Anatomies of Influence 3: Funky Harry

Influences on writers don’t have to be writers, do they?

As I went down the rabbit hole of thinking about influences on my life and work, I decided to take a little sideways look at an influence that is clear to me but may need some additional light shed on it to make sense of it.

Of course, I am not just a writer, but a singer and percussionist so music has been a major part of my life (and also shows up in my work more often than not—my most recent play is really a disguised musical).

I thought about the moment when I first fell in love with percussion and realized there was one album growing up that made me conga-mad. But it also meant the world to me lyrically and I can even see traces of its idiosyncrasies in my work as well, if I look hard enough.

The first time I fell in love with the conga drums was listening to Harry Connick, Jr.’s album She from 1994. I found it as an audio tape (once again, in my brother’s collection). He had bought it because it did produce one hit for the radio, “I Only Whispered Your Name,” which was featured on The Mask soundtrack. He didn’t care for the rest of the record. It seems most people didn’t. But I thought, 10 year-old I was, it was a masterpiece.

Harry.

In the early ‘90s, Harry Connick, Jr. rose quickly as that generation’s vocal jazz front-man (a la the “new Sinatra”). There have been “new Sinatras” since, Michael Bublé is the newest, but Harry was not interested in just a career singing in a suit. He has always been restless, fearless (in his way), and morphing into one thing or another.

He shocked all his new-found fans (who had been turned onto him through the When Harry Met Sally… soundtrack) by switching gears entirely from big band jazz to New Orleans funk for two albums in the mid-90s. Neither were very successful, though the latter went Gold, and in fact many audiences revolted when they showed up to hear a big band show and got a complete 180.

You may think of Harry as just a slick commercial act, but there’s something a little dangerous about him. I see him every time he comes to Birmingham and the show is a complete 180 every time. While he is known for a kind of standard vocal jazz, he has made traditional big-band albums (Come by Me), introspective instrumentals (Other Hours), covers of movie musical songs (the irresistibly fun Songs I Heard) and, while these may not sound different or unusual, it should be said Harry never does anything anyone wants him to do. The album of lusciously orchestrated ‘50s tunes (Only You) was a request from a music executive and Harry begrudgingly complied when he realized the idea wasn’t half-bad. Before that, he had been prickly about being asked to do anything. Otherwise, for his brand, he is eclectic, prolific, and a damned good piano player which people forget.

The last time I saw his show, it was not long after Hurricane Katrina. Near the end of the concert, he began talking about New Orleans and am audience member shouted, "I'm from there!" In a moment I can describe as somewhere between funny and maniacal, Harry lobbed his water bottle in the air and pile drove it to the ground, shouting "That doesn't mean you can interrupt me, ma'am!" The audience was laughing, but I knew there was some real frustration there and he played the rest of the concert with a hurt hand.

The time before that concert, it was the Come By Me tour. One audience member, I guess one who had never been to a jazz concert before, heckled Harry mid-way through the show with "Pick it up, Harry!" He meant the tempo, and Harry introspectively turned it into what they call a "teachable moment" about jazz, which I would ruin if I reproduced here. Back to the point: his musicianship.

He is not just a “piano player" as one track on She attests. The final track, “Booker,” a haunting love note to his piano teacher, the troubled but genius James Booker, features Harry on every single instrument and a lyric that might rip your heart out.

It begins:

“And the warden said

‘He won’t need a cell

He has the key

There’s no harsher sentence.

The man’s doin’ life

In the first degree.’

Some people seek to set blame

Some just accept their part

And now you know why Booker

Died of a broken heart.”

Each successive verse has another visitor meeting with the “prisoner,” Booker. With the last verse, it is a doctor. The lyric kinda gets me right here:

“And the doctor said

‘I can see you’re hurt

Just by lookin’ at you.

Pain we can help

But for hurt

There’s nothin’ we can do.’”

Harry’s choking delivery of the last two lines reveals the depth of his ability to deliver the truth of each song. The way he sings the word “hurt” reveals much about his heroin-addicted mentor who began teaching Harry as a way of commuting a sentence (Harry was NOLA’s Mayor’s son).

CD artwork of SHE

This last stanza is delivered also after a rocking bridge where the various tracks of Harry playing each instrument are spliced together. This instrumental ends with Harry shivering his right hand on the high registers of the piano in much the same way Booker ended a song, invoking some kind of rollicking, skeleton-like horror.

She was the result of Harry picking up a notebook of poetry by Ramsay McLean and asking Ramsay if he could set it to music. McLean is a New Orleans musician (I’m guessing?) with scarce information online, even in this day and age. McLean wrote the lyrics to Marc Shaiman’s Academy Award-nominated song “A Wink and a Smile” from Sleepless in Seattle. But She seems more a kind of book of rough-hewn, sardonic verse from a man who’s seen it all and has a unique way of expressing himself, indulging in pure creativity. No one talks about creativity—just the plugging-in-and-playing part of writing—is one of the best things about us (and hopefully keeps us young).

As an example of the lyrical playfulness, the album’s second track, “Between Us” (a slickly produced ballad with a mean wah-wah guitar) has this:

“They’re building a bridge,

Links Manhattan with the Heartland.

It’s called the California Ridge.

The country needs to expand.

Saw them lay the first stone.

It was made of wood.

Either way, between us, it’s good.”

The devil if I know what it means (and it might lead you to concur with music critics that the album was quote “dumb”), but it also may be an exteriorization of the kind of slick character you meet on New Orleans sidewalks—you know, the kind who says, “I can tell you where you got your shoes!” and, while taking your money says, “On your feet!” Years later, this bit would actually show up in a Broadway musical Harry wrote called Thou Shalt Not. (It was my first Broadway show. I can still tell you what every stage picture looked like.)

McLean’s poetry, as you can see, is raw and wacky. One could argue the word “expand” above only works because it rhymes, but it’s such a goofy idea anyway—a kind of manifest destiny via a highway system—that you really don’t much care.

My favorite track is “Trouble,” a simple song played on a piano with conga drums and that’s it. The lyric describes a man who moans, “I used to not need nothin’/Now trouble is all I need.”

It is a song that’s both silly and stark, musically pared down yet exciting and tuneful. It is also, like much of the album, written in a kind of NOLA dialect. The opening of Side B (remember, this was a tape) was “To Love the Language,” which begins:

“I is just what I was,

And am ain’t who I be.

To love the language,

You got to be born

On the banks of the Mississippi.”

If you had as much fun reading that, imagine how much fun Harry has singing it.

I could praise each song, but I won’t. I encourage you to listen to it, as well as Connick’s funk follow-up Star Turtle, a concept album that is less good overall but features Harry’s amazing piano virtuosity on “City Beneath the Sea” and a terrific vocal on “Hear Me in the Harmony”—another tribute to Booker, with the following lyric:

“But it’s really hard to sing

When nobody hears your song.

Just close your eyes.

You can hear me in the harmony.

“I thought I learned from getting burned.

I bought a suit of armor and silver cane.

I found a little man who’d be proud of me,

But he had to get up early

And I had to get back to my pain.”

Immediately, as nice as that last line is, you can see the problem. Apparently there was a bust-up between McLean and Connick and Connick took over the lyric writing himself on Star Turtle, and while some of his lyrics are great, they are not as wild and weirdly introspective and goofy and lovable as those of McLean. The whole thing makes Harry’s funk experiment fizzle out.

To be truthful, I don’t know what funk is, or should be. I don’t even know if She qualifies, but I dig it. It is an awesome album and it has been with me ever since, mostly exposing me to poetry for the first time. Ever since, I have had no desire to write verse which was academic or ethereal, but playful, even if said playfulness could be described by others as dumb.

Keep Playing!

It all started with a “she.” Here is her song. Hope you dig it too.

Anatomies of Influence 2: The Critic

We were in a critical writing class at Bennington College, circa 2003, and a student was reading a paper that celebrated the then resurgence of “adult animated” sitcoms. While The Simpsons had been on for years by that point, there was a new crop of comedies like Family Guy that had gotten some recognition for the same sort of mile-a-minute skewering of pop culture—made by and for people with the attention spans of gnats. His paper was well-written, with many examples of the form, but he completely omitted one show that partly filled the gap between the (fairly) highbrow Simpsons and (very) low-brow Family Guy, a show that meant a great deal to me growing up.

“You forgot The Critic,” I said.

I could tell immediately most of the people in the room didn’t know what I was talking about. But the people who did know had kind of a gleam in their eyes.

It's Jay Sherman, not Meat Loaf.

The Critic remains, nearly thirty years after its premiere, criminally overlooked as an example of some of the more adventurous animation being done on US TV in the ‘90s. The brainchild of Al Jean and Mike Reiss, two showrunners from The Simpsons, it ran two seasons—one on ABC, the other on FOX—before being relegated to reruns on Comedy Central (and a piddling web-series). But the cult of Critic fans is a dedicated one. We fought for the DVD set and we won and the company that made it never thought it would sell. They’ve since had to reprint it.

The show focused on a cable film critic, Jay Sherman—the adopted child of WASP parents in New York—who hates every film he sees, is unpleasant to just about everyone, and yet ends up being lovable in his misery. The part was written for Jon Lovitz, who (aside from the backstory) seems very much the same sort of character.

“Well, that makes sense you find that an influence,” you say. “You watched a show about a film critic and now you fancy yourself one.” Well, yes and no—Jay Sherman may very well have spurned my desire to be a film critic, but I think I responded more to everything else about Jay. We ended up sharing, for better or worse, similar tendencies and characteristics: rocky relationships, a bottomless pit where a stomach should be—but, most importantly—he merely brought to the surface a neurosis I shouldn’t have been born with.

While I’m from the sunny Southland, I have always felt more in line with gloomy neurotics who roam around New York arguing with streetlamps. Jay’s inability to move forward with his life, his insecurities, his foibles—all these things showed up in my early work more times than I can tell.

So much so that when I asked my director from Bennington, Penn Genthner, to write a forward to my first collection of plays, he wrote this:

“The following plays are stories of people inadequately prepared for the world. Each offers its protagonists the opportunity to take a leadership role in their lives. Some succeed, others fail, some fail to try.” I wasn’t sure if he was writing about me in 2008 or my plays, to be frank.

At any rate, a lot of that neurosis in the plays has gone—though it never goes away as it is drama after all—but one thing that has not gone away is my sense of humor and the rhythm with which I deliver a joke. My love of irony, satire, parody, and sarcasm (my precious little babies) probably developed from wearing out VHS tapes of Critic episodes. In addition, I could tell that The Critic was smarter than the average bear, and I admired the way it constructed jokes. One quick example:

In the second season, Jay got a love interest—a hard-working Southern lady named Alice Thompkins (voiced by Park Overall). She describes to Jay her failed marriage to a country-music singer.

[ALICE: I was waitin' tables in Knoxville while Cyrus tried to make it as a country singer. But then, I began to suspect he was cheatin' on me.

JAY: How?

ALICE: It was in his songs: “My Lyin’ Heart,” “Daddy’s Steppin’ Out,” and then his album I’m Being Unfaithful to My Wife Alice Thompkins. You Heard Me, Alice Thompkins.]

That does end with a shot of the LP with this ridiculous title. The beauty of that little line teaches you a lot about the way Critic writers constructed jokes. Of course, there’s the rule of three (something psychological and universal there) plus the way the length of the album title subverts your expectation while enhancing the already-funny parodies of actual Country songs, like “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” In the end, the joke is smart, dumb, funny, and fun to listen to. It’s great comedy writing.

So, if it was so great, then...?

One of the reasons The Critic never caught on like The Simpsons is because it is set on the East Coast, generally about bright people, and parody, satire, and sarcasm in 1994 were yet to be the crux of everything we do as a society. Basically, The Critic was the smartest kid in class you wanted to kick rather than buy a milk.

Secretary of Balloon Doggies.

The clearest influence from the show on my life is that it introduced me to non-sequiturs, easily my favorite aspect of the English language. I have found myself quoting the lines of Jay’s father, Franklin Sherman, my entire life. I know them all, none of them make sense, and I find when there’s a verbal sparring match with someone, plopping a nice non-sequitur right there on the table tends to diffuse any tension as you can both laugh at something stupid.

In the pilot of The Critic, Jay explains to his date that his father has had a stroke. Franklin’s wife Eleanor (get it? Upstate New York? Franklin and Eleanor?) chimes in, “He didn’t really. That’s just how we explain his personality.” Here’s two lines from Franklin that further explain:

In one episode, we see that a statue of Franklin has been vandalized by a student placing a banana in the ear. Franklin’s response is, “There’s a reason there’s a banana in my ear. I’m trying to lure the monkey out of my head.”

At another dinner table conversation, prison is mentioned and Franklin chimes in, “Ah, prison! That was the best five to ten years of my life. You know, I was a model prisoner. Modeled lingerie, mostly.”

Gerrit Graham today.

Like last week’s blog on James Gregory, the audible absence weighs heavily against me. Franklin was voiced by Gerrit Graham, a very funny actor who models Franklin’s voice on the transatlantic drawl you used to hear in certain East coast millionaires. His physical appearance is almost certainly drawn from George H. W. Bush, but the Buckley-like drawl is what makes most of these jokes funny.

But here’s one where you don’t need the voice. In one episode, Franklin attends the Pulitzer Prize ceremony (huh?) and quips, “This is the worst production of Porgy and Bess I’ve ever seen!” The line is funny to begin with, evoking a dated Gershwin opera, but for me it’s no longer even a non-sequitur. I tend to say this about five times a year after going to attend a concert, play, or film. I am inevitably always right because I have never seen Porgy and Bess. Therefore, everything I saw last year, would have been the worst production of Porgy and Bess I’ve ever seen by doing nothing more than not being a production of Porgy and Bess at all. Do you follow? No? Good!

Another rule-of-three joke comes in an episode where Franklin decides to run as vice-president on an Independent ticket (these were the years of Ross Perot & such things might have mattered). Worried his father is stark-raving mad, Jay tries to see if Franklin understands what he’s up to. Franklin retorts, “Son, could I do a worse job than Spiro Agnew, or Aaron Burr, or William Rufus DeVane King? He died in Cuba two weeks after being sworn in!” Jay, feeling bad, says, “Well, I guess you do know what you’re doing.” Then, Franklin puts a pair of stockings over his head and says, “Yeah. Now let’s rob that bank!”

I never watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus as a child, but I think Franklin was my Flying Circus. His humor seems to all come from the same wellspring that allowed Graham Chapman to insert nonsense phrases throughout Python episodes (like “Lemon Curry!”) to simply throw things off a bit—something arcane, something ridiculous, something sublime. What makes it work is the references are off kilter, the language is like refuse from an overused brain, and the situations patently absurd. It’s not stupid. It’s beyond stupid. It’s genius.

Of course, the reason people remember the show are the movie parodies. The Critic was not originally intended to be animated, but if they had shot the parodies (like Honey, I Ate the Kid—a Silence of the Lambs parody) the show would have been cost prohibitive. Animation allowed them to parody movies which were then in cinemas.

As was pointed out on the DVD commentaries, most of those jokes still land today because the movies they parodied are movies that we still watch. Heck, we're watching them all over again because their reboots are all that they show in the cineplexes, so a parody of Jurassic Park is as relevant today as it would have been in the mid ‘90s.

Their Jurassic Park parody was one of the best. Called "Jurassic Park II" (as The Lost World: Jurassic Park had yet to come out), it consisted of some of the characters locking a velociraptor in a room only to discover the dinosaur finds its way in with a key. Hammond screams, "You may have us, but you'll never got off the island!" The velociraptor then takes out a pipe and monologues in a British accent, "I beg to differ for, you see, the other 'raptors and I have built a crude suspension bridge to Venezuela. Once there, I shall lay low and assume odd jobs under the name Mr. Pilkington. But, perhaps I've said too much." The funniest thing about the line is the name Pilkington. It's a perfect name, but I have no idea why.

Perhaps the best episode, really voiced by Siskel & Ebert.

Yet, The Critic ultimately failed to win more than a cult audience. I believe its second season was a touch superior and had a lot more heart. Certainly, if the show had come out today, it might’ve lasted longer on a streaming service or something. As it is, it's one of the many shows of the ‘90s that succeeded creatively and failed commercially. I think we forget how original and interesting some of the work was that decade. In animation, you had Klasky-Csupo (Rugrats) and John Kricfalusi (The Ren & Stimpy Show) on Nickelodeon. On primetime television, you had people taking risks like never before (Twin Peaks, Profit). It was an interesting decade, but “interesting” didn’t mean long runs back then.

Watching it today, although I know every episode by heart, it runs at a much slower pace than Family Guy or any of those shows. The animation has costs cut at every corner. It’s clear that the movie parodies definitely work and so that makes the stories about Jay’s life (which rarely intersect with his job) a little less interesting in comparison. But there is funny stuff there. An otherwise milquetoast character, his sister Margot, has a particularly great scene where she’s forced to pick out a dress for a debutante ball.

The tailor tells her he has a strict moral code, and he has to know if she deserves to wear a dress of “virginal white” or off-white (“What we like to call a hussy-white.”) Margot sheepishly looks at the floor, touches her neck and tells him it can be white. “Except for the gloves.”

The writers of The Critic were really, really, funny.

And there are people (who may be wrong) who think I’m funny. If you think I’m funny, this is where it came from. Jay’s catchphrase was “It stinks!” He said that about most any movie (he was a bad critic), but The Critic certainly didn’t stink.

And, if you've never met him—here's Franklin!

Anatomies of Influence 1: James Gregory

Do you ever overhear yourself thinking?

Let me put that another way before you click to another site.

The late literary critic Harold Bloom noted that, in his estimation, William Shakespeare was the first writer responsible for “the invention of the Human, the inauguration of personality as we have come to understand it.” He portrayed his characters being acutely aware of their multiple levels of consciousness. His characters are living, breathing entities who do not just act out a plot, but are hyper-aware of themselves in a way we think we think of as decidedly modern.

Well, I am hyper-aware of my humanity. Heck, I’m hyper-aware of just about everything right now as we are being asked to be aware and awake about everything 900% of the time. I think awareness can be an oppressive overload in and of itself, but what do I know?

Bloom’s little quote made me think about another little quote of his—from his theories of the anxieties and anatomies of influence. He was a genius at finding precursors to writers and working out how that influence was made manifest. So, the other evening I was listening to some stand-up comedy in the car and, suddenly, I became hyper-aware of an influence on me as a writer. It seems so obvious now that I think about it, but a major influence on my writing life was not a writer at all.

The famous caricature of James Gregory.

In the 1980s, a comedian from Georgia touring his act throughout the United States was billed as “The Funniest Man in America.” That comedian, still performing now, was James Gregory. If you have not seen his material, you have most likely heard his jokes before—because they have been stolen by many a Southern comedian with a slightly larger reach.

I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, and my brother had an extensive collection of audio cassettes, 8-track tapes, and LPs that I would raid occasionally. One tape had Gregory’s caricature on the cover and billed him as, again, “The Funniest Man in America.” Now, I’m not stupid. In the 1980s, George Carlin, Richard Pryor—some of the most brilliant who ever worked—were strong and virile. But while Carlin was intelligent and Pryor was gutting, Gregory was just funny.

Gregory today.

The proof that he was the funniest (and the reason he got the moniker in the first place) was on that tape. He is deeply, deeply Southern in the best way—his wrecked grammar, malapropisms, and simple savant-ic slip-ups are dizzying and yet never a parody or warped version of a redneck, like Larry the Cable Guy, etc. And his jokes were so funny, not only can some people in the audience barely breathe, but he starts to guffaw himself and becomes the first person, in my estimation, to be allowed to do that—because his laughter at his laughter is even funnier than the joke was to begin with. Aside from being funny, Gregory is a gangly figure onstage, whose bearing usually makes the audience crack up without him uttering a word, until he quips, "Boy, I hope I look alright." And, when he does speak, he fights to get the words out of his mouth before his tongue, as it slaps around with a mind of its own. He did not become a comedian for nothing.

From 2002 to 2014, the largest body of my work was set in the South, dealt with the South and with Southerners in general. But it wasn’t always that way. My earliest writing eschewed any Southern influence because, as a kid at a fine arts school, it was not cool to be Southern. It was cool to be a New Yorker or Angeleno. We had no sense of the beauty of our accents and our way of expression. But, long before that snobbery, I was a kid with a thick country accent like Mr. Gregory, and I wish I still had that accent.

At one point, I could recite Gregory's entire album by heart. He might have been the first storyteller to make me appreciate the delightful way we Southerners use language and the way we create it ("I'll be tell you something..," he starts one joke). He was certainly the first person to make me fall in love with the spoken word and, since I’m a dramatist—in a way—that makes him an influence as what I write are mostly spoken words.

Playwrights are not writing to be read but are writing for their plays to be performed. Of course, it is appreciated when they are read as literature, but that is secondary, perhaps tertiary to the point of the drama, which is to be staged and witnessed. For that reason, the greatest playwright working may still not be anywhere near the best writer working. Plays are not about beautiful words, even the plays of Shakespeare. They are about the fits, the stumbles, the failings, and the glories of human beings in conflict. And playwrights don’t have languid description, prosody, poesy, or the time to do what novelists do. So, our words don’t work unless they sound right and, yet, we’re still putting them on a page.

I was delivering a paper at a historical conference in the summer of 2017. One of the members of the audience was laudatory to me regarding my delivery of the paper. At the time, I was more concerned that she thought the writing was good because I know how to do public speaking, having been an actor since age 5 or so. But, her compliment was taken in the spirit it was given. What I want, actually, is both: words that are beautiful aloud and on the page at the same time.

However, I do acknowledge the skills of rhetoric and presentation that were partly ingrained in me by my acting teachers and, for all I know, I am better onstage. Perhaps the best vehicle is for me to be reading my work aloud, I don’t know. Perhaps this should be a vlog? (Is that still a thing?) But in my nearly thirty years of writing mostly plays, I can see now how Gregory’s performances informed a lot of what I do and even the way I speak as I find myself using variations on familiar phrases that are just a bit cock-eyed too.

I would listen to that one tape religiously—for the jokes, at first. But, after a while, you would listen to see if you could feel his rhythm—get into the way he did what he did. Here’s some short snippets of Gregory’s funniest stuff on the album. I guarantee you it won’t be as funny reading it here as it would have been hearing him tell it, but maybe you’ll see why I like the way he uses the language.

Of course, there are the one-liners. The highlight of his act were his explanations as to how certain ubiquitous signs came to be. For example:

“Have you ever seen that sign that says ‘Road Narrows?’ You know what that means? Sometime in the past, some nut said to his wife, ‘Honey, I believe the car just got wider.”

As writing, it is not spectacular, perhaps not even very funny—except when you hear it. The particular way he delivers the setup—“Sometime in the past (pronounced “paiste”), some NUT said to his WIFE”—is a kind of music all its own.

Later in the act:

“You know, you hear people say all the time that we Americans aren’t as civilized as we used to be, not as humane as we once were. After all these years that have gone by, half the people blame it on Vietnam, half blame it on Watergate. I blame the whole situation on Colonel Sanders…You realize before Col. Sanders came along, the only thing that ate dinner out of a bucket was a hog? Now, he’s got everybody doing it.”

As an example of our devolution, Gregory then begins to tell a joke about a man ordering dinner at KFC. He is acting out the part, with labored breathing, portraying a morbidly obese human who is about to eat a bucket of food (you might have to be in the 80s to realize that phrase is a little odd). Then, Gregory does something completely surprising. He stops the act cold.

He looks at the audience and says:

“I feel so stupid doing this. At this point in the show every night, you know what thought goes through my mind? ‘James, why don’t you just go get a job?’ You know, I coulda been a fork lift operator. I could—my Dad was and his Dad before him. When I got out of high school, my Dad could’ve got me on down at the plant where he works just like that. But did I take it? Noooo.”

Then, he resumes the heavy breathing and continues with the joke. It’s a brilliant "meta" moment long before there was meta comedy. And the "Noooo" is hysterical in its own right, but I can’t reproduce that here.

The Funniest Man in America.

I’ve seen Gregory live a couple of times. He is a work-a-day comedian, has never had a sitcom or reached the success of some of his contemporaries. One reason he may not be a household name is because he's clean, usually even editing his video and audio for all audiences, The fact that, at one point, he was the funniest man in America, never took him to the next level for whatever reason. When you see him now, a lot of the energy has calmed, but his gum chewing, down-home show touches a nerve—particularly for those of us who had Baptist upbringings and others who yearn for a Mayberry that never was. That is not to say his act is in any way political. In fact, one of his funniest jokes explains this (the following is paraphrased):

“I never do sexual or political humor because I get the two confused. I was being interviewed on TV and the reporter asked what I thought about the Middle East position. I said, 'I enjoyed it, but it hurt my wife’s back.'”

That’s the kind of show you get—comedy. Funny. Not a referendum (like Carlin or Maher), not a lecture (like Sahl or Garofalo), not as highly polished as John Mulaney or as brilliant as Chris Rock (my pick for our best living comedian). Just funny.

And that funny made its way into my work also, if I can say such a thing. My humor is rather broad—I like everything from sophisticated comedy-of-manners to the lowest forms—and I like a proper combination of the sacred and profane show up in my work. Humor shows up often at the lowest moments of the characters (a la the Gravediggers in Hamlet) and in a way that attempts to blow the dust off the soul before it petrifies. And when I read my older plays and hear the Southern characters, I can hear Gregory’s Georgia cadences in them perhaps even more than my own family.

Here's a small part of a play called Songs of the Valley, a comedy about a community that stages a welcome home part for the local golden boy. In this short snippet, the local gossip Darla Roundtree is chastising the owner of the greasy spoon for being open on the day of her son’s arrival. I have ceased with this kind of writing in dialect, but you can hopefully see the rhythms that were intended (and came from folks like Gregory).

[from Songs of the Valley

DARLA: I already told you once, Cummerbatch—you shoulda kept that café closed today anyway. My son gits home from the Air Force in case you didn’t know.

CUMMERBATCH: Believe me, Darla. We ain’t never—never—the longest day I live gonna close on Fridays! (pointing his finger) The longest day you live too.

DARLA: But my boy comin’ home is like...Well, it’s like...

CUMMERBATCH: I know, Darla—like the Messiah floatin’ down from a cloud on a white horse. But I ain’t gone to Church in six years to see Jesus and I certainly don’t have time to see Larry git home neither.

DARLA: Cummerbatch! Are you tellin’ me you’d keep up yer restaurant even if Saint Gabriel blew his toot?

(Quick beat.)

CUMMERBATCH: Yer son ain’t Jesus, Darla! And besides, it ain’t the Lord that’s kept me away from Church—(conspiratorial) it’s that Reverend Pilsner!

DARLA: How can you say anythang about the molder of the fold?! He’s led his flock like a good shepherd.

CUMMERBATCH: Well, Reverend Pilsner can flock himself for all I care!

(Cummerbatch crosses his arms. Darla and Hilda’s mouths seem to touch the ground in horror.)

DARLA: I ain’t never.

CUMMERBATCH: (softening) I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I jest...Can I go back to work now?

HILDA: Explain yerself, Cummerbatch Sayln.

CUMMERBATCH: Look. All I’m sayin’ is I felt closer to Je-hovah when Ol’ Butchell sat at the pewpit!]

Southerners do have wonderful modes of expression and, when we don’t have the right words, we make up the right ones. And sometimes we simply recodify words and perpetuate the misreading. For example, I was ridiculed up North for saying I needed to wear my toboggan. I didn’t understand why everyone was laughing. Where I grew up, a toboggan was a knitted winter hat.

This snippet, from a solo short play, is spoken by a husband blowing off steam after a fight with his wife. In the play, he delivers a tirade to the audience on the state of country music, unfavorably comparing older Nashville stars with a generation with decidedly less country-sounding names, like Brad Paisley and Toby Keith.

[from Cowboy Music

MEL: You know somethin’ else about them new Country stars—all them young men sangin’ about nowadays is happy stuff. Happiness don’t brang no good songs. George and Merle and Hank had to work for their due, you know. Famous an’ on top o’ the world one night—down the next, downin’ another. “Brad” gits to be on T. V. twenty-four/seven. Happy men, prob’ly.

(Pause.)

MEL: That they are.

(Pause.) MEL: Maybe not. I don’t know, really. Don’t know ‘em. I’d have to know ‘em, you know? You know.]

While you may think the rhythms of that last line are Mametian, I read that whole play now as a kind of stand up routine in and of itself and I could even hear Gregory performing it.

At any rate, listening to him again the other night, I saw clearly how those nights laughing with headphones pressed to my ears were some of the first nights I fell in love with words—how they sounded, how they could be used and misused, how they could be arranged for spectacular comic effect.

Thank you, Mr. Gregory. Keep killing it.

One more:

“Have you ever seen that sign above an airplane door that says, ‘Do Not Open During Flight’? You know what means? Sometime in the past, some NUT said to his wife, “Honey…I’ll be right back…”

Here's a bit of Gregory from his best era. Check out his website and send some love!