There were three TV comediennes of indisputable genius in the 20th century: Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett and Mary Tyler Moore.
Thankfully, Burnett, at 83, is still with us. Ball died in 1989. Sadly, Tyler Moore is now gone, too.
One of the weekly pleasures of the early to mid-1960s was gathering with friends and neighbors to watch The Dick Van Dyke Show, starring Van Dyke and Tyler Moore as Rob and Laura Petrie. Their dual chemistry was comic magic. Week after week, we would stop what we were doing to tune in.
Starting in 1970, another must-watch show appeared – The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77). What a cast of quirky, eccentric characters: Gruff chauvinistic boss Lou Grant, self-important pompous news anchor Ted Knight, the scheming landlady Phyllis Lindstrom, the hustling hussy TV host Sue Ann Nivens – to name just some. Hard-working, single, underpaid news-show producer Mary Richards (Tyler Moore) struggled to keep her composure. She was stuck in the middle of that zoo of eccentrics – putting up with them, humoring them, soothing their touchy vanities – all the while sharing some of their same human foibles herself.
It was sublime comedy, week after week, for seven years.
The day after Tyler Moore’s death, I watched a video of Chuckles the Clown’s funeral on YouTube. Tears of laughter were streaming down my face. I first saw that episode (“Chuckles Bites the Dust”) some time in the mid-1970s.
It’s as classic as Lucille Ball’s chocolate assembly-line scene and as side-splittingly funny as Carol Burnett’s spoof of Gone With The Wind when, as Scarlett O’Hara, she donned an impromptu window-drapes dress complete with curtain rod and wobbly descended that antebellum staircase.
If you haven’t seen it, the “Chuckles” episode involves the death of a TV clown, killed by an elephant. Mary scolds her co-workers for making wisecracks about the clown’s demise. Later, the news crew is at the funeral, waiting for it to begin. News writer Murray Slaughter cracks another one-liner about how clowns might jump out of a little hearse during the funeral. Mary leans forward to scold Murray – that he should show respect, that death is not funny.
Then the minister steps to the podium. In his somber oratorical voice, he begins an overblown eulogy, using far-flung flights of pseudo-poetic fancy to describe the “deeper meanings” and life lessons in Chuckles’ clowning pratfalls.
He describes one of Chuckles’ characters, Fee-Fie-Fo, who got knocked down, struck by a giant cucumber wielded by his arch-enemy, Senor Kaboom. But Fee-Fie-Fo, the minister intones, “would always pick himself up, dust himself off and then say (pause) I hurt my footsie.”
At which point, strangled laughter sputters up from Mary in the audience.
The minister proceeds to launch into a kind of parable about how “life is like that,” and that we all from time to time fall down like Fee-Fie-Fo.
Mary squirms, coughs, gags and sputters to keep from laughing. And now it’s her colleagues’ turns to scold her like she scolded them. They turn in their seats, casting disapproving looks her way. Then they turn back to the minister, soaking up every word of his pompously overblown eulogy.
The minister points to Mary and asks her to stand.
“You feel like laughing, don’t you,” he says, as she gulps with embarrassment.
Then he tells her in his oh-so serious voice to go ahead and laugh because Chuckles didn’t want people to cry; he lived his life to make people laugh.
At which point, Mary, suddenly overcome by sadness for saintly dead Chuckles (not to mention more than a little humiliation), bursts into spasms of tears. And we who watch that scene are also crying – rollicking from helpless laughter.
The reasons that scene is so funny are several: We have all endured the torture of trying to squelch laughter in a quiet church. We, who loved that show, know well the quirks of the characters and so we can just see the gears of each of their minds turning while the minister eulogizes and Mary the sudden hypocrite almost strangles from laughter. What brings the genius comedic strands of that scene all together are the facial expressions, the body language and the timing of a supreme comedienne.
Like many comics, Tyler Moore had so much tragedy in her life: the daughter of two alcoholics, an alcoholic herself, the mother of a son killed by his own gun that misfired, the victim of Stage I diabetes from age 30 onward, divorce, some TV shows that bombed, surgery for a benign brain tumor.
Carol Burnett once said “comedy is tragedy – plus time.” That may have been a factor in Tyler Moore’s comic genius: the sand particle producing the pearl in the oyster.
I can’t help thinking Tyler Moore, like Chuckles the Clown, wanted us all to keep laughing – sometimes to keep from crying.
