Learning to Say Aha at Ha-Ha : Humor Is Just What the Doctors Ordered as Sons of Sid Caesar, Steve Allen Make Conference a Family Affair
Imagine buttonholing Beethoven, after an initial reading of his Ninth Symphony, and saying, “So, Ludwig . . . how about letting us in on how you dreamed that one up, huh?”
Or opening with, “Tell me, Dr. Einstein, this time-space continuum thing . . . how do I explain it to my 8-year-old?”
Humor is worse. Because if exhaustive analysis of choral symphonies and quantum physics sounds like a murderous bore, try turning the same trick on the subject of humor: What is funny, why it is good for you, and how you, too, can be hilarious.
There is danger there, like watching the Dr. Ruth show and discovering afterward that you are out of the mood.
Given that, what could have happened when Steven Allen Jr., MD, and Richard Caesar, MD, sat down to talk about being funny might have been . . . not funny.
Fortunately, at the sixth annual conference on “The Power of Laughter and Play,” Allen and Caesar brought their fathers, who in turn brought a bulb horn and the U.N., respectively--of which more later.
The doctors’ dads, incidentally, are Steve Allen and Sid Caesar, two of the funniest humans on the planet.
The occasion was the opening night of a four-day conference at the Disneyland Hotel, mainly for health care professionals, on how to use humor as a healing agent. The conference, presented last month by the San Francisco-based Institute for the Advancement of Human Behavior, drew an estimated 1,300 participants from throughout the West, most of whom attended the Allens’ and the Caesars’ “Healing Entertainers and Entertaining Healers” presentation.
It was neither stand-up comedy nor sit-down lecture, but a curious amalgam of the two: a couple of funny guys and their doctor sons (who are also funny) talking about how people feel better when they laugh. Sit-down comedy, with slightly medical overtones.
So, how does one get to be funny? Hang out with the right crowd, said the elder Allen.
“With me, humor is sort of an affliction,” he said. “I came from a funny family, with everyone joking every second or two. I grew up thinking that was how people communicated.”
Steve Jr., who breaks up easily listening to his dad, said his jobs as a family physician and a teacher in New York were helped by growing up around comedy.
“The better you are as a comedian or a showman,” he said, “the more likely you will be a good teacher. Also, as you notice, I have that same high cackle (as my father). Dr. Ruth Westheimer has it, too.”
The younger Allen said he spent a good amount of his childhood trying to crack up his father, and finally got good enough to do it most of the time.
“But you’ve never wet your pants or fallen out of the chair,” he told Steve Sr. “As you’ve done with Sid. Actually, I stopped trying to make you laugh when I found I could make you laugh. (You have) the most infectious laugh on TV.”
“Not that we need another infection right now,” said Allen Sr.
The Caesar household was less funny during Rick Caesar’s childhood. His father, Sid, the brilliant physical and dialect comedian of early television’s “Your Show of Shows,” suffered from depression and alcoholism, from which he since has recovered.
“I was making a movie in Paris with Peter Sellers,” said Sid Caesar, “and I was in my hotel room, and I took a tape recorder and said, ‘Sid, this is Sidney. You’re not having any fun. Why? And if you don’t have any fun, I’m not going to have any fun. So what do you say we get together and have some fun?’ ”
“They charged him double for the room,” said Allen Sr.
Caesar still uses the technique of talking to himself on tape each day and, according to his son, saves every tape for possible later reference, as reminders to have real fun with his life, not simply be a comedian.
“There’s something magic about saying words like that,” said Rick, an emergency room physician who practices in Portland, Ore. “There are certain things you need to hear and . . . they may make a difference coming from you. (My father) is the most transformed human being I’ve ever come in contact with. The healing effect (on our family) has been the ultimate.”
Life could be rugged for the Caesar family during Sid’s darkest days, said Rick, but they coped with laughter.
“We found our own sense of humor,” he said. “I don’t know if there was a humorous spiral of DNA in us somewhere or if it was just an escape from bleakness into silliness. Humor doesn’t eliminate pain, but it does lessen the suffering from that pain.”
In his television days, Sid said he was “so busy doing comedy, I had no time for humor. I couldn’t laugh at myself for a long time . . . and I lost the fun of doing the show. But I found out that depression is ‘I can’t.’ Laughter is ‘I can.’ ”
And, said Rick with a deadpan look at his father, “if someone is not able to laugh at himself, it’s up to us to do it for him.”
Which, of course, broke Sid up.
There was, to the delight of the audience, what could be called the nuts-and-bolts moments during the evening, the occasional flights of fancy on How To Be Funny.
“You take a ridiculous situation and make it believable,” said Sid. “You make it bigger than life.” He told a story of a father who takes his son to the movies on a bitterly cold day, and, before the two enter the theater, the father falls to the task of unbundling the boy. He takes off several scarfs, stocking caps, a parka, an overcoat, shirts, mittens, boots.
“And when he gets all the clothes off,” said Caesar, “there’s no child there.”
Allen Sr. paid homage to a favorite cartoon by his favorite cartoonist, Orange County’s Virgil Partch, who, he said, “would take a common expression and make it literally real.” He recalled one panel that pictured a man walking down a street who has not noticed that his companion has just sprawled lifeless behind him in the gutter. In front of him is an extremely unpleasant-looking woman.
The man’s comment: “Boy, if looks could kill, huh, George?”
Funny situations often follow funny people, said Steve Jr. He told of a cab ride he once took in Buffalo during which the cabbie complained that Kenny Rogers had stolen one of his songs. The only things, he said, that were different about the Rogers version of the song were the title, the music and the words.
“Only by being a member of my family would I find that cab driver,” said Allen.
Actually, said Allen Sr., “I have never met a totally humorless person, and I don’t believe there is such a person.” In fact, he went on, most lay people can eclipse the pros in one significant way.
“Most professional comedians,” he said, “are terrible at telling funny stories (as opposed to a set comedy routine). It’s quite a separate art. If you’re good at that, you’re better than maybe 98% of the professional comedians.”
Humor must be watched closely in some situations, however, he said, because “everything in the universe can produce evil as well as beneficial effects. We live in a very weird universe.”
Said Steve Jr.: “The ‘MASH’-type of humor, with sex, war, infidelity, blood and pain, and in the middle of it all Hawkeye walks through the OR with the Groucho nose and glasses and says, ‘That’s the most ridiculous wound I’ve ever seen’--that can be beneficial. There’s an awkwardness health care people have about making fun of patients. I think it can be quite helpful, but if it’s not done right it can be quite destructive.”
When it goes wrong, said Sid Caesar, it’s called sick or shock humor.
“It’s detrimental not only to language and society . . . it becomes a crutch,” he said. “You say, ‘OK, I heard the (obscene) word. Now let’s say something funny.’ ”
So what’s really funny? Orange juice, nose noises and Japanese, if audience reaction was any indication.
Recalling former yuks at the Allen family dinner table, Steve Sr. lifted a glass of orange juice and said, “You can make a funny drinking sound, and people will laugh at that kind of nonsense.” He followed that by sipping the juice with a sort of gurgling squeak, convulsing the audience.
“And you don’t have any better sense than (my family) did,” he said.
Another famous Allen gag involved, simply, the beeping of a small, hidden bulb horn as the comedian tweaked his own nose. He demonstrated and, again, the audience collapsed.
“But,” he said, pointing to Sid Caesar, “if you want to see someone like Norman Cousins rolling around helplessly on the floor, just ask (Sid) to speak in a foreign language. Of course, you have to know that Sid doesn’t speak any languages.”
Caesar then carried on an animated one-sided conversation with Allen in bogus Italian, Russian and Japanese (during which he appeared to be the perfectly assured linguist while spitting out only the names of Japanese auto manufacturers).
But it was Allen who came up with the quickest retort, and perhaps the best advice of the evening.
A written question from the audience arrived on stage: “Any humorous suggestions for someone living alone?” Allen didn’t miss a beat.
“Come on over,” he said. Nearly 1,300 people thought it was a pretty good idea.
CLASSES ON HUMOR
The idea of healing the whole person by first treating the funny bone hasn’t been lost on several Orange County educators and educational institutions. County colleges and their community service branches have offered a variety of classes dealing with the subject of humor. Some classes are ongoing, others sporadic and still others are one-nighters, but the message is the same: It’s fun to be funny, and it makes you feel better in the bargain.
Among the offerings:
How to Have a Life-Long Love Affair With Your Spouse
A single-night workshop on revitalizing your marriage through, in part, the use of humor. Taught by Lola and Hank Gillebaard, who have taught classes on humor at Coastline Community and Saddleback colleges, the workshop will be held Tuesday from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. in Room 121 of Fountain Valley High School, 17816 Bushard St., Fountain Valley. Course fee is $22. Sponsored by Coastline Community Services of Coast Community College District, the workshop carries no class credits.
Humor in Literature
Taught by Gary Hoffman, a professor of English at Orange Coast College. Offered as a credit class in the current semester. Hoffman said the course, which examines different forms of humor from Chaucer to Woody Allen, is expected to be offered again “from time to time.”
Humor in America
Currently taught as a humanities course at Golden West College by Anna Marie Thames, it will be offered again in the fall semester as a three-hour-a-week, three-unit course. It is described as examining “comedy American style, in literature, film, old radio shows, records and other media.”
Humor in Health Care
Taught by Vera Robinson, a retired faculty member of the school of nursing at Cal State Fullerton. The class, Robinson said, is primarily an extension course for nurses, but others are invited to attend. The non-credit course will likely be offered through the Cal State Fullerton extended education office in January, she said. The fee for the one-day, eight-hour class, Robinson added, will be around $45.
Exploring Humor
Scheduled to be offered in October, this Rancho Santiago College class examines humor as a tool to fight depression, anxiety and other personal ills. It is a one-time, two-hour class taught by Joyce Earl, a marriage, family and child counselor who is on the college faculty. The class fee is expected to be $10.