Inside Comedy by David Steinberg

Author:David Steinberg [Steinberg, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

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While I was directing Mad About You, I got that call to direct Rosie O’Donnell and Penny Marshall in a series of Kmart spots. Given that I have been directing comedians on sitcoms and in commercials for decades, I had learned one characteristic they all have in common—they prefer being directed by other comedians because they share a sensibility, a kind of private language that results in a shorthand of sorts and a successful collaborative result.

Among the commercials with comedians that I directed in 1986 were the spots for Pizza Hut with the then-unknown Garry Shandling and Roseanne Barr (two years before Roseanne). When you use new comedians, it’s a celebration inside you, the director, to be able to see someone finding another way to do comedy. When directing them, it was also like speaking another language because they were both unusual, unlike any other actors. All I had to say was “Action” because there was so much of themselves in their words, in their mannerisms, in their actions. I would give them the basic idea (“don’t overdo anything,” which was unusual with their personalities), and they would get on camera, and you could hear the ringing laughter from those around them. They were original, pure and simple.

Garry Shandling, in the Pizza Hut commercial, improvising, adding his own personality: “Pizza is a real single man’s delicacy ’cause you can pick it up on the way home, there is no commitment, and you can eat it in your underwear.” What a character. What a comic. What an actor. What a writer. What a man.

Garry was the star and writer of one of the most original comedy series ever produced on television. He was a frequent guest and guest host on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and he was probably one of the best stand-up comedians you will ever see. He was so easy to talk to—not because he was easygoing, which he wasn’t, but because you can give him any line, any opening, and he is off and you are laughing nonstop.

“Garry, you look good, man.”

“Thanks, David. I thought I was going to have to say it. I think I look fantastic. I can’t see a mirror from here, but I was hoping to get a glance of myself. Too bad my mom isn’t here. I could always see myself in her eyes. You know why I talk about my mom a lot? I tend to use whatever’s bothering me at the time. After college, I moved here by myself, and when I moved, my mother sued me for palimony, saying, ‘Twenty-two years you live with me and you move out just like that? I don’t think so!’

“My mother, who was Jewish, wanted to marry me. The fact is, for many, many years I would pick women who were the complete opposite of my mother, which is white, gentile cocaine addicts. I used to joke a lot about my father, and my mother said to me, ‘How

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