The Playboy Panel: Hip Comics and the New Humor

Panelists

Steve Allen

Lenny Bruce

Bill Dana

Jules Feiffer

Mike Nichols

Mort Sahl

Jonathan Winters

Playboy: There is a new kind of humor around today – and a new kind of comic – known variously as "hip" or "sick" or simply "new," and everyone seems to be talking about them. For our second Playboy Panel, we have with us several of the major exponents of this new school of cultivated funnymen, plus Steve Allen, who has done perhaps more than any other man to present this humor on television, and Jules Feiffer, who produces the same sort of humor on the printed page with his cartoons. Gentlemen, how does this new brand of satirical humor – however you want to label it – differ from the kind of comedy that was being used in nightclubs and on TV ten years ago? Mort Sahl, you're the man who really started the "new wave." Is it really new, or is it that there is a new responsiveness – a new audience – for something that's always been around?

Sahl: There is no new school of humor. There are just a lot of guys working now who can't sing or dance – so they get up and talk like insurance salesmen. Jack E. Leonard says that Jessel was calling up his mother thirty years before Shelley Berman got on the phone. I think what people mistake for a new school is a matter of coincidence. All the years they thought Jack Benny was the comedian, they refused to recognize the other guys who were coming up – then, when they finally became aware of us, suddenly we're a "new school" – just because we happened to come along in the same time period. There's a terrible tendency to lump all of us together, and then, secondly, to make us competitive so we'll cut each other. In the days when we were really struggling, we all used to tell each other about different clubs where we could work, and share something in common. We were trying to raise this rabble into an army. There's still no reason to compete with each other. The audience has a capacity for everybody – and more. When I get a night off, there aren't many other acts to catch – let's face it. There was Kennedy and Nixon, of course, but I hear a booking agent went backstage after their debates and told them: "I can only use one of you."

Playboy: Jonathan Winters, you were doing pretty much the same act for several years before this so-called new form of humor became the vogue and began getting all the publicity. How do you feel about the "new school"?

Winters: Well, everybody has to have some gimmick, and our gimmick – at least mine – was to get away from jokes per se, because that route always risks comparison with the greats: Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, on down the line. So Mort and Lenny turned to the political and timely subjects. Mike and Elaine, Bob Newhart and I do the bit of developing and exaggerating ordinary situations. You can be funny without making it hokey. I pray to God that we're past the pie-throwing phase, and yet – I'm almost contradicting myself – I can still truthfully say that I laugh at Laurel and Hardy.

Nichols: I think all the people in the "school" have at least one thing in common. We're all peddling a kind of inside humor, which gives an audience the impression that they're the only ones who really understand it. Everybody said in the beginning that we were too inside. But now everybody is inside, so inside is out. Even cabdrivers know that a T.D. is a Technical Director. It's a new frame of reference, and one that many more people share than one would think. But I worry about whether it actually is a school at all. It's something that newspapers and magazines have classified together, like they do the angry young men and the beat writers. They make a category, and then they fit into it whatever comes along.

Bruce: Time magazine propagated this new school of comedy because it gave them something to write about. Then everybody climbed aboard without anything really happening. There is no new school as such. It's just that all these comics went into the business – Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, myself – about die same time – seven, eight, ten years ago – and all like came into their own at the same time.

Playboy: Steve Allen, you can hardly be described as one of the new humorists, but as the author of The Funny Men, and as a serious student of humor generally, what do you have to say about this new hip humor?

Allen: Well, the first thing that occurs to me is that Jayne has very funny hips. They're about the most humorous hips I've ever seen.

Playboy: Let's start over. What do you think, is responsible for the development and the acceptance of this often controversial comedy?

Allen: I don't know, but I can hazard a number of guesses. First, it seems to me that as the broad mainstream of humor – represented by motion pictures and radio and television – has become a little narrower, it has become more inhibited – this being the age of conformity and all that. Humor has sort of gone underground into two tunnels, where it remains as vigorous as it ever was: that is, into the area of hip nightclub humor, and into cartoons, which I think are getting better than ever.

Playboy: Jules Feiffer, you're a member of the new school in a somewhat different sense: you put your social commentary down on paper rather than act it out on TV or the nightclub stage. But your humor directly parallels the new verbal comedy. What do you think accounts for the current development and acceptance of this type of humor?

Feiffer: Well, World War II helped, but the Korean War really capped it. The rah-rah spirit was gone. There was a feeling of cynicism, of entrapment, of "what the hell kind of deal is this?" At those indoctrination lectures – you know, where they were explaining who was right and who was wrong – there'd be general laughter, or people just turning off their hearing aids. People still remembered what war was really like, so you couldn't glorify it. Plus the intrusion of nuclear weapons and the fear that America was no longer the big power that could lick everyone. The world had become so complex that the labels of left and right didn't work any more. And the left label was much more dangerous than it had been at any time since the Twenties – you couldn't be left and be respectable – all you could be was right in the middle. The humor of people like Sahl and Nichols and May and Bruce, I think, represents the post-McCarthy period – although Sahl began in the McCarthy period, and he's probably greatly responsible for some of the change. This humor expresses a kind of reawakening of the American conscience and also of guilt feelings for the Fifties, when everybody just didn't want to be bothered – let Papa Eisenhower take care of us. Does that answer your question?

Playboy: Beautifully. Bill Dana, you've written a good portion of Don Adams' comedy routines, you've written for the Steve Allen show, and most recently, you've scored as a comic yourself as that remarkable Latin, José Jimenez. As writer-performer, what do you think of this new school of humor?

Dana: It's probably cyclic in nature. It seems to me, if I remember my history correctly, that social commentary of this kind gained a lot of yardage even during Lincoln's era. I'm not trying to put a beard on Mort Sahl, but I don't think humorous social commentary is really something new. Like la ronde, it's just come around again. As in Lincoln's time, we are engaged in great civil strife. World problems, the likes of which none of us have ever seen before, have loomed up. It isn't really something that keeps me awake at night, to make a terrible confession. But I'm delighted that a good segment of the population is accepting people like Sahl, and that the Allen show was accepted as it was. I don't know why the hell it's happened, but I do know that it's happened before. This time, though, on the threshold of universal upheavals, we may soon be doing split weeks between Venus and Mars.

Allen: I think part of the reason for it is the world-wide uprising of youth. Everywhere you see rebellion among the young. In our own country, John Kennedy – a young man – is elected President. All the little mosaic bits fit together. Of course youth has always been in revolt to some extent, but never as it is today. And that, in turn, may be because the world was never in such danger. If you're twenty years old and just beginning to live, you have reason to be angry when you find out that the generation ahead of you may not leave a world for you to live in. Consciously and unconsciously, this disturbing awareness may well be adding more fire to this natural revolt of youth. It's no surprise that the new comedians all have something pretty bitter and critical to say. There may always have been a few of these guys around, but now there is a ready-made audience for them. The moment they're discovered, they're national heroes. And thank goodness for that, I say.

Playboy: Ironically, the last time that Henny Youngman – a gentleman of the old school – was on your show, Steve, he told a couple of sick jokes himself.

Dana: Youngman is more of a reporter than anything else. I think he just decided to bring something current into his medley of old jokes. Anyway, the term "sick comic" is getting a little sick in itself. People come up to me and say, "How about that sick comic Mort Sahl?" I happen to consider Mort one of the wellest comics there is.

Allen: But about Henny – his style is so traditional, so borscht belt that he could probably do Mort's whole act and it would still sound like Henny Youngman. When he throws three or four hip jokes into his act, they'll come out sounding old-fashioned. And what's wrong with that?

Sahl: What I think is sick humor was indulged in by those guys, not the new school. All my life I've been hearing the borscht belt comics saying, "Go out and play in traffic," or, "I hit one of those things in my car the other day – what do you call it – a kid." Sick humor is indulged in by everybody – it isn't just the performers. People do it in offices, around the water cooler – the water cooler being the social center of an office. Everywhere you go, they're telling very irreverent jokes. It's just a step away from swearing.

Feiffer: I'm sure that all through history sick jokes were being told before there was really a school of sick humor. There've always been cripple jokes – Jerry Lewis has done it all of his acting career – and makes up for it by heading up Muscular Dystrophy. What's interesting is not that comics have always used it in their acts, but its sudden acceptance as a mass mania, with everybody telling these stories, and at the same time being embarrassed by them. You know, "I really hate these sick jokes, but did you hear the one . . ." They have a sense of the unhealthiness of this whole aspect of humor and yet they indulge themselves in it as a release.

Allen: If you go through one of those old joke books – especially those published before 1930 – you'll find jokes that are anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Negro – less vicious than in poor taste – jokes about Ikie and Abie cheating somebody out of money, jokes where "Pat came home drunk the other night and met Father Murphy." Those are really sick jokes, although not in the contemporary sense.

Playboy: Jonathan, some of your material would seem to be a little weird and on the macabre side – things like the pet-shop skit, which we printed in Playboy some years ago, and your popular gas-station-attendant bit. These were both pretty far out. Do you consider this sick comedy, or yourself a sick comedian?

Winters: Well, who's to say who's sick? You find the audience laughing at the sick, and the sick laughing back at them; it works both ways. What could be sicker than The Three Stooges, where a guy takes his thumb and drives it clear to the back of the other guy's skull, or takes a hammer and, boing, hits a guy over the head and laughs (unh, unh, unh), or pushes somebody down a flight of stairs, and a horse drags him six hundred feet into a barrel of flour – what could be sicker than that? Where do you draw the line? I don't know. I can say one thing definitely, though. I don't see anything funny about cancer, blind people, or mental cases. This is just my own opinion, of course. I first came into contact with sick humor when I spent six months in a Naval hospital during the war, where guys made fun of their deformities because they had to – to keep from going out of their skulls. If it was their leg, or their arm, or their eyes, or whatever it was, they kidded about it, so they wouldn't lose everything. But to peddle this in a club, I just don't buy.

Nichols: Nothing that I've ever seen of Jonathan's seems to be sick. There's nothing sick about Mort, there's nothing sick about Elaine and me, and there's nothing sick about Jules, even though one of his books was called Sick, Sick, Sick. He's concerned with neurotic people, but his viewpoint about them is healthy. You could call certain things that Lenny does sick if you wanted to, but he's really the only one. I've seen him sort of pretend to have intercourse with a guy on stage and everything. I've heard him say that Bobby Franks was a snot. And he said that The Diary of Anne Frank was not as funny a movie as he expected. Funny little things like that.

Playboy: Lenny, although Time magazine did a piece called The Sickniks, as you said before, including a number of the new hip comedians, you're the only one of the group who has really been labeled "sick." Do you consider your comedy sick?

Bruce: We're all sick – Mort kisses newspapers, Shelley's got a phone that he lays in bed with, and Jonathan doesn't make noises for laughs – he's a deaf mute. No, my humor is mostly indictment – making fun of people – which in essence is cruel. Of course if this particular individual were in the audience, I wouldn't do the joke. Not because of cowardice, but because it would make him uncomfortable. I have bigots in my audiences sometimes, and I make fun of them, because I'm a bigot myself. I'm not as bad as I used to be, but at times I've said things like "free, white Protestant," and in the context I used it, I certainly didn't mean it with love. Naturally, I am part of everything I indict. I am part Stevenson, part McCarthy, even part Jack Paar. I am corrupt. That's where my humor comes from, I think. Because I am continually verbalizing to find an answer for myself. It may be because of propaganda, but I even identify with theology. The principles seem correct and profound to me.

Playboy: And yet, people consider you sacrilegious . . .

Bruce: Those who don't really hear me. Those who have ears will hear. "Ye shall know me by my works." Time magazine found this title, "Sickniks." Now a magazine writer has to sketch things out real quick, and so he says things like "Chaplinesque," "Alec Guinness quality," "Beatnik" – then everything's beatniks, there's a whole new school of beatniks, everybody's beatniks, beatniks till they're beat to death. Now we've got sick comics. So everybody falls in the category of sick comics. Take Shelley Berman – a brilliant satirist. But he's a good actor, too, because he does humor that revolves around life, a good slice of life. That's sick?

Nichols: Sick is not a word I would use. But if somebody's going to use it I certainly don't think it can be applied to anybody else but Lenny. But if you prefer to call what he does gay and irreverent, go ahead.

Playboy: Mort, didn't you imply before that sick and irreverent are synonymous?

Sahl: When I said irreverent, I linked it to sickness. I don't mean irreverent because it's about the President. I mean negative about mankind. People seem to question my attacking specific institutions more than they do the guy who is negative about all institutions. You can be completely negative and function quite well in the American theatre today. Nobody will accuse you of being negative. But you rock the boat a little bit and you're in trouble.

Playboy: Do you feel that people aren't reading the basic affirmation between your lines?

Sahl: Right. If you tell a joke about segregation, naturally it means you're in favor of integration. But the legacy of the Eisenhower years seems to be that you can be against one, but not for the other. You're in the middle. I think I'm a victim of that kind of thinking on the part of others.

Allen: The people who create these sometimes cruel jokes, I think, actually have more tender concern for the world than some of these fifty-five-year-old cigar-chewers who don't understand what they're saying. Often the only way you can get the world to pay attention to your plea is through some sort of savage satire. Voltaire was a man who was consumed with a rage for universal justice. His weapon for making men wake up and share his views was bitter and savage humor which, I suppose, in his day was called sick humor, humor that was going too far.

Playboy: Right – and the same may be said of Dean Swift, whose A Modest Proposal was a deadpan polemic suggesting the poor eat their young – as a solution to poverty and hunger . . . All of the comedians of the new hip school seem to evoke harsh negative critical reactions from some quarters. How would you explain this lack of rapport with a part of their potential audience? It's not simply a lack of enthusiasm, as you might get from someone who just does not enjoy a Bob Hope or a Red Skelton, but in some cases an open and pronounced hostility.

Allen: It may be simply a reflection of the historic lack of understanding between the conservative and the liberal, between the man defending the status quo and the radical who would disturb it. I don't think it's so much a case of a critic saying, "I know exactly what Lenny Bruce means, and I don't like it."

I think it's more that they just don't know what the hell he's talking about. One of the points I tried to make in The Funny Men was that people are never entitled to say "So-and-so isn't funny." In a room full of people who are all laughing so hard they're falling off their chairs, it's absurd for some guy to say, "Lenny Bruce isn't funny." All you can say is, "I don't know what the hell Lenny Bruce is talking about, he's not funny to me, but I heard a lot of people laughing, so maybe I'm wrong."

Playboy: While Lenny was doing his kind of satire without much success in the earlier years, Mort was receiving national attention and popularity for his own brand of biting, controversial humor. One day there didn't seem to be any real market for this kind of social commentary, and the next, it was the hottest thing on the club circuits. How do you account for it, Mort?

Sahl: I'll have to answer that with a question, much as I hate to. Who's doing social commentary?

Playboy: You are.

Sahl: Thank you. But who else? I mean guys who are really talking about society as they see it?

Playboy: Lenny Bruce is, certainly . . .

Sahl: So you think that we're related – that somehow we are related just because we have our own individual views of society? I'm just asking. Anything I say about other performers, I say as a member of the audience, not as a competitor. Because I'm barely a performer myself – just barely. I started making a go of this thing in 1953. I was preceded, of course, by Jonathan – truly an original thinker, but I don't know if he's doing social commentary. Whatever I talk about, I try to have an honest approach. A lot of performers talk about a false world. I try to talk about the world I came from – World War II, the GI Bill, being reared in California, a mobile society with automobiles, high fidelity, a lot of mechanistic stuff, a changing America – that's where I come from. I didn't give that up to get into show business; I just sort of extended it. I lived a few more weird bohemian years in San Francisco, and then I started stamping out small plastic replicas of the whole thing, which I give to the audience from city to city. In other words you can trust the audience. You can tell them who you are. You don't have to be a "performer."

Playboy: Jonathan, Mort said he doesn't know whether or not you do social commentary. What do you think?

Winters: Well, I just look upon myself as a humorist. I don't want to use the word "fight" because it isn't a fight – when it becomes one, then you're in trouble – with yourself most of all. My only message is to put down the pseudo-intellectual and the out-and-out bore, and say, "Here, this is what he's like – you decide what to do with him." You know, the big guy with the fifteen Brotherhood Week cards on him, and all the secret rings, and little things in his lapels. This is the guy I've always been hoping to expose – and slow down. We'll never stop him, of course; he'll always be around. But I still enjoy putting the pin in, like into a big balloon in the Macy's Day parade. It'll go down, but not that fast – until the end of the parade.

Playboy: Have you found that these people are aware that you're making fun of them?

Winters: Not the ones I've met. I was in "21" one day, and this guy came up – one of the Binky and Buzzy set, with the lower jaw that sticks out like a lakefish – and he said in this Ivy League drawl, "I think you're rather a funny guy on TV." I turned to him and said, "You know, I'm working on a new character, he's called Binky Bixford and he talks like this – [imitating him] – he's one of these guys who carries a polo mallet in one hand, and a half a martini in his other, and wears a regimental tie and seven buttons on his coat. He's a real fun guy." And this character did a take, and said – "Geezus, that's fabulous; I know a million guys who talk just like that." It went right over his skull.

Dana: You know, I thought I was treading on very dangerous ground at the hungry i – I do the act half as José Jimeñez, and then José introduces Bill Dana. But a fellow came into the club the other night, and said to me, "You know, ai jos' come down here so ai conchake your han' an' tell my famly ai meet José Jimeñez." Not only has there been no offense in Latin American areas, but they seem to be my big fans.

Playboy: Would you say there's any social commentary in your act, Bill?

Dana: I make a social commentary, but in areas which really aren't controversial – because I'm half in the old school in that my main thought is that the audience should be thoroughly entertained. That's what makes me happy. The riskiest thing I do is dialect. Dialects do exist, after all. They are based on the speech of real human beings. If those human beings are sympathetic, then there's really not any danger of offending anybody. That might be called one area of social commentary. Also, I do an astronaut bit with José, where he's the first man that's going to be sent out to space. There's a line where the interviewer says, "Where are you going to be landing?" – and José says, "Ai gon' to Ian' in Nebada." And the interviewer says, "So you're convinced they'll get you back to earth?" "Yes, ai convince dey will get me bock to eart' – how far into eart, ai not so convince about." "But surely they've provided something to break your fall." "Yes, Nebada."

Playboy: Mike, would you say that you and Elaine use the stage as a platform for social protest?

Nichols: Never. I mean protesting isn't what you start out to do. Our bits are simply vehicles for certain observations about people. Very often the most commercial thing you can do is social protest. Like if Lenny has a gag about the Pope, it's like throwing a pie in the face of a guy with a top hat – a sure laugh. The commercial thing is to say beforehand – as Lenny would say – that he's attacking dishonesty. But he's not. He's just making funny jokes about the Pope. It's really that the big, money-making thing is to be brave and courageous in presenting your point of view.

Sahl: You know, Lenny is really a creative person, but I've often heard him say that the other comics are just wind-up dolls. I suppose some people can live better with stuff that they put together themselves on the spot. But look at a guy like Don Adams. He's as hip as they come, but boy, there's a guy who is uniform. You never get short-changed with him. You don't say, "He was off tonight because he wasn't swinging." I've probably cheated myself by not developing and organizing my ideas. I get tired of them when they don't fascinate me any more – and I discard them. And yet, one of them might be the best thing I've got.

Nichols: The reason an improvisation is funny is that it's just occurred to you, like anything that happens in life, really – at a party, or among friends. The funniest things are the ones that have just happened, because they come out of specific moments. And when you repeat them, they're just not as funny – because it isn't with the same people, or the same set of circumstances. When Elaine and I begin tiring of something, we have to try to make it new again rather than throw it out, just because we've said it before.

Playboy: Mike, you and Elaine had worked with the Compass Players, a really first-rate improvisational group in Chicago, but nothing very big was happening to either you or the group, though you were doing some of the best and most exciting creative comedy around. Then the two of you decided to try it on your own, drawing from this early work together. How important do you think it is that the new comic create his own material?

Nichols: Well, it's important that it be worked out in front of the audience. When you have people in front of you and you're trying something, they tell you something, not from their laughs, just from the way they sit there. They help build the material, by the nature of their silence. It even influences what occurs to you – just what's going on in the room. If it's your own material, you can go with what's working best. If an integration joke goes very big for Mort, he can extend the whole integration theme as long as he wants, because that's what's happening with this audience. There's no way to prepare it before. Our stuff is a little different from Mort's, of course, because it's closer to plays. We do scenes about characters. But you're never quite sure what element out of a given scene will be chosen by an audience to connect with.

Feiffer: The really new thing about the new humorists in nightclubs is that just about all of the good ones, and a few of the mediocre ones, write their own material. Sahl does, Bruce does, Nichols and May do, Berman does – they all do it. For the first time, a comic comes out on a nightclub floor and he is more than a comic. He is speaking in his personal voice with his own point of view. He's not telling mother-in-law jokes and saying, "Ha, ha, but I really have a lovely wife." You know that if he's putting down his mother-in-law, it's because he really doesn't like her.

Nichols: Remember Jack Benny's funniest joke? You know, the thing he did on radio where somebody said to him, "Your money or your life," and there was a long silence, and then he said, "I'm thinking it over." He built on that gag for ten years – a gag based on an imaginary frame of reference. What most people in the new school do is to build it out of common experience, rather than a set-up made for the vaudeville stage.

Allen: The audience never seems to have distinguished between the comedians who are humorists and the comedians who are just marvelous comedy performers and don't ever write any of their own material. But it's an important distinction. I think that a comedian who writes his own material today will be of this new, this modern, fresh type. If you're a young, snappy, classy performer who is basically a tap dancer, you can go to one of the comedy writers and get yourself a good act for about a thousand dollars. But the writer who will do your act is usually a guy about forty-eight years old, who's been writing for Milton Berle and Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis for twenty years, so he'll write you a good act that can play the Copacabana and get you a good review in Variety.

Winters: The reason I write my own stuff is that I'm cheap. I admit it. When I first came on I had two or three bits and I worked with a guy who's still with me from time to time, and when I go on television – if I take over for Paar – then I pull in three or four guys. You have to. But I still write about ninety-eight percent of my own material. There are a lot of people who would say "I can do that," but when you nail it right down, can they?

Allen: There are a few. But they're the exception.

Playboy: Jonathan, most of your act is fairly well thought out ahead of time, isn't it? Do you use any improvisation at all?

Winters: I've enjoyed winging it from time to time, after I finish my set routines – you know, when the people throw out something like "Be Caesar in the desert," and you create a situation right on the spot. This is where I get my real kicks. It doesn't have a great payoff, but at least they're seeing you work right on your feet. Creating something new.

Playboy: Mort, your work remains extremely fluid and free-form. It never seems to come out the same, even though you keep specific gag ideas, situations and punch lines with which you pay off many of your new comments. Do you merely improvise on the basis of previous reactions to specific ideas and events, or . . .

Sahl: No, they don't hold up. I've never used the word "satire" or "improvise," but they apply. Every word I've ever used in my act has really started on the stage. It's a very insecure way to go to work, but it's the best way. I'm always talking – as a jazz fan – about form, and yet I get out there and I go the other way. I kind of go with the moment. It's like the high hurdles – if I get off on the wrong foot, it's an hour of boredom. And if I'm swinging, it's amazing. I can't go with predetermined response, because there's nothing in my repertoire that always works. But I keep trying to open up new streets. So I guess I do improvise. The best thing. I've found, is to eat dinner and walk into the show when it's time to go on. Then, it's like a conversation with the audience – you know, you can feel it – a cadence, a rhythm.

Playboy: Lenny, you also work in a fairly free-form way . . .

Bruce: Yes. When the Berle, Henny Youngman, Jackie Miles and Lanny Kent school was formed, orderliness and polish, that was it. Boy, you had to get an act down pat – "I've got twenty-two minutes of dynamite, each line is a gem." It was admired; it was form. Today the form is no form, an abstraction, and people admire that. But we may return to form, again, as we continue to change our views. You may remember there was one society that considered it correct to throw Christians to the lions, and then another society years later would say, "Well, I mean, that's been done before, so now we're throwing lions to the Christians." You know – like Clyde Beatty. But I've got form – if I had no form at all, then I would be completely subjective and private, and I wouldn't be able to earn any money because everything would relate only to me. So I have enough form to be recognized by enough people, like abstract art. Sometimes on stage I will just wait – if the audience gives me love, acceptance right away – (wow!) – like I'll really cook for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.

Playboy: How do they show this love? By the warmth of their laughter?

Bruce: That's the only way I know. I'm at my best when they let me be silly – I mean zany – nuts. If they think I'm funny, I think, "Boy, these are my people, they think like Lenny Bruce," them – I'm really going to show off for them – I really feel a love for them.

Playboy: Platonic or sexual?

Bruce: I think all love is sexual. One guy, one girl, they see each other – strangers – what's the attraction? The intellect is resolved later. Instead of saying, "Well, gee, we just got together to shtup," he says, "She's got a great sense of humor, that chick, she's so hip," and she says, "He's so nice, he's so sensitive." But that first attraction when they saw each other was wanting, man, like they dug each other. If you are a good Christian, or a good Jew, you realize that He was hip, that this was the master plan, to make sex the basis of marriage. There's no couple who's going to intellectualize about how the population's dropping. It's always, "Listen, it's shtupping time." "But I'm shaving." "I don't care . . ." Those are the marriages that really last, the marriages of twenty – twenty-five years, where the guy's still hockin' that ol' lady. But I don't feel as if I'm blatantly balling the audience. I just feel an affectionate love – the first degree of sex – I feel like I want to hug 'em and kiss 'em.

Dana: It's the old physical law of equal reaction to every action – if you dig the audience, they dig you back. If you don't like them, boy, that's exactly what you get back in equal proportion.

Playboy: Jules, how would you compare what you do on paper to what these performers do on stage?

Feiffer: Well, really not at all, because my situation is a good deal easier. I don't have to operate ever under fire. I do one strip a week for The Village Voice, and a strip a month for Playboy, so that I have time to relax and decide what I want to say. Of course, the other guys have set pieces too. But I don't have to worry about my audience. Mort and Lenny and the rest of them have to get sure-laugh material, but I don't really worry about getting laughs. Sometimes I will do strips that just go for a point. If the stuff comes up funny, that's fine, but I won't work for a punch line. I think I'm really in a more comfortable position than they are.

Playboy: Your work has always seemed to approximate on paper the things that Mike and Elaine do "live." Why is that?

Feiffer: It's no coincidence. Of this "new school" we are discussing, I admit that Mike and Elaine are the ones I admire the most. I think they're by far the most intelligent and the best performers. Depending on where they develop from here. They represent, I think – in terms of general interest, intellectual level – the peak of anybody working the field today.

Nichols: Thank you. There's no doubt about it – you have to be an intellectual. The main difference between Jules and us – apart from having to turn out a different strip every week, fifty-two times more than we do – is that he draws little pictures. But I object to the whole thing about "intellectual" comedians. These days you can be an intellectual in twenty seconds just by saying certain names: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Dostoievski, Kafka – it's a new David Susskind type of eggheadism. Intellectual used to mean either a process of thinking, or a body of knowledge. For some nutty reason, it doesn't any more.

Playboy: Do you and Elaine know where you're headed in a piece, or is it just a kind of telepathy?

Nichols: We usually know we're heading toward a last line. And when we're on television we have certain check points – things in the middle that we're getting to. We improvise around a set idea, and they give us a signal when we have so many seconds left, and then we finish.

Playboy: Jules, in the process of creating one of your strips, do you start with a general area and work your way toward the final point, or do you start with the final statement and work backwards?

Feiffer: I probably start from both ends and work toward the middle. I usually start putting words in a character's mouth, and see how it begins to ride. In the beginning I may have a fixed direction in mind, but it may take off completely and wind up something else entirely. It's almost like improvisation on paper except that, since I'm not doing it before an audience, I can doctor it and tighten it up before it's used. You know – apropos nothing – Mike and Elaine are the only ones in the field who go after one of the things that really interest me: the relation between boys and girls. This is one area, I think, where Mort doesn't do well at all. It's less boys and girls with him than it is "adults." He seems to have a slightly sophomoric boyhood dream of the way girls should act with boys. It's a fantasy and I don't think it works as well with him as his political things.

Sahl: I just can't face my own problems, so I try to avoid them by talking about the hydrogen bomb and Kennedy and Nixon and a lot of unreal things like (continued on page 116) Playboy Panel (continued from page 42) that. But I do make a great many sex jokes. I don't talk about bodily functions, but about mental malfunctions as a result of sex opposition. Like the guy driving a sports car saying it's great because how else are you going to get real sexual satisfaction? Or the girl who divides her time between complaining that there's no virility and running away from it when she encounters it. So I don't think my work is asexual at all. Just go to my LPs.

Playboy: Lenny, you've been accused of bad taste in your act, criticized for using four-letter words on a nightclub stage. Do you feel this is valid?

Bruce: Well, as far as working dirty is concerned, I had an influence there – Harry Truman. You know – Harry's working a lot of stags now. He tells the jokes and Margaret plays the piano. They do all the Ruth Wallis numbers – (singing) – "Johnny's got his yo-yo" – all the greats.

Winters: To my way of thinking, Lenny is such a bundle of talent that he doesn't need the swear words. He uses them more or less as shock treatment, but I think he does a lot of funny things. Maybe he's just going through a phase. It's like a lot of guys we knew in the service who might have been great servicemen, but they leaned on this language because they didn't know how to express themselves – and Lenny certainly knows how to express himself. I think he ought to just throw this four-letter jazz out.

Bruce: I don't know any more what is risque. Variety, the show business bible, has this editorial policy to "keep the industry clean." Well, there's a thing called brown-nosing, fear of the mighty, that says "Well, if it's accepted, it must be good." If it's Martha Raye or Sophie Tucker, the reviewer rationalizes: "She was raucous and bold and racy, but then, this is no kindergarten." You should see how they destroy an unknown comic for the same thing.

Allen: The scatological vein has been running through humor as far back as we can trace comedy. If you go back far enough – to times considered by modern men as epochs of great wisdom and peace and wit and spirituality and stuff – you find a lot that was so salacious that there's just no market for it today at all. Even the respected Mark Twain wrote a book – 1601 – that I personally found disgusting. It must have been marked down from 1695.

Playboy: Jonathan, you were saying that Lenny's swearing is a kind of "crutch." Couldn't the same thing be said about your sound effects?

Winters: I've been doing noises since I was a kid, and I still feel it's entertaining. But I don't think it's any more of a crutch for me than sound effects are for the movies. When you go to a movie and see a guy shoot a gun, you expect to hear a shot. This is what I do with my so-called verbal pictures. I used to feel that the more sound I could put into them the closer I'd get to actually being in the movies. A lot of people who've seen me do a couple of dramatic things come up to me and say, "I didn't know you could act – I thought you only made noises." They forget that all of us can act; what else are we doing up there? If we can't get a Broadway play or a good movie part, we turn to these little verbal vignettes. I put the sounds in mine just to enhance the mood.

Playboy: Who are the people you feel have influenced your work?

Winters: Of course, I lean heavily on the new school – all of these guys. But when you ask which direction I really came from, I've got to say Bob and Ray – now they're older guys, but they are two of the brightest talents in the business for my money. Others – Benchley, Thurber, Paul Lynd – a great comedian – and Newhart, I think, is excellent. I like Mort, I like Lenny, and – it's a combination – all these guys.

Playboy: Mike?

Nichols: I am influenced by the art forms I embrace and the ones I reject.

Bruce: All you can say is that you're influenced by everything you've ever read and done. If it's good it becomes part of your experience. You're in touch with people, and the nature of that connection is to change what you are.

Dana: I'm sure that my college background was an influence. As a matter of fact, when I first got into show business, I used to have to watch myself to keep from going on a polysyllabic jag. And here I am today, butchering English as Jose Jimenez – and I got my degree in speech. Certainly Steve Allen was a tremendous influence too. For five or six weeks, I remember, I had the whole Tonight show to write by myself – a sketch a day.

Feiffer: It's very hard to trace back to the first influence I had as a cartoonist, but I think the most important in the early years – for me and a number of other cartoonists – was a guy named Will Eisner, who did a strip called The Spirit. I dare say Harvey Kurtzman would not have come up with Mad magazine if Eisner hadn't preceded with The Spirit. The way my thinking developed, and where it finally went, in the beginning, was very largely because of Eisner. Walt Kelly for a long time was also a strong influence. In style, Robert Osborn has been an influence, and Andre Francois, and William Steig. And writers like Benchley and Samuel Beckett and Dostoievski, and a whole line of novelists. More and more I try to give the characters in my strips the depth that a novelist might try for, except that I try to add an edge of humor to them.

Sahl: In the beginning, the comedian who really impressed me was Henry Morgan. It was a great blow for freedom that this guy could get it across – it was a rallying point. You know, today, the negativists say, "Well, the authoritarians really got to him," and I tell them it was his choice; he could still be swinging if he wanted to. Herb Shriner in the beginning was another guy, except that he couldn't bring off the rural thing. But I always thought he was an extremely thoughtful comedian in the beginning – you know, you had to work a little to find out what he was saying.

Allen: Shriner's jokes were classics. He should have done better than he did. I guess his problem was that he was doing modern jokes with Will Rogers mannerisms. The square, Cleveland-type audience probably wasn't good enough for his material, and yet, you couldn't put a guy who scratches his head and kicks the rug into the hungry i either.

Playboy: Who do you think will come after you, Mort?

Sahl: The sheriff and his hounds, probably.

Bruce: There'll be somebody new out there. It's like the coffeehouse is today's version of Lindy's and soon some new comic will be saying "Those shmucks in their coffeehouses" just like we said, "Those shmucks in their Lindy's." He'll be spiritual – in relating to his fellow man – he'll be better to his friends, he'll be less materialistic. So I think there will be still another new school of humor. There'll always be a new look, because that's the word.

Playboy: Mel Brooks – who used to write for the Sid Caesar show and has now turned to performing himself – once said that the problem of the angry young comedians is that they can poke fun at success-values before they make it themselves, but that they can no longer do this once they become part of the target. How do you gentlemen feel about that?

Nichols: What does "success-values" mean? Making fun of people with money? Making fun of people successful in their work? I really don't know what that half-hip, half-sociological jargon means.

Feiffer: If people are changed by their success, then of course they can't poke fun any longer, except as a bit. When anything becomes a bit, some of the life goes out of it, and the same routines will begin to sound slick rather than heartfelt. But, if you really feel certain attitudes very strongly, not just because you are a have-not against the haves, but because they are a part of your general attitude toward life – then there's no reason why your approach should weaken when you become successful.

Dana: I guess it's kind of hard for Mort or any of these guys to make fun of someone who's affluent, because certainly everybody in the business is picking up a lot of bread.

Sahl: I think comedians are more sensitive to the material success of other comedians than the audience is to theirs. The audience isn't ever going to say to me, "You had dinner with Henry Cabot Lodge, so what kind of a rebel are you?" It's the other performers who do. Anyway, I think your financial position is a state of mind. Look what Goodman Ace said about Lucille Ball. He said she got an eight-million-dollar contract from Philip Morris to go on the air and fight with her husband about buying a dress for $5.98. Did anybody take her to task for this?

Allen: I think there may be something to what Mel Brooks says, but only a little. It's true that you're a little. It's true that you're a little nuttier when you're starting out – at least I know I was. When I read a transcript of some of the things I said years ago, it often seems pretty wild to me. But, in general, you don't change that much. You are what you are, for better or worse. You may get a little more conservative or a little more sparing of other people's feelings as you get older, but I don't think there's any more to it than that.

Winters: It all depends on what kind of an ax you have to grind. Ten years ago, I was doing pretty much what I'm doing now. Sure, I'm on television a little bit more and I've gone through nightclubs, but I feel I haven't changed a lot. My chart has run pretty much like a lot of other people's – it's been up and it's never been really completely down.

Playboy: Steve has suggested that comedians are liberal rather than conservative. How would you yourselves classify your political orientation and its relation to your work? Mike?

Nichols: I would say that its relation to our work is not very great. What we do just isn't political.

Dana: I'm certainly not an extreme left wing, but I would feel very good being classified as a liberal. On the other hand, somebody overheard a conversation on the subway where this woman says, "Well, I used to be an egghead, but I got smart." So I guess I'd rather not get too smart either.

Winters: Occasionally I've gotten into politics, only to find that I don't know a great deal about it. It's like the guy at the bullfight who leaps over the barrier, takes off his coat and says, "Hey, Toro! Aqui! Aqui!" The crowd is with him for a moment, but then they find out that this guy has not only never been a matador, but he's never even eaten a steak. I suppose I do lean to the liberal side, although I'm a conservative in my dress, in that I don't tear my shirt all the way open, or let my hair grow down over my ears. But I see Babbitts within both parties. People call the Republicans the party of the rich, and the Democrats the party of the poor, and yet you see rich in both parties, and poor in both parties. I don't think I'm really begging the question, but you can understand why I don't want to sever relations with half the nation if I make a stand here or there. So I save my politics for the booth with the little curtain.

Feiffer: I'm independent left, certainly, but with no party affiliations. The role of an observer, I think, denies you the privilege of committing yourself completely to any single point of view. Otherwise, at one time or another, you'll have to take after many of the people you admire and say, "I think you're wrong here." The trouble with any organization is that it takes on the worst aspects of the group – bickering, jealousy, factional disputes, high-grade stupidity on all levels. I've always been a congenital non-joiner and I doubt if I'll ever be able to belong to anything without feeling a little guilty that my name is on the membership roll.

Sahl: I've always felt that one of the funniest phrases in the world is "The liberal tradition." Tradition, after all, is the very antithesis of liberalism. I think you have to develop an evolving liberalism. Just about the time you're beginning to live with an idea, you've got to change it. You hear Democrats accusing the people who won't accept Kennedy of "inflexibility." They say, "Well, you're still living in '56." I know a lot of Midwest conservatives who are philosophically anarchistic, whereas Eastern radicals – these are all oversimplifications, of course – will often be politically radical but very conservative in a sociological sense. I think the healthiest thing would be if we didn't argue politics and dissipate our energy, but direct it into our work. I don't know if I've been able to do it myself, but I try. The trouble with liberals is that they're often just a step ahead of the consercative. They look back and say, "Well, he's dumber than I am." But that's not enough. You have to go on, but not to the point of self-cancellation. You can kid liberals to liberals, but if you kid liberals to conservatives, you're just giving them fodder.

Bruce: I'm very subjective about it. Something is liberal to me if it's to my taste. I relate on the floor the things that please me. Like I never was a particular fan of George Gobel, Red Skelton, Eddie Cantor, Georgie Jessel, but that doesn't say that all the people who dig them are idiots. As I get older – and I think I'm getting a little hipper, a little more liberal, if you want to call it that – I say, well, it's not that I dislike those cats. It's just that they don't make me laugh. Or take the group who dig Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, Philly Joe Jones – you know – they say, "That rock 'n' roll is a lot of crap. Stamp it out!" But there are millions of kids with their new school – Paul Anka, Elvis, Bobby Rydell– saying the same thing about cool jazz. And then there's the guy who digs Shostakovich who says they're both crap and that they both have terrible taste. So what the hell is good taste? It's individual. The fact that I don't dig Pinky Lee makes the hippies feel secure – "We don't dig him either." But I say I don't dig Sinatra either, so they go, "Uh-oh, you don't like Sinatra." It's not that I don't like him – he just doesn't excite me as a performer. Johnny Mathis does. Does that make me square, conservative? Here's a paradox: I love Bobby Short and I love Mel Tormé – opposite ends of the stick. People can argue, "This guy's crap, this guy's good," but it all comes down to your own taste.

Allen: But comedians in general do tend toward the liberal. Even the comedians whose work has no burden of social comment at all – people like Jack Benny or Jackie Gleason – when they were kids, they would probably have been the boatrockers in their schoolrooms. By his very nature, the comic is essentially a disturber of the peace. He does it in a way that society not only accepts but enjoys – if it doesn't go too far. And that's the point we've arrived at now. Some people are saying Lenny and Mort and a few others have gone too far. They haven't gone too far for me, but I think that's the point that their critics are making.

Playboy: Steve, your TV show afforded a place where some of the best of the new humorists have been seen. The skits that were a regular part of your show have been among the most delightfully cutting and satirical seen anywhere. Despite this, you're now off the air. Is there no real place for adult satire on TV today?

Sahl: Before Steve answers, I'd like to say that I think he had the funniest stock company of all time.

Allen: Thanks, Mort. As far as the quality of the show was concerned, it could have continued for forty years. The program was generally considered the best comedy show left – which wasn't such high praise, because there wasn't much comedy left anyway. But I don't mean that I was the funniest comedian left – just that the show was funny. And contrary to popular reports, it had good ratings – not astronomical – it wasn't in the top ten – but it had good ratings. It was a good show, and I think I had the best comedy writing staff in TV, and the funniest cast of characters ever assembled. The show really went off because of my extracurricular activities.

Dana: It was because Steve doesn't have one ounce of sycophant in him. He wouldn't compromise himself at all – which is necessary, to some degree, with networks and sponsors. They have complete and utter control, and there's nothing you can do about it. When they said. "Look, Steve, please don't get so involved in controversial matters," Steve, in essence, said, "Drop dead," and they said, "OK, Charlie, we'll take care of you." And they did.

Playboy: Did they put the screws to the show itself?

Allen: The network really never gave us a great deal of trouble with the comedy content of the show. I assumed this was because they just didn't know what we were doing and, therefore, had no particular suggestions to make. Where they gave us trouble was on that "Meeting of the Minds" thing, and once in a while there'd be some objection to a particular joke. But I don't think that anything in the show itself had any connection with our going off. The network got a little punchy about the plug routine, but that was a very minor point and had absolutely nothing to do with it. In the old days, they might call about once every four months and say, "Listen, is Smith Brothers Cough Drops a plug?" Toward the end they were calling like three times a week. But all that was just a minor annoyance for the writers.

Playboy: Bill, as a writer, did you find it possible to present controversial comedy on Steve's shows?

Dana: Well, we sneaked quite a bit across. Even in things as seemingly innocent as "The Question Man," we put in things like this: the answer was "Miss America" and the question was "When they drop the hydrogen bomb, what do we hope it will do?" In the writing process, there's a lot of subconscious commentary – you may be saying things without realizing it. It's really seventy five percent subconscious and twenty-five percent actual sitting down and saying. "Let's see, is there anything we can say that will help get the message across?" Usually, the main problem is no more thoughtful than, "How the hell are we going to get a couple of laughs out of this things?"

Playboy: Have you other performers found that your material has changed when you've gone from clubs to television?

Sahl: Not at all. I can say this in good conscience. I haven't gone on if I felt they were going to change anything. I've gotten pretty much everything on, myself, but I must say that the audience often collaborates with the performer in selling out. They're the first ones to say to you, "You weren't very good on TV, but boy, I know what those pressures are like." After Oscar Levant did the Steve Allen show, he went back to his own show and said, "Boy, when NBC got through with me, I couldn't talk about anything but the weather." The audience didn't turn to him and say, "So you copped out for a price." Instead, they laughed with him, because he was fighting authority. They didn't seem to care that he was also losing. I think the audience should be extremely unforgiving if you sell out. I realize that when I go on and I hold out for something, I am merely satisfying myself, because I've yet to see a member of the audience come up to me and say, "Boy, that was a pretty stroing routine for television – you must have really swung." I have to keep reminding people of how Ed sullivan stuck his neck out for me. Our only reward was that the audience laughed instead of freezing. I've done some wild things on television, but people don't see it. So essentially an artist must work for himself. The mass audience is a byproduct. If they won't listen to you, then you go out and you marshal a hipper audience in the clubs, and then you go back with enough prestige – and, we hope, enough discipline – to get on what you want to.

Playboy: Has there ever been any pressure exerted on you in nightclubs?

Sahl: Practically none. That's why I took to the clubs initially, because they're dollars-and-cents places, and the owners don't faces themselves artistic, whereas in television and theatre you always have self-styled producers and directors who are suspicious of the audience's intelligence and start aborting what you're doing before it ever gets anywhere. Years ago, club-owners would sometimes say, "Don't mention the Un-American Activities Committee" or "We have a customer who is a Republican, so ––" Oh, in the beginning, there was some heat on me, but then as I began to swing, this all changed. Even now, though, there are times – like I worked recently for a guy who is an extreme conservative. This guy was really in conflict because he made a lot of money off my not being a conservative. But he kept saying things to me, like when I came back from Russia, "Maybe you'll like our country better now." As a result he will never see me again nor my customers, nor that money.

Playboy: Lenny, has there ever been any pressure on you in nightclubs?

Bruce: I've had this terrible pressure on the frontal lobe. Yeah, I've had guys telling me what to do – you know, civic pressure, church groups, synagogues. I get letters from rabbis, protests from church laymen, from Prostestant and Catholic people who come up to me and verbalize. Members of the police department have told me just before a show, "We don't want you to talk about politics, and we don't want you to talk about sex." Then I say, "What do you want me to talk about, cement? A lot of people are persecuting it by walking on it. What else?"

Playboy: Have you changed your material for TV?

Bruce: When I go on television, like on Playboy's Penthouse, I do it with the same point of view. I speak in a different language from the clubs, but I'm just changing the words.

Allen: I think the material itself changes. It's just that there is certain material they don't feel at liberty to do, and they are usually correct in so feeling. Almost anything that has to do with religion, for example – they just censor them-selves on that. As you know, Lenny has now made a little routine out of telling what happened when he went on our show.

Playboy: He wanted to do a bit on the program about his grandmother telling him that he couldn't be buried in a Jewish cemetery because of his tattoo – that Jews are supposed to go out the way they came in.

Bruce: Well, I really made a little more of that than there was, just for humor. I always blow things up tremendously. All humor is magnification to the point where it becomes satirical, ludicrous. If the audience takes it as literal truth, well, then, they will also believe that Hitler was handled by MCA, which is another bit that I do.

Playboy: Mike, has your material changed at all when you've gone on television?

Nichols: Only so as not to insult the sponsor.

Playboy: Like the Lilt incident?

Nichols: It's nonsense to bitch about restrictions on television, because those are the conditions under which you take the job. With the Lilt thing, what we were angry about was that we had checked it with them ahead of time. We called them and said we'd like to do a kind of parody on the Emmy Awards in which I was to give Elaine an award for contributing to the dignity of television. And she was going to accept the award and say thank you and make a little speech about how she felt vindicated, and that she hoped to continue to deserve this award. And I was going to say that she was as articulate as she was beautiful. And she was going to say, "Thank you, Mike. You know, looks are very important to an actress, especially her hair. That's why I always use Black Rain Home Permanent." As a matter of fact, even as she is accepting this award, she is giving herself a home permanent. And when we checked it with them, they said would we mind making it Lilt in-stead of Black Rain, and we said we'd be delighted. When we got to the show, of course, they had changed their minds. And the way it comes about is simple fear – the producer is afraid. of the agency man, and the agency man is afraid of the sponsor, so they had never really checked it out. So they thought that if they told us at the last minute, there would be nothing we could do but change the whole sketch. They were wrong.

Playboy: Jonathan, how about you and TV? Any pressures?

Winters: My work doesn't change much. I don't use any blue material – a few suggestive things, maybe, but not out-and-out filth. I contend that you can be funny without it. I've never seen Mort or Shelley do anything blue. In defense of Lenny, there are great hunks of his material where he doesn't swear at all, even in clubs.

Playboy: Didn't you have some censor-ship problem on TV with your prison-break routine?

Winters: Yeah, that was a thing I put in my album that I couldn't use on TV. The television code rules, it seems to me, are still pretty ridiculous. You can't even mention a product, let alone kid one – which is understandable up to a point because of the payola situation. But there are so few other things you can kid either. I found a script recently where we couldn't even say "living color." Figure that out. And yet you'll hear a guy say, "Look at that crazy broad – man, she's got a built like . . ."Just because this guy's a big star or has control. But about the prison sketch: I did a scene about a priest and a prisoner. The prisoner was Tiger Elliot, and the prison priest was Father Duffy. We've all seen these prison pictures, but here was the twist – Father Duffy says, "Well, now, Tiger, sure an' I'm glad you're givin' yourself up, and will you give me the gun?" And he takes the gun. Then he says, "By the way, you are a Catholic, aren't you?" And Tiger says, "No, Father, I'm a Lutheran." So Father Duffy blasts him. Now I told this story to Pat O'Brien, and I've told it in front of priests, and they all thought it was hilarious. But on TV, I had to change it to a little glass gun with candy in the handle. And Tiger says, "All right, Father, I'll give you the gun, but will you give me the candy back?" It was a switch, but it wasn't downing the Protestant or the Lutheran or taking a crack at Catholicism.

Playboy: Didn't they let you do the original on Canadian TV?

Winters: Yes. They are a little more lenient up there, as I find the English are. I knew I was gambling with a hot thing when I did it, but then, you're always going to get letters anyway. But when I had my own show on NBC – a little fifteen-minute thing – I had just two bad letters in thirty-nine weeks. And they were from two kooks. One was because of an irreverent thing I did about General Custer. This woman wrote in and called me a traitor, and said, "You probably wasn't even in the war, you Communist." ect. I answered her, and said that I hoped she would discontinue watching television long enough to read a little history. She would find that General Custer must have been pretty much of a clown to take two hundred and twelve men against three thousand Sioux. If I wanted to portray John Dil-linger as a sissy – you know: "Mercy, I don't want to kill anyone. I just want to have a fun time sticking up candy merchants" – you'd have all the fags down on you too. Where does it end? Who can you kid?

Playboy: Jules, has your work changed as you've expanded your markets?

Feiffer: Well, the Voice strip is now being syndicated around the country – it's in about forty papers, and if anything, it's gotten stronger. It may be because I have a marvelous agreement with the papers: my strip is considered editorial matter and not a cartoon. Also, they have the privilege of not running anything they don't like, and they've got enough of a backlog to replace it with something they find more innocent. When I did a Nixon strip in the Voice, I knew there would be a lot of trouble with it around the country, that it might not be run. And it wasn't. The syndicate never mailed it out because they were afraid the papers might take strong exception, and even drop the feature. That's their privilege. They didn't send out my Kennedy strip for the same reason. But I've had hardly any trouble at all. My security is that if the strip doesn't run nationally, and it's one I like very, very much, I can include it in the books I put out, where there is no censorship at all. So one way or the other, I get into print whatever I want, and have a chance to be seen nationally. Only once, in the early days, did I have any censorship difficulties. It was shortly after anti-Castro sentiment had started going around the country, and so I did a pro-Castro strip. A Cleveland newspaper dropped me, saying they didn't realize when they bought the feature that it was going to be political.

Playboy: It's odd that the syndicate would withhold Nixon and Kennedy, and yet send out a strip on Castro . . .

Feiffer: That's what's marvelous about it – there is simply no logic to it. Every-one ascribes more logic to censorship than it really has. It's amazing what you can get through sometimes. If you're doing something strong, there will always be opposition – if there weren't any, you wouldn't be saying much. And you should never be concerned about how the syndicate is going to take this or that, or how they're going to stop it. If you think continually in terms of how to hedge and get around them, rather than trying to ram through, then you are doing the censorship job for them much better than they could do it.

Playboy: Steve, whose fault is it that TV doesn't have more and better comedy and satire? The success of Jules on paper and of these new nightclub comedians would seem to suggest that there is a big audience for this kind of humor.

Allen: As I see it, humor on television – I've been writing it now for several years – has been going downhill for some time, and I personally see no hope whatever that the trend can ever be reversed. I think it's partly because of the economic system. In other words, it's obvious that TV is an advertising medium. Therefore, an advertiser has every right, I suppose, to insist that his program appeal to the largest possible number of people. Let's face it – you're not going to do that with topical, critical humor, or with great drama and music. I think that Pay-TV could possibly be a solution. Of course, you would face the same economic problem there that you face now, but I suppose then the performers won't care, as long as they make their four million dollars. Maybe they will care, I don't know. The human capacity for greed has never really been tested on that scale. Although we're trying pretty hard now.

Playboy: It would seem, then, that nightclubs continue to be the bastion of hip humor. But why has Bob Newhart decided to forego them for concert tours – because of the drunks and hecklers?

Allen: Right, and I don't blame him. I think nightclub audiences are the jerk-iest. I think I may buy a club just to put up big signs on the wall saying Shut Up and Jerk and You, Out. Just the other night I was watching Newhart, and I had to turn around and give a few people the stare routine. I don't know what the hell it is that makes people talk louder during a club routine. Maybe it's just the booze.

Sahl: The drunks you meet in clubs are drunk before they get there. It's hard to get drunk in a nightclub – I know,I've talked to many who've tried; you know, weak drinks and slow service.

Playboy: Isn't it possible that the makeup of nightclub audiences has changed somewhat since the old days? Certainly it isn't the same audience that went to see a Joe E. Lewis.

Sahl: Yes, clubs have really improved from the old days. And we have a lot of people to thank for that– people like Brubeck.

Allen: The audiences are different because new comedians are different. But occasionally, one of the new guys like Newhart will get so hot – it doesn't matter whether he married Jayne Mansfield or flew the Spirit of St. Louis – that he will attract the crowds who go to see cockfights and Christians being fed to the lions. They don't go because they can't wait to laugh, but because he's the hot thing to see. These are the guys who get plastered and they're the ones you hear from on the floor.

Dana: Once in a great while, somebody will heckle me. I don't mind. I learned a long time ago that when you're in a club you can't do a set act without being imperiled. But I can understand why a guy like Newhart has trouble. He gets into a character, and if somebody interrupts, then it really hurts.

Winters: It's like interrupting a play or a movie. If you have to take time out to dissolve some heckler, then you've created. This is one of the reasons I turned to playing colleges. At least there you haven't got everybody juiced. I faces drunks for seven years. That's enough. In a concert, there's as much money in one night as there used to be in seven at a club. But my chief reason for bugging out was that I had a wife, I had two children, and I wanted to come home. My boy is eleven and my little girl is four. I realized I couldn't hold onto my marriage, period, if I was going to stay on the road for nine or ten months out of the year. By the time you fall back from the front lines, there's no rear echelon there, no tents, no medic, no hot coffee, no nothing. I'm not saying this for page fourteen of Reader's Digest, but a man has to make a decision sooner or later. I didn't want to wind up like the Great American Businessman, who gets so wrapped up in himself and his little cans and boxes that he just sort of says goodbye to the family. When he finally comes back in a pretty good financial bracket, he finds them saying, "Who are you?" You don't embrace a kid at twenty and say, "Well, I've got time to love you now." You've got to decide. I had to. I had to figure out how I could combine my career and my marriage. Finally I did it by quitting the road. It was that simple. When I go away now, when I go out to do a television show, I take my wife and sometimes the kids, if my boy's out of school, or we take a vacation. Perhaps I take more vacations than I should, but I'm not in that big a hurry. I'm not after the gold medal any more. I see it up there, and I'd like to have it, but there isn't that big, gnawing craving inside– "Oh, my God, if I don't get that gold medal, what'll I do?" I have only one medal – it's just made of marsh-mallow – but I like it. You have to decide what it takes to make you happy – twin-heart pools, tigers on the lawn, fur hats, a Sergeant Preston uniform to perform in for the kids every Christmas? Not for me. I would like to do a picture. I'm not saying, "Oh, I'll throw myself on the rug if I don't get one," but this is one thing I'd like to do. If it fits in, fine. If it doesn't, I'll just go on doing the things I'm doing.

Playboy: Shelley Berman has said that Bob Newhart is making a mistake by giving up nightclubs, where you can at least try out new pieces of material – hecklers notwithstanding . . .

Sahl: Well, those guys have got a different problem than I have. When Bob and Shelley start something, it's cumulative, and if some idiot steps on a line, he destroys everything. Whereas I've got a free-form thing going where I can be interrupted by a raid from the Russians and I could work it into the monolog. I'm fortunate there– even though the nation might not be.

Dana: I do the same. If something happens, then I'll just go off on that new theme. At the end of my act, I throw the whole thing up to questions anyway.

Sahl: Any guy who's going to work clubs must learn to handle hecklers. But I don't think that they should be fed stock lines. I believe you should expose them for what they are. When I used to talk about McCarthy and a guy would yell out "Communist!" I knew that this was very thinly-veiled anti-Semitism. And I want him out in the open. If three hundred people are laughing, and he says, "Get off the stage," that means he's made in the image of his idol, Senator McCarthy, and he should be drawn out so that the audience can ostracize him. That's what I want to go after. But none of this wise-guy stuff, "If you smoke that cigar down any farther, it'll be a filling."

Playboy: How do you handle your hecklers, Lenny?

Bruce: Well, each one is different. What I do is, I usually have a cross I put in their face. A silver bullet. A wooden stake, sometimes.

Playboy: Shelley Berman has been known to stop in the middle of his nightclub performance to tell a heckler that his job is not only to entertain but also to maintain order . . .

Winters: I don't buy that. If people are paying, I don't think you have the right to stop and say, "Put out those cigarettes. Stop that boozing. I don't like it." Who are you to tell six hundred people in a room to do this and do that? Either you've got to put up with it, meet them halfway, or just get out. If it gets into a fight, later on you sit there in your hotel room all bound up inside looking at two thick telephone books and a phony Renoir and a pull-out bed and a couple of the daily newspapers, and you say, "It's three o'clock in the morning." And you go down and have your chili at the local shop in a booth with a pathetic handful of entertainers. I've had it.

Allen: I think Bob Newhart was smart to get out of the clubs and into the concert field. The easiest place in the world to get a laugh is in a theatre. There's undivided attention, no booze, nobody walking around, it's quiet, and the lights are out. The audience pays good money to come and do nothing else but make this scene. Bob will be very happy doing concerts.

Sahl: I suppose that part of the reason for Bob's switch was because of Mike and Elaine's success with their theatrical thing.

Nichols: Actually, we didn't get heckled much in nightclubs. I think one guy alone gets heckled, but two people don't get it as much. One person has to relate out to the audience, and the audience will sometimes answer back. But we turn and talk answer back. But we turn and talk to each other. So most of the time they leave us alone.

Playboy: Do you find, because your work touches so closely on social intercourse, that some people act a little selfconscious in ordinary conversation with you?

Nichols: Well, people are always saying, "I'm afraid to say anything, you'll use it in a routine." Or sometimes Elaine will just say, "Pass the sugar," and some body'll say, "There they go." It's irritating. We don't sit there observing people. I think the only people who observe other people are those who do it as a defense – you know, like the kid at the end of the bar who pretends he's making notes because he's scared to talk to the girl. But people in the middle of their lives don't consciously gather material. It just happens to you. So nobody is in any danger, because we're just not looking with that in mind.

Playboy: Incidentally, Mike one of the reviews of your Broadway show called you "bitter and vitriolic." Do you agree?

Nichols: Do you mean at work or personally? I find it very hard to describe what we do, but I don't feel bitter when I'm on stage, and I don't feel vitriolic, unless somebody misses a light cue. There are simply certain things I'm displeased about, so I make fun of them. But I don't think that you can make fun of anything that you don't partake of to some extent. By which I mean, very often humor comes out of the tension between wanting something and not wanting it. One of your new comedians can do fifteen minutes, funny and vicious, on Time, Inc., and then sort of quietly mention that Life is doing a story on him. Or do a whole gag routine about the sports car mania, but manage to refer to his own 300 SL. This sort of thing is funny, but I don't think it's bitter and vitriolic. But speaking of vitriol, a nutty thing has happened lately: Time now enjoys being put down, because it likes to think it's irreverent. So, it no longer takes courage to put things down. Consequently, it may not really be "in" to put things down any more.

Playboy: Mort, haven't you stated in the past that things shouldn't be divided into in and out, hip and square?

Sahl: I just don't like to see anybody or anything addressed collectively. I don't like things like "You're a good audience." There must be a higher calling in life than to be an audience. I do believe in hip and square, only within a person, and I believe you can appeal to the one or the other. Advertising men rate people way too low, and I probably rate them way too high. But if you're going to rate at all, you should overrate. While I might say that one group or another is not too hip. I would never say it to people who can use it as fuel, like to ad men, who are just looking for documentation. Anyway, I've found that people are sometimes more liberal as a group than they are individually. If I say something to somebody about Fidel, or Stevenson, or Kennedy, they usually give me an argument, whereas in the audience they accept it without question.

Bruce: That's because the theatre is fantasy. They're not becoming more liberal. Mort can only assume what they're laughing at. I think they're just more comfortable laughing together than singly. When you've got only one guy in the audience, he feels a little self-conscious laughing out loud. In a big group, the laughter is infectious.

Sahl: In laughing, I think the audience exercises its right of editorial acceptance or rejection. You must touch a nerve, or they won't react. The audience has never let me down – a lot of other people have, but never the audience. What I'm trying to say is they're often less tolerant individually than they are as members of the audience.

Bruce: I see what you mean. It's like I do a piece of integration – getting my point of view across and really socking it in, but with humor so I can get away with it. They laugh, and I say, "Boy, they all agree with me," and then I sit down at a table with them and they really throw in some beautiful bigoted cliches. They weren't agreeing with me at all. They seemed to be laughing at something entirely different from what I was talking about.

Sahl: It has to do with communicating. It may be my own problem of communicating to individuals. The people who admire you most, who know you best, are going to give you the hardest time. Those readers who are married will understand this.

Allen: I think this whole business of hip and square is a division, to a very great extent, between young and old. I would think that people over fifty must have a very difficult time understanding these guys, or even laughing at them. Not many people over fifty seem to keep their minds open, even though they think they do. By that time, the natural processes have set in. We all know some hip old people and some square young people, but I feel there are certain rough lines of demarcation.

Playboy: Wouldn't this wearing-off of hipness happen to the comedians themselves when they pass fifty?

Allen: I don't think much will wear off, but I don't think anything new will be added after they get to be forty-five or so either. I know that Voltaire went on writing to a ripe old age, and maybe so will they, as new subjects come along – as we land on the moon or something – and they'll be able to do moon jokes. But I think they'll be of the same kind that they were creating when they were twenty or thirty.

Playboy: It would seem, then, that all of the comedians of the new hip school have several things in common: they are satirical in their approach, they deal in controversy, and they all write most of their own material. In the last analysis, gentlemen, would you say that you are just entertainers functioning before an audience which already agrees with you, or do you think you are commentators with the power to shake up the status quo, to make people more aware of themselves and of the world?

Nichols: We're entertainers. If we wanted or were able to change the structure of society, I wouldn't choose to do it by joining a comedy team.

Feiffer: I don't do what I do as a preacher, a crusader or as an entertainer. I'm doing it because, in a sense, I have to do it. I'm doing something that's part of me and that I love to do. If I thought of converting anyone I'd have to give it up immediately because I've always distrusted publicity about cartoonists' affecting their times in a direct and strong way. Thomas Nast was said to have been responsible for overthrowing the Tweed Machine. Now it's quite possible that Nast helped buoy up public reaction that was already beginning to go against Tweed. But if he had appeared ten or fifteen years earlier, nobody would have paid any attention to him. To have any effect, a commentator has to be there at the right moment. If I found myself being concerned with getting a message across, then I would have to either bastardize my work or do something else for a living. If I started preaching. I'd be talking down to the audience. I would have to make my characters talk dishonestly, have to put words in their mouths that they wouldn't use, to put up labels directing the audience to the point. It may be that my popularity has something to do with people's not knowing what I'm saying, so they like it. This happens most often in my sex strips. Men who are hostile toward women will think I've really shut up this bitch, and the women who are hostile toward men will be delighted that I've exposed what they think is the male point of view. Actually, what I feel I've been exposing all along – maybe I'm wrong – is the lack of involvement between two people in a very close situation.

Dana: I don't lose much sleep over the philosophy of comedy, but if you press me, I'll say that the only real value of comedy today is that it relieves, entertains and diverts. There's enough tsurus around today that if people can simply be diverted, that's where my real kicks are. If somewhere along the line people are moved to think in a more "liberal" direction, then I'm delighted.

Winters: I don't really have a message. I enjoy doing pathos: I always have, and I think most people enjoy watching it. A lot of people say, "Gee, Jonathan, that's too macabre." But I try to paint a balanced picture of the world – not too grim, but not too bright either. If you want to buy what Mort and Lenny do, if you agree with what they have to say, I say fine. I have my own kick, but I agree with much of what they say and do. I disagree with them too, but they understand. I can certainly respect their dedication.

Bruce: My humor is made up of things I like and don't like. My following is made up of people who love me and hate me. Yeah, people who come in hating me in the parking lot. They'll come in in a group, say four people, with this hostility – before you come on stage they're rumbling, you know, and then one of the group will like me and start laughing, and that'll really bug the other ones. "You think that's funny? You're sicker than he is." Oh, sure, I have an effect. But how lasting is it? How lasting is the effect of anything? I know I whip them up, I know I can get them really cooking and thinking my way exactly. But when they leave the club, then other influences work on them. Nothing lasts. Like you go see a picture and you identify with the poor shmuck on the screen, but you're very subjective and hung up on yourself, so pretty soon you're back inside yourself.

Sahl: When I started, I did a lot of evangelism, you may remember. I've really stuck my neck out. I'm the guy who went to Miami, to Vegas, to the Chez Paree, to the Copacabana – to prove the point. Because I always wanted to challenge the people in the business on their own ground. Not just hide in the little clubs. I've played it with a sense of abandonment. As far as making myself felt and changing the world, I've kidded about that. Stand outside and look at the people coming out of the show – do any of them look changed? I don't know. It would be presumptuous of me to decide what they're left with. If that's one of the few areas in which I'm humble – treasure it.

Playboy: Final comment, Steve?

Allen: I personally don't see the two possibilities you mentioned as alternatives. These guys do have this ready-made, youthful audience that agrees with them before they open their months. But I think that they may eventually also affect society and perhaps society's view of itself by the simple fact that the older people – the squares – will die off sooner or later. In other words, when Mort and Lenny and the rest of them get to be forty and then fifty, they will have brought their own generation along with them – or perhaps vice versa. In any case, they will still be speaking to agreeable contemporaries. At last they will be un bugged. They will have the world to themselves ... maybe.