If you must explain comedy, you’re going to bore the shit out of people. Not this foursome. Insight, when it’s earned, is a most telling thing. I’ve always been a nuts-and-bolts guy. On my first third birthday—don’t ask me how that math worked—I was given a red fire engine. Shiny. Majestic. Gone in minutes. I dismantled it with surgical curiosity and absolutely no capacity to put it back together. That instinct never left me. Take it apart. See how it works. Accept that reassembly is optional.
I’m writing this with Rob Reiner and his wife in mind. Three epic killings this past weekend: the Reiners, Hanukkah on Bondi Beach in Australia, and Brown University. People and places meant for joy. Celebration. Communion. You look at the planet from above and see beauty—the quietness of space and time, the blue calmness of a shared home. But the closer you focus, the more you see hostility, inequities, grudges, hatred, retribution—the psychological wars grinding away within society.
These events, with all their sorrow and anger, will continue to unfold in the coming hours and days. For this write, though, I’m calling a pause. An interlude of grace. A moment of respect for comedy—because comedy, at its best, teaches us how to laugh at ourselves and take the incoming jabs without flinching. The Reiners brought the best out of us.
We watched Dad suffer from war wounds and mental anguish during our childhood. Outside of family and the outdoors, comedy was the thing that kept him rolling. Moments of healing. Small laughs that acted like stitches holding the day together.
Pops was a serious Jackie Gleason fan. Red Skelton. He understood characters and embraced them like neighbours. Carol Burnett. Hee Haw. This stuff rocked his world. Pops even bought Bill Cosby’s first LP - Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow…Right!, played it again and again, and laughed—hard. Long hours in plant security at Colgate’s gave him time to read. He’d cut comics out of The New Yorker, fold them neatly, slide them into his wallet, and pull them out at dinner like contraband joy. Pass them around. Watch the room lighten.
The boys caught the funny bug early—Woody Allen on Ed Sullivan, the pages of The New Yorker. Johnny Carson. That sacred three-minute showcase. Make it explode or go home. George Carlin. Richard Pryor. Rodney Dangerfield. Instant laughs. Precision strikes.
Then it hit me.
It’s 1967. I’m working in the Catskills, surrounded by comics. Most afternoons, they’d gather at the coffee shop at the Pines Hotel and play knock rummy. Scoey Mitchell. Marty Brill. Charlie Callas. Myron Stanley Handelman. You’d think it was a laugh riot. It wasn’t. This was a private zone. Outsiders kept their distance. Never once did I see or hear these guys laugh. Not a chuckle. Not a snort. The only time the temperature changed was when something abusive happened the night before—some heckler, some dead joke buried in silence in the main lounge. Then you’d hear it dissected like a crime scene.
Today, it’s the sixty-minute Netflix specials pulling millions. Comedy isn’t cloistered in mob-run nightclubs anymore. This is sold-out arena stuff for the best and most charismatic. One microphone. No massive stage setup. No band equipment. No fifty handlers. Just a mic, a cable, and nerve.
This morning, a clip floated up on my television channel of choice—YouTube. Four certified greats sitting together, talking craft. And it’s excellent viewing. Comics talking shop without killing the magic.
I remember when we’d occasionally have a comic on Ted Woloshyn’s show on Newstalk 1010. Instead of spreading humour, they’d talk about the craft. Want a dry conversation bordering on a camel ride across the Sahara? Invite an aspiring comedy troupe, still trying to reverse-engineer laughter, and give them a microphone. You’ve been to the emergency room before. You know the feeling. The reason given - there must be a comic listener who’d steal material.
So take this morning reprieve. Sit with it. Let comedy be what it’s always been at its best—a release valve, a mirror, a small act of defiance against the weight of the world.