Regarded with awe by several generations of comedians-in part because, from Johnny Carson to Robin Williams, so many of them have borrowed freely from his body of work-on this Tuesday morning Jonathan Winters finds
himself locked into what has become his standard role, a guest on a television talk show.
The host, Oprah Winfrey, devotes some time to Winters` new book,
”Winters` Tales,” which more than lives up to its enigmatic subtitle,
”Stories and Observations for the Unusual.” But what she really wants from the massive, heavy-lidded, 62-year-old Winters, who sits there in his chair like a dormant volcano, are some improvised comedic fireworks, which are to be set off by suggestions from the studio audience.
For a while the bit almost fizzles out, perhaps because the hour is early and the comedian seems impervious to Winfrey`s chromium-plated charms. But then a woman walks up to Winters and hands him a Christmas mouse-one of those insufferably cute little porcelain animals, with a tiny bow tied around its neck, that dangles from the lower branches of the tree and then is found on the floor the next day, crushed to powder by Billy or Sue as they made their way toward the presents.
Lost in the expanse of his ample palm, the mouse seems to stare up at Winters with innocent, perky glee, while he stares back down at it-wondering what he is going to do, or rather who or what he is going to be.
Then, rising at the corners, the comedian`s mouth begins to shape itself into a broad, toothy slit, from which a low, guttural purr emerges. Winters is a cat, a large and hungry cat. And here, wonder of wonders, is lunch with a bow around its neck.
The purr grows in volume, and so does the size of the fierce, satanic grin that goes along with it-until, with an anticipatory lick of the chops, Winters suddenly mimes the mouse`s transfer from palm to jaws to gut.
Laughter and applause. But that response seems to have a nervous edge to it-as though the audience weren`t quite sure whether all the naked aggression of that spontaneous little skit had been used up, let alone in what direction Winters had aimed it.
”Yes, the violence,” Winters says, recalling that moment in his hotel later on in the day. ”Sometimes it really works-and even more so now, when the public is geared in that direction.
”I was going to go `M-I-C-K-E-Y` with the mouse, but anybody can do that, so I looked at it again and caught a cat`s reaction. And, boy, you could see those people out there thinking, `Uh oh . . . what`s he going to do?`
”It`s interesting how from time to time I can throw in my violence without getting a lot of criticism for it. For instance, the other night on the Carson show, I said something about my mother and how she didn`t run into my arms, and what it is with Caucasian people, that they have a strange way of greeting one another, compared to all the minorities that hug and say”
(Winters adopts a soulful, black-male voice) ” `I looove you, man,` and Caucasians kind of go” (his palms are up, his arms extend in stiff rejection and his tone of voice becomes feminine and prissy) `Oh, I don`t know.`
”So I said that one time I thought that if my mother doesn`t behave, I`ll throw a grenade at her, just to get her attention; and finally,” Winters continues, switching to the voice of a fiendish little child, ” `I put her in a hollow tree and squirrels annoyed her and chewed her hair.`
”You offer up these pictures to people, and it gets a little scary sometimes. It can be tough for them to handle all that stuff.”
From time to time, it has been tough for Winters to handle ”all that stuff” too.
Having risen to stardom after he made his national television debut in 1955, as a summer replacement for George Gobel, Winters was working at San Francisco`s Hungry i nightclub in May, 1959, when he climbed into the rigging of a sailing ship moored at the Embarcadero and threatened to jump-an incident that resulted in his spending eight months in a California sanitarium.
That particular bout of mental distress was quickly incorporated in Winters` act. (”I`m still a kid,” he said on one of his subsequent comedy albums, ”and I proved that not too many months ago . . . left the mother ship and they caught me . . . but I had fun, playing checkers all day and making rope-soled shoes.”)
But his deviations from the norm were felt to be far from incidental-not only because the dazzling speed with which Winters switched from one voice and character to another seemed at times to be genuinely manic, but also because his humor was unmistakably fueled by a lot of real-life pain.
Writing of a ”rotund, insanely funny” and very Winters-like comic whom he called ”Rod Munday,” author Alan Harrington said that ”in the area of the nervous system where most people experience a feeling of identity, he maintains a guesthouse filled with a thousand characters. No central individual feels permanently at home in Munday`s head, because he`s always being somebody else.”
The important thing, though, in addition to the fact that Winters has managed to retain his mental stability through the years, is that he was, and still is, insanely funny-”maybe the most wildly imaginative comedian who ever lived,” in the words of critic Pauline Kael.
A difficult statement to credit, perhaps-especially if all one knows of Winters` work are the talk-show appearances where he usually appears to be under wraps and the commercials for plastic garbage bags and various foodstuffs that have been his major source of income in recent years.
But if, as Kael put it, Winters` problem is that ”he has never found his forms,” a face-to-face encounter with the man suggests that he found his
”forms” many years ago, even though they are not necessarily amenable to mass-market packaging.
Playing in his hotel suite to an audience of three-an interviewer, a photographer and a friend he hasn`t seen in 25 years-Winters can, as he likes to put it, ”wing it” in every sense of the term.
Free to don the guise of any character or voice that comes to mind, and using those ”masks” to say whatever occurs to him, in this setting Winters also is free to determine the shape and length of his routines-which twine around the alleged interview the way ivy climbs the walls of Wrigley Field.
That is, Winters` forms are, of necessity, without limit, or with limits to be determined only by himself-an endless series of improvised variations on what the rest of the world thinks it`s doing, which get much of their life from the sense that Winters is interrupting or disrupting some authoritative force that does not want to be disturbed.
Think, for instance, of that funny fellow that almost everyone knew in school, the guy whose free-form takeoffs on teachers and the like were at once openly rebellious and convulsively amusing.
Now if ”Joe” (let`s call him that) was very good, he probably made you laugh harder than any professional comic who was around at the time-and perhaps someone finally told Joe that he had what it takes to become a professional funnyman.
But even though the young Jonathan Winters must have been light-years beyond any imaginable class clown, his humor, like Joe`s, was fueled by essentially private passions. And it could only diminish in power, if not shrivel altogether, when it was delivered to an audience that was not intimately aware of the forces against which Winters was pushing.
So even though it`s possible for some of Winters` undiminished comedic brilliance to shine through when he`s sitting beside a sympathetic admirer like Johnny Carson, he is still being asked to perform on cue-when what Winters needs to do instead is act and react as the mood strikes him, violating the talk show`s normal boundaries of decorum and good taste with his own brand of spontaneous uproar.
And make no mistake about it, revenge is the name of Winters` game, a drive to get even that is tempered by the deep pool of pathos that underlies it.
Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1925, the only son of Jonathan and Alice Winters, who divorced when he was 7, Winters says that ”I don`t single myself out as a guy with heavy tears, but I think anybody that`s a victim of a divorce is just that. You never get the direction you`re looking for; it`s always one parent against the other.
”Like he goes,” Winters speaks in a pompous, savage bellow, ” `Your mother is a clown!`
”And then she says,” the voice becomes seductively feline, ” `Oh, yes-”The Magic Man.” What is he all about?`
”My dad was a guy who was unfortunately a combination of Mr. West Point and the old admiral who lives at the base of the Farragut statue at Annapolis and every night runs `The Great Santini`-and yet he ended up a loser, which I never bargained for.
”My mother was in show business, sort of a watered-down Arlene Francis who had a talk show on (radio station) WIZE in Springfield, Ohio, a big fish in a little pond, and I went to live with her and my grandmother after the divorce. She had a great sense of humor and gave me a set of rules.
”But my dad . . . well, when I got some success, he was living anything but through me. Instead, he was living around me and near me, as though he were jealous of what I`d begun to become.” (After attending the Dayton Art Institute, Winters worked at local radio and TV stations and then moved to New York in 1953, where he soon became a favorite at such clubs as the Blue Angel and La Ruban Blue.)
”Once in my life I asked him for money, that`s all. I was driving out to Utah with another guy to cut wood, and I went to sleep at the wheel this side of Salt Lake City and wrecked the car.
