Argument
You don’t have to read this . . . but it explains how this book came about.
Some time ago a friend of mine named Rob wrote a book of sorts (Tales of the Troupe) recounting his adventures, 1984-1990, with a cabaret-comedy show we both wrote for and performed in. Rob is an imaginative fellow yet narrative was strangely flat and dull. He seemed to have denatured all the characters so that they were both unrecognizable and uninteresting. I think this had less to do with his lack of talent than with the fact that he was attending a memoir-writing support group in Hamilton, Massachusetts, and was easily chaffed out of including interesting material. Of course, just writing a memoir for the first time would make many people gun-shy!
A mutual acquaintance tells me that I (or, my character) was removed from the story entirely because I was too objectively interesting. The other characters were just made boring; I was eliminated entirely!
When I learned this I found it very flattering indeed, even if in a left-handed-compliment sort of way. I gather my persona scared the horses, as it were, or the needy neurotics in the support group. One of those neurotics in the Hamilton Writers’ Group later proved to be mad as a hatter, and shot six people in her biology department in Huntsville, Alabama (2010). She’d previously killed her own brother with a shotgun (she claimed it was an accident), and while she was with the writing group in 2003 she was suspected of trying to kill her lab supervisor with a pipe bomb. Meantime my friend had himself suffered from chronic depression and binge drinking. So there was level of nuttiness and instability in the group, and this no doubt was a damper on the creative imagination.
He and I had both encountered such a damper when we worked together on the Chuckleheads, our comedy troupe. One of us would come up with a wild and wacky sketch idea, and after the script was read, one or two at the meeting would start grimacing and making ‘urrm’ noises. It might be that there were elements in the script that didn’t seem ‘politically correct’—ironic, isn’t it, for a comedy script?—or the subject matter was too far removed from the subject matter these people were familiar with from TV. I’ll give some actual examples in this book, but for now, let’s just say these weird demurrals gutted much of our best material.
Introduction
In talking about the Chuckleheads, I am going to keep referring to some earlier projects most of us were involved in. There was the American Bystander, a vague sort of humor magazine with tenuous links to the National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live; production of the pilot issue, and anticipation for the actual launch, brought most of us together in 1981-83. Then there was Klub Kar and Club Ted, two revue-like pocket musicals that Tim Hill and Jay Martel wrote and performed in a West 29th Street nightclub, 1983-84. The Chuckleheads followed directly from Club Ted, and differed mainly by having a bigger cast and writing team, and by consisting of richly textured, anarchic sketch comedy, both live and video.
Like Club Ted, the Chuckleheads performed mainly at The Dive (the aforementioned nightclub) and at the Westbeth Theatre complex near the Greenwich Village waterfront. Later on, after the Chuckleheads renamed the show simply “Chucklehead” (a decision most of us roundly disagreed with), we performed at the West Bank Cafe (near Times Square) Cafe La Mama Etc. (East Village) and Upstairs at Greene Street (in SoHo). A few of the performers also did sketches in MTV segments or turned up in television commercials, but I know little about that.
In the last years of “Chucklehead” my involvement diminished to the point where I mainly built props while writing brilliant, imaginative scripts that were never used because the show had become so dumbed-down.
The Chuckleheads’ afterlives were mildly interesting and mildly successful. Bruce Handy moved on from Spy magazine to Time and then Vanity Fair. A couple of others worked for kiddie TV on cable, mainly Nickelodeon. Tim Hill wrote songs for kiddie TV and directed Muppet movies. Some of us became published cartoonists, novelists, screenwriters, freelance journalists, and of course memoirists. I don’t think we followed or cared for each others’ work very much, so there’s really no story there. And so the story of “Chucklehead” and the Chuckleheads ends abruptly in 1990, like a limp balloon that runs out of air and comes to rest on a sooty theater floor. In this book I focus on the lively years, basically 1984 through 1987.
I. The Popcorn Palace