In the seventies, after The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H and All in the Family redefined what a sitcom could be, there were probably thousands of attempts to reinvent the variety show. Most never got farther than pitches to networks but every year, there were at least a dozen such pilots, some disguised as one-shot specials, and a few became series. The consensus seemed to be that the day was past when you could just take someone like a Danny Kaye or a Carol Burnett and build a show around them and their versatility. That kind of multi-faceted entertainer was becoming extinct. The new ideas were mostly matters of concept — some format that allowed for songs and sketches, often incorporating elements of a sitcom and/or Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. One that tried to the latter combo was the short-lived 1971 series, The Funny Side.
It was produced by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, and I'm not sure who else worked behind the cameras. In front of them, they had a stock company of ten regulars, five men and five women representing five different kinds of couples. The pairs were Warren Berlinger and Pat Finley as the "blue collar" couple, Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon as a more or less "wealthy" couple, John Amos and Teresa Graves as a "minority" couple, Michael Lembeck and Cindy Williams as a "young" couple and Burt Mustin and Queenie Smith as an "old" couple. The host of it all was Gene Kelly and I thought it was a pretty clever show that deserved to run longer than the three months it lasted. It would have if the show had been as funny and charming as Mr. Mustin was, off-camera.
I have a personal story here. In '71, I was nineteen years old and writing all sorts of things — mostly comic books published in languages other than English — for the Walt Disney Company. Often when I wasn't attending my classes at U.C.L.A., and sometimes when I should have been, I'd take a bus out to Burbank and spend the morning on the Disney lot, which was a much more magical place then than it is today. Back then, everyone who worked there felt like they were a part of Walt's heritage and that they had a job for life…maybe not a great-paying one but there was a sense that being part of D*I*S*N*E*Y (and having all that job security) made up for low wages. These days, it seems like everyone who works there thinks of themselves as an extended Temp toiling for whoever runs the company this week, watching their paychecks get slashed to compensate for CEO bonuses.
In 1971, I worked mainly for a fellow in his late thirties named George Sherman, who was involved in all sorts of publishing projects. We got along great and he was always recommending me for other jobs on the lot and to outside companies doing Disney projects, especially anything involving Goofy. I was his big Goofy writer. I owe a lot of my comic book writing career to that man.
George was out sick for weeks at a time (he died not long after) but when he was there, I'd sometimes spend mornings in his office, go to lunch with him and then in the afternoon, I'd walk the two blocks to NBC Studios and sneak or talk my way in to watch the taping of a Bob Hope special or Laugh-In. Some days, I could see The Dean Martin Show rehearse without Dean Martin or even watch the legendary Mr. Carson do what he did so well.
One day, George and I were lunching in the Disney commissary when a man came by and said hello. It was Gene Kelly. I have no idea how George knew him but he knew him. The great star of so many movie musicals was on the lot to talk to someone at Disney about some project. He sat and talked for a bit and told us about a new TV show he was taping over at NBC, one that wasn't yet on the air. It was The Funny Side. George told him that I was known to prowl the NBC corridors and Mr. Kelly invited me to visit the set whenever I wanted…say, later that day. I accepted and that afternoon, I didn't have to talk my way past the security guards. I was, ahem, the personal guest of Mr. Gene Kelly. Matter of fact, for the next few weeks when I went there, the guards just waved me through because they figured I was associated with him.
I'm not sure if The Funny Side ever taped with a live audience but they didn't have one that day. For most of the afternoon, I was the live audience. They spent about an hour with Kelly, who was dressed in a tux and looking just like you'd want Gene Kelly to look, doing a very simple dance routine on a conference table with the cast seated all around it. It should have taken ten minutes but there were technical snafus and delays, and you could see Kelly was getting annoyed but he kept his temper in check.
When he was done, he wasn't needed for a while so he came out to the bleachers and sat with me and we talked for…well, it must have been an hour. It was another of the many "I'd give anything for a tape recorder" moments of my life. We talked mostly about current Hollywood and how Gene (he insisted I call him that) didn't like the way it was going. He was more interested in discussing his recent work as a director — on Hello, Dolly and A Guide for the Married Man — than in talking about the MGM days, but he did tell me a long, X-rated anecdote, the point of which was that Louis B. Mayer preached core American morality to all whenever he wasn't making starlets earn their contract renewals on or under his desk. Of the film of Hello, Dolly, Gene said his great directoral achievement was to make it appear that Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau did not want to strangle each other.
Later, wearing the same tux, Gene went down the hall and taped some spots for The Dean Martin Show, some of them even with Dean. I was invited to tag along and there Kelly introduced me to Lou Jacobi, Kay Medford, Nipsey Russell and to Harry Crane, who was the head writer and as famous in the business for creating great jokes as Gene was for dancing in inclement weather. It was quite a magical day, though Gene showed no interest in continuing our casual friendship and I never spoke to him again after that. I was impressed with how much energy he had (he was 59 then) and how he truly worked hard at everything he did. I guess that was one of the reasons he was such a great performer. I felt bad for him when I heard The Funny Side was cancelled because he seemed to think it was his last chance to prove he had a place in the current entertainment industry, as opposed to the "old-timer" circuit.
Here's a little less than five minutes of The Funny Side, and it should give you a pretty good idea of what the show was like. My thanks to someone named "Wookie" who wrote to say he put this clip up on YouTube, just because I once mentioned the program here. So does anyone have any clips of Stubby Kaye hosting Shenanigans? How about Our Place starring Burns and Schreiber? Or that season of Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers that was taped in London with Marty Feldman?
