I like It Better when You're Funny: Working in Television and Other Precarious Adventures

Chapter 1 A Horse Who Can Type In the early 1970s, after two brief appearances with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, I was asked if I'd like to be under exclusive contract to Johnny as a late night talk-show guest. I was startled, recovered quickly, and said yes. I was told it had been done twice before, with David Steinberg and Joan Rivers. I thought about what I might have done with Johnny Carson that would have made him want to put me under contract. I specifically remember one question and answer. The movie The Heartbreak Kid, where I had my first starring role, had just opened. Johnny asked me what my family had thought of me in the picture. I said they hadn't seen it yet. They were waiting for it to open in the neighborhood theaters. That really made him laugh. It wasn't all that funny, but Johnny seemed to respond to the "sincerity" with which I said it. That "sincerity," of course, was exactly the kind of thing that would later get me into difficulty. Actually it still does. Over the years I watched several of Johnny's guests-David Letterman, Jay Leno, David Steinberg, and Joan Rivers, among others-be invited to that next exalted level of guest host. In a twenty-year period of appearing with Johnny, I wondered from time to time if that invitation would ever come for me. One day after an appearance, I was standing in the hall with the talent coordinator, Bob Dolce, an unusually intense fella, who was always championing me on the show, as well as trying to shepherd me through its minefields. Bob would offer advice like "Let Johnny speak first," which I often didn't do, because that kind of minute planning could make you self-conscious. Bob said to me more than once, "I have no idea who you are once you're out there." I didn't know if he meant that as a compliment or a criticism, and I decided not to ask. One day I was with Bob when the executive producer, the legendary Freddie De Cordova, approached. Freddie defined smooth. "Why shouldn't Charles Grodin be a guest host on The Tonight Show?" he thundered. "I always wondered about that myself," I said. Everyone chuckled, but not another word was ever said about it. Not that it was the most pressing question in my life, but I was curious. Why not? When I later asked Bob why the call never came, the answer was, "The unexpected thing they like about you as a guest might make America uncomfortable with you as a host." It's not that easy to make America uncomfortable, but I had evidently succeeded to an alarming degree. I had even made my friends uncomfortable when they watched me on the show. They would tell me they'd leave the room when I came on, or stay and watch peeking through their fingers. What was I doing to cause such discomfort? I was kidding around. The problem was that only Johnny and a minority of viewers seemed to know it. So when Johnny would ask, "How are you?" and I would refuse to answer, because I said I didn't believe it mattered to him how I felt-millions shuddered at the rudeness of it all. Plenty laughed, but more shuddered. Sometimes the audience would hiss, and Johnny would try to pacify them by holding up a hand and saying, "It's all right, I'm used to it." Since being the host of a television show didn't rank in my top ten goals in life at that time, I didn't give a lot of thought to not being asked to guest host and continued on my merry way as an annoying guest. It's not that I'd wake up on the morning of an appearance and decide to be annoying. It's just that I didn't have a lot of faith in the alternative: "I'm very excited about my new movie." "She was a joy to work with." Right beneath all that, "Who cares?" screamed back at me. On the other hand, if I walked off the set, as I once did on The Tonight Show, saying, "The unfunny environmenGrodin, Charles is the author of 'I like It Better when You're Funny: Working in Television and Other Precarious Adventures' with ISBN 9780375507847 and ISBN 0375507841.