IT’S DIFFICULT to imagine any American of any age who has not heard the phrase “But seriously, folks.” Of course, it’s also difficult to imagine any American of any age who doesn’t want to personally blow the head off of every prisoner in Guantanamo, but never mind that now. “But seriously, folks” was the phrase of choice directly following uncountable trillions of jokes said out loud in America over the last hundred years. In burlesque and vaudeville houses both high and low; in theaters and night clubs; from Smith and Dale and the Marx Brothers through Berle, Hackett, King, and all their wonderful brothers; even up through Klein, Brenner, Dangerfield, and into my generation of joke-tellers, that phrase has probably been uttered over the years as much as “I love you,” or even what I believe to be the most-used sentence in human history: “Can we get another round here, please?”
It’s an ironic phrase, though, because after telling what was (hopefully) a terrific joke, the comic who said, “But seriously, folks,” was disclaiming himself, in effect saying to his audience, “Gee, I’m sorry I had to momentarily mislead you with such pointless frivolity. Now let’s get back to something weighty.” I know I’m biased, having spent a good deal of my life trying to make people laugh on stage and screen, but I really can’t imagine a loftier goal. Of course, that’s not the view of most people, especially in my business. Comedies virtually never win Oscars, and the only reason they win Emmys and Golden Globes is because there’s a special category for them called, oddly enough, “Comedies.” I know there’s bad comedy out there. (I’ll bet you know that, too.) And maybe I have chauvinistic tendencies (maybe?), but whether broad or subtle, visual or textual, good comedy contains every valuable element present in all of entertainment. For sheer weight, depth, truth, and even drama, I’ll take “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” over “American Beauty” anytime.
