Did anyone else go to Inside Joke tonight in NYC for that awesome interview with Al Franken and Tom Davis?
Inside Joke is an occasional interview series taking place at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater, on West 26th Street in Manhattan. Previous guests include Scott Thompson and Steven Colbert.
Tonight it was Al Franken and Tom Davis. The interview was billed as their first appearence on stage together in 16 years, and you better believe I bought a ticket online as soon as I got the email! Franken & Davis, how cool is that?
more after the jump -
Man, it was great seeing them together again. Tom had long salt-and-pepper hair and a beard, and looked reasonably fit. We all know what Al looks like, since he's been in the public eye so much.
The format of the show is you have some chairs and a table on the stage, and host/impresario Carl Arnheiter gently interviews various legends of comedy.
Al and Tom met at a tony private high school near Minneapolis. They said it was an Ivy League feeder school, since it was the school all the rich people's children went to. Then at some point in the 50s they realized they needed to admit some Jews "to get their SAT scores up," said Al, and Al got in.
An early and important influence was the comedy team of Bob & Ray, Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding. They were radio comics in the 1950s and made a few albums as well. (Bob Elliot is the father of Chris Elliot.) A friend of Al and Tom owned six hours of Bob & Ray albums, which Tom and Al listened to in one day! The experience made them resolve to be a comedy team. (Al and Tom would later write for a Bob & Ray special, starring Lauraine, Gilda, and Jane which replaced an early episode of SNL. "Tom: It was never repeated. Al: Yes it was. Tom: That must have been one of those ten dollar checks I get. Writers' Guild...")
Al and Tom wrote and performed together from the start, in their high school theatre program and on their own.
Al and Tom remembered bombing one night at some kind of Bnai Brith function. Al was pumped up because it was a Jewish crowd, so they'd be smart enough to get the jokes. They go out on stage, and the audience turns out to be mostly very elderly. And their act did not go over too well.
After high school, Al went to Harvard and Tom started working in a dinner theater, eventually becoming a performer.
At some point Tom studied improv under Del Close. Al said he had no improv training. Tom had a funny story about Del: during an improv session with Del performing, Tom walked out to edit the scene, and Del grabbed him, picked him up, and put him back against the wall! "Tom: He broke just about all the rules of improv in one second."
For three months or so during Al's senior year at Harvard, Tom moved in to his dorm despite not being a student. He was almost busted by the residence staff numerous times, but Al and his friends always helped Tom get away.
Al and Tom eventualy headed for California and worked in Mitzi Shore's Comedy Store. Only headlining comics were paid anything by Mitzi. Al and Tom told a very sad story about a Comedy Store comic who lead a comics' strike over payment, after which he was "blackballed" by Mitzi. Then after failing to get on the Tonight Show (the big test for comics), he killed himself by jumping off the Comedy Store roof into the parking lot, with a note in his pocket that said "I am a comic."
One of their early pieces of material was "Local News on the Day World War III Starts." "The stock market closed today, for good..."
In 1975 Al and Tom wanted to start doing television, but there was no clear place to get in. The big TV comedies were the Carol Burnette Show, Sonny & Cher, and a few others, that clearly did not match their style.
So Al and Tom wrote up a 14-page "packet," as it is known in the biz, of their material, and sent it in to NBC. "Q: Why only 14 pages? Tom: That's all the material we had!"
In television comedy a "packet" is a kind of a practical job application, it's to show you can write for the show. Normally you would tailor your packet to the show you are applying for, but in this case, there was no show! So they wrote material for a show they WISHED was on the air. And that show turned out to be Saturday Night Live.
Lorne hired them as a team, each one of them to be considered a half of an apprentice writer. They made $150 a week each. But they lived in Al's family's rent controlled apartment, two bedrooms on 89th and Riverside for $250 a month. (The audience reacted with noticable envy at this point.) "Al: So $150 a week looked pretty good! We were happy with the situation."
Al had thought that a network was like a university, that there was all this institutional knowledge there and that they knew how to put on television. "Al: I was wrong. Tom: When we started with NBC, they were in the process of dumping all their old Kinescopes into a landfill."
Al remembered being overwhelmed when walking into the studio control room for the first time. "Al: It's so powerful, this is going out every home in the country."
Al and Tom started out by writing a whole bunch of commercial parodies before the start of the season, which were shot in Westchester.
One of their favorite sketches was Nixon's Last Days -- it was also their first significant piece to be aired live.
Al and Tom both remembered the infamous Mr. Mike, Michael O'Donoghue. Mike would do nice things to improve staff morale, like grabbing a script out of Al's hand and throwing it out the window without looking at it, or saying "My sketch is brilliant, what piece of shit are you working on?" "Tom: Mr. Mike didn't like you, Al. Al: No, he didn't."
Lorne preferred that Al and Tom stay behind the camera. He thought they were more valuable to the show as writers, and said so. But once in awhile the show would run short, and "The Franken and Davis Show" would be used to fill in time.
The worst thing on SNL was the Muppets. Bernie Brillstein managed Danny and a few other SNL personalities, AND Jim Henson. So the next thing they knew, the Muppets were on SNL. The only bright spot was Al and Tom got to make a visit to the Muppet workshop. "Tom: Feathers and felt. Al: And plastic eyes."
In the early days, the network did not run a repeat SNL episode when the show was taking a break, they ran replacement shows. Usually wrestling. And the wrestling would get better ratings, leading some at NBC to question why they were producing this show.
Al and Tom won their first Emmys for writing, for their work on the Sissy Spacek show. Tom says he traded one of his Emmys for a Grateful Dead gold album.
Al hastened the demise of the first incarnation of the show with his anti-Freddy Silverman sketch, "A Limo for a Lameo." Even though Al wrote a letter to Freddy explaining why the sketch was funny (which Tom still has, he saved all that junk), Silverman and Lorne soon parted ways. Al said there was no way to have predicted the reaction to the sketch, but Tom disagreed. "Tom: On readthrough everyone was like... whew!"
Al and Tom were back on the show from 85-93, the years with Carvey, Hartman, Nealon, Hooks, and Miller. Al considers that period a resurgance of the show.
Today, Al said, SNL is overproduced, in that NBC produces three SNLs for every two that air. So it is really hard now for a writer or performer to get show time, more so than in the first five years.
Al said the show knew what it was about during the first five years: it was countercultural. But then something changed and the show lost its grip on its identity.
Tom said that Harry Shearer is one of the worst people he's ever known. He's also brilliant and one of the best voice-over artists of all time.
There was no overtly political talk to speak of, although Tom did mention Al's possible run for Congress.
Well, that is all I can remember. It was a great night with Franken & Davis!