Truth Be Told Page 18

  The cop says, “I’m embarrassed.” So he whispers it: “Cocksucker.”

  The judge can’t hear him. He says, “What?”

  The bailiff says, “Cocksucker!”

  The judge says, “Cocksucker!”

  The whole court erupts, “Cocksucker!”

  It’s like an opera.

  And Lenny says, “I charge this court with lewd and lascivious behavior!”

  I think he got acquitted.

  Lenny’s humor was really about the way he used his intelligence to turn the world upside down so it could be seen clearly. He wasn’t generally a joke teller. But this is one that I’ll always remember.

  The greatest argument in the history of mankind, he said, is between the environmentalists and the geneticists. The geneticists claim you are the way you are because of your genes. The environmentalists contend that you are the way you are because of the way you were raised.

  Here’s a story that doesn’t give any answers, but shows you just how deep the problem is.

  A family is in Yellowstone National Park for a weekend. On the way home, they suddenly remember they forgot their six-month-old boy. Now, they’ve got a choice. If they go back and get the kid, the father will have to miss a sales meeting. There won’t be another sales meeting the next day. But, hey, you can always have another kid. So they go home and leave the kid in the park.

  The kid is raised by wild dogs. That’s all he sees for eighteen years—wild dogs. No humans. Just wild dogs. One day, one of the dogs, in a fit of understanding, drops him on the side of the road and leaves.

  The kid is picked up by a hitchhiker and is integrated into society. He enrolls at the University of Chicago. Makes Phi Beta Kappa. The president of the University of Chicago says in the history of the school this is the brightest kid with the most promising future—and then, damnit, one day he’s killed chasing a car.

  Joan Rivers

  What makes somebody funny? That’s an impossible question. It reminds me of the greatest answer ever in horse racing. The jockey Willie Shoemaker was asked about one of his competitors: What makes him a great jockey? And he said, “Horses run for him.”

  Joan Rivers keeps a catalog of every joke she’s told. But if she gave you or me that catalog, and we told those jokes, they might not be funny. Joan Rivers is funny because she makes people laugh.

  George Carlin

  George Carlin became our Lenny—except he didn’t get busted.

  The most amazing thing to me is how he remembered all his material—it was so involved. He used to do the weatherman, make fun of disc jockeys, the sportscaster. “Here are tonight’s scores: 6–3. 2–1. And now, a partial score: 6.”

  It’s not good to say you have a great joke before you tell it, because it’s a letdown if people don’t laugh. But this is a great joke from Carlin:

  A Catholic kid goes into confession. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  “Yes, son, what did you do?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “You must confess, or I cannot give you absolution.”

  “Well, Father, I had relations with a young girl.”

  “I will forgive you. But who was the young girl?”

  “Sorry, Father, I cannot betray a confidence.”

  “It would help a lot to give forgiveness if I knew who the young girl was. Was it Angela Latrice?”

  “I cannot say, Father.”

  “Was it Betty Santangelo?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “OK, you’re absolved. But for four months you cannot be an altar boy.”

  The kid comes out of the confessional box and his friend asks, “What happened?”

  The kid says, “I got two great leads and I don’t have to work for four months.”

  Henny Youngman

  Henny was known for his one-liners. But there’s a story my friend George Schlatter loves to tell that shows him off-thecuff.

  Henny invited George to eat at the Carnegie Deli. “Come by for lunch, the family’s here. I want you to meet everyone. Just come by to say hello.”

  So George goes over as the family is finishing up a big lunch. George has a cup of coffee, and the server places the check in front of him.

  George picks up the check—and Henny says to make sure to leave a big tip.

  George says, “Henny, I can see picking up the check. But the tip, too?”

  Henny says, “I don’t want you to look cheap.”

  Milton Berle

  Once, Berle and Jack Carter were at a Henny Youngman performance. They let him tell the run-up to one of his jokes, like this:

  “A Polish guy buys a zebra for a pet. You know what he calls him?”

  And then, before he could say another word, Berle and Carter shouted out the punch line: “Spot!”

  David Letterman

  David Letterman is one wacky guy. First of all, he keeps the temperature in his studio at about forty-eight degrees. When you go onstage, you’re freezing. It warms up a little when the lights are on you. But maybe an undertone of discomfort plays into his humor.

  A person could have been on his show forty times, but it wouldn’t matter, he’d never say hello beforehand. That’s how he works. When you come on, he’ll greet you with a big hug, then not say anything to you during the commercial break. One time, during a big intro, as he was hugging me, he whispered in my ear: “I hate my tie.”

  We did a nice first segment. As soon as we broke, he looked at his tie and said, “Why did I wear this?” He was tortured. “Why did I wear this?”

  “You wanna change ties?”

  “No, they’ll notice. They’ll notice.”

  Then he calls to his producer. “You let me wear this tie!”

  But out of nowhere, he’ll come up with the perfect line. Like the time I came on a couple of days after a crazy airplane experience. I had been flying across country with the talk show host Cyndy Garvey and some other friends. As we were landing, the winds were so strong that they blew the plane backward. It was unbelievable. The gusts must have flung us five hundred feet in reverse. The pilot recovered and landed us safely, but afterward he told us he’d never experienced anything like it.

  I told Letterman the entire story on the air. “What if the plane had crashed?” I said. “Can you imagine what the headline would have been the next day?”

  “Yeah,” Letterman said. “CYNDY GARVEY AND FIVE OTHERS PERISH.”

  Jay Leno

  Jay is the opposite of Letterman in that he comes by before the show to say hello.

  He works very hard. I can remember years ago when he’d call CNN for the overnight news as soon as he got up in the morning so he could get started on his material.

  If you ever get a chance, see him in Vegas. His Vegas act is much different from what he does on The Tonight Show. He stalks the stage. Three times as much energy.

  I guested on his show shortly after Larry King Live ended and we did a nice bit.

  “I want to ask you something honestly,” he said for the cameras. “Do you miss the routine of doing the show after twenty-five years?

  “You know something,” I told him. “I’ve got to be honest with you. I never even think about it.”

  “Never think about it?”

  “Never.”

  The phone rings. I pick it up. “Albuquerque, you’re on the air!”

  Conan O’Brien

  “There’s a rumor that NBC is so upset with me they want to keep me off the air for three years. My response to that is if NBC doesn’t want people to see me, just leave me on NBC.”

  Jimmy Kimmel

  I don’t go on the Internet. But if I did, I’d go to YouTube to see the clip of Jimmy talking to kids in Hollywood while he’s dressed up as a chimpanzee.

  Jimmy Fallon

  Jimmy had Tiger Woods on not long ago. He said, “I want to say thank you for having the courage to come on a late night comedy program.... It must have been painful and awful—everything you went through. Bu
t from a comedian’s standpoint, and my monologue writer’s, thank you! . . . Not even making jokes—it kind of wrote itself: Balls, shafts, holes, foursomes . . . Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  When you can make Tiger Woods laugh at what happened to him, you’re funny.

  Lewis Black

  Nobody makes anger funnier.

  Woody Allen

  “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

  Larry David

  What’s the expression? A comic says funny things. A comedian sees things funny. Larry David sees things funny.

  The situations he puts himself in are amazing. He never really behaves badly—but he’s so honest that he gets himself into all sorts of trouble. There’s a genius to that.

  Larry David is leaving a restaurant. He’s got his claim check for the valet. A black guy is standing next to him, and Larry gives him the claim check. The black guy is waiting for his car. Larry didn’t mean anything wrong by it, but ...

  Bill Maher

  Bill used to come on my radio show in Washington back in the eighties when he was just starting out. He’d dissect the political landscape for two hours and take calls. Nobody really knew him. Then look what happened. Last year, I introduced him when he got his star on Hollywood and Vine. When I did, I saw Kato Kaelin in the audience.

  “Hey, Kato,” I said, “who’s house you living behind now?”

  “Tiger Woods’s,” he said.

  Bill was the perfect guy to have as a guest the night I announced my resignation. He came on with little notice and no preparation and turned what could have been a difficult night into a lot of laughs.

  “I’m glad you’re not being fired for your comments about 9/11,” he said. “Oh, no, that was me ...”

  Bill is often misunderstood. People say that he hates America. But he loves America. He wants it to be a better place and he believes that the only way to make it a better place is to criticize what’s wrong with it. If we can laugh along with him, so much the better.

  One night, he went off on Mitt Romney’s book, titled No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.

  “Really?” he said. “Always waving the big foam number one finger. We’re not number one in most things. We’re number one in military. We’re number one in money. We’re number one in fat toddlers, meth labs, and people we send to prison.

  “We’re not number one in literacy, in money spent on education. We’re not even number one in social mobility. Social mobility means basically the American Dream, the ability of one generation to do better than the next. We’re tenth. That’s like Sweden coming tenth in Swedish meatballs.”

  Stephen Colbert

  Colbert is basically doing a parody of Bill O’Reilly. So when I went on his show, I did a parody of Larry King. I parodied his parody. We had fun.

  Afterward, he said, “I was going to say it on the air, but I’ll tell it off the air: My first sexual experience was in a car, and you were on the radio. I was in college—in the back seat.”

  “Was it romantic?” I asked.

  He said, “You had a good guest.”

  Jackie Gleason

  Jackie was very much a perfectionist. There were no satellites in those days. He’d do a show for the East Coast. Later on, they’d play it for the West Coast. In between, he’d watch and know if the third violin was off.

  He was not a joke teller; he was a sketch comic. He needed that rotund physique. There was a time when he lost a lot of weight and he wasn’t funny.

  Before he died, he told me he wanted to do The Odd Couple. I said, “Jackie, that’s right up your alley. You’d be a great Oscar.”

  “I don’t want to be Oscar,” he said. This shows you how Jackie understood comedy. “Oscar’s easy. I want to be Felix. You play off Oscar. Oscar has one note. Felix has layers. As Felix you get bigger laughs.”

  Kathy Griffin

  “I have a very unusual stance, which is that I am pro-gay marriage, but I believe that heterosexual marriage should be a criminal offense because I’m divorced and a little bitter.”

  Craig Ferguson

  I can only hope to be as free flowing as Craig when my show gets to the question-and-answer session with the audience.

  Craig is from Scotland. I once asked him, “What’s under a kilt?”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “On a good day,” he said, “lipstick.”

  Bob Hope

  I can’t explain it, but I never thought that Bob Hope was funny.

  Colin Powell

  Not many people are aware that General Powell has a great sense of humor.

  When I was in Washington, the hot invitation in town every New Year’s Eve was Ben Bradlee’s party. Ben was the managing editor of the Washington Post at the time, and anybody who was anybody was at his home on that evening.

  The first time I went, the music was playing but nobody was getting up to dance. So Colin and I got up and started dancing together. It became a ritual. For years, we opened up the dance floor by dancing together.

  In the fourth year, I said to him, “Think of it. A poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn. A black kid from the South Bronx. Who would’ve thought that the editor of the Washington Post would invite them to a New Year’s Eve party and they’d be dancing together.”

  Colin leaped back and said, “You’re Jewish?”

  Colin has become mishpocheh—family. Whenever we see each other he’s got a joke in a Yiddish accent.

  This is the one Colin told me after the last time I interviewed him.

  A Jewish woman says to a friend, “I’ve got to tell somebody! I’ve got to admit it! But how do I say it? How do I say it? I can’t tell anybody.”

  “Please tell me,” the friend pleads.

  “OK. I’m having an affair.”

  “Who’s catering?”

  Robin Williams

  He’s so fast you can’t even remember afterward what he said. But you were laughing.

  Shecky Greene

  “I’ve got a four-hour erection.”

  “Call the doctor!”

  “I will not!”

  Steven Wright

  I’m still amazed by creativity. After all these years, I haven’t heard it all. I can still hear something new that makes me laugh.

  Steven Wright’s mind is in another league.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that Monopoly has only one manufacturer?”

  Monopoly is a monopoly. What made him think of that?

  Mark Russell

  Mark is a great political comedian. He plays the piano and relates popular songs to politics. The thing is, we do kind of look alike. One day he was walking through the Atlanta airport and passed three pilots. One said, “Hey, that’s Larry King!”

  Russell looked over and said, “Fuck you!”

  The best part of the joke is that he kept walking. He did it just so he could tell me, “I don’t think I did you a favor the other day ...”

  Jon Stewart

  “Democrats always seem to have to prove to America that they love America. Republicans love America. They just seem to hate about 50 percent of the people who live in it.”

  Jon is the Mark Twain of our time. He does the fastest half hour on television. Who else would come on my show after I announced that I would be leaving and say, “What’s happening, baby? Can I tell you something? You made the right choice. You are leaving this place. You know what you are? You’re the last guy out of a burning building, my friend! . . . Oh, I’m sorry. Am I . . . are we on CNN right now?”

  George Burns

  Even at the end, Burns presided over the Hillcrest Country Club. He made them put up a sign that said it all:

  NOBODY UNDER AGE 98 MAY SMOKE

  Saturday Night Live

  Saturday Night Live is America’s weekly campfire. I’ve seen about 70 percent of them since the days of the original cast. That show had giants: John Belushi. Chevy Chase. Steve Martin. Bill Murray. I interviewed the show’s creator, Lorne M
ichaels, and some of the show’s recent stars last year.

  Saturday Night Live has been around for thirty-five years and had a lot of fun with me during that time. It once began a show with a sketch of my wedding to Shawn.

  But the bit that always stuck with me is the one about the famous philosopher. It’s not all that funny—it’s more just true. The philosopher had a new book out about the philosophy of life.

  An interviewer asks, “Can you briefly tell us what your philosophy is?”

  “Yes. My philosophy is to live in the now.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means you’ve got to live in the now. Because as soon as it’s over, it’s a was. You can’t do anything about the next minute, because it’s in front of you. You can’t do anything about the minute you just lived. So you’ve got to live in the now. You’ve got to grab the now, now.”

  You’re frantic. Because all you’ve got is the now. And see, this now, it’s already gone.

  So, I’m still going to be waking up at 6:15 every morning. As soon as my eyes open, I’ll be shooting out of bed. I’ll be trying to make the best of all of my nows.

  The last words I said on Larry King Live were: “Instead of goodbye, how about so long.”

  But that’s not how this book is going to end. This book is going to end with the start of a new chapter. And my new chapter is going to begin like this: