Neil Simon's "Laughter On the 23rd Floor' by 1812

Television's so-called Golden Age of the early '50s— the age of Sid Caesar, Jack Benny and Milton Berle, not to mention "Omnibus," "See It Now" and "You Are There"— owed its sparkle not only to the novelty of the medium but also to a basic economic fact: Although TV screens were tiny in those primitive days, a TV set itself was embedded within a "console," a large and expensive piece of furniture that only the most affluent Americans with the largest living rooms could afford. Consequently, the first TV audiences consisted of relatively sophisticated urbanites clustered in and around America's major cultural centers.

In retrospect, those first half-dozen years of network TV— before the growth of a mass audience forced network executives to dumb everything down to the level of rubes in Nebraska— generated much the same sort of exciting adult experimental freedom that the movies experienced during their brief five-year window between the invention of talkies in 1929 and the imposition of the blue-nosed Motion Picture Production Code in 1934.

Sid Caesar's well-remembered 90-minute weekly variety program, "Your Show of Shows," for example, was actually launched in 1949 as the "Admiral Broadway Review"; it was produced in a legitimate Broadway theater before a live audience, whose members received a printed program just as if they were attending a Broadway play.

"'You can't decide to laugh'

The difference, of course, was that Caesar and his half-dozen writers— among them Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart (who later wrote M*A*S*H and Tootsie) and Woody Allen— had to come up with new material every Saturday night, a challenge sure to burn out even the most creative minds. As the Philadelphia lawyer Alfred W. Putnam observed last month in a eulogy to the coal baron Ted Leisenring (himself a marvelous practical joker, among other things):

"The thing about laughter— real laughter— is that it is involuntary. You can't decide to laugh. Someone or something has to make you. And while trying to make other people laugh may well be a high art, it is also a dangerous one. A joke can fall flat. It can even cause offense. One can misjudge one's audience. Or the moment. Or the mood. It is perhaps a wonder that anyone tries— and we all know that many people who do try have no facility for it. You can't teach someone how to be funny. And you can't learn how to be funny. You either are or you're not. It is a gift."

Hackneyed but effective

Laughter On the 23rd Floor is Neil Simon's 1993 memoir based on his days as a young and very green comedy writer for the Caesar show. As in My Favorite Year, Richard Benjamin's 1982 behind-the-scenes film about the same legendary TV program, Simon uses an overworked but effective dramatic device— the innocent ingénue learning the ropes from his cynical elders— to recreate the sense of manic lunacy that infused the Caesar show's writing sessions.

Simon portrays himself as Alice in a wonderland of Mad Hatters— compulsive comedians who will burn every bridge and sacrifice entire careers for the sake of a good gag or a witty comeback, even just among themselves. Especially among themselves.

This isn't necessarily the formula for show business success, as will be attested by anyone familiar with Rottenberg's Sixth Law of Mass Media ("At any publication, when the writers begin expending more creativity on internal memos than on the publication itself, that publication is in trouble"). But 40 years out, Simon astutely perceived that the steady stream of repartee among his fellow writers may well have been as funny as anything they produced for public consumption.

"All humor is based on hostility," one writer reminds his colleagues. "Isn't that right?"

"Absolutely," another agrees. "That's why World War II was so funny."

Caesar as Belushi

Above all, these writers compete for the attention and approval of the group's most frenetic lunatic of all, Max, the show's star and their employer. As hyperactively portrayed by Pete Pryor, this Sid Caesar doppelganger staggers from one week to the next on a suicidal combination of drugs and booze, only to pull himself together for 90 brilliant minutes on Saturday night. Think of John Belushi running a major corporate enterprise.

Beneath the gags lurks a serious point. Simon's play is set in 1953, a watershed moment when this group of professional funnymen and inveterate wisecrackers suddenly found themselves confronting two serious existential threats: on the one hand, the threat of being blacklisted amid Senator Joe McCarthy's Red scare demagoguery is they didn't pull in their horns, and on the other hand the pressure from the network to cater to a broader and less sophisticated audience in America's heartland— a near-impossible task for a staff consisting mostly of New York Jews.

Going squishy

Simon's script exploits this issue without really confronting it— he's Neil Simon, after all— and he goes soft and squishy on us at the end, as is his natural instinct ("We just lived through history," one writer consoles his colleagues). But the net result of Simon's labors is a play that's both very funny and more substantial than we customarily expect from Simon. Indeed, the great irony of this play is that Simon, who here bemoans the necessity of appealing to a mass audience, subsequently made a successful career for himself as the author of bland and inoffensive comedies aimed at Middle America.

Simon is very well served here by 1812 Productions, with a uniformly strong cast of nine character actors (among them Carl Wallnau, Chris Faith, Anthony Lawton, Jennifer Childs, David Ingram, and Dave Jadico) effectively orchestrated by director Matt Pfeiffer. The result is a very funny evening of theater, as well as more real food to chew on than the hors d'oeuvres that Simon usually delivers.♦


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