Television

A Thought on David Brenner

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For a ten-year-old who was starting to notice two things: 1. the grown-up world had a lot of gaps in its “logic” and 2. laughter felt better than confusion, David Brenner and his droll commonsense stand-up act turned out to be a revelation. He was one of the first stand-ups I unofficially studied; I remember listening to his albums over and over, searching for the moment, the word, that would make the recorded audience laugh. That makes me pretty sure he resides in my perspective on the world. As Johnny Carson introduces him in the clip below, it was a “somewhat warped” perspective.

The news that David Brenner died today at age 78 reminded me that I had not thought about Mr. Brenner for a long time, much like most things I liked when I was 10. A love for the New York Yankees, strawberries, and comedy in general are about the only things I have in common with my ten-year-old self.

In my teen years I ignored or even rejected anything I had liked when younger, and of course, like every teenager worth the term, I also rejected anything my parents liked. So, with prejudices like these, David Brenner stood no chance in my world. He was not “edgy,” not “interesting,” not a lot of things. He was not absurd like Steve Martin and not dry like Steven Wright and not inflamed like Sam Kinison or angry like Bill Hicks. He was in my comedy DNA, but he was one of my mom’s favorite stand-ups, so he was old.

But I also liked, even loved, “old” comedians. The old vaudevillians, all of them, I adore. When YouTube started to become popular, one of the first things I looked up was Ed Sullivan clips—I wanted to see if my recollection of certain comics was right or not. I like to think I was the first person to enter “Myron Cohen” as a search term on YouTube. My parent’s generation of performers? Not old enough, I guess.

One of the first Tweets I saw today about Brenner’s death asked, “Why is it so hard to believe he was 78?” Almost every photo of him in his obituaries today is from the 1970s, with a helmet of hair and Johnny Carson nearby. He remains ever 40. Even though he was still a working stand-up at his death, he was not a television presence and had not been one for almost 20 years, when he briefly had a show on MSNBC. (Who hasn’t “briefly” had a show on MSNBC by now?) He had a couple hit books in the ’90s, but so did every comic.

Something did not happen for David Brenner that happened for a lot of comics when the next generation came along: They did not bring him on their shows very often. When Johnny moved on and Jay and Dave took up permanent residence at 11:35 p.m. and yet more talk shows proliferated, Brenner was an only occasional presence, even with the larger number of late-night stand-up slots available. Brenner was dubbed “the father of observational humor,” but only after “observational humor” became a term, after Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser and others were making millions talking about how interesting it could be to find mundane the things that … actually were mundane.

Among Brenner’s generation, George Carlin started out doing fairly conventional characters before he became an unconventional character himself, one who noticed absolutely everything and filtered it through a jazz poet’s brain. Robert Klein was the cool history professor. Bill Cosby told shaggy-dog stories that made the familiar comfortable. Richard Pryor was a force of nature—the reason “Pryoresque” is not a term is because he was uniquely himself and made the unfamiliar uncomfortable. None were “observational comics,” none were professional noticers of the lack of logic in our everyday lives like David Brenner. He was one of the first.

Brenner did not yield details about his current life, but he reminisced about growing up in West Philadelphia with a novelist’s eye for detail; he did not do impressions, but he easily tossed out one-liners from cabbies he encountered and the like (they all sounded like him). He did not bring audiences into a tortured psyche like Richard Lewis; he was ever cheerful, and ever 1970s. When Johnny Carson started making his schedule easier and bringing in “guest hosts,” Brenner filled in 75 times, but all in the late ’70s and early ’80s. By the time Carson was retiring, the battle to replace him was between Letterman and Jay Leno and there were no other names.

David Brenner never found himself on the outside looking in and was thus never the subject of a “where are they now”-style re-discovery, but he also never got bigger than he was in the 1970s, when he appeared on almost every talk and game show and in every nightclub and medium size theater. For a time, he seemed as ubiquitous as a public utility, and then, for showrooms on the Vegas strip, he was a public utility: cheerfully reliable and pleasantly maintenance-free.

There are worse things to be said about a career. So even though I did not think often in recent years about the late David Brenner, I was aware he was still out there, still making people laugh. I have come to respect the people who are public utilities in our lives, and I only wish I had randomly written this appreciation yesterday instead of today, before an occasion brought it.

* * * *

The story that Steve Martin tells in “Born Standing Up,” his “autobio”: “I called the comedian David Brenner for advice. David was successfully guest-hosting The Tonight Show and filling theaters and clubs. Our paths had crossed, and we had exchanged phone numbers. I explained that I was getting jobs, but the travel costs were killing me. If I got five hundred dollars for an appearance, it would cost me three hundred just to get to it. He told me the deal he always proposed to club owners. He would take the door, and they would take the bar. He said he would hire someone to stand at the entrance with a mechanical counter to make sure he wasn’t being cheated.”—”Born Standing Up,” 146-7.

Chicago’s Cult of Harry: Harry Caray at 100

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

When I moved to the Midwest in the summer of 2000, I learned that Phil Rizzuto was not the baseball announcer who had coined the phrase, “Holy cow!” I also learned that there was a controversy about this, and that, as a Yankee fan and native New Yorker—and worse, someone unaware of a controversy—I was on the wrong side of said dispute. Born wrong.

No, I was informed, the recently departed Harry Caray was the first to use the phrase on-air and was the announcer with whom it should be associated. Not the beloved Yankees announcer. For Cubs fans, a long-simmering resentment against all things New York became easy to openly express after a “Seinfeld” episode featuring a Phil Rizzuto keychain that exclaimed “Holy cow!” when its head was squeezed unfairly cemented in popular culture the notion that the saying was Rizzuto’s.

Upon learning that I was from New York and a sports fan, one new friend—in our very first conversation—brought up the issue. “You know who used to say ‘Holy cow,’ right?” As an astute observer of humankind and its many denizens, I picked up that there was only one answer and if I said “The ‘Scooter'” I would be inciting conversational violence. But I was not certain what the correct answer was. From my lofty, ivory tower, New York post, I was oh-so dimly aware that Harry Caray, the voice of several Midwest baseball teams over several decades, who had passed away just two seasons before, had been in a feud with my beloved Yankees announcer. Or that Cubs fans were in a feud. I also “knew” that it was possible that both used a really common euphemistic exclamation, Caray in the broadcast booth and Rizzuto on the field and later in the booth.

When I am confronted with a statement that is either false, uninformed, or ill-informed, but I do not see the value in debating the merits of facts, I will respond to such statements with a nod and say something like, “That is an idea.” Period. No emphasis on any syllable. Or even more aggressively passive-aggressively, “That is a sentence.” As if I am attempting an escape from a hostage-taking situation. I shared my theory about how both iconic baseball figures may have come up with the expression independently, since it is a common euphemistic exclamation, with my new Midwestern friend. He replied with a nod and said, with no emphasis on any syllable, “That is an idea.”

Harry Christopher Carabina was born in St. Louis, Missouri, 100 years ago today, March 1, 1914. For over fifty years he was a mostly regional, sometimes national, baseball and college football announcer. At some point in his career, he realized that as an announcer, he was not only the eyes of the fan in the broadcast booth, he was the fans’ voice, too. He wasn’t their representative, he was one of them, one lucky enough to be paid to watch a game he loved to watch. Thus, even though he had been an official broadcaster for teams that Cubs fans naturally detest—the White Sox and the Cardinals—when he became the voice of the Cubs in 1981, he was embraced as if he had always secretly been a Cubs fan. WGN, the station that broadcast the Cubs, was also one of the first “superstations,” which made him a nationally famous quirky regional personality. (Upstate New York, where I am from, did not have WGN, so Harry Caray was as much a rumor to me as Phil Rizzuto, heard on the non-national non-superstation WPIX, was to my Iowa friend.)

By the late 1990s, Will Ferrell started performing his Harry Caray impression on “Saturday Night Live,” and many other performers followed suit, but really, they are performing an impression of Will Ferrell’s Harry Caray impression. From my lofty ivory tower New York perch, I only knew Ferrell was poking fun at an elderly and much-loved baseball broadcaster, one much like my own beloved ‘Scooter’ Rizzuto. I did not understand why the impression continued after Caray’s death in 1998, but again, I was living in New York.

Former Cubs pitcher Ryan Dempster is noted for his pretty funny impression of Will Ferrell’s Harry Caray:

Because it is almost the same distance to every major metropolis with a major league sports team, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I lived, is one of the luckiest cities in the country for a sports fan. “Local” television broadcasts include the Cubs, the White Sox, the Cardinals; and the Bears, the Vikings, the Rams. I became a Cubs fan in part, I believe, because of all the day games that they play and that I could listen to while at my job writing instruction manuals. In August 2001, my “That is a sentence” friend and I drove to Chicago for a memorable day: a Friday afternoon loss game against the rival St. Louis Cardinals and dinner at Harry Caray’s Italian Steakhouse, a day that made me feel like I was finally a Midwesterner. The meal was terrific, and the Harry Caray name is now more associated with the seven establishments bearing his name and caricature (see the photo at the top of this post) than with the memorable broadcaster himself.

Which is too bad. Harry Carabina, born in desperate poverty in St. Louis, authored one of the unique success stories in baseball, in broadcasting, in America, when he invented Harry Caray. The success of those restaurants some sixteen years after his death, the fact that comedians still get gentle laughs at his memory, his long career, all stem from one man’s brilliant and rare talent at becoming beloved.

A last word from Harry Caray himself, from the last day of the 1991 season: