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I’ll get back to the main theme of the book: man’s search for god in a pointless, violent universe.
Charmingly, she feigns interest in my spate of self-aggrandizing anecdotes in which I come off like Rhett Butler.
They asked me my goal in life. I said, to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race and see if it could be mass-produced in plastic.
I still experienced some moderate feelings of anxiety—like when you’re buried alive.
I wrote one single joke for Don Adams. Jonathan Winters needed nothing from anyone; he was simply a genius.
I don’t know what the hell I was thinking; I hated nature, and more than nature I hated being a car owner.
Like all mechanical objects, we were instantly archenemies.
The moment I sold the Plymouth was like having a tumor removed.
In those days the planes had propellers and couldn’t make the trip nonstop and, worst of all, traveled through the sky.
He opened my eyes to just how great S. J. Perelman was, superior to all other funny minds, an axiom I hold to this day.
But the arguments we had over free will and monads, while heated, were never as combatative as the ones we had over our marriage. I knew I was in trouble when, in one philosophical discussion, Harlene proved I didn’t exist.
Caesar and The Honeymooners—two very different great comedians, Sid and Jackie Gleason.
Sid had a cerebral band of writers, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Mike Stuart, Shelly Keller, Neil Simon, not to mention contributors like Carl Reiner, Howie Morris, and Sid himself.
To say that I was blown away by Mort Sahl—it would be like when I first tasted spare ribs.
In those days, the Stage Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue was a late-night ritual.
Eureka! I remember now, I accidentally came upon my parents having sex, and the trauma that I’ve long repressed has caused my inordinate fear of being nailed shut in a cello case.
I’m ordering a bottle of Bordeaux. I know as much about wine as I know about horses or bipolar women.
The Bitter End sold coffee, no liquor, and it had the signature brick wall to back the acts. They were mostly folk acts. Lucy and Carly Simon; José Feliciano; Peter, Paul and Mary;
She could only make spaghetti and her recipe was for eight people, which she could not pro-rate. Hence, the two of us would always be eating spaghetti with six portions leftover.
“I shouldn’t have had the waiter debone my fish,” she once said at Lutèce. Horrified, I asked, “You don’t want the bones put back?” I braced myself. Would I have to make that request? But anything for that woman because I did love her.
I think I can safely say I’m the only American stand-up comic who played the Eiffel Tower.
In those days, Chicago had a joint called the Black Angus that had ribs the taste of which gave life meaning you couldn’t get from religion, psychoanalysis, or great art.
I was dating whoever would say yes to my desperate pleas to let me feed them.
Let’s just say Keaton always suited up with a certain eccentric imagination, as if her personal shopper was Buñuel.
Self-obsession, that treacherous time waster.
but to pun on no less a maven than Blaise Pascal, “The art has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of.”
Love and Death had been a broad comedy. Eisenstein and Tolstoy in cartoon.
We titled it Anhedonia, which is a psychological symptom wherein one cannot experience pleasure.
Stacey was sharp and educated, and I recommended a book to her. She claims it was Kafka, and that sounds like the kind of fun guy I was.
I am one who shares Saul Bellow’s estimate of Hemingway rather than John Updike’s. I could pick up any book of his and turn to any page and read and the poetry of his prose kills me.
I was hailed by Time as a comedy genius, which is to a real genius like Mozart or da Vinci, as the president of the PTA is to the president of the United States.
And I definitely do not want to be on one of those first rockets to outer space, to glimpse Earth from afar and experience weightlessness. The truth is, I hate weightlessness; I am a big fan of gravity and hope it lasts.
In the end this obsession for conformity leads to fascism.
Tortellini was one of the only things you could eat there and that tasted passable if one’s demands for flavor were kept at a minimum. I often told Elaine that her food would have been turned down by the lost party on the Donner Pass.
In retrospect, the red flags existed every few feet, but nature provides us with a denial mechanism, else we couldn’t make it through the days, as Freud teaches us, as Nietzsche teaches us, as O’Neill teaches us, as T. S. Eliot teaches us. Unfortunately, I was never a good student.
Mia had three beautiful sisters and three brothers. One brother died behind the controls of a plane. Another brother committed suicide with a gun. The third brother was convicted of molesting boys and sentenced to prison.
We weren’t in love but we provided one another with reasonable companionship.
I would have preferred to stay put in town, as the life bucolic affected me like chloroform and I could never get used to the sound of a moth hitting the bug zapper.
Mia regarded Soon-Yi as hopelessly stupid.
But as I would later learn, Soon-Yi was not just a diamond in the rough but round cut and flawless.
Mia was proud to advertise herself as a mom willing to adopt a child with cerebral palsy, but the dedication and work involved fell to the other kids.
Thaddeus was the one she locked in the outdoor shed overnight. Is it surprising he committed suicide with a gun ten minutes from his mother’s house?
Soon-Yi was the one adopted child who stood up to Mia and incurred her wrath.
Soon-Yi had me down for an unperceptive Ignatz who served Mia as a high-profile significant other and kept her career moving.
I was trying to balance Soon-Yi’s problems with my own, with Dylan, Moses, and Satchel, whom Mia had possession of, complete control over, and a willingness to use them as pawns if and when necessary.
“He took my daughter, now I’ll take his.” What she seemed to mean was that knowing how much I loved Dylan, she was embarking on a plan to see to it I would not be able to see her anymore.
And why threaten to “take my daughter”? Should the kids be used to wreak vengeance? Do you really want to deprive Dylan of her father to punish me? Are there no limits to your vengeance?
So August 4, 1992, I float up to Connecticut to see my kids as haggled by our lawyers. It’s an uneventful afternoon. Mia goes out shopping while I watch a little TV with a room full of people all warned to keep an eye on me.
The next day I went for a scheduled visit with Susan Coates, Dylan’s shrink, who I was conferring with to try and navigate the waters and do what was best for the kids. She broke the news to me that I was being accused of molestation and she had to report it. It was the law.
