They Help Politicians Carry Off the Big Shtick

At the 83rd annual Alfalfa Club dinner in Washington, a prestigiously goofy event where the elite gather in formal wear to roast one another behind closed doors, President Clinton and Colin Powell were featured speakers.

“I do have one announcement to make,” Clinton says. “Secretary Rubin has asked that if you did not eat your dessert, please take it outside with you, because after dinner the Treasury Department will be holding a bake sale in the lobby.”

Twelve stories above Manhattan’s Upper West Side, about half a block from Central Park, you step out of a tiny elevator into a hallway with stained carpeting and around the corner is Apt. 121B.

This is where the leader of the Free World gets a lot of his material.

The door opens and there stands a grinning Mark Katz. He’s 5 feet, 7 inches, with small hands and a puckish expression on his face. In his modest, one-bedroom apartment, Katz, 32, cranks out speeches and one-liners like those that took some of the starch out of Vice President Al Gore’s image.

Samples: “Al Gore is so stiff, racks buy their suits off him.”

“Al Gore is an inspiration to the millions of Americans who suffer from Dutch elm disease.”

“If you use a strobe light, it looks like Al Gore is actually moving.”

On Katz’s “Forrest Gump” wall of memorabilia, next to the signed messages from the president, First Lady Hillary Clinton and Gore thanking him for his humor, are some of the writer’s most prized possessions: photographs taken in the Oval Office showing Clinton and members of his staff cracking up.

“I came dangerously close to going to law school,” says the Cornell graduate, “and I thank God every day that I didn’t and, in fact, you know what? Excuse me for a moment.”

Katz bows his head, eyes closed, fingers to the bridge of his nose.

“I haven’t thanked him today.”

A moment of silence.

“It is with great humility and heartfelt thanks that I accept the presidency of the Alfalfa,” Powell says. “This is a presidency for which I do have a passion. I do have a commitment. I do have a calling.

“And it’s better than nothing.

“Plus, Alma said I could do it.”

*

Writer Landon Parvin draws the analogy that doing humor is like standing up naked in front of an audience and slowly turning around for all to see.

“I mean, you’re really exposed,” he says.

If true, that would make Parvin and Katz kind of like fig leaves for the famous. They are the sought-after few--Parvin primarily for Republicans, Katz for Democrats--who not only write humorous material for presidents and other luminaries, but coach and prepare them for their public deliveries.

“It’s an odd thing to walk into a room with a very powerful person and start telling them jokes premised on their own foibles,” Katz says.

As ghostwriters, neither seeks credit. Parvin, 47, whose humor is really a sideline to serious speech writing, doesn’t comment on his clients. (Although Powell’s office let slip that Parvin wrote the former chief of staff’s Alfalfa remarks). Katz will only say that he “helps out” when Clinton, Gore, the first lady or Democratic National Committee Chairman Chris Dodd try to be funny.

Their brand of political wit is specialized, gently cutting without crossing the line, but with a strong emphasis on taking a pie in the face. Self-effacing humor is the ritualized dance of Washington satire.

“I think people respond to it because when the speaker is self-deprecating, he’s saying, ‘The power hasn’t gone to my head. I still am in touch with reality. I can still laugh at myself,’ ” Parvin says.

Good-natured joshing about oneself or others is the easy-listening form of jocularity preferred in the nation’s capital and should not be confused with the acid rock of paid entertainers. Nowhere was this distinction more clearly drawn that in the tizzy that erupted last month over the annual Radio and Television Correspondents dinner.

When New York political shock jock Don Imus fricasseed the Clintons and various media bigwigs about infidelity, Whitewater and bad toupees, the audience laughed nervously. But when it was over, they complained that comedic rules of etiquette had been trampled.

“I’m surprised that everyone was so surprised,” Katz says. “There’s a whole different set of rules when a paid professional entertains.” Where an Imus can send politicos into a dither, an accepted round of ribbing by Parvin or Katz can restore a tarnished image literally overnight.

Author Hedrick Smith, in his book “The Power Game” (Random House, 1988), describes how the perception of Nancy Reagan, pummeled because of her lavish wardrobes and expense account, underwent “sheer turnaround” in imagery the night she walked onto the stage at a 1982 Gridiron dinner.

Wearing a horrible aqua skirt held together with safety pins, and in a flowered hat and feathered boa, Mrs. Reagan belted out “Secondhand Rose,” rewritten as “Secondhand Clothes,” to a stunned audience: “Even though they told me that I’m no longer queen/Did Ronnie have to buy me that new sewing machine?” The audience roared.

Parvin wrote it.

“It’s become a tradition at Alfalfa that we have to recognize Henry Kissinger,” Powell says. “Otherwise he wanders around all night asking, ‘Vy didn’t they mention me?’ But seriously, this is a man who’s been admired for years--unfortunately, none of them recently.”

*

Parvin, who grew up in the Midwest, is bespectacled, slender, blond and mellow in demeanor, with a high-pitched voice. He lives with his wife and son in historic Fredericksburg, Va., and got his start in Washington writing a funny column for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call in the ‘70s. Businessmen and politicians started calling.

“I realized there was a demand for humor,” says Parvin, ultimately hired onto President Reagan’s speech writing staff. From there, Parvin’s reputation flourished.

Katz, who grew up in the New York suburb of Rockland County, says he inherited jocularity from his doctor/dad, “widely acknowledged as one of the funniest orthodontists in America in both the AP and UPI polls. When someone is tightening your teeth with heavy gauge wire, laughter can sometimes be a friend.”

Katz’s introduction to politics was writing funny press releases as a Michael Dukakis campaign volunteer in 1988, where he got to know future Clinton aides George Stephanopoulos and Mark Gearan.

After a stint in advertising, Katz’s break came in 1993 when Gearan asked him to write a Gridiron speech for U.N. Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright. It was a hit and Clinton was in the audience.

Katz has since “helped out” with a dozen speeches for the president, often turning for assistance to a coterie of Los Angeles-based friends like screenwriter Erik Tarloff; “The Tonight Show” scribe Jon Macks; Gary Ross, who wrote the movie “Dave”; columnist Roy Teicher; and writers Matt Newman, Cindy Shupack, Tracy Abbott, Phil Rosenthal and Alan Mandel.

The vice president borrowed Katz for help with a 1994 Gridiron appearance.

“He loved Al Gore jokes,” Katz says. “There’s just something about the name ‘Al Gore,’ which is why the Al- Gore- is- so- boring- that- his-secret- service-code-name-is- Al-Gore joke is twice as funny. You get to use the name twice in the same joke.”

He conjured up a bushel full of things people didn’t say for a book coming out in June from Del Publishing titled “ ‘I Am Not a Corpse,’ and Other Quotes Never Actually Said.” Richard Nixon is on the cover.

Some non-quotes:

* John F. Kennedy’s sure-fire pickup line, “Hi.”

* St. Francis of Assisi, “Who you calling Assisi?”

But real fun is a trip to the White House.

“I couldn’t have a better setup,” Katz says. “When I get down there I get a great reception because people associate me with all this fun stuff. No one thinks about Bosnia or the budget or any of the difficult issues. I’m down there and it’s recess time.”

*

“I want to tell you a little of the inside skinny about these budget negotiations,” Clinton says. “It began on a cold December morning, a morning that was so cold outside that the Republicans began their day by huddling around Dick Armey for warmth.

“We met at 7 a.m., so I began by proposing that the first order of business be breakfast. Before we even began discussing what to eat, the Republicans opened discussions by demanding that I balance my diet within seven days.

“I agreed to do it, but I insisted that the OMB score the calories.”