Q & A - Page 1 | Page 2

Q: Maybe this is just my perception, but I have always seen you as a somewhat iconoclastic comedian - someone who's broken barriers and done different things. Does it seem odd or ironic that you're getting such an "establishment" kind of honor here?

Tomlin: I know I had that reputation, and I'm not saying I don't deserve it in some part, or at some time, but, you know, I have a very wide acceptance from people. But, as my mother said one day when I was airing one of my specials back in the early '70s, and my relatives sat around in Kentucky watching it, and almost no laughter, my mother said - the next morning - "Don't worry that people didn't laugh last night. It's just that they've never quite seen it done that way before. But they know somewhere in their hearts that you're trying to do something different and something that's respectful." She didn't use the word "respectful," but somehow she meant there was something bigger and deeper and somehow richer, and even though they didn't laugh, it didn't mean they didn't really respond to it. So, I blessed my mother, you know, for being that perceptive to help me.

Kaminsky: It's not about standing up and telling jokes. It's about something a lot deeper. It's interesting that you said "Laugh-In" and "mainstream" [together], because it was such a subversive thing when it came out.

Tomlin: Yeah, I loved Laugh-In. But still, a hit television show is mainstream. That's what won me a mainstream audience, because then I began doing concerts and one-nighters and things that brought me to the counterculture.

Q: What was it like, the first couple of Laugh-Ins? Did you guys know it was going to be a hit?

I had no idea "Ernestine" would hit the nerve she did. I had never seen "Ernestine"; I'd only done her in little clubs and stuff. After my first taping, the crew would see me in the hall and they'd go "Snort…snort…snort" [laughter] and I thought, "What the heck?" I didn't quite get it.

Tomlin: Well, Trudy stands on her own - the street person from [The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe]. She doesn't have as wide an exposure because she's almost never been on television.

Mrs. Beasley is a very long-lived character, my middle-American housewife.

I think Lud and Marie have a very long [laughter] life. They were the parents of Agnus's mother in our first Broadway show, Appearing Nitely, and they were Agnus's grandparents in The Search....

Edith is a child and Ernestine was a telephone operator and she touched everybody's life in some way. Everybody experiences the telephone.

I'm always trying to find characters to do. In my day, I had a fairly open field. There was almost nobody else doing characters.

If you can capture somebody, it's thrilling. If you can capture their essence, a part of the society that you can speak through, it's really fun and delicious.

[About the Mark Twain Prize program]

Kaminsky: This particular show is to honor a body of work, as opposed to one song. And, the show has no host. So the people who participate in it aren't random bookings. They are people who have really been influenced in their own work by the people being honored.

So the comments, when you see Steve Martin up there, talking about Carl Reiner … these people have worked with them and so it's a real genuine feeling that comes about at the end of the evening, that your peers have honored you in something that is not a confection.

People like Robin Williams show up because Jonathan Winters is his idol and he's delighted to be there. There's a certain genuineness that comes with this show.

Q: How are the winners selected?

Kaminsky: There is a process. The Kennedy Center board is involved, and we discuss names and ultimately they decide.

Q: Lily, do you have a list of people you want to honor you?

Tomlin: People I've worked with or people with whom I've continued friendships, but only from that personal connection. If I could have my fantasy, yeah, I'd like to have Greta Garbo there. [laughter]

Q: When you look back over your career, what are your proudest achievements?

Tomlin: You know, I can't …. It's like people saying "Which is your favorite character?" Of course, I love The Search..., I love working on stage, and there's many monologues that I adore.

I had an old monologue from my first show about my second-grade schoolteacher, Miss Sweeney, who died not too long ago. She had moved to Ireland and I'd always planned to see her one more time before she died. And, of course, I didn't.

She wore monogrammed sweaters to school - little M, big S, little A, Margaret Ann Sweeney - and I wrote a dramatic monologue about throwing myself in front of a bus because Miss Sweeney rejects me.

I do something that displeases her, and it was based on a true event. I drew a … oh, it's too long to go into again. But, you know, I also had this sophisticated sense that the other people in the classroom were kids and I was more adult; I knew something that they didn't know, and the teacher knew that.

And of course, Miss Sweeney, when she heard about the monologue, she said she barely knew who Lily Tomlin was, much less the little girl in second grade. She said "I must have made a deeper impression on the child than I realized." [laughter]

It's really - and this will sound like a funny comparison - but it's like when I was offered the part of Miss Hathaway in Beverly Hillbillies. I said, "I don't want to be Miss Hathaway." I'm thinking I'm a little bit more like Dorothy Malone, or Beverly Michaels, [laughter] who were my '50s idols. I was always crazy about bad girls because the good girls were so duddy and the bad girls had all the fun. I'm always getting offered some spinsterish uptight kind of female.

So then my mom calls me and she said "I heard you were going to be Miss Hathaway." I said "No, mom, I'm not going to be Miss Hathaway." "You be Miss Hathaway," she said. "You will be so funny!"

So I thought, well, what am I fighting this for? It's awkward. It feels awkward. But somehow the Mark Twain award seems as appropriate as Miss Hathaway. [laughter]