delanceyplace.com 08/04/06 - nichols and may

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In today's excerpt - Mike Nichols and Elaine May, an improvisational comedy team formed in Chicago, break through on national television as "Nichols and May" in 1959. The team stayed together only a few short years, but had a profound and enduring effect on comedy and popular culture. Both went on to successful careers in entertainment, especially Nichols, who has had a significant career in directing and producing—including most of Neil Simon's plays and a number of movies, including The Birdcage, The Graduate and Catch-22:

"They auditioned for Jack Paar's Tonight show, but their improvisations bombed before a studio audience. ...

"[Manager Jack] Rollins neatly engineered the ploy that brought Nichols & May to national TV prominence when he got them on the prestigious Omnibus, as part of a special theme show called, 'The Suburban Review'. As he recalls now: 'I knew it was very difficult to present them on television at the time, because TV is a medium of twenty-second bites. Nobody is on longer than five minutes. They needed to be on for fifteen minutes. Where are you gonna get that in TV? But it came along, because there was a show called Omnibus, a very classy cultural show on Sunday afternoon with high ratings, with Alistair Cooke as the host  ... after [that] 'the world broke open for them' ... there were lines around the block. Milton Berle came three times and couldn't get in. ...

"... the program's producer, Robert Saudek, had seen them on a Steve Allen show performing a sketch about a ditsy, name-dropping starlet ('the very wonderful, the very talented Barbara Musk') talking to a fatuous deejay, Jack Ego ... about her close personal relationship with Albert Schweitzer: 'Jack I think you know that I think Al is just a great guy. Al is a lot of laughs. I personally have never dated him,' adding 'Bertie [Bertrand Russell] also is a heck of a good kid. I think a pushy philosopher is always a drag. ...'

"The team's literary parodies, which set them apart from their comic peers, ranged from a ten-second version of Dostoyevsky (following ten seconds of uproarious laughter from May Nichols shouts: 'Unhappy woman!'—blackout) to Tennessee Williams (renamed Alabama Glass, whose heroine has taken to 'drink, prostitution, and puttin' on airs' and whose husband, Raoul, has killed himself 'on bein' unjustly accused of not bein' a homosexual') to Oedipus Rex (Look sweetheart, you're my mother.) ..."