Funny Business, Seriously

A good friend of ours in the moviehouse has carved himself a respected niche in the Midwest as an in-demand standup comedian and  - more significantly - as a teacher and mentor of fledgling regional comics. He got his first dose of laughter in childhood appearances on annually televised hometown telethons for cancer research, pantomiming to wacky tunes by Spike Jones and His City Slickers.

From 1980 to 1985, he and his first wife owned a small, alcohol-free club called The Comedy Cabaret in a quaint nook of Uptown Minneapolis. As Minnesota’s first full-time comedy theater, it became not only a popular venue for area standup comics but, as well, a welcome stopover for an eclectic array of widespread talent, including Jay Leno, Louie Anderson, Paul ("Pee-wee Herman") Reubens, Penn and Teller, Tom Arnold, Morey Amsterdam, the cast of "Mystery Science Theater 3000," and Jerry ("Leave It to Beaver") Mathers.

Often described as a "live cartoon on stage," he has successfully maintained a commitment to clean comedy and a selfless integrity in an environment marked - make that marred - by envious one-upmanship and cutthroat competition.

"The ancient Greek definition of comedy is 'life with hope,' and I'm all about that."
- comedian Scott Novotny

This is for you, Pard…Just move!

Court jesters and fools were recurring characters in Shakespeare's plays
...and in Woody Allen's "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex"

A brief history of standup begins in ancient Egypt, when the first jesters entertained pharaohs. In the New World, Aztec rulers had their own jesters. Many royal courts throughout European history had professional fools. Jesters and fools became recurring characters in Shakespeare’s plays. The English tradition of court jesters came to a priggish end when Charles I was overthrown and beheaded by Oliver Cromwell, a humorless Puritan who had no room for levity.

"A funny thing happened to me
on the way to the agora..."

When it comes to the image of a lone figure on a stage, the theatrical device of the monologue can be traced back to Ancient Greek theater - the seat of modern drama - which started with a sole actor on the stage (accompanied by a background chorus). Ancient Roman theater featured monologues more often than Greek drama. From the Renaissance onward, theatrical monologues were assigned to characters who used protracted speeches to limn their dramatic desires and needs.

When it comes to blending fools and monologues, England has a venerable history of stand-up comedy, rooted in music halls of the 18th and 19th centuries, a rich heritage which produced the quintessential music hall comedian, Max Miller (above). Born Thomas Henry Sargent in Sussex, Max Miller (1894 - 1963) worked the top of the bill in variety revues in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Known for his flashy wardrobe, Miller had a rakish charm and a penchant for double entendres and sexual innuendoes which earned him the nickname "The Cheeky Chappy" and often got him into trouble with censors. By  the 1970s, music halls virtually disappeared.

Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice in "The Entertainer"

(Part of Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-nominated characterization of a fading, third-rate music hall comedian in 1960’s "The Entertainer" - directed by Tony Richardson, of "Tom Jones" fame - was based on Max Miller, although Miller, the highest paid revue star of his time, was anything but third-rate. Olivier originated the role of the seedy vaudevillian in the play by John Osborne.)

Mark Twain was in demand as a featured speaker, performing solo humorous
lectures similar to what would become standup comedy.

In the U.S., standup comedy emerged from such entertainment traditions as the aforementioned British music halls, vaudeville, minstrel shows, and lectures by authors and humorists like Mark Twain.

Bob Hope made 57 tours for the USO between 1942 and 1988.

Pioneers of modern American standup comedy included Jack Benny, Bob Hope, George Burns, and Milton Berle. An era of blossoming showcases in nightclubs and resorts provided venues for numerous comedians. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a bold exploration of social satire and experimentation with the boundaries of language, politics, race, and sex.

The fever for standup mania spread like a gold rush in the 1970s and 1980s as comedy clubs sprouted up all over the country. Bobby Van hosted "Make Me Laugh," a popular syndicated game show in which a roster of zany comedians, including Howie Mandel, Gallagher, Bruce Baum, Bill Kirchenbauer, and Vic Dunlop, would try to crack up the non-celebrity contestant within a specified time limit.

Vic Dunlop, who set a record for making a contestant laugh the fastest
 on "Make Me Laugh," died of complications of diabetes in 2011, age 62.

"An Evening at the Improv," based in the Los Angeles comedy club on Melrose Avenue, aired in syndication from 1982 until 1996, while The Comedy Channel debuted on basic cable television in 1989, merging with the rival HA! Channel two years later to become Comedy Central.

"Standup comedy is the nation’s newest spectator sport," Roger Ebert declared in his 1988 review of "Punchline," a syrupy melodrama starring Sally Field and Tom Hanks as struggling comics (more on this film later). He went on to say, "Comics used to be part of the act in show business - along with singers, dancers, tumblers and magicians and anybody else Ed Sullivan could dredge up. But why a whole evening of nothing but comedy? Nobody wants to laugh that much."

By the 1990s, the craze had already begun to die down as karaoke nights replaced standup gigs, and less successful clubs closed. In the meantime, filmmakers and television producers attempted, in one way or another, to bring drama to standup comedy. Most attempts to recapture the singular experience and adrenaline rush of making an audience laugh have been problematic from the onset, but the problem is the nature of the beast itself - a comedian alone on the stage behind a microphone is cinematically challenging.

A 1971 episode of Rod Serling’s TV series "Night Gallery" aptly titled "Make Me Laugh" featured Godfrey Cambridge as a fading, heckled standup comedian whose wish for eliciting nothing but big laughs is granted - with unforeseen consequences - by a down-on-his-own-luck genie (played by deadpan comic Jackie Vernon). The tale of bittersweet irony, costarring Tom Bosley and Al Lewis, was directed by Steven Spielberg.

Godfrey Cambridge confronts Jackie Vernon
in "Make Me Laugh" on "Night Gallery."

Godfrey Cambridge, along with Bill Cosby, Dick Gregory, and Nipsey Russell, was acclaimed by Time magazine in 1965 as "one of the country’s most celebrated Negro comedians." (The piece was patronizingly titled "Comedians: They Have Overcome.") Sadly, Cambridge died of a heart attack at the age of 46 in November of 1976 on the set of the made-for-TV movie "Victory at Entebbe," in which he was to portray Ugandan despot Idi Amin. (Idi Amin later commented that Cambridge’s death was "punishment from God.")

Renowned comedian Danny Thomas, who performed on a Detroit radio station in 1932 before beginning to work in Chicago nightclubs in 1940, got his first taste of television as one of the hosts of the NBC variety show "All Star Revue" in the early 1950s. His regular nightclub act was a flop on TV, after which he lambasted the medium as suitable "only for idiots," vowing never to return. Within a year, in 1953, Thomas  returned as the star of "Make Room for Daddy" (later known simply as "The Danny Thomas Show"), portraying a nightclub comedian whose frequent on-the-road absences affect his at-home family situations. The sitcom enjoyed an amazing 13-year run, first on ABC, then on CBS.

For an equally impressive nine seasons (from 1989 - 1998), "Seinfeld" dominated television as a critics’ favorite, a ratings blockbuster, and a downright cultural phenomenon. Standup comic Jerry Seinfeld played Jerry Seinfeld, a single, "minor celebrity" standup comic coping in New York City with dates-gone-wrong, eccentric friends, and a bottomless mixed bag of offbeat characters. The "show about nothing," which featured cut-aways to Seinfeld’s nightclub performances to counterpoint his misadventures, was proclaimed by TV Guide in 2002 as the greatest television show of all time in a list of the top 50.

Acerbic standup comedian Louis C.K. (above) created, produces, writes, directs, edited and stars in the FX network sitcom "Louie" (which began airing in 2010), a fictionalized version of his life as a comic and recently divorced father raising two daughters in New York City, punctuated by his standup performances.

Louis C.K.’s standup career began on an open mike stage in Boston in 1984, at the height of the standup comedy boom, however, the experience was so discouraging that it took two years before he performed again, and he eventually achieved a degree of success, along with fellow comics Denis Leary and Lenny Clarke. In 2006, he created, executive produced, wrote and starred as a muffler shop mechanic in the sitcom "Lucky Louie," which aired on HBO for 12 episodes before being abruptly canceled.

An early attempt to put standup comedy on film - not counting filmed live performances by comics - came in 1974’s "Lenny," a dramatization of the rise and fall of controversial comedian-social satirist Lenny Bruce. Off the stage, he became entangled in substance abuse and promiscuity, while onstage, Bruce became infamous for weaving politics, religion, and sex into his freewheeling monologues, which resulted in frequent arrests for obscenity. He was sentenced in December of 1964 to four months in a workhouse on an obscenity conviction but was freed on bail during a drawn-out appeals process. Bruce died from an accidental overdose in August of 1966, age 40, before a decision was reached. He was eventually granted a posthumous gubernatorial pardon in December of 2003, more than 37 years after his death.

Lenny Bruce strikes a familiar pose at a police station booking.

(Lenny Bruce’s daughter, Kitty, who was briefly engaged at one time to standup comedian and actor Freddie Prinze, costarred as a member of an all-girl gang of juvenile delinquents in one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite cult flicks, 1975’s "Switchblade Sisters." Speaking of switchblades, Lenny brandished one in his one and only foray into feature films, as a homicidal enforcer - "Big deal, so I killed a guy - that makes me a criminal?" - in "Dance Hall Racket," a lower-than-low budget melodrama directed in 1953 by Phil Tucker, the auteur responsible for the idiotically delightful "Robot Monster," and scripted by Bruce himself, who made sure to write roles for wife Honey and his mother, Sally Marr.)

The producer of "Lenny," Marvin Worth, had managed the careers of jazz greats Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday before managing and co-writing material for Lenny Bruce. The screenplay, adapted by Julian Barry from his play of the same name, depicted the comedian’s messianic drive behind his artistry and his appetite for self-destruction.

"Lenny" was nominated for six Academy Awards, including the grand slam of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress. Dustin Hoffman’s chameleon-like performance as Bruce lost out to the sentimental choice of Art Carney in "Harry and Tonto," while nominee Valerie Perrine’s savvy interpretation of Bruce’s stripper wife, Honey, was beat out by Ellen Burstyn for "Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore." (Honestly, when was the last time anyone admitted to actually watching "Harry and Tonto" or "Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore"?)

"The Godfather Part II" took the Best Picture prize, and "Lenny" director Bob Fosse was edged out by Francis Ford Coppola. (Coincidentally, two years earlier, Fosse won the Best Director Oscar for "Cabaret" over Coppola’s nomination for "The Godfather.") "Lenny" was also nominated for Adapted Screenplay (the Academy Award went to "The Godfather Part II") and for its atmospheric black-and-white cinematography, which lost out, laughably, to "The Towering Inferno."

It was only fitting that at the New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival in April of this year, fest co-founder Robert De Niro personally introduced the 30th anniversary screening of director Martin Scorsese’s "The King of Comedy," the dark, squirmingly uncomfortable and often hilarious fable about Rupert Pupkin (De Niro), just one more speck of humanity in New York, an autograph hound and would-be comedian who practices standup monologues in an eerie basement mock-up of a TV studio, repeatedly harangued by an unseen upstairs mother (who may or may not be real).

Odd couple Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard in "The King of Comedy"

Pupkin’s demented aspirations lead him to abduct a popular talk show host (abetted by a stalker-minded fan, played to hysterical perfection by comedian Sandra Bernhard) in an attempt to wrangle an appearance on television. After Scorsese’s first choice to portray the fictional talk show host, Johnny Carson, turned it down, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were considered, before the role went to Jerry Lewis.

As ludicrous as De Niro’s Travis Bickle being hailed a hero and family savior after the blood bath in Scorsese’s "Taxi Driver" is, De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin - whose standup routine is remarkably humorless - is likewise ridiculously praised at the end of "The King of Comedy" as just that: "Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime."

Director Martin Scorsese called Robert De Niro's role
as Rupert Pupkin his favorite of their collaborations. 

Paul D. Zimmerman, a former Newsweek film critic, wrote the screenplay nearly a decade before "The King of Comedy" was made. Before his untimely death from colon cancer at the age of 54, Zimmerman (who once commented, "If you’re not cynical, you’re stupid") later wrote a script titled "Back Again," in which a preserved Adolf Hitler is embraced by America after he writes a book genuinely apologizing for all the suffering he caused.

In his review of "The King of Comedy," Roger Ebert called it "one of the most arid, painful, wounded movies I’ve ever seen." Obviously not what Ebert would deem "a fun movie," it was "also not a bad movie. It is frustrating to watch, unpleasant to remember, and, in its own way, quite effective."

In 1983, "The King of Comedy" painted a picture too dark for a nation basking in the feel-good sunshine of the Ronald Reagan era to appreciate. The film has since been understood and praised as a commentary - ahead of its time - on the questionable and negative influences of media and celebrity. Martin Scorsese, who appeared onstage at Tribeca, alongside Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis, stated, "We knew we were commenting on the culture of the time, but not thinking that it would blow up into what it is now."

Martin Scorsese, Jerry Lewis, and Robert De Niro pose for the 30th anniversary
screening of "The King of Comedy"...Scorsese: "It wasn't a comedy, was it?"

Jerry Lewis also had a major role in a screen curio from 1995 called "Funny Bones," starring the versatile Oliver Platt as a struggling comic whose standup act bombs in Las Vegas, after which he flees to the British resort of Blackpool, a summer childhood retreat and the seaside home of his world-famous comedian father (Lewis), hoping that a return to his roots will help him rediscover his own funny bones.

Directed by Peter Chelsom, a native of Blackpool himself best known for 1991’s "Hear My Song," "Funny Bones" had such a distinctive British fish-and-chips flavor that reviewer Roger Ebert remarked, "The artificial introduction of Vegas and Jerry Lewis are attempts to disguise the movie as American…maybe the picture’s Hollywood backers insisted on that."

"The Jimmy Show" (2001) was another oddity, based on an Off-Broadway play by Jonathan Marc Sherman, scripted and directed by actor Frank Whaley, who stars as a New Jersey grocery store clerk (and failed inventor) by day and a struggling standup comic by night. The character’s "utter lack of talent," critic Stephen Holden noted in The New York Times, "makes a creepy mediocrity like Rupert Pupkin seem as hilarious as Robin Williams shooting the moon."

Frank Whaley portrayed guitarist Robby Krieger in director Oliver Stone’s "The Doors." He played a young Burt Lancaster in "Field of Dreams" and was the Big Kahuna Burger boy killed by Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction." He played a young Jack Nicholson in "Ironweed," then murdered Jack Nicholson in "Hoffa." Whaley, according to Stephen Holden "has always exuded the slightly repellent screen aura of a twerp looking to be kicked in the teeth." Holden dubbed Whaley’s Jimmy "a loser in his 20s whose face seems frozen in the expression of someone sniffing vinegar."

According to Holden, "The Jimmy Show," which features Ethan Hawke as Jimmy’s pot-headed buddy, is "the kind of movie that is a must to avoid on a bad day. Even on a good one, it could send you into a funk."

Bill Paxton, Judd Nelson, and Wayne Newton star in "The Dark Backward."

Hands down, the most demented take on a standup comic has to be 1991’s "The Dark Backward," a freak show of a comedy set in a nightmarish alternate universe that could have been created by David Lynch or John Waters, or a really depressed Tim Burton. Judd Nelson (onetime Brat Pack costar of "The Breakfast Club" and "St. Elmo’s Fire") plays Marty Malt, a stoop-shouldered, sweaty, sniveling garbage man who moonlights as a pathetically awful standup comedian. His fellow trash collector and dubious friend, Gus, played over-the-top by a wondrously manic Bill Paxton, is a loud, disgusting human cockroach with a fondness for his accordion and grossly overweight women.

Gus: "I will laugh so hard my stomach will burst open
and spill bile all over the stage!"

When Marty inexplicably sprouts a third arm from his back, the two hook up with a small-time talent agent named Jackie Chrome, portrayed to sleazy perfection by Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton (who later recalled this as his all-time favorite role), and Marty appears on the Twinkee Doodle kiddie show as "Desi, the Three-Armed Wonder Comic." The once-in-a-lifetime cast features Lara Flynn Boyle as Marty’s dispassionate girlfriend, James Caan as the horrifically incompetent Dr. Scurvy, Claudia Christian as his curvaceous nurse, Kitty, and Rob Lowe (with a prosthetic hooked nose and buck teeth) as an unctuous talk show talent scout.

As repellent as things might get, "The Dark Backward" is never uninteresting to watch. It was the first script written by writer-director Adam Rifkin, who was 19 when he wrote it, and whose prolific output since has included screenplays for such family fare as "Mouse Hunt," "Small Soldiers," and "Underdog." In 2007, Rifkin wrote, directed and starred as a philosophical caveman in 2007’s "Homo Erectus" (also known as "National Lampoon’s Stoned Age"), costarring Ali Larter, David Carradine, Talia Shire, Gary Busey, Tom Arnold, and Ron Jeremy.

On the distaff side of the microphone, Sally Field, when she was still enjoying the Oscar bump from her second win for "Places in the Heart," played a restless housewife who suddenly yearns to be a standup comedian in 1988’s "Punchline," written and directed by a man, David Seltzer, best known for the 1986 slow-clap crowd-pleaser "Lucas," featuring the late Corey Haim, Charlie Sheen, and Winona Ryder.

As her blue collar hubby (portrayed with his eyes closed by John Goodman) tries to cope with her midlife crisis, Field develops a precarious friendship with a medical student who moonlights as a standup comic, played by Tom Hanks. Both Hanks and Field played clubs with standup routines to prepare for their roles. Comedian Susie Essman coached Field, while veteran comic Barry Sobel helped write Hanks’ material. The result, in The Washington Post’s Hal Hinson’s words, was "a movie about comedy that’s not funny."

"Punchline" prompted Roger Ebert to wonder, "When did the laughs go out of standup comedy? When did standup comedians stop being humorists and start being ‘personalities’?…When did standups start being bores?" Calling it "a pathetic movie into which a great deal of energy and talent has disappeared," Ebert noted, "The movie does not seem to know it is about two would-be comics who are both lacking in talent."

Only four years later, screenwriter Nora Ephron (best known for her scripts for "Silkwood," "When Harry Met Sally…," and "Sleepless in Seattle") got it right when she made her directing debut in 1992 with "This Is My Life," based on a screenplay she co-wrote with sister Delia Ephron. Julie Kavner (a TV favorite for her endearing roles as Valerie Harper’s kid sister Brenda Morgenstern on the series "Rhoda" and as the voice of Marge on "The Simpsons") starred as a single mother of two daughters (guileless performances by Samantha Mathis and Gaby Hoffman) who, with the help of an agent portrayed with uncharacteristic restraint (not unlike his Academy Award-nominated performance in "Driving Miss Daisy") by Dan Aykroyd, pursues her dream of becoming a standup comedian.

"There have been show-biz movies told from the point of view of neglected children," Roger Ebert commented in his review, "and others told from the POV of parents who hardly have time for their children…But what’s new about ‘This Is My Life’ is that it’s an argument between the two points of view - with the mother and her daughters each demanding their own rights. There is humor in this approach, and also some truth."

When it comes to comics playing comics, Richard Pryor directed himself (in the only fictional film he directed) in the semi-autobiographical 1986 movie "Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling." Pryor insisted the story was not about himself, despite the script’s flashback plot triggered by the main character’s near-fatal, drug-sparked self-immolation.

Even as a fictionalized version of Pryor’s life, the film, according to A.V. Club critic Nathan Rabin, "falls victim to a widespread scourge I call ‘Biopicitis.’ Biopicitis occurs when a biopic starts telling a specific human story about a real human being, and gives itself over to well-worn, one-size-fits-all show-biz clichés…Other symptoms…include abrupt leaps in time, overacting, histrionic melodrama…an excess of drugged-up, sexed-up debauchery, and a complete aversion to subtlety and understatement."

On the other hand, Roger Ebert praised Pryor for "taking some major risks in this movie. He has played straight and honest with his story, but he has also shown that he has a real gift as a director…This isn’t a heartfelt amateur night, but a film by an artist whose art has become his life." Even Rabin conceded that "enough of (Pryor’s) genius shines through to render ‘Dancer,’ if not an outright success, then at least a gloriously alive mess of a movie, vital and confused and bursting with abundant moments of greatness as well as unrealized potential."

Martin Lawrence, whose comedy was influenced by Richard Pryor, starred in "Talkin’ Dirty After Dark," a raunchy 1991 comedy about one night at a black comedy club in Los Angeles and one struggling comic’s goal to get $67 to pay his phone bill. Director Topper Carew, who also wrote the screenplay, co-created, co-produced and co-wrote Lawrence’s TV series "Martin."

In her review for The Washington Post, Rita Kempley called "Talkin’ Dirty After Dark" "a little like Mardi Gras in full swing, a big ol’ bawdy celebration of nuttiness for its own sake. Breakneck-paced and barely focused…it’s less a movie really than chockablock punch lines." The DVD Verdict website noted, "It sees itself as a rowdy, randy behind the scenes look at the struggles of African Americans in the cutthroat world of open mike merriment. But it’s really just a soap opera-ish sitcom with swear words."

The Unknown Comic has Chuck Barris at a loss for words on "The Gong Show."

Several years before he threw a paper bag over his head and made over 150 appearances on Chuck Barris’ "The Gong Show" as the frenetic speed-gagster The Unknown Comic, Murray Langston first appeared on "Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In" doing off-the-wall impressions of a fork and a tube of toothpaste. He teamed with comedian Freeman King, and the two performed regularly on "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour." Allegedly embarrassed to appear on "The Gong Show" as himself, Langston conceived the paper bag gimmick, and his act became a hit.

In 1984, Langston wrote the screenplay for and starred in "Night Patrol" as a hopelessly inept Los Angeles cop who moonlights incognito as a standup comedian appropriately called The Unknown Comic. The raunchy, sex-and-toilet joke-filled comedy featured Linda Blair as a fellow police officer and possible love interest for Langston, legendary funnyman Pat Paulsen as Langston’s seasoned veteran partner, "The Gong Show’s" Jaye P. Morgan as a talent agent, and Billy Barty as a chronically flatulent police captain. (The incessant gas-passing sound effects were reportedly added in post-production, much to Barty’s dismay.)
Alongside cockeyed cameos by comedians Pat Morita, Vic Dunlop, and Bill Kirchenbauer, Andrew Dice Clay made his motion picture debut as a foul-mouthed comic named Tony Baroni.

Pat Paulsen and Murray Langston "bust" Kitten Natividad in "Night Patrol."

The New York Times critic Vincent Canby backhandedly praised the film for possessing "a kind of consistent vulgarity that isn’t easy to achieve, even with the help of a handy anthology of bad-taste jokes." Although "the humor is strictly for the stag-party crowd, which isn’t discriminating, the performances have a good, low-burlesque style to them."

Linda Blair later recalled that the director, Jackie Kong (known for low-budget horror schlock "The Being" and "Blood Diner"), and Murray Langston "had differences of opinion." Inexplicably, Langston’s lines as The Unknown Comic were dubbed by another actor, prompting Blair to gripe, "No one can do The Unknown Comic except Murray."

The Unknown Comic and Linda Blair share an intimate moment in "Night Patrol."
(Actual dialogue: "I love that dress you're wearing. I never knew you had such big tits.")

Blair first met Langston at a nightclub called SHOW-BIZ, in which Langston had invested. The then fifteen-year-old Blair went to the club with her friend, Kitty Bruce, the aforementioned daughter of standup icon Lenny Bruce. (The club closed within a couple years but not before a number of future celebrities had passed through as servers, including David Letterman, Debra Winger, and Michael Keaton.) Blair and Langston became close friends and were reunited onscreen in 1989’s "Up Your Alley," an odd romantic comedy about the homeless, costarring Ruth Buzzi and comedian Bob Zany.

Twice divorced by the early 1990s, Murray Langston stepped away from show business to raise his daughters as a single father. He occasionally does standup in Las Vegas and is an active advocate for children’s causes. He reprised The Unknown Comic in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell as Chuck Barris, who claimed to be a covert assassin for the CIA.

The ubiquitous Jerry Lewis appears as himself in "Mr. Saturday Night."

"Mr. Saturday Night" (1992) was a long-planned labor of love for its star, popular comedian Billy Crystal (who also co-wrote the screenplay and made his directing debut behind the camera), which backfired in its saga of a self-destructive standup comedian who, in the words of reviewer Leonard Maltin, "turns out to be his own worst enemy," alienating audiences and family alike. Maltin noted, "It’s….tough to make an appealing movie about an unappealing character." Maltin also singled out Crystal’s old-age makeup as "garish and unbelievable."

The otherwise downbeat "Mr. Saturday Night" is buoyed by cameos by comedy legends Jerry Lewis, Carl Ballantine, Slappy White, and Jackie Gayle and by David Paymer’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar-nominated performance as Crystal’s long-suffering brother.

Jim Carrey channels the late Andy Kaufman in "Man on the Moon."

Milos Forman, a Czech-born filmmaker unafraid of taking risks -  his diverse résumé as an acclaimed director includes "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest," "Hair," "Ragtime," "Amadeus," and "The People vs. Larry Flynt" - directed Jim Carrey in "Man on the Moon" (1999), a remarkable comedy-drama based on the life of the late comedian Andy Kaufman. The film was produced by Danny DeVito, who portrays talent agent George Shapiro.

Actually more of a performance artist, Kaufman disliked telling jokes and doing comedy as it was traditionally presented. He didn’t consider himself a comedian, referring to himself as a "song-and-dance man." Elaborate put-ons, pranks, scams, happenings, and hoaxes were highlights of his career. Fans even believed that his death (from kidney failure as a result of lung cancer at the age of 35) was a hoax.

Andy Kaufman plays his beloved congas.

A.V. Club critic Keith Phipps posited, "How do you make a movie about Andy Kaufman, the enigmatic comedian who hid himself beneath so many layers of characters and pranks that he didn’t seem to exist anymore? Attempting to explain Kaufman is a self-defeating task that’s contrary to everything for which he stood. It might be better just to describe what he did, pointing out his continual puncturing of the illusion surrounding entertainment…as an act of subversive, conceptual comedy in its highest form…‘Man in the Moon’ more or less contents itself in doing just that." According to Phipps, the film "works wonderfully as a funny, moving tribute to Kaufman, which might be the best that could have been hoped for."

Carl Reiner, a godfather of American comedy, once said, "Did Andy (Kaufman) influence comedy? No. Because nobody’s doing what he did. Jim Carrey was influenced - not to do what Andy did, but to follow his own drummer. I think Andy did that for a lot of people. Follow your own drumbeat…You could do anything that struck you as entertaining. It gave people freedom to be themselves."

Jim Carrey on the verge of stardom, Adah Glassbourg on the verge of oblivion

At the age of 21, Ontario-born Jim Carrey exhibited seeds of the freedom Carl Reiner spoke of in a very early acting role, in 1983’s "Introducing…Janet," a Canadian television equivalent of the "ABC Afterschool Special," featuring one-movie-only actress Adah Glassbourg (oddly enough, sharing the same last name as the teleplay writer) as an overweight, painfully insecure high school class clown whose lack of self-esteem is restored by her friendship with a comedy club dishwasher and aspiring standup comic named Tony Moroni (played by a gangly Carrey). The treacly story is predictable, but the intent is sincere, and Carrey’s infectious charm and goofy antics presaged things to come. "I want to be in show biz!" Tony Moroni declares.

Tony Moroni: "And when the people laugh,
it's the sweetest sound you could ever hear."

Long (and probably rightfully) neglected, the 45-minute drama was rushed into video store bargain bins to cash in on Carrey’s fame, retitled "Rubberface," no doubt to capitalize on Carrey’s elastic mugging.

The same video store fate awaited "Going Overboard" (filmed as "The Unsinkable Schecky Moskowitz," also known as "Babes Ahoy!"), a 1989 comedy starring 23-year-old Adam Sandler, a couple of years before becoming a featured player on "Saturday Night Live." Sandler played Theo Huxtable’s friend Smitty on a few episodes of "The Cosby Show" in the late 1980s and also appeared on the MTV game show "Remote Control" as such characters as Trivia Delinquent and Stud Boy before making his feature film debut in "Going Overboard" as a cruise ship waiter who wants to be the ship’s standup comedian.

From the onset, Sandler, in the first of several addresses directly to the camera, lets the audience know the movie was made solely because the filmmakers had access to shoot on a cruise sailing from New Orleans to Cancun with a bevy of real beauty queens aboard, on their way to the Miss Universe pageant, all for a budget of $200,000.

Adam Sandler in a ridiculous cruise uniform upstages Billy Zane in a cheap beard.

Written and directed by Valerie Breiman (who would go on to make "Bikini Squad" in 1993), with Sandler providing most of his own material, the film is excruciatingly unfunny (the standup routines alone are especially humorless) and numbingly interminable. Billy Zane (best known as Cal the cad in "Titanic") has an amusingly silly cameo as King Neptune; Billy Bob Thornton (the same year he appeared in "Chopper Chicks in Zombietown") pops up in one scene as a foul-mouthed heckler; a very sweaty (possibly very drunk) Burt Young mumbles through incongruous cutaways as Panama strongman Manuel Noriega and is joined by Terry Moore (whose claims to fame include a starring role in the 1949 giant ape flick "Mighty Joe Young," an alleged secret marriage to Howard Hughes, and a nude photo shoot for Playboy magazine at the age of 55 in 1984); and Milton Berle (complete with laugh track and canned applause) gives Sandler’s Schecky sage, Obi-Wan Kenobian advice on comedy.

Twenty years later, Adam Sandler portrayed an older but not much wiser standup comic in 2009’s "Funny People," a surprisingly mature comedy from the mind of writer-producer-director Judd Apatow ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Knocked Up"). Sandler portrays a self-centered, 40-something comedian-actor who believes a diagnosis of leukemia is terminal and decides to return to his roots in standup. He hooks up with an aspiring standup comic (Seth Rogen) as his writer, assistant, and consequential companion and nursemaid. Costarring Leslie Mann, Eric Bana, Jason Schwartzman, Jonah Hill, and Aziz Ansari, the film is chockful of cameos by comedians like Dave Attell, Ray Romano, Sarah Silverman, Norm Mcdonald, Paul Reiser, Carol Leifer, George Wallace, and Andy Dick.

Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen star in "Funny People."

Critic Leonard Maltin gave "Funny People" an "A for effort," noting that the "sprawling comedy-drama tackles everything from mortality to the emptiness of material success." Roger Ebert called it "a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances…and it’s about something. It could have easily been a formula film…but (Sandler) learns and changes during his ordeal, and we empathize."

The sad thing about our moviehouse saga of funny people is that there really wasn’t much to laugh at on the screen. In his review for "Punchline," a particularly disenchanted Roger Ebert remarked, "Everybody knows that standup comics represent the unhappiest and most screwed up people in show business…a public display of ego and ambition unmatched by talent or imagination."

But surely there must be some record on film out there that depicts the joy of standup comedy, the fulfillment one individual with one microphone reaps from making an audience laugh.

The good news arrived in the 2007 documentary "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project," directed and co-produced by John Landis (the director of such hit comedies as "National Lampoon’s Animal House," "The Blues Brothers," "Trading Places," "Coming to America," and "Three Amigos"). Co-produced by Don’s son, Larry Rickles, the film is an affectionate celebration of a unique presence known as a so-called "insult comic" who has enjoyed (emphasis on "enjoyed") more than a half century in show business. "What becomes clear in Landis’ film," critic David Wiegand wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, "is that Rickles is really a softie, a guy who loves humanity and life. The guy they call Mr. Warmth really is, and that’s apparently the worst-kept secret in show business."

The movie, which debuted at the New York Film Festival before airing on HBO (and subsequently winning Primetime Emmy Awards for the producers and for Rickles himself), features onscreen comments from an exhaustive who’s who of comedians, as well as filmmakers and actors the likes of Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Sidney Poitier, Roger Corman, James Caan, and Ernest Borgnine (who costarred with Rickles in a 1967 stage production of "The Odd Couple").

"In the old days, he strode on stage with a confident swagger, leading with that bulldog jaw," David Wiegand noted in the San Francisco Chronicle. "These days, his legs are bowed with age…and he walks a bit unsteadily to the center of the stage…Age may have stiffened the joints but…his wit is as sharp as ever." Comedian Richard Lewis insists, "He’s fearlessly honest," while magician-entertainer Penn Jillette pointed out that for Rickles, "pleasing the audience is the most important thing in the world, not (in) his life, in the world."

Unlike his show biz mentor, Frank Sinatra, Don Rickles is no crooner, but he regularly closes his shows with a song written for him by the late Ron Gaylord:
I’ll trade you laughter for love
I’ll trade you one for the other
Laughter for love
What can you lose?…
Whether you like it or not
I’ll give you all that I’ve got!