The writers’ room started me on my noble quest to always get to the “ultimate punch line,” the cosmic joke that all the other jokes came out of. The goal was to go as far as you can go, as deep as you can go. One of the most difficult things to do in comedy is to come up with a good ending to a scene or a sketch. The real struggle is to take a premise, the center of it, and nurture it and blossom it into a punch line. We managed to do it each week because it was life or death. We fought like beasts in that room. Our backs were up against the wall. Between Sid and Max, we knew if a joke worked. We were told if an ending to a sketch wasn’t great, and we’d have to rewrite it. It’s almost impossible to create a great ending to a sketch. We pulled it off at least half the time.
We wrote things that made us laugh, not what we thought would get a laugh from the audience. But stuff that really made us collapse and grab our bellies, that knocked us down on the floor and made us spit and laugh so we couldn’t breathe—that’s what went into the script. We wrote sketches with beginnings, middles, and endings—little playlets. It was a different kind of comedy, not just one-liners. Everything we wrote was based on truth. We commented on what was happening in the world at the time.
For instance, in the early fifties new apartment buildings were going up with lower ceilings and thinner walls. Landlords were getting ever more greedy. So we wrote a sketch with Sid as a guy who couldn’t sleep because the sound and light of the neighbor’s television came right through his walls. So he broke his lease by simply walking through the walls of ten different apartments. The sketch worked, giving us some hope that we were on the right track.
There was a lot of anger behind the comedy. There were a lot of jokes about death and murder, dirty language, quarrels, conflict, a lot of yelling. Sid punched the wall so much it was bent. We’d throw pencils in frustration at the acoustical ceiling, where they would get stuck. Sometimes the screaming and fighting in the writers’ room would get so bad I felt like I was back at Fort Sill in basic training on the infiltration course with live machine gun bullets flying over my head! It was all creative anger, intense competitiveness, all trying to please Sid. We cared passionately about what we were doing and who we were working for. We were responsible for entertaining millions of people on live television every week. There were no second chances. The pressure was not just to be good, but to be outstanding.
There was no sneaking in of script ideas to Sid. It was all done by committee, and all ideas were equally considered. We never really passed judgment until something was tried on its feet. We’d do it as a skit. I would play Sid. Sometimes Lucille would play Imogene, sometimes Carl. Sometimes Imogene would be there to play herself. I was always performing in the room. I could go from playing a rabbinical student in one minute, and then in the next I’d be Moby Dick thrashing about on the floor with six harpoons sticking out of my back. We yelled out ideas, competing for Sid’s attention and approval. Sid was not tyrannical, but he would occasionally have fits of anger. He once lifted a huge desk and banged it to the floor to punctuate his anger, yelling: “Joke no good!” Mel Tolkin quietly offered, “Sid, don’t worry. We’re not married to it,” all in a voice meant to calm Sid down. Another time, the wall phone in the office rang during an idea exchange and disrupted the creative flow. So Sid ripped it out of the wall and threw it into the hallway. Other than emergencies, there were no more calls during working hours.
Our head writer, Mel Tolkin, was a veritable font of worldly information and taught me so much. I relied on him often for advice. An émigré from Russia as a child, he retained more than a bit of an accent. Sometimes he sounded like Bert Gordon, who played “the Mad Russian” on The Eddie Cantor Show. He introduced me to all the great Russian writers. Not only the ones I knew like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, but geniuses like Nikolay Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Leonid Andreyev.
（Later, I myself discovered two newer Russian writers called Ilf and Petrov, who wrote a book called The Twelve Chairs, which I adapted into a screenplay and it became my second film. More on that later.）
Mel Tolkin could be funny on paper and—without knowing it—also funny in real life. Example: Every spring the restaurant across from our office and writers’ room on Fifty-seventh Street, Longchamps, featured an item called “spring lamb.” All the writers together with Sid, Carl, and Max dutifully went across the street to go get our spring lamb. It was a big item. We all ordered it.