MOVIES : Saturday-Night Lives : The old kings of comedy are grateful for Billy Crystal’s tribute, but can’t hide the anger that’s propelled their careers

You can see an entire photo album of old familiar faces riffle by in Billy Crystal’s portrayal of Buddy Young Jr., the central figure in “Mr. Saturday Night.” And if we tend to think of them as sealed off in another era, every one of them exerts the pull of memory in a surprisingly poignant way.

“Mr. Saturday Night” is Crystal’s most ambitious film to date (he stars, directs, and co-wrote the script with Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel). In it, he shows us the life of a stand-up comedian in the postwar era, from his Brooklyn childhood, when he first plays to his appreciative Jewish relatives crowded in a living room (as part of a duo with his brother, Stan), to his rise through the Catskills into television and the Las Vegas scene, to the struggle of his later years, when show biz has passed him by and drives him to observe: “I have cancer of the career; it’s inoperable.”

As a character study, Buddy has moments rivaling the great heels of movie history, like Kirk Douglas’ Midge Kelly in “Champion” and Laurence Harvey’s Joe Lampton in “Room at the Top” (except that Buddy’s loyal to his wife and mom). Particularly in his abusiveness toward his loyal, long-suffering brother.

But Buddy is more than a funny/cruel guy whose caustic wit coincides with a self-lacerating envy. He’s a composite of a number of people we’ve actually glimpsed. Are those Jack Carter’s ears, or Milton Berle’s? Certainly those cherubic, liver-colored lips are Berle’s. Is the cigar his, or Alan King’s? Or George Burns’? And how many of these old guys seem bent in that walking gallows slump, as though some great invisible thumb has snapped the base of their necks, causing them to peer ahead like tortoises?

Buddy Young defines a class and a history. He evokes an era when, in the New York Jewish comic, America tapped into one of its great mother lodes of popular expression--which still informs our movie and television industries and its artists, executives and producers, as well as any number of writers such as Neil Simon, Herb Gardner and Murray Shisgal, and younger comedians like Paul Reiser and Richard Lewis.

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Although no one yet includes Crystal in the same breath with our top “serious” film artists, in his past few movies he’s shown something only the best possess: An instinct for the role that reaches beyond specifics into deeper social currents.

The question posed in “When Harry Met Sally . . . “--can a young and attractive couple be best friends without having sex?--might have seemed redundant and a little naive had the specter of AIDS not begun eating at the edges of our social fabric. With the resurgence of ‘80s feminism pitted against the mounting absurdity of the Rambo and Terminator ethic, “City Slickers” addressed the question of how an ordinary middle-class guy with a family can locate his manhood in what was once termed common decency.

In “Mr. Saturday Night,” Crystal creates a history that’s very much with us, funny and alive and full of pain. “I can’t see that movie,” says Shelley Berman. “I won’t be able to see it because I know his hell.”

How much do we know these guys after all, these Buddy Hacketts and Jan Murrays and Don Rickles and Shecky Greenes? (For every comic who made it big, there are scores who have faded out of sight.) What world did they come from and how much does it parallel the new immigrant infusions of the American ‘90s?

What made them seem to grow old overnight? Does Buddy’s bitterness always come with the territory? Does he represent a cautionary tale about an inversion of American values, in which, unlike classical cultures, the wisdom of the old is disdained in favor of the raw energies of the young? Sure, these guys are out-of-date. But they were once hot, even beloved. Is this what we do to our artists?

“Jack E. Leonard used to say, ‘Good evening, opponents,’ ” recalls Emmy Award winner Mel Tolkin, who was one of the writers on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” and later worked on “All in the Family.” (Tolkin is also the father of author and screenwriter Michael Tolkin who wrote “The Player.”) “It’s one of the great keys to comedy. Comedians demand to be loved. They’ll put on a pint of paint, a dress--anything for a laugh. At the same time, they hate to be judged. There’s constant anger in all of them.”

Many, if not most--like Buddy--are casualties of their anger. But judging by the success of Jackie Mason’s one-man shows and the hefty run of “Catskills on Broadway,” they are unfinished business in our collective memory.

They are still here, the great ones, these one-time kings of comedy, even if their kingdoms have sometimes shrunk to the size of fetid condominium day rooms in Florida. And because one of our greatest common frames of reference in the ‘90s is the world of show business and entertainment, they move through time as mirrors of our own change. This is what lends “Mr. Saturday Night” its resonance.

“Emotionally and sociologically, we all came from the same place,” says 65-year-old Alan King, who’s done very well for himself as a businessman as well as an actor and entertainer. “Most of us were first-generation Russian and German Jews who came through the Depression. American humor didn’t start till the end of the century. The Italians had brought their music, the Irish brought their lyricism and wit, the Jews brought their suffering and humor.

“Most of us were poor, ghetto-raised as part of the largest family in the world. The oldest son was usually the surrogate father. The next fought to get out--you had a lot of boxers, like Barney Ross and Max Baer. To be an entertainer was a way of getting attention and then getting out. Our heroes were Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor. And we all knew each other. I’ve known Buddy Hackett and Jan Murray all my life, and we’re still friends.

“This is what Billy understands,” King says. “He has great love and feelings of humanity for these comics. He’s been talking about this story for years. He brought it up to me when we were doing ‘Memories of Me,’ and I opened up my archives of 8-by-10s of the old comics for him to go over. I told him, ‘Take what you need, but if you put me in this picture, I’ll break your legs.’ ”

The usual course for comedians like King was to move from local talent competitions to the small clubs and to the Catskills, where they performed their generation’s version of the tummler , the professional entertainer or clown hired to entertain the hotel guests (Buddy’s anger is caught in a moment when, after triumphing onstage in Grossinger’s packed showroom, he says over the applause, “ This is why I love the Catskills,” then turns back to us with, “Would you believe these schmucks?”). Then it was onto the big-time rooms in New York, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Then television and movies.

Those postwar comics shared both the fading conventions of burlesque and an unquiet cultural memory.

“I lived through pogroms in the Ukraine,” Tolkin, who is 79, recalls. “My father was a bourgeois businessman who couldn’t make a living. It was that way for a lot of people, stuck behind the walls of the shtetl. The background was very undignified. The pressures made heroes of some, and poets and violinists of some. But it made for a lot of broken human beings too. I’m not happy to have to say this: It created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke.”

Tolkin echoes other cultural historians when he observes that, for the European Jewish emigre, “the East Side and the Bronx of New York in the pre-Holocaust period was one of the richest cultural mixes of all time, full of reading clubs and theaters and music recitals--just like Harlem for the blacks in the ‘20s and ‘30s.”

But then came the inevitable generational rift. “Being a second-generation citizen sometimes brings out the hero in you,” Tolkin says. “But mostly it’s deleterious. To the younger people coming up, the ghetto background was foreign. There’s always a cultural tension between the young, who want to go on, and the old, who want to stick to their ways.”

(Implicit in this view must be a small element of shame. The first time Crystal’s young comic takes the stage, he drops his surname Yankelman with instinctive swiftness, the way Nathan Birnbaum became George Burns or David Kaminsky became Danny Kaye.)

“All good comedians have an inborn gift,” Tolkin adds. “They’re talented people. In the phrase, ‘Take my wife, please,’ those four words took Tolstoy 400 pages to express in ‘Anna Karenina.’ Good comedians are kibitzers, commentators on a world that’s never right. The new generation took a close look at its parents, and in the Borscht Belt setting, felt free to say the things everyone felt but no one else was willing to say.”

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It was only a brief matter of time before the rest of the country began to listen in.

“The comedian was the bold one, the rascal,” says Shelley Berman (who was not part of the Catskills crowd, but grew up in Chicago and came to prominence after he left the Compass Players in the ‘50s).

“The stand-up made the jokes you weren’t supposed to tell, jokes about fat girls, wives, mothers-in-law, fairies--stuff we don’t talk of now. The big cliche is that the happy guy we see up there is really a sonofabitch inside. You do find performers who’re angry, but you also find journalists who go off the deep end in the name of their own righteousness. When you sit down with Don Rickles and talk about his kids, he’s really a sweet guy. I’ve never known Milton Berle to be anything other than a pleasant man. The same with Alan King.

“If you’re a comedian you have to feel things deeply,” Berman continued, by way of explaining why the comedic personality is bound to harbor a certain amount of turbulence.

“You have to articulate in another way, you have to be able to translate. It’s not just setup and punch. Any artistic effort demands compromise. There’s the technical aspect of working onstage, the lights and sound, that can throw you. We understand the frenzy of creativity, when something can interfere even with the compromise. Then you’re not as happy as you’d like to be. You blame yourself. Not outwardly, but it’s there.”

Berman chose his words with exquisite care. No one has taken more of a beating over the years for a temperament and perfectionism that would go unremarked for a movie or TV star who, for example, demands a trailer sizably proportioned larger than everyone else’s on the set.

“When you know your reputation has preceded you, and you’re arguing for something in a script you know is right, you hold back because you know what they’re thinking,” Berman said. “I’ve seen press agents bad-mouth the clients they’re paid to carry. If anger is part of a comedian’s makeup, he should be allowed to hold on to it.”

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Like Buddy Young, there are a lot of comics who don’t enjoy the luxury of being able to stand apart from themselves. They inhabit the center of their own lifelong drama in a state of perpetual aggrievement.

Jack Carter likes to joke about how finicky he is in a restaurant. If he doesn’t like the look of his plate, he’ll send it back. He’s joked that if he doesn’t like the look of someone else’s plate, he’ll send that back too. The story is probably apocryphal but apropos, that on an airline he once thumbed through a gourmet magazine and saw the picture of an omelet that looked flat, and sent the magazine back.

In “Mr. Saturday Night,” Carter is referred to as “the comedian’s comedian.” Like Buddy, he never quite made TV’s “A” list--his top-ranked Chicago comedy show ran head-to-head with Sid Caesar’s, and NBC reportedly opted to throw its national weight behind Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows.” That was Carter’s big shot, and he never quite recovered.

“I’m happy for Billy,” he said of Crystal. “He’s pure gold, a heavyweight. The rest of them, they make these movies and they’re a joke. They haven’t paid their dues. Look at Marty Short--a disaster. Chevy Chase--no talent whatsoever, except he got lucky in ‘Foul Play.’ John Candy can’t make a successful movie. Yet they keep makin’ ‘em.” (He does admire Dana Carvey and Garry Shandling.)

Carter, like Berman, prides himself on being principally an actor who learned how to do comedy. He gamely tries to conceal the multitude of his disappointments in jokes, but they’ve thickened and settled in his rough voice.

“It used to be that our leading men were all tall, like Cary Grant, Randolph Scott and Jimmy Stewart,” he quipped while awaiting a veal Florentine dish at a West Hollywood restaurant (he did not send it back). “Now it’s short guys, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Michael J. Fox. I was visiting Israel and saw Dustin at the wailing curb.”

Carter, who grew up in Brighton Beach, started out at the Mill Pond Playhouse on Long Island and went into stand-up to support himself. He’s proud of his several substitute-host spots for Berle on “The Texaco Hour,” and for his 75 appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” “I was always a tree. I branched out and kept building. Just the other day a big name in Atlantic City--one of my friends--used a bit I threw away long ago.

“Bitterness is part of our humor. There’s nothing funny in uplift. We grew up in poverty, disaster, slum areas, ethnic backgrounds. The Jewish part is over-accented--there were a lot of Italians too, like Dick Capri and Fred Roman. That was a dying breed, but there were a lot of bull-------- in it too, a lot of Buddy Morras, Corbett Monicas, Shelley Shempkes. Had I done a one-man show I’d have maintained my greatness. I can sing and dance--everything. But they only see you as brash.”

Carter concedes: “No one is more bitter than I am. I get it before I even show up. ‘He’s not an actor’ or ‘He’s vicious.’ ‘Cheap’ is the big one. When they wanna get you they say, ‘He’s got the first dollar he ever made.’ I’m one of a kind. I had such jokes once. Now I’m scared --------. In the past 10 years I’ve neglected my life. I should’ve gotten out of it long ago. I appreciate success, but I’m not built to play the game. My wife tells me, ‘You’re so angry! You’re like an animal.’ ”

If all the characters who make up Buddy Young didn’t fatally sabotage their own careers, the changes in American show biz eventually pulled success beyond the reach of most of them. Even if they could have changed their acts to keep up, the new world they saw developing around them wasn’t, in their eyes, a necessarily more desirable place. If Lenny Bruce, Second City and Mort Sahl pushed comedy out onto a broader plane of social and political comment, they were at least comprehensible to the old school.

But then the ‘60s brought what Alan King calls “the rock ‘n’ roll comedians and the monster machine of television which led to everyone becoming processed as part of a package.” Tolkin looks back on some of the trends then and sees the development of “a complete amoral view of life.” He doesn’t see dissolution measured so much then by the country’s clamorous exuberance over sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. He sees it more in the decline of language.

“Jews are people of the word,” he says. “It comes from the Talmud, from Sholom Aleichem. No matter how poor you are, there’s no such thing as illiteracy. The carelessness of language was part of a breakdown. With somebody like Berle, even if a joke was terrible, if you notice the language, it was condensed to the hardness of a gem. Now it’s loose and sloppy, a product of mind.”

Berman thinks that shows such as “All in the Family” and “Sanford & Son” took away the stand-up’s natural turf, the realm of domestic tension and moral indignation.

“Irreverence was in the living room now,” he says. “The stand-up comic was in danger of becoming obsolete, so he became bolder. George Carlin threw away his suit and tie, put a handkerchief on his head and slayed them. Richard Pryor came along to point out that there were Americans who were still separate and unequal. There was a war on that we couldn’t win. The music reflected the rebellion. It kept going on and on, until now we see the law of diminishing returns begin setting in.”

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The generation of Buddy Young had begun seeing that law go into effect years before. A man who was for a time in the late ‘50s the hottest comedian in America recently sat in his living room and said, with quiet heart-rending finality, “I have been effectively stopped.” In a fresh, heady 90-minute set at Pepperdine University recently, Mort Sahl told his audience that he has no agent.

“There’s a terrible insecurity in most of us,” concedes King. “The minute you start to climb the ladder, the animal urge is to protect your ass.”

Billy Riback, 39, is a former stand-up comedian who works as a writer-producer on TV’s “Home Improvement” and is a student of the Catskills era (he’s written for a few Catskills comics).

“They paved the way for the rest of us,” he says. “If it hadn’t been for them, comedy as we know it today wouldn’t exist. None of the younger comics acknowledge them. But it’s like baseball. There are a lot of millionaires batting .230 who know nothing of the earlier guys who made it possible for them.”

“The big transition,” says Berman in retrospect, “is in finally learning to love them”--meaning the audience. “It’s the only answer. You learn they are not to be manipulated. Just love them. Give them what you have and don’t expect them to do something for you. They already have given just by being there. They gave you the first kiss just by putting their ass in a chair. I don’t know if Billy has this.”

Billy has. In the end, “Mr. Saturday Night” discovers what he’s known all along: What he is in this world is a comedian, and a comedian tells his truth. As it turns out, that’s not such a bad thing.