The baby grand piano, draped in blue bunting, sat in the center of a star-spangled oval in the middle of the Katharine Cornell theater at State University of New York at Buffalo. The man at the keyboard, his features leaping in quicksilver fashion between the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, opened up with a verbal machine gun:
”They took a growth off President Reagan`s nose, and it was big news,”
he said, tickling the piano for accompanying riffs of melody. ”The media was so busy watching his nose they missed three divisions landing in Nicaragua. From now on, every time Reagan gets his teeth cleaned, his dental hygienist will be Sam Donaldson in drag.
”A lady from Indiana died the other day. She was a life-long Democrat. She wished to be buried in Chicago so she could continue to be active in party politics. . . . Jerry Falwell just got back from South Africa where he was quoted as saying, `Boy, it`s good to be able to say colored again.` ”
”Tah-dah, tah dah, dah, dah!” said the piano. Mark Russell, primo political satirist of the Washington scene, had struck again, parodying the powerful, puncturing the pompous and generally having a wonderful time razzing the town in which he lives and where he grew up. After rehearsing the blitz of one-liners and scathing songs he would deliver that evening in a live telecast to be carried by 250 Public Broadcasting Service stations nationwide, he grew concerned.
”Now all I have to do is get that Falwell joke past Gus here,” he said clapping WNED floor manager Gus Ransom, a black man, on the back. Ransom was wiping tears of merriment from his eyes. ”No, no, man,” he said. ”That`s cool.”
”Cool” adequately describes Russell, who interrupts a schedule of about 100 road bookings six times a year to do his ”Mark Russell Comedy Specials” for public broadcasting. His wit, inspired from childhood by Mort Sahl and Fred Allen and lightly seasoned with a pinch of Tom Lehrer and a dash of Steve Allen, never is cruel. It ruffles feathers without breaking the skin; lampoons without lacerating. It is a labor of love which Russell said never will want for material so long as Congress is in session.
”I have 535 writers, 435 in the House and 100 in the Senate,” he said.
”They`re the writers and the media is the message bearer. Individually, they`re great guys. They have high ideals and they have great senses of humor, otherwise, they wouldn`t have been able to win any elections. You don`t make the cut–you don`t get out of the city council or the statehouse–if you`re a little bit peevish by nature. These guys made it to the federal level by being jovial.”
When the House of Representatives, in a paroxysm of high moral dudgeon, cut funds used by the Library of Congress to translate Playboy magazine into Braille, Russell commented that they were ”striking a great blow against pornography by denying the magazine to the only people who read the articles.” Recollection of the line brought a hearty chuckle and
acknowledgement that laughter often can do more in Washington than a lobby group.
”That was just a chance for them to demonstrate to the folks at home that they were fine, upstanding, God-fearing, moral people who are not going to succumb to evil,” he said. ”So they voted to take Playboy away from the blind. It was a silly thing, a small appropriation, and they put it back 24 hours later. That was a case where they weighed the humor factor.
”People ask me, `Will this humor make a difference?` Of course it will. Collectively, the cartoonists and the columnists like (Art) Buchwald make a difference. They`ll (congressmen) weigh the humor factor. They`ll say in private conversation, `The cartoonists are going to kill us on this. Do you think we ought to go ahead with it?` That`s part of the fishbowl syndrome. They`re so visible that they get ridiculous once in a while.”
What, however, is this thing called humor–that magical catalyst that can reduce a sobersided monolith to rubbly laughter with a single punch line? The question put Russell, who uses humor as casually as he uses the air he breathes, into a momentary study.
”It`s surprise,” he finally said. ”It`s a sharp, 90-degree turn, and it`s so delightful when you recognize it. Life is just one predictable thing after another, one monotonous road if you allow it to be, but with humor, all of a sudden you`re on the dodge-`em cars. It starts from birth. You can make a one-hour-old baby laugh. The baby`s an hour old and already he`s on kind of a treadmill, but you can make that baby laugh by presenting it with something that is not straight ahead but over here somewhere.”
Russell, who grew up in Buffalo with ”a funny father, a funny mother, funny uncles, funny aunts and funny cousins” and attended Canisius High School, a Jesuit-run institution where his early proclivity for making fun of serious matters frequently had him on the carpet, laughed at the concept of pain as the wellspring of comedy.
”That`s the Lower East Side myth,” he said. ”They say all comedians grew up poor on the Lower East Side. I came from the middle class. They only scraped during the Depression when we were only allowed to have a little glass of orange juice. But pain can be frustration and humor is your way of standing up, really unchallenged. The person who isn`t in show biz, all he can do is get into an argument with somebody who can interrupt him. The comedian can rise above that because he`s got a microphone. You don`t have a microphone in a bar or in your kitchen. A comedian does it because he needs that laughter and that applause.”
Russell, suddenly embarrassed, dropped his baritone voice half an octave to the level of mock pomposity.
”It`s not something I like to dwell on,” he said. ”I am a very private person. I`m just doing this to get back at the priests and nuns.”
Russell and his wife, Ali, who accompanies him wherever he goes, are regulars on the Washington party circuit, and even those who recently have been targets of a his barbs do not retaliate. He makes about $10,000 per speaking engagement and charges half of that, $5,000, for each PBS special.
It was not always so. Until WNED general manager J. Michael Collins discovered him in the piano bar at Washington`s Shoreham hotel in 1974 and brought him to the national audience of public television, Russell was a
”saloon comedian” who learned to fence for the sake of survival.
”When I was first starting out as an unknown piano player working in a bar on Capitol Hill and I was just getting my feet wet and tippy-toeing around some of these issues with no background in politics at all, they would shout me down,” he said of congressmen and their aides who patronized his watering hole. ”Remember now, they go through all day shouting each other down. `Would the gentleman yield?` `I challenge the gentleman on that.` After a day of doing that, they come in this bar and have a couple of drinks and I`m up there with an opinion they disagree with and they start up again, but they did not call me a `gentleman.` Now nobody even writes me a letter.”
Russell said his videotaped debut on national television was a disaster that ultimately mandated the live format of the show he does.
”We did the pilot the day Ford pardoned Nixon,” he said. ”It was a Sunday and I didn`t know about it and a lot of the audience didn`t know it either. We did this pilot and offered it to the stations, and it wound up on the air on maybe 15 or 20 of them, and it made no sense at all. There I was, addressing Nixon and Watergate without knowing that Ford had pardoned him. That`s what made us decide that the show`s got to be live. Sure, it`s dangerous. If a joke bombs, it just lies there and we can`t repair it later with canned laughter, but the great part about it is that I can be very topical.
”I`ve had cases where I directly followed a White House press conference. I have a television set in the dressing room so I can come right out and comment. I still don`t know at 9 in the morning what my opening line is going to be. It depends on what happens during the day.”
Ten years of parody in the big time, enhanced by a two-year stint as a regular on NBC`s now-defunct ”Real People” which convinced him that prime time was not his vehicle, has made Russell an artist on the high-wire of live broadcast, and he said times have changed radically since television`s prissy adolescence.
”It`s more daring and more shocking now,” he said. ”I`ve seen performers on late-night television who get into quasi-libel areas, and it doesn`t seem to bother them. There`s greater freedom now than ever. Whether or not that`s made the performers more incisive I don`t know, but you can say just about anything you want to. Just remember, Jack Parr was taken off the air for saying `water closet.` ”
Russell said the freedom to ”say anthing” about public officials
–especially presidents–also is greater now than it was in the beginning, and that Ronald Reagan is the toughest Oval Office-holder he has ever tackled. ”As usual, Reagan rises above all of this,” he said. ”People aren`t going to take too much out of me these days. They don`t get offended, and this is an interesting phenomenon, because they love him so much. He has such a presence that I`m no threat at all. Most of my audiences around the country are conservative audiences–business groups, chambers of commerce–and the laugh`s on me because 49 states elected him. I can babble all I want and it wouldn`t make any difference. It gets kind of pathetic if I overdo it.
”The easiest thing in the world today is not to joke about a president, but the people around the president. During the Carter administration, all you had to do was say, `Billy Carter` and the audience would laugh. You didn`t even have to do a joke. That has switched now from the White House to the media and the most visible member of the media–probably because of his Satanic eyebrows–is poor old Sam Donaldson (ABC White House correspondent). He`s fair game and he knows it. He probably wouldn`t admit it, but he probably enjoys it, secretly.
”Nixon was fairly easy. He`d get through an evening with me all right. He did pretty well, but there`s no comparing Lyndon Johnson. You just didn`t joke about Lyndon. He`d get up and walk out of the room, or he`d start talking to somebody sitting next to him. Then there was J. Edgar Hoover. I`ve had the director of the FBI in the audience, and to have some laughs at his expense was just unthinkable. It was medieval with the fawning and the scraping. It was Victorian compared with the way it is now.”
Russell has called Washington ”Guam without sand” because with no representation in Congress, the district has the same legal status as Guam or the Virgin Islands.
”We don`t have a congressman,” he said. ”We have a nonvoting delegate. He cannot vote on matters that come before the house, but he goes to work every day just the same. Every day he walks into the capitol building and says, `Can I watch?` We pay him anyway. We`re paying $70,000 a year to send a eunuch to an orgy.”
With that line, Russell departed for his hotel room to write his syndicated column and rehearse again with a tape recorder while his wife monitored television news for sudden changes. No president, ever again, was going to pardon another president and catch Mark Russell napping.
