Memoirs of a Muppets Writer: (You mean somebody actually writes that stuff?) (18 page)
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Authors: Mr. Joseph A. Bailey
I’ve always thought that deep, down inside, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew has a few sadistic tendencies he won’t admit to himself. It can’t be coincidental that all of his research ends with the explosion, ingestion, strangulation, depilation, or decapitation of his assistant, Beaker. And, he’s so matter of fact about it.
Zoot, the burned out sax player can milk a solid laugh out of a blank stare.
(In Jerry Juhl’s imagination, Zoot and the rest of the
Electric Mayhem
were all rich from their record royalties and really didn’t need the gig on
The Muppet Show.
Jerry’s inspiration was a group of hippie-looking musicians in an L.A. studio. All they talked about were condos in Hawaii. But, they weren’t talking about apartments. They were talking about financing hi-rise condo developments.)
But my favorite Dave Goelz character is still the Great Gonzo. Named after the Hunter S. Thompson school of journalism, Gonzo is a pure Muppet. To paraphrase Jerry Juhl, nothing Gonzo does can be done by humans. He’s impervious to fear or pain and maybe a little masochistic. And a human being couldn’t dream up Gonzo’s stunts. (I mean a normal human being.)
Dave just created this maniacal dodo who loves show business more than life itself, and is willing to regularly risk his life to stay in it. He really is gonzo. He’s pure Muppet off-the-wall lunacy. And, Dave made it so much fun to write for him.
Imagine a character that you could make wrestle a brick blindfolded (and lose!), or tango with a cheese, or jump a motorcycle from the stage to the box where Statler and Waldorf heckle Fozzie.
And, as you will see, even when my material was less than sterling, somehow, Dave would still make it work.
H
emingway said that writing was the only art that was self taught. He wasn’t talking about the mechanics of writing. The novelist was talking about the creative side of writing: where the stories come from; how the characters are formed; how they express themselves; and, in my case, where the jokes originate. Every writer has to find in himself that particular mood or frame of mind that’s called inspiration.
There’s also a school of literature that says writing is very little inspiration and mostly perspiration. For me that’s one of those moot, how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin questions. In my case, inspiration comes from desperation.
As soon as I finish a sketch, the anxiety immediately starts about finding the next one. There are writers who can sit down in the morning, very businesslike, and methodically work their way through a manuscript. They say Neil Simon works that way. So did Don Hinkley.
Not me. I spend hours pacing, doodling, chewing pencils and bounding off the walls, waiting either for God to show up or the blood to come out of my forehead. If Don wasn’t such a laid back Californian, I’m sure he would have strangled me by the third week of the season.
The joke in the writer’s office was that I could never write anything until at least twelve noon,
New York time.
That meant I would go through my mental and physical gymnastics until 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. London time. Then, if I had come up with anything worthwhile (a very big “if”), I would sit down at the typewriter and furiously pound it out until 8:00 p.m., when we quit.
Part of this was also caused by my dislike for and inability at typing. Rather than go through three or four drafts, I run a sketch back and forth through my head like a piece of improvisational theatre. Only when I finally get it right do I put it down on paper.
By the middle of a season, I’d be spending every waking moment looking for laughs. Everything I saw, everything I heard, any idea that came to mind went through a mental filter:
Boring. Boring. Boring. Maybe. Nope, boring.
Even away from the office, I became very entertaining in a hysterical sort of way. Anything I might say that might be boring or mundane got filtered out. I once had a taxi ride through London where half my brain was looking for a script idea and the other was making polite conversation with the driver. He laughed so hard a couple of times, he nearly wrecked the cab. When we got to my destination, he told me I was the funniest passenger he had ever had, and I hadn’t the remotest idea what we had talked about.
One night I was having dinner at the bar in Joe Allen’s in my usual state of creative angst. Then I noticed on the wall there was a poster that pictured the most endangered species of animals - the timber wolf, the mountain lion, etc. Among those endangered species was the American Bald Eagle.
In a flash, an idea came to me.
The Muppet Show
had a character, Sam the Eagle. Sam hung around the Muppet Theater and generally disapproved of everything. Politically, Sam was so far to the right, he made Margaret Thatcher look like Mao Tse Tung.
The idea was simple: Sam would come on camera and deliver an editorial about how some, “namby-pamby conservationists” were stopping our progress, by shutting down industry and grinding our highways to a halt for the sake of a few so called endangered species of insignificant animals.
“I have here a list!”, Sam declared. (The only time in my writing career I ever quoted Senator Joe McCarthy.) “A list of these so called endangered species!”
Sam then began to read the list about the mountain lion, the timber wolf, etc. Finally, Sam got to the last species on the list: “The American Bald Eagle.
The American Bald Eagle!!!?”
“Sorry. This list is now
inoperative.”,
said Sam as he slunk off camera. (The only time in my writing career I ever got to quote Richard Nixon’s Watergate Press Secretary, Ronald Ziegler.)
The show did it up right. They gave Sam a podium with an official looking eagle seal, columns behind him and some pompous entry music. I even got two more bits out of it as Sam’s Editorials became a part of
The Muppet Show.
In the second piece, I had Sam railing against nudity. He had just realized that underneath their clothing, the entire population of the world was walking around naked!
Completely naked! Naked!
And, Sam went on, it wasn’t just people! Underneath their fur, even cute little doggies and pussycats,
absolutely naked!
Even worse, Sam continued, underneath their fine feathers, birds, yes, birds were completely…
At this point, Sam had a moment of terrible realization. He covered his nether regions with his wings and, greatly embarrassed, slinked off the stage.
Sam’s third editorial was about the crime rate, which was rising at an incredible rate. While Sam ranted about it and demanded immediate action, a gang of Muppet thieves stole the columns and everything else off the stage behind him. After Sam exited, they stole the podium, too.
Jerry Juhl was happy with all three of them. So after a brief relaxation period of five or six minutes, I slipped back into my permanent mode of creative panic.
O
ur work week on
The Muppet Show
began on, “the Sunday”, as the Brits say. Working on Sunday was pretty depressing, especially in England where the rest of the world was off. It rains a lot in England but the Sunday morning storms always seemed wetter and windier.
Once we got to our office, there was little for Don and I to do but twiddle our thumbs and watch the rain teem down while we waited for the guest star to arrive. Even Don couldn’t write comedy under those conditions. And Don had written for Steve Allen, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett, and Flip Wilson.
To kill time, we’d make up mythical English geographic locations like,
Blighton-Thames
or
The Isle of Lout.
One Sunday, with the rain pelting the windows of our shabby little office, Don would mention that in all the shopping he had done in England, he had never seen suntan lotion. He had asked in drug stores, supermarkets, department stores, but never found suntan lotion. It was unknown to these people.
Then Don would let me in on his secret. He was going to secretly acquire the Bain de Soleil suntan lotion franchise for England, and monopolize the market before they knew what hit them. Don would rhapsodize about cornering the English suntan lotion market and becoming a zillionaire while the rain pelted against the windows behind him like large caliber machine gun bullets.
On another rainy Sunday morning, Don brought up the fact that although it was cold and rainy in England, in the Sahara Desert the temperatures reached 120-degrees Fahrenheit. Then he segued into an item he had seen in the morning newspaper:
There is actually a trans-Sahara vacation bus tour. The last trip had been booked by a group of German vacationers. During the tour, two passengers died of heat prostration.
“Only the Germans,” Don said, “would think of busing across the Sahara Desert as a vacation.”
Eventually, we would get word that the guest star had arrived. Don, Jerry Juhl and I would dutifully trudge upstairs to the rehearsal hall for the first script read through.
The Sunday rehearsal hall was even gloomier than our office. It was big and mostly empty with one wall lined with windows and the opposite wall was lined with dance mirrors, the better to reflect, and double, the rain and overcast outside.
At one end of the room was a large square table made from placing four large conference tables at right angles. The entire cast and production staff sat around it, 25 or 30 people.
After the guest star was introduced to every member of the staff, the cast and guest star would read down the script but with little acting or timing. Additionally, the music, technical, props and wardrobe people have the right to jump in, usually in mid-punch line, to ask production questions pertinent to their departments. All the jokes seem to die and the writers died with them.
When this weekly fiasco was over, Don and I would trudge downstairs to our cramped office and try to write. But it was like trying to ski uphill. The weather was bad enough. But since it was Sunday, no one was working except us. The studios, the shops, and the rest of our building had a mausoleum-esque atmosphere that was not exactly conducive to writing comedy.
Additionally, since there was no activity in our studio, our television monitor stared blankly at us from the corner of the office. During the week, the fun in the studio was a constant source of inspiration for us. But we soldiered on.
T
he Muppet Show
was very fortunate to have some of the most famous and talented people as guest stars. Thirty years later, I still have the impressions they left on me. Some were long. Some were short. But, all were memorable. Here are nine of them.
Edgar Bergen
When Edgar Bergen was scheduled for
The Muppet Show
, the usually easy going Jerry Juhl announced in no uncertain terms that he was going to pull rank as Head Writer and write every scene that included the famous ventriloquist and his characters. Jerry had started out as a puppeteer and like the rest of the Muppets, had worshiped Edgar Bergen since childhood.
The thrust of Jerry’s story line was that Fozzie, the bear comedian, inspired by Edgar Bergen, had decided to do a ventriloquist act himself. The pay off was that nobody had told Fozzie that the ventriloquist also did the talking for the dummy.
The usual gloomy Sunday morning script read through went well with very few changes. So, Don Hinkley and I left the rehearsal hall and went back to our office to work on our current script.
A short while later, the phone rang. It was Jerry in the rehearsal hall. “You guys better get up here. You don’t want to miss this!” Don and I trooped back upstairs to the rehearsal hall and found that Jerry was right.
The Muppet guys, Jim, Frank, Jerry, Dave and Richard were sprawled on the floor like a group of ten-year-old kids watching television.
Seated on a chair in the middle of the room was Edgar Bergen, doing every bit of his “A” material. He had Charley McCarthy out. He used Mortimer Snerd. He did a variety of his lesser known characters and even some blue material.
Our puppeteers sat in rapt attention for almost an hour without moving a muscle, watching their real, live inspiration. It was a private command performance by one puppet genius for another, and one which I shall never forget.
Elton John
I had lunch with Elton John. All he talked about was his soccer team, Watford.
Zero Mostel
One particularly dreary Sunday morning,
The Muppet Show
writing staff, Jerry Juhl, Don Hinkley and I were huddled on one side of the giant table awaiting the arrival of this week’s guest star, Zero Mostel.
Zero finally arrived, appearing to be quite elderly and partially crippled. He hobbled in stooped over, and very much dependent on the use of a cane. He slowly and painfully sat down on the other side of the large square rehearsal table, directly across from us.
The live script reading began. And during it, Zero may have delivered his funniest performance for
The Muppet Show
, albeit off camera.
About half way through the script, Zero stopped in the middle of a scene. He politely asked Jerry, as the head writer, to change a line. Jerry made a note and said we, the writers, would look at it later.
Zero asked again, perhaps a little less politely. Jerry repeated that we would look at it back in the writers’ office. Zero became even more insistent. He wanted the line changed now and he knew the change he wanted. Jerry hesitated again.
Suddenly, Zero abandoned his crippled old man persona, lunging to his feet, throwing the cane in one direction and the chair in the other, both of them bouncing noisily in opposite directions across the large rehearsal hall. With a great roar, Zero sprinted around the table with the speed of a jack rabbit. He came up behind Jerry Juhl and threw a wrestling hammer lock on him, bending Jerry’s arm behind his back.
“I said I wanted that line changed!”, Zero hissed menacingly.
Throwing his creative convictions to the winds, Jerry wasted no time in agreeing. After that, the read through went fairly quickly, as all of Zero’s suggestions and changes were immediately incorporated into the script.