SHOW-AND-TELL FROM A ‘SHOW OF SHOWS’ MAN

The host resembled the quintessential academic--tall, spare, graying and bespectacled; he fumbled with his papers and deferentially probed his guest with weighty questions. His black pullover sweater seemed his only concession to the setting, a UCLA Extension course on TV sitcoms that runs through Jan. 28.

The guest--writer-producer Garry Marshall--did well, showing tapes and outtakes of one of his biggest successes, “The Odd Couple,” and informing the class that the successful sitcom requires a solid premise, good acting, a strategic time slot, a difficult-to-define and impossible to anticipate conjunction with historical moment, and luck.

The host never intended to bring attention to himself; he was, in fact, almost painfully shy and peered anxiously as though Marshall might at any moment whip out a Saturday Night Special and shoot up the classroom. There was one moment, however, so unlike anything else that it was as though someone had accidentally piped a fragment of startling music into the room. The host was decribing a memorable group of crazies with whom he had worked on a phenomenally successful comedy show. He briefly noted each of their eccentricities, and added, “and there I was at the center of it all, a Ukrainian with a death wish.”

The moment came and went without further mention, but it represented a quiet epiphany. Mel Tolkin was the host. The group he mentioned was the writing corps for Max Liebman’s “Your Show of Shows,” one of the great mother lodes of modern TV (and to some extent movie) comedy which, in conjunction with the later “Caesar’s Hour,” launched the careers of (in addition to Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca and Howard Morris) Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil and Danny Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen, Tony Webster, Joe Stein, Lucille Kallen and Michael Stewart.

As head writer, Tolkin was indeed at the center of the maelstrom of high-octane talent compacted in a room (whether or not the story is apocryphal, it seems plausible that at one point the physically powerful Caesar angrily hung the diminutive Brooks out of a window by his heels). Tolkin wrote the fabled party scenes for Brooks and Carl Reiner which culminated in “The 2,000 Year Old Man,” and played straight man for Brooks at the historic 1959 gathering of New York show-biz, press and publishing celebrities at Momma Leone’s to honor Moss Hart.

The late Kenneth Tynan was on hand to report part of their exchange, in which Tolkin played interviewer to Brooks’ Famous Psychoanalyst.

“Q.: You’re an analyst, sir, and you never heard of an Oedipus Complex?

A.: Never in my life.

Q.: Well, sir, it’s when a man has a passionate desire to make love to his own mother.

A. (After a pause): That’s the dirtiest thing I ever heard. Where do you get that filth?

Q.: It comes from a famous play by Sophocles.

A.: Was he Jewish?

Q.: No, sir, he was Greek.

A.: With a Greek, who knows? But with a Jew, you don’t do a thing like that even to your wife, let alone your mother.”

“Max Liebman, who was the real creator of ‘Your Show of Shows,’ used to say, ‘What makes you breaks you,’ ” Tolkin observed. Some people, including Caesar himself, never again achieved those heady successes. Tolkin went on to write for Danny Kaye, Danny Thomas and Bob Hope, and was story editor for “All in the Family.” He has an Emmy and seven nominations, four Writers Guild Awards and a Humanitas Prize. At 73, he’s slowed down some, but he’s at work on a book on humor, and makes his occasional forays into teaching and lecturing on the underlying elements that make comedy work.

In person, Tolkin appears even more quixotically preoccupied than he does behind a lectern; his head seems enveloped in whorls of thought whose contours he traces with a pedagogical index finger. His conversation operates on at least three discernible levels at once, where impulse is verbalized, caught in mid-sentence (often structurally inverted), edited, judged for its accuracy in his own mind, then commented on for how it will seem to someone else.

“I have a theoretical turn of mind,” he said. “An amazing amount of people in power in television and comedy are intellectuals. Brooks reads quite a lot; so does Neil Simon. They’re highly intelligent men who have a knack for making jokes. I think about comedy itself as much as I think of jokes. Comedy is energy. Comedy is truth distilled. You should not belittle a joke. A good joke has a certain rhythm; the right wording is essential; it sums up. Humor is anger recollected in hysteria.”

If there’s such a thing as a prototypical comedy writer, Tolkin isn’t it. His Beverly Hills house is filled with objets d’art, including pen and ink drawings, African wood sculptures and Wedgwood. A baby grand piano occupies a corner of the living room, and for the visitor Tolkin willingly plays Mozart, Chopin, show-tune parodies and his own compositions. (He created the jaunty theme for “Your Show of Shows.”)

“I’ve always had great respect for sitcoms,” he said, by way of explaining why he’s teaching this course. “There’s no question that there’s an unbelievable amount of crap on the air. But there’s a certain expertise even in that--sitcoms take the place of what was once known as the well-made play. They maintain suspense; what cheapens them isn’t craft, it’s the banality and repetitiveness of their themes. ‘The Honeymooners’ was a great show because Ralph Kramden’s poverty was heightened by a real sense of shame. The cliches of that show smelled of truth.

“Sitcoms have to have plausibility. The first time I saw the Bill Cosby show I saw something fresh--a father absolutely in charge. It didn’t follow the modern thinking that the father is always a fuddy-duddy who has to learn from his children--which is a lie. When he said to his misbehaving son, ‘I brought you into the world and I can take you out,’ that was brave--it threw all the liberal psychobabble out the window. However, lately I see him getting back to the old liberal daddy. He doesn’t raise his voice. But it’s still a tremendous show; it’s got the big key: Identification.

“ ‘Moonlighting’ I think is beginning to run its course because the connecting theme is ‘Will the two stars go to bed?’ Somebody made the remark the other day, ‘Four years of foreplay is too much.’ ”

Recalling the pandemonium of their working days together, Sid Caesar offered this note, “Mel Tolkin stood by the window contemplating suicide.” The image contains a certain emotional if not literal accuracy; Tolkin is a visibly pained man to whom humor offers surcease.

“I was born in the Ukraine in 1913. I can say now I’ve lived under the czar, Lenin, Stalin and Ronald Reagan. My father was a small businessman. My mother was a professional midwife. It was a terrible situation in those days. We lived through a couple of pogroms. Our house was bombed a couple of times.” The family emigrated to Canada when Tolkin was 12. Later he joined the Army, where, he adds, with a straightforward expression that needs no further adornment, he played the glockenspiel. At McGill University Tolkin took up accounting, a major at which he was miserably inept. He took in Broadway as much as he could and kept up his songwriting. He was working in an adult camp called Camp Tamiment; the show he wrote there with Lucille Kallen was, Tolkin says, picked up nearly intact by Max Liebman for Liebman’s revue.

Tolkin is a social critic who sees America’s mounting identification with Rambo-ism as an outgrowth of the erosion of individual accountability. “I see in our social thinking a residue of psychoanalysis which removes guilt while destroying authoritarian figures,” he said, beginning to pace the room. “You’re never guilty, only sick. The question of good and evil isn’t alive in individual conscience today. Religion tells you that what happens is preordained. Marx says it’s all the product of class struggle. Psychoanalysis excuses by explaining--the meaning of violence loses its horror when you can say ‘he wasn’t loved by his mother or father.’ We’re living in a time of great intellectual rigidity.”

And how does he reconcile these thoughts with creating humor?

“Please don’t make me sound pompous. I’m an outsider. I’ve been an outsider all my life. In Russia I didn’t belong because I was a businessman’s son. In Canada I was a Russian. I was an accountant who wanted to be a songwriter. I’m a constant immigrant in this world.” Tolkin was surely speaking of himself when elsewhere he said, “The insider takes life for granted. The outsider sees the foolishness or the cruelty in it.”