Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny Read Online Free PDF Page A

They needed to be a part of the scene they had given up when they got married, and most of them probably liked it a whole lot better than staying back home with the kids. Especially with all those cute ponies swishing their tails around.
    They were a lot alike, these women. Most had come from poor neighborhoods and had only high school educations. After dinner at our house, they’d all hang out together in the den talking about their kids and their parties while their husbands sat in the living room telling jokes and sharing on-the-road war stories. (That was the room I always wanted to be in.) One or two of the wives would get a swelled head and become a bit pretentious. I remember Red Buttons was married for a while to a woman who was taking French lessons. Soon after, she started calling Red “Rouge.” Poor Rouge—the boys had a field day with that one.
    But most of the wives understood the game. I think that was their bond.
    Except for one. The dreaded wicked witch, Sylvia Fine, Danny Kaye’s wife. From the time I was a little kid, I had always heard the women talking about what a “ballbuster” Sylvia was—she didn’t even take his last name. And “poor Danny”—how she humiliated him, spoke for him, wore the pants and all that. I always felt so sorry for Danny Kaye. He was a cute and funny man who, unlike the other guys, was saddled with this terrible wife.
    Decades went by, and I hadn’t thought about Danny or Sylvia for what must have been thirty years. Then one night I was at a big dinner event in New York. Danny Kaye was long gone, and I spotted Sylvia from across the room.
    Suddenly, this strange feeling came over me. It was like the melting of ice off a very old structure. Seeing Sylvia there made everything I had learned about women in the past decades flash before me:
    Women who didn’t play by the house rules were called “man-haters.”
    Women who took charge were called “bitches” (while men who took charge were “leaders”).
    Women who wanted to have their writing taken seriously used their initials to hide their gender.
    I was now looking at a woman who had been far ahead of her time. She was her husband’s manager and writer, both for his nightclub act and many of his movies. She had written some of his most successful songs, which had earned her Oscar and Emmy nominations. She wore the pants all right—if wearing pants meant having talent. That was her crime.
    I got up and walked over to where Sylvia was sitting. I had no idea what I was going to say to her. I was even surprised to be walking toward her.
    When I got to her table, she looked at me and stood up. I put my arms around her and whispered in her ear.
    “I grew up thinking you were the most awful woman,” I said. “But I just realized tonight what a gifted, unusual woman you have always been. And you took a lot of grief for it. So I just wanted to apologize.”
    Sylvia hugged me back and smiled. She knew. She’d lived through it and had taken it all. But no one had stopped her from her work. And in the end, it was better than standing in the wings.
    In 2005, the American Film Institute nominated the 400 most memorable lines from motion pictures for its “100 Years, 100 Movie Quotes” list. Sylvia’s line from her husband’s film The Court Jester was included among the nominees.
    “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.”
    It was the only quote from a Danny Kaye movie to make the nomination list.
     
    TAKE MY WIFE . . .
AND HUSBAND, PLEASE!
    If a man speaks in a forest and no woman
    can hear him, is he still wrong?
    •
    My wife and I went back to the hotel where we
    spent our wedding night—only this time,
    I stayed in the bathroom and cried.
    •
    What are three words a woman never wants to hear
    when she’s making love? “Honey, I’m home!”
    •
    I just got back from a pleasure trip.
    I took my mother-in-law to the airport.
    •
    I