Right on the heels of musicals I loved comedies. Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Buster Keaton’s The Navigator, and of course the Marx Brothers, the Ritz Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy. When I was older and more sophisticated there was Ernst Lubitsch’s smart comedies like Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and Design for Living, Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story and Sullivan’s Travels, and the foreign comedy masterpieces such as Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, and Jacques Tati’s Jour de fête.
I learned about rhythm. Rhythm is the ability to know where the top of the vocality, the vocal message, happens. It’s a rim shot, it’s a whack, depending on what kind of comedy you’re into. The Marx Brothers had that—they were my mentors. After Top Hat, A Night at the Opera is my favorite movie of all time. It’s brilliantly constructed. First, their hearts are in the right place. Groucho, Chico, and Harpo want to give Allan Jones a chance to sing at the opera, because they know what the audience will hear—his gorgeous tenor voice. All hell breaks loose because they are doing what the Marx Brothers do, jamming a hundred people into a ship’s tiny stateroom. They are crazy and anarchic, but they still have charm and warmth. They married intellectuality and a brushstroke of wit with their great physical comedy.
The Three Stooges were a brilliant combination of timing and earnestness. They are very serious. Their physical timing was impeccable. They never laugh, or break up, or seem to enjoy the violence they inflict upon one another. They left that for the audience. They showed me that comedy is a juxtaposition of textures. Later in my career I got to do a Stooges-like routine with Rudy De Luca in Life Stinks when we slap each other silly.
I also loved the Ritz Brothers. Harry, Jimmy, and Al came from my neighborhood. They were like gods to me. They were big in the thirties and forties. Harry had a physical insanity and freedom that no other performer ever had. He was the master of wild, bizarre walks, facial contortions, and wacky sounds. You could see Harry’s influence in Danny Kaye’s voices, in Milton Berle’s facial expressions, in Jerry Lewis’s crazy walk, and especially in Sid Caesar’s mannerisms. In my film Silent Movie, Sid’s in a hospital bed, and he has to swallow a large white pill. He places the pill prominently on his tongue and then Sid takes a big glass of water. He drinks for an entire minute, and swallows and swallows and then he breathes. He opens his mouth, and lo and behold, the big white pill is still there! That’s all Harry Ritz.
The Marx Brothers were much more intellectual. They had a sense of character and story. The Ritz Brothers had a sense of the meshuga—craziness. They were unfettered by anything normal. I took from both of them, so I suppose I have a combination of the Marx and the Ritz brothers. You might say that I’m an intellectual meshugenah.
Charlie Chaplin was the only person who could make you laugh and cry simultaneously. I got to re-create Chaplin’s One A.M. routine for Silent Movie. Like Chaplin in the earlier incarnation, my character Mel Funn, having drunk himself into a stupor, is having difficulty managing the Murphy bed （a bed that folds down out of the wall） in his hotel room. While sitting down on the bed it suddenly folds up into the wall. I fall flat on my backside, much like Chaplin had done more than sixty years earlier.
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My soul adored Buster Keaton. He was a master at physical comedy. His scenes were extremely crazy, but he played them with absolute reality. He never winked at the audience. I loved that he could stand in the doorway and have an entire house fall down around him—leaving him unscathed. I loved Laurel and Hardy even more. W. C. Fields was a genius at skit construction. Jack Benny and Fred Allen showed me new kinds of irony. I loved the “Road” pictures with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour. I was drawn to teams and siblings. Unconsciously I was a pup in a cardboard box with three other pups, my brothers, and we tumbled about with one another. That’s why my films are almost always about at least two guys on a journey. I didn’t have to learn about pathos, loyalty, and a family that stuck together in order to weave that into my stories. I was raised and taught by my own childhood.
Comedy was as important—if not more important—than music in the neighborhood. Our training began on the street corners. You had to score on the corner. No bullshit routines. No slick laminated crap. It had to be “Lemme tell ya what happened today…” You really had to be good on your feet.
“Fat Hymie was hanging from the fire escape. His mother came by. ‘Hymie!’ she screamed. He let go and fell off the ladder right on his head.”