Always Leave ‘Em Laughing

I was in a place called Kinko’s the other day making copies of some records for my tax man when I noticed a person copying a script and puffing furiously on a cigarette. The reason I noticed him is because the cigarette wasn’t lit.

“I’m trying to quit,” he said when he saw me staring. There was a jittery quality to him that I assumed was caused by the sudden absence of nicotine in his system. I complimented him for working at giving up cigarettes. “Not cigarettes,” he said. “I’m trying to quit writing for sitcoms.” Then he laughed loudly and looked around to make sure everyone had heard him.

The guy was a comedy writer and at the time was preparing a script to submit to “Roseanne,” the new television series about crude fat people. I said that was very interesting and went about my business, satisfied to have limited our contact to those few peculiar moments.

But then he said, “Maybe we can have dinner sometime.” I had never seen him before in my life, and the likelihood of our having dinner together was remote. I didn’t even know the man’s name. I am, however, a civil human being and said sure, yeh, we certainly ought to do that, and he said, “Seven o’clock OK?”

I said I was busy at 7 o’clock, finished copying my tax stuff and left. His last words to me were, “Seven o’clock is a lousy time anyhow.”

I mention the strange encounter only because the man was not untypical of people who write comedy, of which there are thousands in L.A. They are different than you and I, in touch with a vision one of them refers to as transcendental atticism, a state of mind he attains by staring through the screen of his word processor into its very soul. He claims to have actually seen a computer’s soul once and says it resembles a gossamer and very beautiful microchip.

By pointing out some of the eccentricities of people who write comedy, I do not mean to dismiss them as useless lunatics. They are a little loopy to be sure, but we owe them a great deal. More than once a comedy episode has lifted me from despair by the sheer lightness of the laughter it has stimulated. I don’t rise from the couch singing madrigals exactly, but I do rise from the couch, which in itself constitutes a kind of psychic triumph.

I discussed all this the other day at Junior’s Deli with Martin Ragaway, who has been a comedy writer for 45 years and who has written about 800 shows for radio and television. He is the one, by the way, who asked the question during the Reagan Administration, “If anything happens to Nancy, will Ronnie become President?”

Like so many comedy writers, Ragaway has about him the furtive manner of a hunted animal, as wary of the shadows as he is of the light. His moods range from gloom to an almost spiritual belief in comedy’s healing qualities. On the one hand he is saying canned laughter has ruined the business; on the other he is offering to share his talent with any young comedy writer willing to tap into his experience. He is writing a book about the business, by the way, which he calls an unauthorized autobiography and which will offer anecdotes gathered over almost five decades.

He tells, for instance, about a fellow comedy writer who considered his baby son too short. The writer took the infant to an orthopedic doctor who attempted to stretch him on a rack-like device meant for that purpose. When Ragaway asked if the treatment was helping the boy add height, the father replied, “No, but he’s confessed to 300 crimes.”

During the dangerous, red-hunting McCarthy Era of the 1950s, Ragaway says, two men who wrote for the Bob Hope show were in Russia with Hope and thought it would be great fun to send him a three-month subscription to Pravda. “The loathing in the eyes of the mailman,” Ragaway said, “was indescribable. I’m surprised I was never called to testify.”

Mark Twain said, “The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” That may be untrue now due to the new presence of comedy writer Lester White, who died last month of leukemia, but who in the spirit of one who reveled in life’s absurdities did not die without a punch line. The story was first told to me by Ragaway and verified by White’s son, Steve, a television executive.

White, 77, was hospitalized and close to death but still had hope. “It ain’t over,” he was telling a hospital visitor, “until the fat lady sings.” Just after he said it, an extraordinarily obese nurse entered his room with medication. White observed her for a moment and then with a timing perfectly equal to the occasion said, “Don’t sing.” What a way to go.