ANYTHING ELSE IS A LAUGH By Peter Filichia
Many people remember the birthdays and anniversaries of friends and relatives.
I do, too – but I also remember when people laugh at lyrics in musicals.
Sounds crazy, no? But this occurred to me when my beloved Linda and I were at ONCE UPON A MATTRESS and her first laugh came after Marshall Barer’s slyest lyric in “An Opening for a Princess.”
Because the plot includes a ludicrous law that says no one in the entire kingdom will be allowed to marry until Prince Dauntless does, the frustrated townspeople complain that “Nobody’s getting any.”
Wow! Pretty saucy for a fairy tale – even a fractured one. But Barer had one more word to add to those three, making the statement “Nobody’s getting any younger.”
And when Linda laughed, I realized that she also did after that same line 27 years ago when we saw the 1996 revival with a pre-Sex and the City Sarah Jessica Parker.
Linda then laughed twice in “Shy.” These responses happened when Sutton Foster, now playing Princess Winifred, delivered the same wordplay that got Linda to laugh at Parker when she stated that she was “going fishing for a mate with bated breath and hook.”
Minutes later, Linda reprised her 1996 laugh when the chorus gave a new meaning to “Shy,” when stating that Winifred was “one man shy.”
I even remember the laughs from audience members. It started early on in my theatergoing, when a SOUND OF MUSIC lyric received laughs when Rolf told Liesl “I am 17 going on 18; I’ll take care of you.” At the time, I was his age, and it certainly sounded reasonable to me.
I can’t say for sure that the first big laugh that Barbra Streisand got in her professional life was in I CAN GET IT FOR WHOLESALE, for I had missed her in the one and only off-Broadway performance that ANOTHER EVENING WITH HARRY STOONES had on October 21, 1961. But four months later, when she sang the eponymous “Miss Marmelstein,” she got an enormous laugh after establishing her educational credentials. Even young, I got that one.
My knowledge of classical music isn’t strong. To me, the three Bs are Berlin, Bock and Bobby Lopez.
So, I missed a joke in BAJOUR, but the man next to me didn’t. It came when Nancy Dussault delivered “Where Is the Tribe for Me?”, arguably the most eccentric song ever written for a Broadway musical.
Dussault played Emily Kirsten, an anthropologist who went to Africa in hopes of uncovering natives no one else had found; that way, she’d have the apt subject she needed for her Ph.D. thesis.
After many false starts, Emily happened upon a group she thought ideal — until she heard the distinctive sounds of classical music, coming from one of their tents proving that someone had beat her to the bunch.
I didn’t recognize the piece, but the gentleman to my left certainly did, for he cackled to the point where he doubled over. I’ve since learned that the music was “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” by one of the three Bs who’s mentioned in an ON YOUR TOES song.
Appreciative laughter came in THE FULL MONTY after Malcolm jubilantly sang, “I’ve got a friend like Carole King, or was it Carly Simon used to sing? I always get those two confused.”
The laughter that followed revealed that many had made that same mistake themselves.
At an early performance of ANNIE – long before the cast album was released – I recall that one laugh came before the joke. Depression-era unfortunates who felt victimized by our 31st president snarled when reviewing the 1928 election:
“They offered us Al Smith and Hoover
We paid attention, and we chose
Not only did we pay attention – ”
And that’s when many in that second-night audience laughed, knowing where lyricist Martin Charnin was going.
And if by some miracle you’ve missed ANNIE all these years, here’s betting you can anticipate the next five words.
No? Then listen to “They Go Wild, Simply Wild Over Me” in the 1973 revisal cast album of IRENE (a much-underrated recording), and you’ll hear the same joke. I still recall my then-wife’s laugh when we saw the tryout at the National in Washington.
Sometimes the laughter comes after only one word. In BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, all Karen Ziemba had to say was “Everybody!” and arguably everybody did laugh. Of course, what she sang before made the joke land. Listen, and see if you do the same.
And at other times, I’m the one who laughs the hardest. At a Pennsylvania college production of Cole Porter’s OUT OF THIS WORLD, I was suddenly glad that I had taken biology in high school. No, I was no whiz in the subject, but now I could understand what the god Mercury meant when he told his new love that, when he considered all previous loves, “They Couldn’t Compare to You.”
The big laugh line? “Though I liked the Queen of Sheba, she was mentally an amoeba.”
(Now, aren’t you glad that you took biology as well?)
Three trips to the recent FUNNY GIRL revival showed me that many audience members were discovering Bob Merrill’s lyrics for the first time. Most of the songs received at least one laugh. Winner and still champion? “Sadie, Sadie.”
Even those who knew GIGI from its Oscar-laden film laughed from surprise at “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore,” for there were lyrics that were more frank than a 1958 movie would have allowed.
And speaking of GIGI, sometimes we laugh at what wasn’t intended to be funny.
Listen to the way that Daniel Massey blurts out Gigi’s name on the 1973 cast album. Laura Frankos Turtledove, author of Broadway Revival (a novel that asks, “What if Gershwin had lived?”), says that her family has listened to Massey’s rendition more than once to guffaw at his (way) over-the-top exclamations.
Similarly speaking, ten years before Bette Davis made audiences wonder Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, she did a musical revue called TWO’S COMPANY. If you’ve heard Davis in any of her 100 or so films, you probably can’t imagine her singing. Hear her on this cast album, and you’ll laugh, all right.
The marvelous title song of Meredith Willson’s HERE’S LOVE has Kris Kringle asking for peaceful coexistence between rivals: CBS to NBC; Dallas to Fort-Worth, et al., leading to “Elizabeth Taylor to husbands in review.” Taylor by this time in 1963 had had four weddings; who knew that she was only at the halfway mark to her ultimate total?
Was it Willson, orchestrator Don Walker or someone else who decided that in the theater – not on the album, mind you, but at the Shubert – there was an extra musical measure of padding so that the audience could laugh at the line. The song needed it, for indeed the audience did.
Incidentally, you can hear the surnames of all of Taylor’s husbands in “Elizabeth” in a WHOOP-DEE-DOO song that had my friend Paul Roberts and the rest of us laughing when we saw the revue in 1993.
WHOOP-DEE-DOO played off-Broadway, where laughter sounds less potent, what with fewer theatergoers to acknowledge the jokes. Not this time, or when WHEN PIGS FLY was playing an equally modest venue. Mark Waldrop’s hellishly clever lyrics for “A Patriotic Finale” (or, as I like to call it, “The Gay National Anthem”) got plenty to roar out loud. Similarly speaking, off-Broadway’s audience at THE WILD PARTY reacted to a lesbian’s favorite position in “An Old-Fashioned Love Story” with gales of glee.
JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS played an even smaller venue: a now-defunct nightclub. Still, I don’t think the booze was responsible for the wholehearted laughter during “Brussels” after Alice Whitfield told the crowd about her parents: “He had no brains; neither did she. How bright could I turn out to be?”
When URINETOWN was still off-Broadway, my pal Ken Bloom responded to an unforgiving Penelope Pennywise who told those who wanted to relieve themselves, “If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go through me.” However, some months later at Broadway’s Henry Miller’s Theatre, the same line delivered by the same performer (the marvelous Nancy Opel) got from my buddy Dan Richards and others a reaction that brings to mind the words “tore,” “down” and “house.”
I’ve heard Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics get plenty of laughs: the fate of thieves and saints in MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG’s “Now You Know.” Desiree’s questioning whether or not Anne is actually a human being in A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC’s “You Must Meet My Wife.” INTO THE WOODS’s Wolf giving his view of what the lass to whom he was speaking truly represented to him.
When Nancy Walker sang “I’m Still Here” on SONDHEIM: A MUSICAL TRIBUTE, the mention of a certain one-time debutante garnered a generous laugh. As CABARET’s Emcee says, “Don’t take my word for it.” Listen to the audience on the live recording and hear for yourself.
And what about the laughter I’ve missed? Oh, to have seen an early off-Broadway performance of A CHORUS LINE and then a slightly later one. According to reports, little to no laughter greeted Val’s song when she reached the words “tits and ass.” Once someone realized that revealing the title in the program was the problem, the song became “Dance: Ten; Looks: One.” So, when Val arrived at “tits and ass,” the laughs poured forth as freely as the rainwater at the end of 110 IN THE SHADE.
(By the way, “Looks: One” isn’t a typo. That was actually in the title for a short period of time, until someone eventually decided that Val wasn’t that deficient in looks; three would be more accurate and merciful.)
So, every time I listen to these funny lyrics on their cast albums, I remember how my friends, relatives or strangers responded to them. I love recalling that people had a good time, which might spur them to return and see more musicals. No laughter warns me that they’re not enjoying themselves, and that they may never attend another show.
And that would be no laughing matter.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His new book – BRAINTEASERS FOR BROADWAY GENIUSES – is now available on Amazon and at The Drama Book Shop.
