Waiter! There’s a Joke in My Soup : A Neil Simon Play Inspires Dream Team of Comedy Writers to Reunite and Recall TV’s Golden Days

“Hey Larry, tell that actor’s story,” Danny Simon said. “Two actors approach each other on the street,” Larry Gelbart said. “ ‘You working?’ says one. ‘I’m doing a one-man show,’ says the other. The first guy says, ‘Is there a part in it for me?’ ”

Simon, Gelbart, Sheldon Keller, Mel Tolkin and Sid Caesar sat around a table at Hollywood’s venerable Musso & Frank’s Grill one recent afternoon to talk about one of the greatest runs in comedy history, the eight-year period, beginning in 1949, when Caesar nearly owned TV Saturday night.

They quipped. They cajoled. They reminisced. They are free now of what Keller calls “the creative terror” of putting out a weekly 90-minute show, live. Of all the things that can be said about the golden age of anything, among the truest is that you never know you’ve been in one until it’s over. They’ve known now for some time.

“Remember that sketch when Barbara Nichols goes to work as Sid’s maid?” Danny Simon said.

“She was so beautiful,” Keller said. “In the sketch, she has to go to the airport. She has to fly to Denver to meet her fiancee.”

“I said, ‘Can I drive you to the airport?’ ” Caesar recalled. “ ‘Can I drive you to Denver?’ ” Everyone at the table laughed.

“We used to socialize a lot, but not any more,” said Gelbart. “This is our 25th annual reunion--our only reunion.”

*

They were together again thanks to one of their ranking members, Neil Simon, who remembers them for the rest of us in “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” which has its West Coast premiere starring Howard Hesseman at the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood tonight.

Caesar, as a TV Hall-of-Famer, is already well-remembered (a five-minute standing ovation greeted him when he showed up for “Laughter’s” Broadway opening). But, unusual among comedy shows, so are his writers. Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen were there at the beginning, writing for “The Admiral Broadway Revue.” And by the time “Your Show of Shows” (1950-54) had segued into “Caesar’s Hour,” which ended in 1957, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Michael Stewart, Tony Webster, Larry Gelbart, Sheldon Keller, and Neil and Danny Simon were among the writers who made up what in retrospect is an American comedy dream team.

“(Producer) Max Liebman brought NBC vice-president Pat Weaver to lunch to talk about doing the show,” Caesar recalled of the show’s inception. “ ‘How long do you think it should be?’ Weaver wanted to know. ‘A half-hour, an hour, an hour-and-a-half?’ It was a thick menu. I went through all these pages, looking for a roast beef sandwich. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Let’s make it an hour-and-a-half.’ I was too stupid to realize that it was impossible. When we went on, it was all live. There was no videotape then. You couldn’t stop and try it again.”

Danny Simon leaned over to watch the reporter scribble frantically in his notebook. “I was giving a lecture at Columbia University,” he said with perfect sang-froid. “When I told them we did an hour-and-a-half live, one of the students asked, ‘How long did it take to shoot the entire show?’ ”

He looked at his plate, an indescribable meat dish, smothered in gravy. “I had a heart bypass six months ago,” he said. “I’m retired from life.”

Caesar described a typical work week. Everyone showed up on Monday. A finished script had to be ready by Wednesday. Thursday was the day for set, lighting and costume design. There was a full dress rehearsal Saturday afternoon before the show actually went on.

Tolkin has often described the writing process as taking place “in a room full of raving madmen. And there I was at the center of it all, a Ukrainian Jew with a death wish.”

Now he added, “There was a creative anger in the room. We had an acoustic ceiling. People would throw their pencils at it in frustration. One time I counted 39 pencils hanging from the ceiling.”

“It was the best mix of terror and laughter,” Keller said.

“It was a departure from other revues because it was the first comedy group where everyone started in psychoanalysis,” Gelbart said. “Everyone there was thinking and feeling out loud.”

“Can I add to that?” Tolkin asked.

“No,” Gelbart replied.

The name Mel Brooks cropped up several times during lunch. “He was always late,” Keller recalled. “He always came in with something to compensate.”

“His mouth,” Gelbart said.

“Once he came in and said in a thick Western drawl, ‘Ah’m the new marshal here and ah’m gonna clean up this town,’ ” Keller said. “Someone asked, ‘Where you from?’ ‘Warsaw, Poland.’ ”

They talked a bit about what they did before joining Caesar. Caesar had made a splash in a Coast Guard revue called “Tars and Spars,” which he developed into a night club show with writer-producer Max Liebman. At different times, the Simon brothers and Tolkin had written revues for a Poconos resort called Camp Tamiment.

“I was starving,” Keller said.

“And you made a very good living at it,” Gelbart said.

The Admiral Broadway Revue is probably the only TV show ever canceled because it was too successful: the show’s skyrocketing ratings meant that the sponsor had to reroute all its available funds into manufacturing TV sets to meet the enormous surge in demand.

“I thought I’d have to go back to Montreal and be an accountant again,” Tolkin said. “I borrowed $70 from Sid. I never repaid him. I never will.”

He never had to. In its heyday, “Your Show of Shows” was so popular that a group of Broadway theater producers tried to pressure NBC into changing the show’s schedule--too many people were staying home to watch it who might otherwise have gone to the theater.

Now it’s in the theater. Does Neil Simon’s play capture the way they were? Everyone nodded in assent.

“Pretty much,” Gelbart said. “A few details may be missing here and there. But he catches the spirit. We didn’t write from TV, like they do today. We wrote from literature and the theater. And from life. We all have a different past in common.”

* “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” opens tonight and continues through July 9 at the Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000. Shows are Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m. Also Sundays, May 7-28, 7 p.m.; Thursdays, June 1-July 6, 2 p.m. $15-$37.