COMEDY AWARD TO MAZURSKY

When Jerry Lewis won the Jack Oakie Award last year, he took every opportunity to tell us how great he is, or was. This year Paul Mazursky got the award. He didn’t tell us why. He showed us.

The award, established in 1981, is given annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy Foundation for comedy in film. Awards are always a chancy proposition, particularly in the entertainment industry, which preens in formalized self-congratulation.

But when you left the Mazursky retrospective Monday night, in which he spoke and showed clips from his films, you felt the academy had made a lovely choice.

Academy President Fay Kanin spoke briefly on the elusiveness of humor before Mazursky came on to tell us how it’s even worse than that--it’s impossible. But it happens anyway. Mazursky, 56, had started out as an actor and did stand-up comedy in Greenwich Village and the Catskills (he also played a particularly impecunious gig at a place called the Renaissance here in Los Angeles, with Lord Buckley also on the bill). A producer saw him in one club and hated him. He saw him in another, doing the same act, and loved him.

“The same thing that wasn’t funny three days ago was now funny,” Mazursky said.

You figure it out. That was also true of writing for the Danny Kaye show, Mazursky said. “What was funny on Monday was tragedy on Thursday.”

It never gets better, so you might as well raise the stakes. Mazursky took a gamble with Larry Tucker and left television to write and produce (as well as act in) “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas,” which came out in 1968. That did well enough for him to follow a year later with a cunning look at the middle-class fall-out from the flower generation, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” He was on his way.

Unlike his latest movie, “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” not all of Mazursky’s films have been commercially successful. Not all of them have even been uniformly very good. But the clips he brought with him showed us why he deserves everything he gets. There’s a tendency to lump him in with Woody Allen because he’s given his closest scrutiny to the urban Jewish middle class. But Mazursky is heartier, less self-lacerating, and if human nature mystifies or intrigues him, he still treats it with a greater degree of affection.

Mazursky’s views are more social than individually self-preoccupied; sex is up-front as well as discussed; he prizes unaffectedness, which is why animals tend to have important parts in his films, and he trusts the instincts of his actors, laying out the sketch and letting them fill in the colors (in ‘Bob & Alice,’ Elliott Gould does three or four different takes in the space of two seconds when his wife, played by Dyan Cannon, withholds her favors).

He’s a satirist with humanity. Your heart goes out to Robin Williams’ importunate Russian defector in “Moscow on the Hudson”--even while you’re laughing at him--in a way it didn’t when Williams played “The World According to Garp.” Mazursky found a way here of combining terror and hope in a Chekovian tenderness.

At a question-and-answer session after the film clips were shown, Mazursky said he had met resistance in depicting Jewish-American life. “For example, in ‘Next Stop: Greenwich Village,’ I originally had the two cantors sing in Hebrew, but I had to go back and have that dubbed,” he said. “Maybe they think it doesn’t play to the masses. The industry is anti-Semitic.”

We learned that the classic scene from “Alex in Wonderland”--in which an importunate producer gives a reluctant director the Chagall off his wall--was based on a meeting between director John Boorman and Sir Lew Grade. Boorman was genuinely reticent about committing to a Grade idea, but Grade kept raising his offering price, as though money were the issue.

Early in the program Mazursky read two definitions of humor from Webster’s dictionary. One affirmed a happy ending, and the other mentioned bodily fluids. Humor can be derisive, expedient, clever, insular, philosophical, base, utterly vapid or devastatingly cogent. It isn’t one thing, and it isn’t definable. The same is true of human nature. Paul Mazursky has the ability to see the one mirrored in the other, which has distinguished his career. If that’s not apropos, consider this: It takes a rare talent to make you feel better coming out of an awards program than you felt going in.

Mazursky did that, too.