At that point, when he contemplated playing Buddy Young Jr., he said, “It’s easier.”By then, he’d also become more familiar with the whiplash oscillations of show business that were mostly speculative when he made the movie. “I’ve had ups and downs and sideways and middles, and the middles may be harder than the downs,” he said. “The middle, that’s the weird one, because you’re looking up and looking down at the same time.”Crystal, Ganz and Mandel wrote a new book for the musical, one that charts Buddy’s trajectory from Catskills dining-room cutup to TV star to washout, and the show features songs with music by Jason Robert Brown (“Parade,” “The Bridges of Madison County”) and lyrics by Amanda Green (“Hands on a Hard Body”).Its director, John Rando (“Urinetown,” “The Wedding Singer”), said that where the film used younger performers to flash back to Buddy’s earlier days, the actors in the musical will play their characters at every age. In his initial conversations with Crystal, Rando recalled, “I said I want to see Billy Crystal play his 20-year-old self and his 40-year-old self and his 70-year-old self. This is the theater and we should capitalize on that.”In workshopping the musical, Rando said that the overall size of the cast shrank from about 20 people to a more intimate group of eight. “That made us discover the real heart and pulse of the show, which is Buddy’s family, and how each of them relate to him,” he said. (The principal Broadway cast also stars Randy Graff as Buddy’s wife, Elaine, and Shoshana Bean as his estranged daughter, Susan.)But just as “Mr. Saturday Night” was nearly ready to go before audiences, the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 halted work on the show. Crystal hunkered down with his family in Los Angeles, finding that his quarantine at least provided the time to focus on other writing projects. “It gave me a discipline.”For Crystal, who hasn’t performed in a full-length musical since 1981 (when he played the master of ceremonies in a Kenley Players production of “Cabaret” in Ohio), this was also a period he spent working with a vocal coach and practicing his songs.When “Mr. Saturday Night” was at last able to have an out-of-town tryout at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., this past October, anxieties were running high. After hearing the audience clap and cheer for the show’s first performance, Crystal said he found Rando backstage and collapsed into his arms, crying with relief.“I felt like Dr. Frankenstein — it’s alive!” Crystal excitedly recounted. “We had a show.”Crystal on the set of the musical, which is in previews at the Nederlander Theater. Opening night is scheduled for April 27.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesCrystal remained a persistent presence through the Broadway rehearsals at Pearl Studios in Midtown Manhattan, sometimes wandering its narrow room to joke around with his cast and stoke morale, but always watching fastidiously for opportunities to make refinements.“He’s more serious than I thought he would be,” said Bean, who has previously starred in musicals like “Hairspray” and “Waitress.”“If it’s a scene that he’s not involved in, he does listen in,” she said. “He stands there with his little arms folded and he squints his eyes and he’s paying attention.”Bean added, “I live for the moments when I can get him to crack a smile or laugh. It’s like the sun comes shining through on you for two seconds. And I don’t know if he’s just being polite or if he really thinks that I have charm, but it’s the greatest.”Paymer, who has now performed “Mr. Saturday Night” onscreen and stage, said that Crystal is constantly striving to find ways to reinvent the musical and keep it distinct from the film.“I said to him last week, ‘Well, in the movie, we did this,’” he recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, that was the movie.’ That, to me, was freeing. I found myself giving the same line readings at times. And then I stopped myself from doing that — don’t go back to the movie and say things exactly the way you did then.”However long “Mr. Saturday Night” runs, Crystal said that the physical and psychic demands of the show are exactly what he is looking for at this point in his life — a self-explanatory rebuttal to any potential argument that he’s running out of steam or should be looking to pack it in.“If you just do the math, you could say, all right, there’s less time to do stuff,” he said. “But why look at it that way?” Though there’s no established path for a comedian to follow at this point in his career, Crystal added, “the exciting thing about it to me is that there is no road map.”And making this incarnation of “Mr. Saturday Night” has taught Crystal that there is still so much more he wants to make, if he can just pace himself.As he explained, in a voice that was familiar for both its shticky-ness and its sincerity, “I have too much to do and I’m in no rush. When you rush, you make mistakes. That’s the old excuse: ‘How’d you fall?’ ‘I was rushing when I shouldn’t have rushed. I didn’t read the thing. I tripped and I fell.’ So, I’m just going to take it as it comes.” More