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GP: As a writer, you don't get the same sort of feedback that a stand-up comedian gets on stage. So how do you know when something is funny? Do you have an internal voice in your head that critiques what you write?
LG: Yup. That voice is experience, and instinct, and a sense of humor, I hope. And the voice can be giving me a wrong message, telling me that something is funny that audiences don't share. That's why theater is a very good place to do comedy, or anything for that matter, because you're collaborating with an audience every night, and they'll tell you what's funny and what's not. With television, you can either sweeten things or put on a laugh track, so you never really know whether a human audience would have laughed at it; and in motion pictures, of course, you have to take a chance and release it in front of the audience [and hope they think it's funny].
GP: Do you have a favorite medium?
LG: No, it depends on the piece. For me, it's not movies, because movies are just too tough for writers. It's an industry that doesn't really respect the writer and thinks he or she can always be improved, and calls in other writers.
GP: Are there places that are welcoming to writers, that celebrate the writer?
LG: Oh, the theater, certainly! And writers have a status in television that is unique, because the script is so important in television and the writers so responsible. When I say "writer," now, I am talking about anywhere from one to 15, depending on the show. But writers make handsome deals, get very handsome credits, and very handsome respect in television, far more than in motion pictures. They get that kind of respect on Broadway too, or on off-Broadway, or in theater in general, but nothing like the financial rewards.
GP: How do you feel about theater today?
LG: I'm at the point where I'd rather write for it than go to it. I'm old! I think if I lived in New York I would see a good deal of theater, but I don't. Theater has been dying for years; it's just a very slow dier. Certain kinds of theater have not died, but they're in the rest home. We went through that whole cycle of big, effects-driven shows, from England, mostly, from one man, mostly. And I think we may have seen the end of that cycle, which is welcome news to a lot of people. There are some good young lyricists and composers, and it's up to them to give the theater some artificial respiration.
GP: It's just so expensive to put a show on Broadway now that you have to be a solid hit before you even attempt it.
LG: That's right; that's why there's so much archeology. Old hits, you know.
GP: I think they had to come up with a "Best Revival" category for the Tony, because otherwise there might not be anything to celebrate.
LG: Exactly, absolutely. Actually, I think I won one of those!
GP: Is there a certain kind of comedic style you enjoy the
most?
LG: Well, I can laugh at the silliness, the sort of surrealistic
efforts of a Monty Python, and then I can laugh at John Cleese doing
FAWLTY TOWERS, in which he's playing a very unsubtle, almost slapstick
kind of comedy. And go from Benny Hill to Noël Coward.
GP: Everybody you've just mentioned is British!
LG: I know, I realized that as I said it! But no, of course
Americans -- W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy are the obvious ones.
GP: Do you have a special place in your heart for British comedy?
LG: The left side of my heart is reserved for British comedy. But yes, of course, I do -- it's only English or American, obviously; I don't know any Portuguese comics, or Indonesian stand-up comedy. I grew up watching funny people on the screen, and those people weren't George Burns, it wasn't Milton Berle -- although I remember seeing Milton Berle when I was 11 years old live in a stage show in Chicago, thinking what a wonderful comic he was. But I grew up with those screen heroes, those comic heroes.
GP: Like Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello?
LG: Not Abbott and Costello; I never thought they were that funny. In fact, I never thought they were funny at all. But certainly Laurel and Hardy, and I loved the Ritz Brothers, a long-forgotten team. Harry Ritz influenced more American comedians than you can imagine; Sid Caesar's one of them. Very, very funny. All physical, no wit, no humor -- just outrageous takes and body movements. Hysterical. If you look them up on the Internet, you'll see they appeared in a number of mostly 20th Century Fox films. But certainly Fields, and Hope on the radio, and Jack Benny on the radio, and Fred Allen on the radio.
Interview by Sarah Birnbaum for GREAT PERFORMANCES Online conducted in February 2001.
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