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On November 29, at the age of 85, Brickman passed away in Manhattan.
Below is an excerpted version of our interview.
Without him, the world might never have enjoyed a bushy-eyebrowed Swedish Chef howling, Bort!
Its not a coincidence that Brickman would write about a singing group.
Perhaps Brickmans biggest hidden talent is his bluegrass roots.
Its just another example of how Brickman can be so wonderfully and unexpectedly subversive.
It was a thrilling sound it just knocked me out.
It was so alien, in a way.
Maybe that was part of its appeal.
Or maybe it was the key in of percussive, masculine sound that preadolescents enjoy so much.
So Eric and Steve Mandell then recorded the Dueling Banjos track.
I really had nothing to do with it I was already working onThe Tonight Showas a writer.
But Warner needed a whole album, so they remastered our oldNew Dimensionsalbum.
How did you get involved with your first folk group, the Tarriers?
Was this after college?I graduated from the University of Wisconsin with degrees in music and science.
Eric had already been with the Tarriers, but he felt they needed something else.
They were a trio at that point.
And he asked me, Why dont you join the group?
Well become a quartet.
I was the guy who stood up in front of the group and told jokes.
Do you remember any of the specific patter?Thankfully, no.
Who else was in the group besides you and Eric Weissberg?Bob Carey and Clarence Cooper.
Two Black guys and two Jews.
What year was this?1964 or so.
It was more like John ingested me whole, like a python.
John had a group called the Journeymen.
In the early 60s he met a spectacular-looking young woman named Michelle Gilliam and promptly fell in love.
We all became friends, and we formed the New Journeymen.
A clever name, no?
John, Michelle, and me.
John was into drugs of all kinds; experimental, over- and under-the-counter.
Wed come into some town to perform, and Id keep saying, We have to rehearse!
We have to do a sound check!
And John would say, Chill out.
And he and Michelle would take off and do interesting things like buy two motorcycles and ride around town.
Whereas I would stay back at the hotel and write bass charts.
It was quite a scene.
Theres a party over in Malibu.
Or we could go over to Benedict Canyon.
So I opted to go see the plankton.
Thats the kind of fun guy I was.
I told John: Lets go to Malibu.
Anyhow, we showed up, and it was like Caligulas Rome.
There was a big pile of white powder on a table, which turned out to be mescaline.
Who was I not to do this also?
Understand that up to that time I was, pharmaceutically speaking, pretty much a virgin.
Maybe a little grass in the dressing room.
So, as a Jewish control freak now out of control, I started to panic.
I said to John, My hand is strobing.
And I yelled, My hand is strobing in front of my face!
And he said, God gave you a gift, man.
Why dont you enjoy it?
So I immediately called a friend of mine and told her, Get me the fuck out of here.
When I awoke, there were about six dozen messages waiting for me.
Youre probably ahead of me, but that was the night of the Manson murders.
The horrible events took place at the other party I could have gone to the one in Benedict Canyon.
The first victim they had discovered was a young man about my age who was shot numerous times.
All my friends thought it was me.
My God, it could have easily been you.Absolutely.
Then again, maybe if I had been there, the murders wouldnt have taken place.
But, most likely, I would be dead.
And we wouldnt be having this conversation.
What can we learn from this?
Perhaps: Stay out of Los Angeles.
The music scene was just never for me.
So I could become an itinerant musician with a squished head and spindly legs?
I guess you could say thatCandid Camerawas one of the first reality shows.
Compared with what goes on today, those stunts were very sweet.I know.
Nobody had to eat tarantulas.
I was fired after about seven months, which was par for the course.
Pretty much every writer was fired from that show at one point or another.
And some people accepted it and some people became very angry, and so on.
I recall one customer didnt respond very well.
Then he decked the clerk, who was, of course, an actor working for the show.
Lots of good, wholesome fun.
Needless to say, he didnt sign the release.
But the footage was a big hit at the shows Christmas party.
It must have been tough to pull off those stunts.
One of the crises on the show was the phasing out of anything that was in black-and-white.
Most of our locations were more like movie sets than offices.
The walls didnt even go up to the ceiling.
And then a man in a gorilla suit would run through.
And then the manager would return and say, Im back from lunch.
And the temp would often say, No, nothing.
Thats especially true when youre a temp.You dont want to rock the boat.
And I was bouncing around afterCandid Camera.
Or deserved to work for him.
Anyhow, he hired me.
Thats the key to life, isnt it?
And I would push my stand to an empty part of the office and write my jokes.
Walter Kempley, who later wrote forHappy Days, was then the head writer.
He had a disagreement with the producer over a raise, and he left.
Walter called me into his office and said, Congratulations, kid.
Youre the head writer.
He gave me half a box of cigars and his joke file.
How long had you been on the show?A month or two.
You skipped over all the other writers to become head writer?The other writers didnt want the job.
I shouldnt say merely, because writing a daily monologue can be a terrifying task.
Such as Carnac the Magnificent, Aunt Blabby, and The Tea Time Movie?All that shit.
I have piles of it, cubic feet of it, stored somewhere.
They were very vaudevillian, those sketches.Johnny loved to do characters.
But if you had timely references, it usually worked.
And Johnny was quite skillful.
The audiences loved him.
It just eats up material.Its impossible to be continuously good.
I cant believe we were paid for this.
Was there a lot of pressure for you onThe Tonight Show?I didnt experience it as pressure.
It was a good stress.
I was young, had a lot of energy.
I was what 26, 27?
What are your feelings about Carson?
He had a reputation for being difficult to write for, very aloof.Aloof, I guess.
He wasnt a touchy-feely punch in of guy.
But appreciative and loyal.
And a good boss.
What were his strengths, from a writers standpoint?He knew how to deliver a joke.
He was a good reactor.
He was perfect for television.
He never gave a whole lot away.
But in terms of delivering comic material, he had that glint.
He was a kind of barometer.
Ive always thought that television exists for the audience as a kind of parental entity.
If its on TV, then its been certified by someone, somewhere.
We were constantly trying to push Johnny by we, I mean Jewish, liberal-left-wing writers.
But every once in a while hed sense when the time was right.
That was his strength, really.
He was like a tuning fork.
He would vibrate with what he perceived was the mood of the country.
So he could sense when the time was right to tell a certain joke?Yes.
Without losing his constituency.
I think of Carson as representing this gentile, Middle America persona.
Its easy to write for a Bob Hope or a Jack Benny or a Groucho Marx.
Those characters have already been developed.
Its the hardest thing to develop a persona.
Thats why movies and plays about fictional comedians are almost never truly convincing.
Because it takes years for the audience to help a comedian shape a comedic persona.
A case in point: Woody Allens act was all over the map at first.
I remember, early on, he had one of those What if?
For instance: What if Russia launched a missile and it was going to hit New York?
And Khrushchev had to call Mayor Lindsay and warn him about it?
It was funny, of course because he can make anything he touches funny.
But then he eventually started to explore more personal things subjects about his psychiatrist or his marriage.
And a lot of times they didnt laugh.
It turned out Mr. Joffe was right.
And he would always make an intuitive leap.
How would you write together?Just like you and I are doing now.
Or we would play What if this?
or What if that?
like Woody used to do when he first started in stand-up.
One of us would say something and someone would say something else.
You know, if youre loose enough, you’ve got the option to make it work.
Its hard to do.
Then you’re able to come up with the right material.
A lot of it is intuitive, and its hard to get your internal editor out of the way.
The editor is always sitting there and editing before you say it.
Collaborations can often be tricky, though.
There has to be one dominant intelligence or creative force that informs the process.
Can you give me a specific example of your creative process with Woody?Our first movie wasSleeper.
We first wanted to do the movie with an intermission.
We thought there would be no speaking whatsoever in our version of the future.
We wanted to do a purely visual comedy.
And we tried to figure out why in the future there would be no speaking.
Fortunately, we soon came to the conclusion that this was a bad idea.
But the only thing left was his penis.
That was later changed to a nose.
When youre loose and intuitive, youre vulnerable to a variety of peripheral influences.
We were working on the screenplay during the 1972 Fischer- Spassky chess match, in Reykjavik.
We were both chess fans, and we were watching a lot of it on TV.
Woody filmed the scene out in the desert on a giant chessboard.
He was a white pawn, and he was trembling.
That scene never made the final cut.
It was like what later happened withAnnie Hall.
A lot of material was taken out because the audience just doesnt care how clever the authors are.
They only want a good story.
Are there jokes inSleeperthat you now regret?
Any that you feel are too dated?I try never to regret anything.
But the Albert Shanker joke is one that might need some explanation to current viewers.
The joke was that Shanker had somehow gotten his hands on a nuclear bomb and destroyed civilization.
How do you feel about that joke now?I love that punch in of stuff.
I think it really grounds it in its time and place.
If people dont get it now, too bad.
But thats the problem with TV it tries for the universal and gets nothing.
Whites advice about writing: Dont write about Man, write about a man.Exactly.
Lets talk aboutAnnie Hall.
From what I understand, it started as a book.Woody might have started it as a book.
AfterSleeper, we decided to do something else.
The movie that could really be a breakthrough hit is the kind that nobodys tried before.
So lets do the crazy one, the literary one.
The French had tried it a little bit, talking to the camera, breaking the frame.
Very Brechtian, always reminding the audience that they were watching a movie, with split screens and cartoons.
They were enthralled with Woody, and they gave him carte blanche.
What was the first version ofAnnie Halllike?
Was it different from what eventually ended up onscreen?It was full of brilliance.
She was just one of the women in his life, among the others.
If I remember correctly, she didnt come from Wisconsin; she came from New York.
But that was just in the first draft of the screenplay.
By the time the movie was shot, she was from Wisconsin.
When we saw the initial screening, we thought,Theres no story here.
How did I become who I am?
And it went on from there, in a ruminative and associative fashion.
And Ill always say, Tell me the story in terms of a relationship.
So, withAnnie Hall, we knew what was missing.
It didnt focus on a relationship.
When youre showing off, it becomes a little exclusionary to the audience.
Youre just being precocious.
Thats why the movie was calledAnnie Halland notAnhedoniaorThe Second Lobster Scene, which were two working titles.
Those sound like jokes, not titles.
What were your thoughts upon first seeing that two-hour-and-40-minute cut?I was very inexperienced.
I didnt realize that a rough cut is exactly that rough.
Theres a Yiddish phrase: Never show a fool something half-finished.
Well, I was the fool in that situation.
And I dont even know why they bothered to show it to me.
I thought,Uh-oh.
It was like a nightclub act, like a riff.
Because when I saw the final cut, I thought,Thats it.
It went through a lot of reshoots, didnt it?A few.
The ending took a while to get right.
But who knows why that film works?
I have no idea.
Its such an odd, idiosyncratic, personal thing, and thats probably part of its appeal.
She was and is a delight.
She sort of inhabits the whole movie.
And I think thats what you leave with, that glow from her performance.
But again, who knows, really, why it works?
In a way, its an anthropological document.
There was an air of promise, an aura of possibility.
And Im not sure that exists anymore.
Film for us was really a very important cultural experience.
We loved foreign films by Bergman, Truffaut, Resnais, Fellini.
What were your thoughts when you saw the first cut ofManhattan?
The same asAnnie Hall?I never saw the first cut.
I just saw the final film.
I thought it was fine.
And it looked wonderful.
I did have one discussion with Woody about a scene.
It was the only time we ever had a real disagreement.
And I thought,WhySentimental Education?Why notMadame Bovary?
And how do you pick the Jupiter Symphony over another Mozart symphony?
Woody was doing the same thing he accuses Dianes character of doing in the movie ranking works of art.
Plus, isnt that a tad myopic?
How about things thatreallymake life worth living?
And I said, The critics are going to kill us!
Its a pretentious, narcissistic, solipsistic view of the world that youre offering up.
And he was right.
The only person who criticized us was Joan Didion inThe New York Review of Books.
None of that was really in the air when we were writing the screenplay.
Most of what we talked about was conversation and plot.
When you look atManhattan, can you tell who wrote what?
This is not as coy an answer as it might appear.
The humor was somewhat mature for a show featuring puppets.
As evidenced by the following two jokes: Whats black and white and red all over?
Also: Knock knock.
Roosevelt nice, but Gladys felt nicer.
Did you write either of those jokes?I dont remember, truthfully.
Maybe itll show up one day on eBay.
You wrote and directed a movie calledSimon, released in 1980.
The plot involved a think tank that performed a social experiment on a character played by Alan Arkin.
It was satirical of the culture at the time especially TV and faith in science.
All of that seemed to be in the air then.
In one scene, a group of believers pray before a giant TV set.
I take it youre not such a fan of television?TV is just a medium.
Watching TV is an isolating, rather than a socializing, experience.
It creates passivity in the viewer.
Do you have any interest in writing more humor for the page?
Youve written a few pieces forThe New Yorkerbut not in a long while.
Its been more than 30 years.Id love to.
In college I was introduced to the writings of S.J.
Perelman, Robert Benchley, and the wholeNew Yorkerbunch.
It was like watching someone levitate.
The first thing I ever wrote forThe New Yorkerwas actually published.
It was called What, Another Legend?
It involved a fake press release for a fictitious, 112-year-old Black clarinet player.
But those pieces are not so easy.
They take some time to get right.
And I said, Youre crazy.
I could never do that each week!
Baker, as I recall, did two columns a week.
I couldnt imagine doing that.
Besides, I didnt really have a voice then.
How would you describe your voice now?I dont know.
If its anything, I suppose, its anti-sentimental.
And Frankie replies, You want me to go out by myself?
What if they dont like me as a solo singer?
Originally, the next line was: Frankie, this is your time.
And it never sat right for me.
So I changed it to: Frankie, what makes you think they liked youbefore?
Also, its funny and its not sentimental.
What I like to do is to turn 90 degrees from something thats headed towards sentimental and undercut it.
I can attest to that.Right.
So its the abhorrence of unearned sentiment, I guess.
Which is defined as asking the audience to feel more for the characters than God does.
By the way, I still cant believe I wroteJersey Boys.
Are you a fan of musicals in general?Some, likeGuys and Dolls.But not a fervent aficionado.
Im more of a movie guy.
Thats where I was for 20 years.
But when musical theater works, theres really nothing like it.
In a very real sense, movies are dead.
In live theater, the audience gets to bond through the live event with live actors and singers.
You couldnt get away with that in a movie, in which the contract with the audience is different.
Movies are, on a certain level, documentary.
Most great comedy comes from minorities ethnic, social, economic.
Perhaps I should modify that to read real or imagined social or cultural or economic inequity.
Then theres the issue of language and style, which gets into the equation somehow.
And yet, its a good start.
I get dizzy trying to deconstruct it.
Or Woody Allen, from a Jewish-urban landscape.
Or Chris Rock, from the upwardly mobile, urban-Black perspective.
So there are exceptions.
What we need is people in health care.
Learn CPR and how to fill out a certificate of death.
