What makes Shandling a comedy great?
ONE of my favourite lines in all of comedy — indeed in all of anything — is when Arthur, the old-style producer in The Larry Sanders Show played by Rip Torn, describes the beauty of Glenlivet single malt whisky: “When you die, you’ll go to heaven. You’ll say ‘hello’ to God, and when God says ‘hello’ to you, this is what you’ll smell on his breath.”
Some of the greatest lines in that great show were given to Arthur (Artie), by the show’s creator and star, Garry Shandling. Which might be a sign of the generosity of creative spirit which Judd Apatow describes in this article, or it might be something else altogether.
You never know, really, with the gifted ones of comedy. Indeed that may be the whole point, that they know something that you don’t know, that they can feel the true power of what the poet Kavanagh meant when he said that tragedy is underdeveloped comedy. That it is not just serious, it is beyond serious.
I have some passing familiarity with this because, by a stroke of tremendous good fortune, one of my oldest friends also happens to be one of the great comedy writers — Arthur Mathews (another Artie), the co-creator of Father Ted and of many other things. To me, and to anyone else who knows him, he has always had that strange gift.
When I read here about Garry Shandling being regarded by other comedians as a kind of a leader, I think of this effortless instinct which Arthur Mathews possesses, this sensibility which enables him to know what is funny in any situation — not to think it, to know it.
The rest of us are just thinking, we know very little for sure, we don’t even realise how much we are constrained by the rules which we have absorbed all our lives, until we run into an Arthur Mathews, or indeed a Garry Shandling, and they are somehow free of all that. So when I see that this TV documentary is called The Zen
Diaries of Garry Shandling, I think I understand where they’re coming from, that they are trying to connect with this higher state of being which gave us The Larry Sanders Show, which was so funny because it was so true, so right.
This is what the kings of comedy are always trying to do, they are always trying to get us to see that the most hilarious things of all are not contrived or constructed after the fact, they come from an observation of what happens, and just that — not what should happen, or what shouldn’t happen, though there has to be a small bit of that stuff. But mainly when you look at The Larry Sanders Show, you are looking at people being themselves, inasmuch as the star and his sidekicks and the writers and the other staff of a TV talk-show can ever be themselves.
From this obsession with the limitations of the real, comes the liberation, comes the laughs. And we should be fascinated by people like Shandling, we should be curious about their wisdom. I don’t know if it will feature in this documentary, but I would love to know what Shandling really thought of that line he gave to Artie about going to heaven and meeting God and smelling Glenlivet on his breath.
For all I know, Shandling threw that one in for some esoteric purpose of his own, to comment on the old-fashioned style of an old-fashioned guy like Artie, and his enslavement to the lure of a straightforward punchline. Shandling may not even have considered it all that funny, just a decently constructed line of the type that doesn’t stretch any boundaries, from an old school of show business in which they were always trying too hard.
In fact, he probably hated it.