Is It Funny?

Staggering up to the finish line just before 2021 ends is another episode of the languishing series Is It Funny? This time we turn to the Scots style icon Muriel Spark, whose books never fail to cheer me. She is both vicious and economical, as well as laugh out loud funny when she turns to the truly surreal and sublime. She also has great advice for writers, which may involve letters and cats. If all you know is Miss Jean Brodie, let me introduce you to the flashing scalpel of her mind.

I manage to get all the way through this episode referring only to 'the Scorsese show' which of course is Pretend It's A City, which is on Netflix and has the director following around his pal Fran Lebowitz and chatting with her in various places, as a follow up to his HBO documentary Public Speaking. I cogitate on what cool is and why and how Lebowitz defined a certain NYC/art world/film world cool for me as a kid in the sticks reading Interview Magazine along side my various music mags. I may or may not have invented an entirely spurious term, the 'weirdo ceiling' (cf glass) and am definitely uncool.

You have probably heard of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, though odds are you know the film and not its pioneering author. Anita Loos was the first contracted female writer in Hollywood and her scripts made Douglas Fairbanks the first swashbuckling star, as well as making the Talmadge sisters the toast of the town in witty comedies. She wrote one of the first handbooks for screenwriting, too!

She hung out with the luminaries of Hollywood, but also the heavyweight intellectuals of New York during the wildest times of the Prohibition era. In addition to Blondes, she of course wrote the script for The Women (1939), turned Colette's Gigi into a play that of course led to the musical film, but it was the play that made Colette's discovery -- a young Audrey Hepburn -- into a superstar.  

Today's episode focuses on the 1939 filmed based on Clare Boothe Luce's smash Broadway success, THE WOMEN. The script by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin features an all-women cast and some of the biggest stars in Hollywood at the time: Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Norma Sheerer, Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard and an amazing array of character actors in one of the wittiest scripts ever, directed with impeccable timing by George Cukor. I try to resist quoting all my favourite lines (because there are so many!!) and instead enthuse about why everybody needs to revel in this movie. Watch it tonight with friends!

Because I can't just stop at one? Because they're so much fun? Because I can't help rhyming? Or my faulty sense of timing?

The two dialogues in question from Pete & Dud are 'On Music' and 'On Sex' and are not available in recorded form which leaves some aspects a mystery only to be imagined -- which is more or less how they think about Sex. Music is a conduit to sex but also a way to conjure the imagination if you have the capability (they do not) and if you also have the title of the piece correct (this also they do not).

Yes, I do at one point say Beowulf when I mean Beethoven. In my defence they begin the same way and the medieval came up a couple times in the course of discussing these dialogues so my subconscious took over. Apologies. A more exacting host than I would have re-recorded it. I am pressed for time so the handful of you who list will be asked to forgive me.

This episode mostly talks about what led up to Not Only But Also and how it became a success. Originally meant to be Not Only Dudley Moore But Also some guests like Dihanne Carroll and utility player Norm Rossington, it became also Peter Cook and then turned around to be Peter Cook but also Dudley Moore. And there was that John Lennon fellow, too. The theme song 'Goodbye-ee' was actually a hit.

This 1962 Edinburgh festival show kicked off the 'satire boom' of the 60s and made stars of Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore. I trace it all back to hearing that first LP. A mix of individual performances and group theatrics, much of it hold up even today. 

What is the first thing you can remember being funny? While we tend to remember things better as we age (until a certain age when it all begins to drop away again) in the early experiences of our lives many of the patterns are set for the rest of our lives. The weird mix of comedy coincidences in my childhood led to an explosion of interest in comedy at a very geeky level in adolescence. From P. L. Travers and Lewis Carroll to Monty Python and the Goons isn't as big a jump as it might seem at first.