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.
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.
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.
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!
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