![]() Ward piles some cold spinach linguine onto a plate and stands in the middle of the kitchen, shoveling it in while I wax on about the Hollywood School, Dean Amsterdam, and comedy theory. The perfect guy to help me prepare for Morey Amsterdam. He comes down the stairs wearing a pair of those goofy fake eyeglasses, where the plastic eyeballs, attached to slinky springs, dangle grossly at cheek level. His wife, Celeste, is out when I arrive, and he's just put his 3-year-old son Robbie to bed. ![]() In spite of his literary pedigree, Ward is one of those truly manic comic geniuses who is always loud, always outrageous, always on. Once an acclaimed intellectual novelist from Baltimore, he'd tired of being poor and defected to Hollywood nine years earlier to write TV scripts. With time to kill before the next day's interview with Morey, I drive up through the Hollywood Hills, north of Los Angeles, to the Laurel Canyon home of a friend, Bob Ward. Unlisted perhaps? To guard against a daily flood of unsolicited bad jokes? In Los Angeles I check the phone book but find no listing for the Hollywood School of Comedy Writing. He spends five wired hours alternating a wearying barrage of one-liners with chapters from a tragic story that many fringe comedians know all too well: Neither his boss nor his wife thinks he is the least bit funny. I grab the next flight to Los Angeles and sit beside a glib sportswriter heading for the coast to cover a baseball game. His thrilling response is brief, but rich with that familiar, sarcastic Buddy Sorrell chuckle: "Sure. I track him down by phone, and in a cloying blurtation of hero worship, beg for an audience. Naturally, I laugh, for the boss is coming right out of Lesson 14: the Misunderstanding Element.Īnyway, the first thing I do is confirm that Morey, now 85, is still well and residing in good humor in Beverly Hills. "I thought you were just gonna make a few phone calls," he gasps as he looks up from my expense statement. In an inspiring moment of journalistic courage, the editor of our Existential section gives the OK for my quest - although there is a very minor flap later. Given the rapid spread of my bald spot, I figured the extra hair would be a nice bonus. They came back with wisdom and lots more hair. My role model is the Beatles, who went out to the Himalayas and asked the maharishi for the words to some good songs. I longed to understand the cosmic mysteries of comedy: Why is funny funny? How does one become funny? Am I funny enough? Somewhere in those Hollywood Hills I knew I could find the answers. Plus, somebody else paid the way.įor years I nursed the dream of going out to Hollywood and divining comedic truth from my mythical dean, Morey Amsterdam. Why did Burton search for the Nile? Why did Amundsen trek t the South Pole? Why did McGuire seek Amsterdam? The answer is simple: It was their destiny. And to wonder when I would really get serious about being funny. I revered them like Holy Scripture, removing them occasionally from their box just to hold them and think of Buddy Sorrell. But even as fortune and deadlines led me from city to city, time zone to time zone, decade to decade, I whittled out my niche as one of those comedians without portfolio: the office banjo player, the monologist at every going-away party, the lunch-table gagster, the person most likely to show up at a stuffed-shirt event wearing a gorilla suit.Īnd wherever I went, I faithfully bore the baggage of those dozen slim, spiral-bound books. Thus did my alternate career as a sober-minded newspaper reporter begin. And with a family on the way, I reluctantly realized I had better get serious. There also was no room for me at his paper. "There is no room in newspapers," he trembled gravely, "for comedy." Fresh out of college with a journalism degree, I brashly told a managing editor at a job interview that my goal was to write comedy. But by then I was a committed comedian, writing a humor column in the college paper and acting the clown as a campus disc jockey. ![]() I finished only two volumes of the course before I went off to college, and then never seemed to find time to complete the rest. ![]()
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