Nichols, May Honored by TV, Radio Museum : Comedy: Many of the team’s television sketches are screened for the celebrity-studded audience at tribute.

It was a scene that called for Jack Ego, the unctuous radio talk-show host who called everyone, including his buddy “Al” Schweitzer, a “very close, very personal friend,” and for Barbara Musk, the eager Hollywood starlet who was making “The Big Sky,” the life story of God--whom Ego immediately claimed as a very close, very personal friend.

Mike Nichols, who played Ego to Elaine May’s Miss Musk in one of the many memorable sketches created by the comedy team of Nichols and May during their heyday on TV and records in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was trying to encapsulate their art to a sea of sound-bite-seeking reporters from “Entertainment Tonight” and other entertainment-news TV shows.

Nichols and May--who, it is still surprising to remember, improvised scenes that are still considered some of the wittiest comedy turns in American humor--have performed only a few times together since their professional breakup in 1962. They were being honored for their TV work on Wednesday night with a tribute by the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.

“What was the secret of your success?” a TV reporter asked.

“You know, I’m just not good at that kind of self-analysis; I’d be the last to know,” Nichols replied.

Quietly, May, 60, a dark-haired woman once described by Carl Reiner as “either the funniest sexy woman or the sexiest funny woman” he knew, appeared behind the cameras, facing Nichols, 61, and causing him to laugh, just as she often had broken his actor’s facade with an ad-lib onstage. May posed with evident nervousness for the photographers.

She was more relaxed when she was facing only a reporter’s notebook a few minutes later.

“I’m truly phobic about this,” said May, who rarely has been interviewed in the past 20 years. “But I’m not scared to wing it onstage.”

It was that ability to wing it onstage that created sophisticated comedy (a kind of psychoanalytic shtick) about the neuroses of the post-Eisenhower, pre-Kennedy era--and made Nichols and May heroes to a generation.

“Whenever I wanted to be cool and hip in the outer reaches of South Dakota,” NBC anchor Tom Brokaw recalled during the tribute, “I’d light a candle in a Chianti bottle and listen to (the comedy albums) of Nichols and May.”

“They were the quintessential class act of television,” recalled Jack Paar, who cast the then-twentysomething Nichols and May, an improvisational comedy team from Chicago, on the “Tonight Show” in the late 1950s. “They became the intellectual Fibber McGee and Molly.”

NBC, Paar said, erased many of the videotapes of the pre-Johnny Carson “Tonight” show that Paar hosted from 1957 to 1962 in New York. But, he said, thanks to the controversy his show sometimes generated, a number of kinescope recordings of the program had been saved for evidence in potential lawsuits. These kinescopes, recently discovered in storage, yielded a number of Nichols and May routines that the museum plans to add to its collection for viewing.

The formally dressed audience at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, some of them too young to have seen Nichols and May before, laughed with great appreciation as some of the sketches were shown on a giant screen.

“I’m Miss Loomis, your grief lady,” May says to a bereaved Nichols in a sketch satirizing the funeral industry and the high cost of dying. “Would you like some extras for the loved one?”

Nichols: “What kind of extras?”

May: “Well, how about a casket?”

In one Kafkaesque sketch that went on for many minutes, May played several different telephone operators, all of whom failed to return Nichols’ last dime. In another lengthy sketch, Nichols, playing a rocket scientist who has been too busy launching rockets to call home to his mother, was slowly, irrevocably reduced to blithering baby-talk by her guilt-invoking phone call.

But the one that seemed most hilarious--and most harrowing--to the audience was one in which Nichols played a high-school boy trying to get to first base with May in a parked car. It was funny at first, with Nichols grabbing May so quickly that they had to blow their cigarette smoke to the side of kissing lips. But their roles reversed when May--asking plaintively, “Do you really like me?”--began to undress.

Such scenes, Nichols said in an interview, were largely improvised. “I never knew what she was going to say onstage,” he said. He also said that they are considering updating and re-releasing one of their comedy albums.

May, asked to speculate about the state of comedy, said: “ ‘Saturday Night Live’ and Second City (the Chicago-based improvisational troupe) are doing satire, but sometimes today, it seems that reality is beyond satire. And language has so deteriorated in this country--it takes four words for one, and people use phrases like ‘vertically disabled’. . . . A kind of Newspeak takes over. That may have an impact on satire.”

Since they went their separate ways professionally--Nichols has said that the demands of maintaining their standards of high-wire improvisation, plus his moving toward becoming a director, were among the reasons for their splitting up; the separation was said to have been painful, although they are close friends today--both Nichols and May have become film directors. May’s credits range from the successful “The Heartbreak Kid” to the flop “Ishtar,” while Nichols’ include “The Graduate,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “Silkwood” and the recent “Regarding Henry,” a critical and financial disappointment.

In their brief remarks at the conclusion of the tribute, Nichols said that they were so delighted and encouraged by the event that, “We have decided to go back to performing together.” All they need, he said, is to update their name for the 1990s: “We’re going to be called ‘Ishtar’ and ‘Henry.’ ”