Larry Gelbart for the uninitiated

Below is a boiled-down survey of Larry Gelbart's career I did for a 1997 Gelbart tribute produced by the Writers Guild of America. These are my program notes. One of the happiest experiences of my life, doing this in service to Larry's legacy as a small payment for the many kindnesses he bestowed upon me in my life . . . and as Larry said that without Danny Thomas, he wouldn't have had the life he had, I can say unequivocally the same about Larry Gelbart . . .

Radio
“All we had were words.”
To appreciate fully Larry Gelbart’s professional writing career, one has to go back to his high school years, not because they were formative, but because that’s when he became a professional writer. In 1943, after his family moved from Chicago, he joined the Fairfax High band, the drama program, and would occasionally play duets at the USO and the Hollywood Canteen with his schoolmate, Andre Previn. Typical high school stuff.
His father, Harry Gelbart, a barber, offered his teenage son’s services as a comedy writer to his customer, Danny Thomas. Larry soon found himself pitching jokes with the writers of Fanny Brice’s Maxwell House Coffee Time. There he gained experience under Mac Benoff, $40 in salary (which he spent on a sportcoat), and the agent from the William Morris Agency. If it weren’t for Thomas, Larry admits, “I wouldn’t have the life I have.”
Next he joined Duffy’s Tavern the day Abe Burrows left the show. Ed Gardener, “Archie the Bartender” to millions, taught Larry the power of the word, and sharpened his abilities for puns, malapropisms, and non-sequiturs. Larry managed to squeeze his military duty writing Command Performance at AFRS inside his two years with Duffy’s Tavern.
A chance to write for Eddie Cantor ended when his partner, Sid Dorfman, fell ill. Larry then wrote for the Jack Parr Show in 1947, along with The Joan Davis Show (where he would finally get to work with Burrows), and later a season for Jack Carson. Bob Hope offered Larry and his new partner, Lawrence Marks, positions on his pared-down staff-they signed scripts “Larry and Larry”-and the two remained with Hope through the Berlin Airlift, Korea, and (scariest of all) Hope’s plunge into television.

Stage
“The only safe place for writers”
A revue titled My L.A. gave Larry a chance in 1949 to write for the stage, and to vary his lifestyle from the daily Hope routine. It ran only four performances, but presaged a later musical, 1989’s Broadway hit City of Angels. Teamed with composer Cy Coleman and lyricist David Zipple, Larry created in City of Angels a breathtaking intersection of two Hollywoods-one fictional and the other even harder to believe-in two simultaneous settings.
Between My L.A. And City of Angels, Larry penned several other plays: his first Broadway musical, The Conquering Hero (1961), had so many problems in its tryout performances that Larry quipped, “If Hitler’s alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.” His next show had problems on the road. But they, thankfully, were solved, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (co-written with Burt Shevelove and composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim) played nearly a thousand performances in its initial run.
Larry moved to England, then to M*A*S*H, but returned to the theatre in 1975 for Sly Fox, which he adapted on Arthur Penn’s suggestion from the Renaissance play Volpone. From first draft to final, Larry re-wrote all but one page, a luxury of theatre to which he has often alluded.
After writing several films, Larry again returned to the safe haven of theatre for Mastergate: A Play on Words, a savagely funny indictment of governmental “self-abuse” that closed on Broadway just as City of Angels opened. Larry’s other stage works include the original dark comedies Jump! (1970) and Power Failure (1991), as well as adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels for narrator and orchestra (music by Patrick Williams), and revised narration for Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

Television
“With most television, the only way you get any feeling out of it is if you touch it while you’re wet.”
From his earliest days in television, Larry Gelbart watched the medium critically. His work with Bob Hope in the fledgling medium offered few new directions for writing: “a monologue is a monologue,” he noted. Still, writing for Hope taught Larry to polish a line until it shone bright. His education in comedy writing has followed a linguistic model: he learned the power of the word with Duffy’s Tavern; the potential of the sentence, the one-liner, with Hope; he would soon perfect the “paragraph” of comedy, the sketch, when he joined Red Buttons’ staff in 1952 and learned what constituted a full-fledged television/burlesque sketch.
After a season and a half with Buttons, he moved on to several other assignments, building on what he had learned. In 1956, Larry joined perhaps the most celebrated writing staff in the history of television, for Caesar’s Hour. He never wrote for Your Show of Shows, as many histories of television comedy claim (and while we’re debunking myths, Woody Allen wrote for Sid Caesar only after these first two series left the air). Nevertheless, Caesar’s Hour boasted the writing talents of, among others, Mel Tolkin, Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Sheldon Keller, Michael Stewart, and Selma Diamond. With performers Caesar and Carl Reiner sitting in, the writing sessions became jam sessions. As Larry explained once, “Except for the fact that we were all white and Jewish, we felt like we were the Duke Ellington Band.”
The television sketch that Larry learned with Buttons reached its apotheosis with Caesar, whose staff elevated the comedy to the human condition and Larry began to understand in a real way the social powers of comedy. He went on to write for Patrice Munsel with Sheldon Keller and (with Woody Allen) several specials for Caesar, then three for Art Carney. He wrote a season of The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom, and helped launch The Danny Kaye Show. While his family lived in London, Larry wrote very little television, just a few pilots and The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine (1969-1970), which ran in England and America. For the cast, Larry hired British comedy legend Spike Milligan, and Americans Barry Levinson and Rudy DeLuca, as writers. Near the end of his nine years in England, he was visited by producer Gene Reynolds, who wondered whether Larry had seen the movie M*A*S*H.
Larry penned the pilot for the new series in two days (after extensive discussions with Reynolds and five weeks of “incubation”). He spent four seasons with M*A*S*H, and wrote or re-wrote the lion’s share of the show’s first 97 episodes. M*A*S*H afforded yet another opportunity for Larry to stretch the perceived limitations of television comedy. Multiple story lines, timely anti-war messages, and practically a new genre—the “dramedy”—are but a few of the program’s historic innovations.
One point of contention between the producers of M*A*S*H and the network involved the use of the laugh track (which were present in his later shows Roll Out! and Karen as well). When Fred Silverman coaxed him back to television for United States (1980), Larry stipulated that there be no laugh track and endeavored to draw real laughs from real situations, since much of United States explored marriage as Pat Marshall and Larry Gelbart (and their friends and children) had lived it.

Film
"One of the funniest comedy writers that has ever lived. One of the truly great comedy writers of our epoch.”
-Mel Brooks, AFI Seminar, October 19, 1977
As the 1960s dawned, Larry had reached the point where he felt able to go the distance on long projects, like Forum, and films. His first break came when Charles K. Feldman asked him in 1961 to adapt Sam Locke’s play Fair Game for the screen. Fair Game was never made, but before that decision was made, Larry had already moved to another project, a rewrite of The Notorious Landlady for director Richard Quine. Larry quickly realized the treatment writers received in Hollywood, and as a result has rigorously sough protection for his own work through the years.
After collaborating on the story for Carl Reiner’s The Thrill of It All (1962) and re-writing (with Peter Barnes and Norman Panama) Not With My Wife, You Don’t, Larry once again teamed with fellow Forum author Burt Shevelove on an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrong Box (1965), a wickedly funny black comedy about greed, families, mores, and death. The cast included many of the most respected British film actors—in or out of comedy—Michael Caine, Ralph Richardson, John Mills, Peter Sellers, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Directed by Bryan Forbes, The Wrong Box is that rarity of rarities, it seems: a cult film of true quality.
Larry’s film output went on hiatus until near the end of his M*A*S*H years, when he adapted Avery Corman’s novel, Oh, God!, for the screen. Initially, he envisioned Mel Brooks and Woody Allen to play God and Jerry (the roles eventually played by George Burns and John Denver). Carl Reiner directed the story of God’s continued interest in humanity, which became an instant classic because, as Pat Marshall pointed out to her husband, “It’s what everyone wants to believe.”
Hearkening back to his childhood experiences sitting through triple features each Saturday afternoon (“today they’d call it a film festival”), Larry and Sheldon Keller embarked on a loving send-up of 1930s and ‘40s film writing titled Movie Movie (1978). Directed by Stanley Donen, Movie Movie combines two short films and a coming attractions reel that not only recall Larry’s past, but also figure into later projects like the musical City of Angels.
After Movie Movie, Larry’s next triumph would come in the hugely popular classic Tootsie (1982). By now the story of Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels is legend, as is the story of the making of the film. All involved—Larry, director Sydney Pollack and star Dustin Hoffman—sweated each change because they knew how special the project was.
With the exception of Blame It on Rio (1983), also directed by Stanley Donen, the remainder of Larry’s later screenplays have intersected the medium of television, specifically in the form of made-for-cable ventures such as the adaptation of his own Mastergate (Showtime, 1992), the highly regarded Barbarians at the Gate (HBO, 1993), and the upcoming Weapons of Mass Distraction (HBO, 1997). The success of these films demonstrates the truth in Larry’s observation that much of his satire arises from a desire to show the politician (or CEO) “how disappointed I am in you.” It also demonstrates what might be said of Larry’s entire career, that “He never met a medium he didn’t like.”