How to Cook Up a Well-Done Roast : It Takes a Lot of Work to Leave ‘em Laughing at Comedy Benefit

“Hey! How about this one: ‘Frankie Laine’s so dull you go to stay with him when you want to be alone . . . ‘ “

“OK. Stick it in the Dull module. Any more Dull jokes?”

“Uh, just a minute . . . Oh boy. How could we fit this in: ‘There are no two ways about Ted Leitner . . . you either hate Ted Leitner, or you are Ted Leitner.’ Just change the name . . . naah. Wouldn’t work. Everybody loves Frankie Laine . . . could be a problem. How do you roast a guy everybody loves?”

That’s Gary Beals’ and Bob Ross’ problem. The two are sitting in Gary’s house/office in East San Diego, sweating over how to roast one of San Diego’s most famous immigrants. Chicago native Frankie Laine has agreed to be roasted for this year’s Rolf Benirschke Celebrity Roast, the seventh annual, which will be held Kona Kai Club Wednesday night to benefit the National Foundation for Ileitis and Colitis. Chargers kicker Benirschke, who has endured colitis, is honorary chairman of the foundation.

Beals and Ross are semi-professional comedians. There’s something of the Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum in them. Beals is lean and mean and nervy with a black Sheriff of Nottingham jawliner beard and a wicked twinkle to the eye. Ross is all ginger-haired, roly-poly and cuddly, but with the pressure of the man of middle years who plays his sports too hard.

Each man has his hoard of jokes. Beals on his computer discs; Ross in an array of small card files and joke books.

They’re working together, but there’s just a little sense of competition, too. Each has his own stock, as well as his own sense of humor. Both are members of the National Speakers’ Assn., an educational forum for public speakers. Gary Beals offered his skills to act as “humor engineer”--a behind-the-scenes organizer--for this roast. He called on the skills of his friend Bob, who’s known as “Mr. Roast” in San Diego.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, they were brainstorming jokes to offer to Frankie Laine’s tormentors for the night: Jonathan Winters, Bob Crosby, San Diego Police Chief Bill Kolender and radio personality Don Howard.

It’s a little delicate. There are the roasters’ professional egos to consider. People with individual senses of humor, with their own relationship with Frankie to draw on. But Beals, in particular, is determined that the evening shall not become a boring line of in-jokes, or too blue, or too personally injuring to Frankie Laine, who has been generous enough to lay himself open to personal slings and arrows all evening.

“I’ve been to so many roasts where people either ramble or get too risque for a mixed audience or tell stories that only the roastee would appreciate,” Beals said. “Roasts are mainly for audiences . . . That’s why long stories should be out. One-liners. That’s what it should be. A string of one-liners with the roastee’s name attached. Of course sticking to the real events of his life--and more important, his actual foibles--is important, but above all the roastee acts as a kind of catalyst, an excuse for an evening’s fun.”

Beals and Ross have been hunched up around Beals’ MacIntosh computer in a corner of Beals’ office most of the morning. “Dull Jokes” heads the list on the computer screen. Ross leans uneasily out of an easy chair, fingering through a plastic card-file labeled “Dull.” Another box sits nearby labeled “Fat.” Next to that is “Aging.” Another file is color-coded: green cards, jokes heard on TV; yellow cards, “Savers,” and blue cards--for blue jokes.

“How about this one,” Ross says suddenly, “ ‘Frankie’s so dull that when he used to play ‘doctor’ as a kid, he always wanted to play the . . . optometrist . . . ?’ No?”

Beals shakes his head.

“Well, maybe ‘Frankie’s so dull he went to Halloween dressed as an insurance salesman.’ ”

“So’s the joke,” Beals says without looking away from his screen, “What about Age?”

Ross fiddles into the Age box.

“Uh, ‘When you talk to Frankie about a rock group he thinks you mean Stonehenge.’ ‘Frankie drinks his martini with a prune in it.’ Oh. How about this: ‘Frankie’s so old he doesn’t even dare buy green bananas.’ ”

Roasts have been getting more popular in San Diego in the last few years. Of course, they have been around for a long time. Humorously insulting after-dinner speeches became a tradition in Europe and the Americas around 1850. Mark Twain is suspected of being an active advocate of them about a century ago. In this century, the Friars Club in New York brought the roast to its present state of refinement--with recent help from Dean Martin.

“The main thing,” says Beals, “is that material should have a bit of a bite to it--we call them ‘mild zingers’--but that they should be at heart good-natured. Not really wounding. Insults should be parodies of insults. There should be an illusion of friction. The spirit of the event should be sassy.

“As roastmaster Joey Adams said years ago, ‘If you can’t say anything nice--let’s hear it!’ But the main thing is you’re roasting some guy because you love him. It takes skill to get that balance.”

“The thing about humor and audiences,” says Ross, “is that you’ve got to structure it properly. All spontaneity has to be well planned and disciplined. Unless you’re the type who’s funny just in the telling itself, you’ve got to make it brief. Every unnecessary word slackens the tension.”

“That’s it,” says Beals, “all humor is tension and relief, tension and relief.”

“OK,” Ross says, “Let’s get serious about Fat jokes.”

Beals whirrs through his floppy disc. Ross flips through his cards. There’s silence for a moment.

“Ha! How about this: ‘Frankie Laine used to be a lifeguard but he gave up. He got harpooned too many times.’ ” Ross looks up.

“Great!” Beals says, “though maybe a touch deprecating. What about ‘but they kept pushing him back into the water.’?”

“Whatever. Oh, and ‘Frankie Laine is so fat his bathtub has stretch marks.’ Hee, hee! That’ll be a Three.

“You know, I score everything. Every time I give a speech I tape it. Afterward, I listen back to it and I score every joke based on audience response. A Three is Rock ‘Em in the Aisles. Two is a respectable laugh. One is when they stare back up at you like a pool full of carp.”

“Like a tree full of owls,” says Beals.

It’s obvious that they have both faced those owls and carp.

“OK,” Beals says. “Now let’s remember we’ve got to share these (with) all four roasters. And we’ve got to remember the roastmaster will need some, and we’ve got to keep Frankie’s rebuttal in mind.”

“Now one thing we’re going to have to do is check with Frankie as to what’s off limits. Like, we’re going to have to be careful with lines like ‘He’s on the critical list at Weight Watchers.’ You know he’s just had a quadruple by-pass operation. It’s made him a lot thinner than he was before. Maybe the Fat jokes won’t work any more, even if they don’t worry him.

“Plus we must check all the other things I’ve targeted from his bio. Chicago childhood. Sicilian background, the fact he’s been singing since the dinosaurs. His weight. His age. Going bald.”

“You know, it’s a funny thing,” Ross says, “humor is an emotion, and yet what sparks a laugh is actually intellectual. Not emotional. You’re playing tricks with their normal responses, their logic, their left brain and their right brain.”

“Yes,” says Beals, “but it’s also visual. You’ve got to be able to picture it. And also it’s got to have a human element. A little bit of real life, real hurt preferably. By piercing it, facing it, you burst the boil. Tension and relief. Our great humorists, like Mark Twain, Will Rodgers--they always had real life in their tales.”

Time is pressing. It’s 2 o’clock already. Ross wants to go play tennis.

“We’re lucky,” Beals says. “The roasters are experienced. But don’t kid yourself that there’s such a thing as a spontaneous roast. They say there are three ingredients essential to a successful roast: writers, writers and writers.”

A few days later, Beals and Ross meet with Jerry G. Bishop, “Sun-Up San Diego” co-host, at the Kona Kai Club on Shelter Island. This is where the roast is to take place Oct. 1.

Bishop is seated next to the grizzled Homeric figure of Frankie Laine, surrounded by the fidgeting faces of the two humor engineers. The breeze is blowing the pages of the “humor modules” about in their hands.

“You mean we’re supposed to read these out?” says Frankie.

“No, no,” Beals says from behind his stack of modules. “These are ideas for you to use. To extrapolate from.”

“Take what you like, and let me know what doesn’t hit your funny bone, and I’ll take it back and share it out to the others,” he says. Frankie and Bishop agree to meet at Bishop’s Seaport Village cafe and rehearse the material. They don’t seem utterly convinced that their own spontaneous reactions on the night wouldn’t be better than someone else’s prepared jokes. But Beals hasn’t done all this work for nothing.

“Just remember some of the other more recent roasts, like last year’s. A very qualified success. The San Diego Chicken Roasting--not well thought out. It wasn’t great. And that was because of the preparation,” Beals said.

This meeting excludes the roasters, because Beals wants to make sure that they don’t get to see the rebuttal material he’s giving to Laine.

The talk drifts naturally back to Laine, and his life in Chicago, where his father was personal barber to Al Capone, where Frankie earned money in marathon dances, and then broke through to a career that sold 115 million records--one of the five top sellers of all time. He looks strong and fit for 73.

“Oh, Frankie,” says Beals, “I’ve got to ask you. Is there anything off limits? Chicago? Sicily, your heart operation? Your former size?”

Frankie shakes his head. “Nope. In fact the more heart jokes you can get in the better. It’s always good to try and take the fear out of that. I think what they did to me was fantastic. Besides, if it’s Bob Crosby, Jonathan Winters, Bill Kolender, hell, they know me as much as I know them. They know the best subjects.”

“Ah, yes,” says Beals, “Jonathan Winters might not be on. Movie commitments. He says he’s trying.”

“Well, I don’t care who else is coming but please invite Father Joe Carroll, to say the invocation. That man . . . when my mother died, he came all the way up to Burbank to take care of her. He was fantastic. Whenever he wants something--he’s got it. So if you could, try to make it possible for him to come.”

Two days later, the roasters get a look at their scripts. Or two of them do. Jonathan Winters has pulled out. Bob Crosby won’t be coming down till the night before the roast.

Don Howard’s sitting in his open-necked check shirt hunched over the script his wife has helped him type. Large chunks of it come from the “module” Beals has sent him. Howard has done his homework.

Opposite him, Police Chief Bill Kolender sits in a smart gray suit, white shirt and striped tie with the module Beals has sent, untouched. This is supposed to be a rehearsal. There’s going to be a small problem. Howard reads out his script and gets plenty of laughs from the group. Kolender shuffles his papers.

“The way I see it, we don’t want to draw things out into great long pieces,” Kolender says. “Two or three minutes should be great. There are some good lines here, but I’ve never roasted anyone from a script, and I’ve done dozens of them.”

“Chief, you and I have seen some roasts that were the worse for lack of scripting and preparation,” Beals says. “I really believe in short, tight gags, sequentialized, worked up. That way 10 minutes slips by like greased lightning.”

It’s a touchy moment. Both are experienced men. Kolender is a natural wit, a natural speaker. He doesn’t need someone else’s wit to tell him how to roast Frankie Laine.

“Chief, chief, gimme a break will you? Just read out the stuff, and see how it works. Then use what does and ditch the rest.”

“Hey,” says the chief, “Frankie should have some police jokes to throw back at me. Like what a difference I have made since I took over. Sex crimes down. Mugging down. Car thefts down . . . and that’s just in the police department.”

Soon the laughs are rolling again. Jokes are being jotted. Ideas spawned.

Father Joe Carroll is subpoenaed to appear as the fourth roaster. Beals and Ross realize they haven’t had their rehearsal, they haven’t got the tight, disciplined program they were working for. But they also realize they’re dealing with pros. People they can only suggest ideas to, not bulldoze.

They agree to meet at 6:30 on the night of the roast to coordinate their material so they don’t overlap.

Beals is about to take off for Hawaii and Ross to Australia. Neither will be back till the night before. But somehow nobody’s worried. An atmosphere has been created.

The National Foundation for Ileitis and Colitis has collected about $300,000 in its seven years of roasts. It has also helped to refine the ancient art of roasting on the West Coast. And who knows, Frankie Laine may find out more about himself and who his friends are than he ever could in a month of concerts. And Rolf Benirschke may have his best roast yet.

“Hey,” yells the chief, as they take off toward the Harbor Drive, “You know how Frankie’s wife cured Frankie of biting his nails?”

“No,” says Beals.

“She hid his teeth. See you Wednesday.”