Inseparable? Being Funny Isn’t About Liking Each Other

As I write this, I have auditioned and received a callback for the play The Sunshine Boys, Neil Simon's hilarious tribute to Vaudeville. It's about the comedy team of Al Lewis and Willie Clark, who over the course of forty-odd years, not only grew to hate each other but never spoke to each other offstage throughout the final year of their act—or for the ensuing eleven years. Willie's nephew Ben attempts to put the team back together for a TV special about great American comedy but getting the two cantankerous actors into the same room for a rehearsal proves almost futile and provides most of the laughs in the play. 

The fact that Lewis and Clark had so much chemistry onstage but couldn't stand each other offstage is less of a stretch than it seems. In fact, there are a slew of examples of this phenomenon that can make The Sunshine Boys' tiff seem tame by comparison. For instance: Bud Abbott & Lou Costello, one of the most popular comedy duos of their day, suffered a rift in 1945, at the height of their popularity, when Costello accused Abbott of hiring a servant that he had just fired; he then refused to speak to Abbott unless they were performing. Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert, while coworkers for many years, were not the best of friends off camera due, in part, to the fact that they worked for competing Chicago newspapers. Roger wrote in a tribute shortly after Gene's death, “Gene and I were known for our rages against each other.” William Frawley and Vivian Vance, I Love Lucy’s Fred and Ethel Mertz, were not at all fond of each other. In fact, “Their hatred for each other started very early on, in the first week or so of the show.” And Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, possibly the hottest duo in all of America in the early fifties, called it quits in July of 1956. In his book Dean and Me, Lewis says Martin angrily left, telling Lewis with he was “Nothing to me but a fucking dollar sign.” 

When it works, don't ignore it because of a minor technicality, like not getting along—milk it for all it's worth.

And then, there was Fox & Leonard, my duo, the first two-man morning team on FM and Rock & Roll radio. When we first teamed up, we found we had pretty amazing chemistry and essentially had the ability to know what the other was thinking. Ours was the kind of chemistry that makes for entertaining radio, television, film, vaudeville stage, or any other venue where a comedy team might perform. Sonny Fox was the program director, and had hired me to do the morning show solo until he realized that he and I might be able to try something that had yet to be done on the FM band. We found that besides a mutual admiration for each other’s work, we shared an adoration of the radio comedy team Bob & Ray—we had both grown up listening to them. I was struck by the amazingly creative ideas that came from Sonny's fertile mind but sometimes that was far as it went. I provided the follow through. This balance made for a very good team. Every time the microphones went on, we were flawless, and for the first couple of years, we also spent a lot of time together off the air. But like in many relationships, that began to deteriorate after we got to learn more about personal lives, priorities, and most importantly, idiosyncrasies. He loved the faster side of life, with all of its perks and problems, and I liked to go to my quiet, suburban home after work, mow the lawn, yell at the kids, and take a nap. Towards the end of our tenure together, we understood that the twains would never meet and we parted. It wasn't necessarily by choice, however; he was fairly unceremoniously "let go," and disappeared without ever saying goodbye. Perhaps the fact that we hadn't really spoken to each off the air about anything but the business of the show for over a year had a little to do with that. Then, not a word exchanged for more than thirty years. We were The Sunshine Boys. 

Why would anyone stay with a partner who is a polar opposite? Willie says it best in the play, when his nephew Ben asks why he stayed with Al for forty-three years when they couldn't stand to be in the same room together: “Nobody could time a joke the way he could time a joke,” Willie explains. “Nobody could say a line the way he said it. One person, that’s what we were.” That's exactly why Abbott and Costello would meet in the middle of the stage and make magic. It's why Fred and Ethel were the perfect couple on I Love Lucy and why Fox & Leonard had the highest ratings in Philadelphia. When it works, don't ignore it because of a minor technicality, like not getting along—milk it for all it's worth. 

At the end of The Sunshine Boys, Willie and Al find out they will be neighbors in the old actors’ home. They sit down and start to chat, and the intense love and respect they have for each other immediately trumps any ill will harbored over the years. They seem to just pick up where they left off. When I moved to Florida from Texas, my route took me through Pensacola, where I knew my ex-partner Sonny was living. I called and he asked me to stop by and spend the night on my way through. When he opened the door, we hugged and it was like nothing had changed in the thirty years we hadn’t spoken. 

Just like Willie and Al, reuniting for a CBS special on comedy, we were asked to put Fox & Leonard back together as our old radio station changed formats and was producing a reunion show of all of the talent from across the years. We did and like all great comedy teams, the chemistry was in tact. More than three decades of silence and the magic was still there. 

We are now the best of friends, who understand the importance of the contributions we made to each other’s careers. The parallels between Lewis & Clark and Fox & Leonard were almost eerie, considering the play debuted just a couple years before we met and teamed up. At the time we had no knowledge of who Neil Simon was, what he had written, or how it would relate to us thirty years later. It seems that Fox & Leonard were Lewis & Clark then and today, which helps me understand what Mr. Simon was trying to say in The Sunshine Boys. It showed me that even after all these years in retirement, I was ready to go to that audition and I am ready to do this part when I go to the callbacks tonight and nail it. 

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I got the part of Al and kicked ass and took names for eight weeks. It was a great theatre experience, and I hope the audience enjoyed it as much as I did.