Bam! The wiseguys are waiting for no one. Swift and
rhythmic, they drop lines that fly like graceful left hooks.
They swing on-the-spot commentary that plows through 80
layers of balony and conjecture, grabbing truth by the nuts.
They are the sharp progenitors of a talking style that cuts
quick...but, real quick, to the essence of coolspeak: wising
off.
"At my age, what's to look forward to? If I'm good and
I eat real healthy, then I can get sick and die."
-Rodney Dangerfield
"Hey, hey, somebody please put somethin' in his mouth,
'cause my zipper's stuck."
- Robin Harris to club heckler
Shakespeare dug that brevity was the soul of wit, but it
took a whole lot of aluminum siding salesmen to prove it.
Like seltzer bottles and clip-on ties, wising off was born
of practical necessity. It's no accident that stand-up
swingers like Dangerfield and Jackie Gayle got their start
selling tin shingles. In both comedy and sales, if you
shlep you're sunk. A smart sales pitch explodes on a hotbed
of 60 seconds of wheedling, hustling, cajoling and
shpritzing. You need guts of steel, crazy chutzpah, and the
ability to economize words in order to Make Believe before
twelve heartbeats are up. Henny Youngman's Giant Book of
Jokes (Citadel Press 1963) contains 400 traveling salesman
jokes! Among Hen's dot-dash definitions -- "Race track: A
place where windows clean people... Ecstasy: something that
happens between the scotch & soda and the bacon-and-eggs...
Herbie, you drive. You're too drunk to sing."
You can just picture deadbeat road merchants trading these
corn pearls at motel diners across the country, like secret
members of a smart-aleck society. By the mid-Fifties, every
shlubnik shikker nightclub worth its protection budget or
strippers' wardrobe featured full-blown standup
wisenheimers, plenty of them named Jackie: Fat Jack Leon-
ard, Jackie Gayle, Jack Carter, Jackie Mason, Jackie Vernon,
Jackie Lord, Jack Roy (later Rodney Dangerfield). (On the
Steve Allen Show, comic John Byner even parodied the rimshot
rappers with a character named Lenny Jackie.) These guys
weren't strictly conventional comedians. They didn't slip
on banana peels or lean to limericks. As emcee's, they were
paid to provide interstitial programming between dancers,
and their workspace had all the elapsed time of a dragster
popping its chute after a quick quarter. Their humor hit
'n' split, and you never knew what'd come out next.
"If Jesus Christ came back and was electrocted, you'd
all be walking around with electric chairs around your
neck." - Dick Gregory
"We were married by a Reform rabbi. A very Reform
rabbi. A Nazi." - Woody Allen
Don Rickles to Sinatra: "Make yourself at home, Frank.
Slug somebody."
To a lot of onlookers in the later Fifties and early Six-
ties, these comics seemed "sick" or "cynical,"
but they
weren't haters. They blasted each other's misgivings, often
with the same candor -- and underlying compassion and
outraged sense of ethics -- that they used to blast the
corruption and hypocrisy of society at large.
"I can't get worked up about politics, man. I grew up
in New York, and I was hip as a kid that I was corrupt
and that the mayor was corrupt... You believe politi-
cians, what they say? If you were to follow [Fifties
liberal Democratic Presidential candidate, Adlai]
Stevenson from New York to Alabama, you would shit from
the changes." - Lenny Bruce
They came in all shapes and sizes. Some of 'em, like sadsack
Jackie Vernon and arch-paesano Pat Cooper, were just funny,
funny guys. Some were brutally honest, like Dick Gregory
and Lenny Bruce. Some were just honest, like Mort Sahl and
George Carlin. Don Rickles was just brutal. But what they
all had in common was talking cool: a way of honing in quick
and making a play.
Standup is really only one accountable form of wising off.
Today, "wiseguy" is often taken to mean "gangster,"
and, to
be sure, plenty of these guys broke bread with other guys
who broke heads. But you have to dig that the Shpritzkrieg
is everwhere! Wentworth and Flexner's Dictionary of Ameri-
can Slang defines "wiseguy" as "one who is aware
of contem-
porary happenings" and "a person who says he knows every-
thing, a smart aleck; one who gives advice and criticism
freely; a troublemaker." Wiseblood flows in Jay Leno, but
it also courses through the characters of novelist/screen-
writer Richard Price. Teller's unsilent partner Penn
Gillette's a wiseguy, and there's a wise-gal sensibility
under the shtik in Joan Rivers too.
Their breed's made of thinner stock today, but AM deejays
have always posted high wise-cell counts. Behind the
scenes, payola greased the wheels. On mike, boss jocks
word-danced like hell, shoving syllables into the space
around three-minute singles, hardselling everything from
tapered slacks and Hawaiian getaways to used auto parts and
records nobody on earth would care about a month later.
What's the dif? It's all hep talk to them. On cable's Home
Shopping Club network, sales-crazed hucksters move mock ice
with mock enthusiasm ("Are you crazy? We've already sold
a
hundred and fifty of the cubic zirconiums just this morning!
Comin' home to ya!") and zero eye contact. In low budget
television spots for suits, hair care, weight loss and tech
schools, modified coolspeak is the lingo of choice.
And it isn't stupid. Because, for all its velocity, wiseguy
fast-talk embraces knowledge: far-out facts, bet-you-didn't-
know-this arcana, nutball anecdotes and wild metaphors, out
and out b.s....anything so you get the picture just right.
The shpritz surfs along the twilight edge of a free jazz
solo and a rugged blast of rock 'n' roll energy. Check out
Billy Bats (Frank Vincent) and Tommy D (Joe Pesci) spraying
and slaying each other in a game of high-stakes insult
pingpong during their barroom scene in GoodFellas. Or step
into the deli and eavesdrop as the table heavies celebrate
hardluck vaudeville manager Broadway Danny Rose over hot
pastrami. Like Dyl's Howard says in "Highway 61": "Tell
me
quick, man, I got to run."
True shpritzing runs on freedom and fluidity, the uncanny
ability to both accelerate and stop on a dime and respond to
the moment. A great many king shpritzers started out in the
Forties and Fifties as Catskills resort court jesters, where
they were expected to be FUNNY everywhere all the time.
Bruce worked the Catskills. As did Mel Brooks. As did Phil
Silvers:
"I was the emcee. It was a frenetic business. The
comedian had to work with the social director as the
hotel buffoon, the tummeler, the noisemaker who would
do anything to keep the guests from checking out.
Potato races, "Roll the peanut." "A Night in Tahiti."
The hotel owner gave me strict orders: "I don't want
ever a dull moment."... The work onstage loosened me
up. I tried everything. I didn't have time to think of
failure."
Dig it: "Professional" comedians stuck in repetitive
"rou-
tines" only approximate what is coolest about wising off:
namely, that undefinable drive that makes some wiseacres
talk the talk because they just can't help but react,
publicly, to the moment. For example, both Albert Goldman's
Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce and Phil Berger's study
of
standups The Last Laugh sing the praises of Joe Ancis,
notorious Marquis deSphritz. Ancis was a tin man with a
bachelor's degree in accounting who lived in his mother's
apartment till he was 35, and had no aspirations of ever
being a professional comic. Afternoons in the late Forties
and early Fifties, he made the scene at Hansen's Cafeteria
(1650 Broadway, Manhattan), where pro yucks-cats such as
Dangerfield, Buddy Hackett, Bruce and the rest would be
killing time, waiting for the big break. For the sheer
pleasure of it, Ancis would burst into bull's eye insults,
spontaneous monologues and surreal riffing that "crippled"
the whole damn deli. "You shmuck," Joe would howl, "you
look like a fuckin' fire sale at Sears and Roebuck!"
While most of his genius has gone unrecorded, you can tell
from rumors and reminiscences that Joe Ancis is a great
example of the type of everyshmuck anyone in a big city will
come across sooner or later: the fast-thinking nudnick who
lives to make you die laughing. These free-range smart
alecks raid the sandwich shops, streetcorners, the subways
and elevators and block parties and backrooms, daily waging
a full-scale war on the doldrums. They celebrate life in
language, relying on what are probably age-old, maybe even
instinctive, equations of speed and knowledge and insight
into the human condition.
On a recent trip home to Philly, a legendary L.A.
bossjock runs into an old crony, a PA king swinger:
"...We go down to the bar. As soon as we walk in
Jerry's buyin' drinks for everybody. 'Hey, one for my
man over there! This one's on me! Set 'em up!' I
look at him, I say, 'Jerry, are you nuts? You're gonna
go broke, you're buyin' drinks for people you don't
even fuckin' know, man.' He stops, looks at me, he
says, 'Hey, you never know who's gonna be on the jury,
man..."
WISEBUYS
Today, there's a glut of vertical jokers on the circuit,
most of whom couldn't crack wise to save their lives (A.D.
Clay's X-rated juvie act has all the wit and spontaneity of
a horse race re-creation). If you want to swing, give these
a ring...
Sounds:
The Real Lenny Bruce (Fantasy Records)
Rodney Dangerfield: No Respect (Polygram)
Richard Pryor: 'CRAPS' After Hours, Live at Red Foxx Club -
(Laff Records lp)
Woody Allen: Standup Comic (Casablanca double-lp)
Screen:
The Great Standup Comics (video info ), feat. Jack Carter,
Jackie Vernon, Joan Rivers, Alan King and more.
Tribute To Lenny (video info), with Steve Allen, Jackie
Gayle, etc.
Ink:
Why A Duck? - Richard Anobile (Avon 1972): a book of verbal
and visual gems from Marx Bros. films.
The Last Laugh- Phil Berger (Ballantine 1971).
The Essential Lenny Bruce- ed. John Cohen (Ballantine 1957).
How to Talk Dirty and Influence People- Lenny Bruce (Playboy
Press 1963).
This Laugh Is On Me- Phil Silvers (Prentice Hall 1973).
Mad's Al Jaffee Spews Out More 'Snappy Answers To Stupid -
Questions (Signet 1972).
The Breaks (Simon & Schuster 1983)
Wiseguys in Uniform:
Sgt. Ernie Bilko (Phil Silvers Show; CBS TV 1955-59),
Ensign Lester Gruber (Carl Ballantine, McHale's Navy; ABC TV 1962-66)