"A factory of sadness."

Mike Polk

See: Comedians

Mel Helitzer

Melvin Helitzer (October 18, 1924 - April 11, 2009) remains a legend at Ohio University, where for decades he was the professor of the Humor Writing for Fun and Profit course, in addition to other journalism classes. The class taught how to write for greeting cards, political speeches, cartoons. It's claim to fame, however, was the final exam which was five minutes of stand-up in front of a sold-out audience of their peers.

In the old days it was held in the Frontier Room, a bar. So the audience was drunk. When the campus went dry and the venue became the Front Room - a coffee house - the audience was still drunk but now also high on caffeine.

Prior to his "retirement" as college professor, Helitzer was one of the "Mad Men" (fo shizz) a Clio-Award winning advertising executive, though his work tended more toward and emphasis on toy companies, cereal and candy than cigarettes and bourbon. Mel was a WWII vet, and a hard-working journalist.

In spite of this sterling reputation, I was a young turk who thought he knew what's what about comedy, and saw Mel Helitzer and his class as Henny Youngman 101.

And so, I was a little confused when the director for Comedians (whose name I cannot recall) invited Mel Helitzer to participate in a symposium on comedy as part of the promotion for the play. I mean, in hindsight, duh, of course, he’s a nationally-known comedy instructor. He was an expert on writing comedy, for stand-up, for print, television, advertising, politics, public speaking. Good gracious, he wrote the Choo-Choo Charlie jingle!



But from my perspective a) he was representative of the kind of fatuous comedy that is sent up as reprehensible and empty in the play in question and b) this 20 year-old thought he was a hack. He did a few minutes of stand-up for our benefit, and every third joke was one I’d heard someone else tell before. It was unbearable. Take my life. Please.

Not to mention the fact that when the director in question did his own five minutes of stand-up at the symposium, it was like hearing watered down Robin Williams. And by 1988, I was already entirely done with Robin Williams.

Which is why, when signing up for winter semester classes, I enrolled in Humor Writing for Fun and Profit. Because in spite of my feeling like I already knew everything about everything, I had enough fire to try and beat the old horse at his own game.

It was challenging, it really was. I am not good at writing comedy. I don’t know how better to put it, but I find it very hard to slow down the thought process in my writing. I know where I am going with something, so I find difficult to spell everything out and bring people along. Gags I come up with seem so obvious I don’t even write them down, and then what I do put on paper is so obscure no one gets it but me. So that was an education. And Mel was invaluable in teaching me about the rule of three (okay, that one is easy) but also timing, set-ups, slow down!

But we had great, enjoyable conflicts about content. My routine was intentionally psychotic, half a series of jokes aimed largely at myself. I refused to make fun of others … except vague others like “ugly people” which could mean anything, and of course, Wham! Unfortunately, the Wham! joke was supposed to just be a weird twist on the old joke about separating the men from the boys in the Greek army, but in hindsight it comes off as homophobic. Sorry about that.

I think the real joke is that I love George Michael, and everybody knows it.

The second half devolves in this uncomfortable Oedipal shaggy dog story, which got laughs, and made people squirm. Mel hated that part AND YET was instrumental in improving upon my delivery. He didn’t like it, but he made it better.



Most people audit Mel’s class. But then you have to pay for it. I wanted to take it for a grade, but then in addition to the live performance, you also have to write a paper. I was going to argue the superiority of improv over stand-up.

To be continued …

On Comedians

"I should be drinking a toast to absent friends
Instead of these comedians."
Elvis Costello
My junior year was the year of comedy. Stand-up comedy. One of the main stage productions that fall at the Ohio University School of Theatre was Comedians by British playwright Trevor Griffiths. In brief, the play is about an older man who teaches an after-hours course in stand-up to working class guys in Manchester. The final exam is a five-minute routine at a local pub.

However, when the instructor’s old partner shows up, a very successful British comedian and talent agent, and announces he is scouting for new talent and will be attending that night’s event, well, that raises the stakes considerably, doesn’t it?

These two men of a certain age have differing opinions about comedy, and its uses. Morecambe and Wise vs. Angry Young Men, don’t you know. The guy in downtrodden, 1970s era Manchester, scraping his living, thinks of comedy as a time-honored art form best employed to divine difficult truths. The other gentleman is about entertainment and money -- If you can get everyone in the room to laugh at the fat kid in the front row, you win!

Also in 1988, when Tom Hanks was still willing to risk playing an asshole, he starred in the film Punchline, which might be my favorite role he’s played. A middle-aged housewife (Sally Field) is having a midlife crisis and wants to try out stand-up. Hanks' character is a moderately successful, workaday comedian, kind of a dick troubled character, and takes her under his wing.

"But doctor ... I am Pagliacci."

Comedians, it turns out, are not happy people. They are bitter, angry people. The best ones can be charming, lose themselves in the content of their “character” and who can cleverly cut down everyone around them but remain adored. Caustic, scorched earth comedians offend everyone and most often flame-out. I don't need to name them. The ones with the longest self-life are beloved, unknowable clowns. Who is Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson? Who cares, they’re funny.

That school year was also my year of graphic novels. The daily comic strip I had written during my sophomore year had been cancelled, but as a result of that experience I had begun delving beyond strips and books, and into what Art Spiegelman called “comix.”

Junior year was when I began reading Harevy Pekar, Spiegelman’s Maus and Raw, and Watchmen, an underground comic posing as a superhero book. Watchmen famously features a character called The Comedian, an psychopathic mercenary who plays the American system to the hilt, G. Gordon Liddy with the expertise, style and strength of Batman. He wears the iconic “smiley face” button that is the signature gaphic for Watchmen. It’s also his blood that gets splattered on it.

He's the Comedian. He gets the joke.

The second act of Comedians features all of the younger performers presenting their shtick. To the playwright’s credit (and the ability of the actors) the routines actually do make the audience, the actual theater audience, laugh -- or not, if they are supposed to be lackluster. All the student had been instructed carefully to look into themselves, to find the humor within. When one comedian’s work begins to flag, he starts making racist jokes which are unfortunately hilarious. Win! A team of brothers have a melt-down onstage, however, when one of them tries to pull the same thing in the middle of their act, and the other refuses to.

The final comedian, Gethin Price, is entirely balls-out bizarre. It’s more like performance art, it isn’t "funny", it’s a grotesque lashing out against the upper class. It is COMEDY. I wasn’t in this production, but I was very interested by it, read the script in advance. I had made acquaintance of the guy playing Price -- he was an O.U. Alum, a visiting artist -- and gave him a Watchmen pin I had gotten from the Uptown Mini Maul. He was thrilled, and got permission from the costumer to pin it on costume.

I like comedy. I like funny. I do not like comedians. In general, I find them to be misanthropic, mean-spirited people. And the only thing worse than a comedian is an improv comedian.

To be continued.