This Writer’s Life Still Full of Chuckles : Veteran Writer-Director Hal Kanter to Open ‘Laughing Matters’ in Westwood

Some of the best comedy we’ll ever enjoy isn’t the hard stuff concocted by pros; it’s those impromptu moments when a spirit ignites--usually among family or friends--and a series of remembrances or eccentricities or outrages balloon into each other until everyone is crippled with laughter.

Such moments are nearly impossible to replicate--like trying to seize character in a snapshot. But veteran writer-director Hal Kanter will give it his best in a new work called “Laughing Matters,” opening Wednesday at the Westwood Playhouse.

Marty Brill, Hank Garrett, Jackie Kahane and Freddie Sherman are in the cast. The first three are “knowns,” as they like to say in the biz. Freddie Sherman is not.

Kanter, who will be making his first professional onstage appearance, is somewhere in between. His name has rolled up through so many TV and movie credits over the years that it occupies its own small chink in the collective unconscious. If his face--a 30s, William Powell-ish sophisticated kind of face--isn’t familiar to the public, anyone who’s been around the film and TV industry for any length of time will know it for all the industry functions he’s emceed, and all the shows he’s worked on, from radio days to the annual Oscars ceremony--to which he has contributed for the last 25 years.

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“Do we have to mention my age?” he said one recent afternoon. “I know it’s foolish to be coy. Let’s just say I’m over 70.” Old enough to have known and written for the original Sunshine Boys (they were the vaudevillians and sketch artists Smith & Dale). Old enough to have cut his teeth on one of the zaniest shows in the history of Broadway, 1938’s “Hellzapoppin’ “--whose big-time pandemonium has miraculously survived transfer to the screen.

At age 20, Kanter was at home with the show’s anarchic energies. “It had no story at all,” he recalled. “It was just a series of blackouts, crossovers and specialty acts. The only theme was that there was no theme at all. I contributed a few topical jokes for each show. The other stuff I wrote, well, that didn’t show up until they did their other shows and didn’t tell me about it.”

Kanter’s voice was free of rancor. He’d learned an early lesson: the entertainment industry can inspire bitterness and use it to scald the embittered (“the stories now are for 24-year-olds; ageism is a hard thing to deal with”). But he hasn’t forgotten what brought him to Hollywood and kept him there: “An enchantment with the whole process of making movies.”

The list of Kanter’s credits is voluminous. It begins with his gig as a Boy Scout troop correspondent to the Miami Herald at age 11. At 12 he went into a semi-retirement that lasted six years. Then he was a gag cartoonist for various magazines. In Hollywood, he joined a reception line to tell Eddie Cantor that he could improve the writing on Cantor’s radio show. Unfortunately, he first relayed the message to a stranger standing next to him, who turned out to be Cantor’s head writer, who was kind enough to get him work anyway--on the Jack Oakie show.

Danny Kaye, Ed Wynn, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Paar, George Gobel, Carol Burnett, Norman Lear and James Stewart are only a few entries on Kanter’s list. So is Elvis Presley. Kanter wrote “Blue Hawaii” and then directed the King in another Kanter script, “Loving You.” Most improbably, he wrote “The Rose Tattoo,” a straight drama for which Anna Magnani won an Academy Award. Co-star Burt Lancaster then hired him to lighten up the grim proceedings on “Vera Cruz.”

“I enjoy writing drama, but early on I discovered that comedy makes you more money,” Kanter said. “Why I’m so prolific, I don’t know. It’s been suggested that I’ve always wanted to impress my father, who was a real estate salesman in Florida who moved to Long Island and started up the Classic Comics series. But I don’t think that’s true. He was a literate, witty man, a great storyteller. I know he was proud of my success.

“Maybe it was the culture shock of moving from Savannah, Ga., where I was born, to New York--from the Deep South to the shallow North. I hated New York. When I vowed to get rid of my geechee Southern accent, I swore I wouldn’t sound like a New Yorker either. I made sure nobody would ever be able to tell where I was from. I do know that outside of my family, I was influenced by writers like Robert Benchley, Mark Twain, H. Allen Smith and S. J. Perelman. They gave me a sense of play and surprise with language, like the line, ‘I’ve been in bed all week with a terrible haircut.’ ”

“Laughing Matters” came about when Kanter and his veteran Westwood Playhouse cast were supposed to do a show for the University of Judaism. One member turned out to be a no-show. During the backstage wait, reminiscences were exchanged, show-biz horror stories related. But instead of keening lament, the atmosphere quickly grew, according to Kanter, “hysterically funny.”

“It’s very hard to capture those moments when something just takes off, but these guys had so many stories to tell that it seemed more refreshing than anything you could set out to write. I’m just shaping the material. The show isn’t like anything you’ll see on TV. And it doesn’t have dirty language. It’s something you could bring children to. And, if you want, leave them there.”