Requiem for a Clown

For a man who had spent his life making others laugh, Martin Ragaway’s final observation seemed a bitter punch line to 35 years of comedy writing.

Kept alive by tubes at St. Vincent’s Hospital, unable to speak, he gestured for a pencil and a pad and wrote laboriously, “Game’s over, we all lose.”

Then, his body eaten with cancer, Ragaway closed his eyes and was dead at 66. Or 62. I never did know his real age.

“How old are you?” I asked impatiently when I first met him a few years back in a Studio City bar called Residuals.

Ragaway had been side-stepping the question for an hour, telling jokes, making comments, waiting for laughs. He had the quick, furtive moves of a chipmunk, and even sitting still seemed in motion.

“S-Sixty,” he finally replied with a slight stammer.

“You don’t look it,” I said in false praise.

“O-k-kay,” he shot back, “59.”

Before I could respond he was out of the starting blocks again and halfway around the track with, “You hear about the widow in Miami Beach? She meets a guy and says, ‘I’ve never seen you around here before.’

“He says, ‘I’ve been in prison for 34 years. I poisoned my wife, cut her into small p-pieces and put her in the garbage disposal.’

“ ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘then you’re a s-single man!’ ”

Ragaway never stopped entertaining. He told stories, he repeated anecdotes, he made up gag lines. Sometimes he stammered, sometimes he didn’t. The faster he talked, the less he stammered.

He had his own newsletter, “Funny, Funny World,” composed of jokes, offbeat news items and comments on the news. He began by sending it to friends. In a few years it had a circulation of 10,000.

It was another way of telling a story, of defining with wry insight the nature of the existence he would ultimately call a game. Ragaway was a man obsessed with laughter, the ultimate entertainer, the quintessential clown.

Then why didn’t he leave us laughing?

I last saw him three months ago. I didn’t know he was dying. None of his friends did. He didn’t look well, but he never looked well. That’s what made my false compliment seem funny to him back at Residuals.

The face was pale and craggy, the eyebrows arched in a sad and quizzical expression, his hair dyed a funny auburn. Only the eyes were bright and riveting. Only the eyes were alive.

He talked about his years of comedy writing the last time we met, about how he churned out gags for Skelton, Benny, Hope, Gleason and a lot of others you wouldn’t remember if I told you.

There was a biographical quality to his monologue. He wanted me to remember. The cancer he had secretly fought for almost two years was winning.

Ragaway had written for radio first and then television. He produced scripts for 400 sitcom episodes, or maybe 800. He told different stories. “All those episodes,” he’d say with incredulity, “and I’m s-still able to dress myself and t-tie my own shoes.”

He loved making people laugh but hated laugh tracks, and it drove him crazy when sitcom actors couldn’t deliver the lines he sweated to create.

Of one particular performer he’d say, “She’s so dumb she thinks a d-double entendre is a strong drink.”

“My father was always entertaining,” his daughter Jill said. “At a dinner party he’d sneak a look at a matchbook cover he’d written words on during the day to remind him of jokes. When we’d see the matchbook cover come out we’d say, ‘Oh, oh, here it comes.’ Then he’d start in.”

Ragaway’s last note perplexes fellow comedy writer Bill Larkin. “It didn’t seem like Marty. He was always up. His only goal in life was to entertain. But maybe being up and entertaining just covered his real attitude. Who knows?”

Humor is born in dark places of the soul, masking anguish with a tilt toward absurdity. The humorist defines not only human folly but his own dreadful inadequacies, and to come face to face with them is to look the devil in the eye.

I think at the end Ragaway was observing life’s ironies more than its futilities. He was acknowledging that we all play a game we can never win, no matter how well we play it.

“Humor,” he once said to me, “is based on little realities. Everything’s a joke.”

Last week he must have realized the joke is ultimately on the clown.