Everyone on the 'net who ever had their photo taken with Jonathan Winters is posting theirs so here's one of mine. It was snapped at a recording session for Garfield and Friends in 1990 where we spent about four hours with the man, only two of which were used to record voice tracks for the show. The other two were spent listening to Jonathan. Which meant they were spent laughing at Jonathan.
He was booked to be there at 1 PM. At Noon, the deli delivered food and we broke for lunch, having been at it since 9 AM. Sandwiches were just being unwrapped as Jonathan Winters walked in and just began telling stories…like we'd hired him to come in and perform for us as we ate. No "hello." No introductions. He didn't even ask if we were the Garfield show. He just found an audience and began talking and weaving in and out of characters. When he got bored with one, he'd seamlessly segue to another…and every so often, I'd throw a question — not at him but at whoever he was at that moment. He would immediately start to answer and you could see that he had no idea where he was going. He just knew he'd eventually find a destination…and he always did.
For about a fourth of our non-recording time, he was even Jonathan Winters, telling stories like one that went roughly like this. He was in a store and a little old lady ("You know the kind," he said, though all we knew at that point was that she was a little old lady in a store) came up to him and said, "I've read about you, Mr. Winters. You're crazy!" He lapsed into semi-mock outrage ("How dare you approach me in a public place and say such a thing?") then cross-examined the woman as to whether she was married (she was) and how much money her husband made.
"That's a very personal question," he quoted her as saying, whereupon he fired back that calling someone crazy was a very personal thing to say and she owed it to him to answer. She cited some figure around $100,000 a year and Winters replied, he said, "A hundred thousand a year? I've made that much in one day making commercials for trash bags and you have the nerve to say I'm crazy? You just wish your husband was as crazy as I am, lady!"
He was wonderful, just wonderful. I had to play Bad Guy twice that afternoon and stop the performance. Once, I had to announce it was time to go in and record a Garfield cartoon. After the recording, when the funnier show resumed in the waiting room, I had to call it quits after an hour so we could record things without Jonathan. I softened the blow to him by pointing out that Muppet Babies was recording next door. Jonathan promptly walked into their studio and the folks over there had a great time not getting any work done.
I cannot claim to have known Jonathan Winters well and I'm sure there were many people who were around him more than I was who can't claim that, either. Much of the time when you were with him, you weren't with him. You were with a U-boat commander or the King of Thailand or a Civil War General.
But every so often, a hunk of Jonathan would peek out from behind the character and I'd observe something I've observed with a few other performers, most notably Sid Caesar. The following incident will explain it clearly…
For a period in the eighties, Jonathan could usually be found at lunchtime in one of the restaurants along a stretch of Riverside Drive out in Toluca Lake. I ran into him at Paty's and at Honeybaked Ham, and he was known to turn up in two or three others. You'd encounter him and the monologue would just flow — fascinating and always funny. If it wasn't funny, Jonathan would make a face like he didn't like it either and just launch into something or someone else. Then at some point, an onlooker who didn't know better would approach him and say, "Mr. Winters, you're the funniest man who ever lived. I've loved you in everything you've ever done —" and then they'd start naming movies or TV appearances or records…
And all that would be fine until they'd make the mistake of saying one or both of two things…
"You know, I think Robin Williams [or Johnny Carson or other name of someone then earning more money than Jonathan Winters] stole so much from you…"
"Why aren't you on TV more? You should have your own series."
You know those smiles we all make when someone has said something painful and we don't want to let on that it stings? You'd see one on the face of Jonathan (or Sid…or Soupy…or several others I've encountered) and they'd mutter something noncommittal about the first observation — neither agreeing nor disagreeing, which meant they were agreeing. And they'd say of the second point, "I really don't know."
That was the sad thing about a guy like Jonathan Winters: He really didn't know. No one really did.
If you were a baseball player — it was all you ever wanted to be, all you thought you could be — and no team wanted you. Well, if you were batting .150, you'd probably understand that…and you'd understand how to change that. You just had to get better at swinging the bat.
But let's say you were an aspiring comedian. Now, granted, it's a little more difficult to count laughs than home runs. I mean, you could argue that Richard Pryor wasn't funny but not that Barry Bonds didn't know how to hit the ball. Still, there are some comics whose "funny" seems beyond question…but they still can't get on a team, don't get to play as often as they think they should. That was the subtext I saw every time I was around Jonathan Winters. He was either out of work or doing marginal (for him) jobs like commercials or cartoon voices. One time, I heard him respond to someone who said both of the above things. Jonathan muttered, "Robin Williams? Oh, he's the guy getting ten million dollars to star in movies while I'm sitting home, praying they bring back Hollywood Squares!"
It wasn't like Jonathan could rationalize his lot in life by thinking, "I'm not working more because I'm not that funny." Everywhere he went, people howled at everything he said and told him he was the funniest human being on the face of this planet. It just didn't make sense. To him, to anyone.
Producers and networks couldn't figure out what to do with him…and it wasn't like they didn't try. For a long time there, there were new shows and pilots and new formats. The problem was that if you put him in something scripted…well, why? That's like hiring Luciano Pavarotti and insisting he not sing but instead just hum along. There were other people who could read lines as well as or better than Jonathan Winters.
So instead, let's let him do what he does best. Let's let him ad-lib as characters. Well, what's that show like?
Jonathan was not an improv actor. Jonathan was an improv monologist. Improv actors can create a scene together and he couldn't do that. He either had to be out there all alone, controlling every aspect of the narrative or he had to work with a straight man who fed him questions and challenges. Where is the place for that on television? It worked for short segments on talk shows and on The Dean Martin Show and other programs in the variety genre that has since become extinct. But how could you wedge this brilliant comic mind into a starring position?
They tried. He had two different programs called The Jonathan Winters Show, both of which forced him into the template of the classic variety show. Neither of them were wonderful in the way Jonathan was wonderful. Neither of them were that successful. Greg Garrison, who produced and directed Dean Martin's shows, tried a couple of ventures where they just put Jonathan in an attic set and let him ad-lib little scenes with an array of hats and props. That didn't work so well, either. They'd spend hours taping anything that came into Jonathan's mind and then Garrison would edit the weaker moments out, losing any sense of "live" to the performance. What's the point of improv if it looks and feels edited? (A lot of the success of Whose Line Is It Anyway? is because it doesn't, though they way overtape and chop out the chaff.)
In 1981, producer Paul Keyes, who'd been one of the main brains behind Laugh-In, crafted a pilot for NBC called Take One with Jonathan Winters. Keyes had a sharp comedy mind and you'd think that if anyone could invent the kind of show where Jonathan Winters could be Jonathan Winters for an hour of prime-time television each week, he could.
He did not make Jonathan the host. Jonathan wasn't comfortable (or particularly valuable) when not in a character. For some reason though, they brought in Rich Little as the host and I didn't understand that, either. Rich Little not doing impressions is like Jonathan Winters being forced to stick to a script. Then they loaded the show down with guest stars, including Jimmy Stewart, Ernest Borgnine, Phyllis Diller and Charlie Callas.
The way it worked was that they set up little scenes, each involving one of the guests. Jonathan, Rich Little explained, would enter each scene with absolutely no idea what it was about or even who was in it and then he'd wing it. I only remember two of them — the only one that worked at all and the closing one, which was a spectacular flop.
For the one that worked, they had an airplane cabin with Jonathan's old champion Jack Paar sitting in one seat as a passenger. Jonathan, who didn't even know Paar was on the premises, entered the scene and sat down in the seat he was told to sit in — the one next to Paar — and I guess the idea was that Paar would then engage him in conversation about where they were flying or why or something. What I recall is that Winters walked into the plane, sat down, turned and found himself next to Jack Paar and said, "Gee, I was hoping you'd look younger." Or words to that effect.
Paar cracked up and the scene was effectively over. It wound up basically being just the one big laugh. The other spots didn't even have that.
The finale was amazing for its failure. As Mr. Little explained in his role as emcee, they'd brought in several men and women who were practicing nudists. They placed them — naked — into a set that had been constructed so that the studio audience and cameras couldn't see their privates but when Jonathan entered the scene, he would. Paul Keyes obviously thought this would be hilarious. Then again, I met Paul Keyes a few times and he thought Richard Nixon was the greatest statesman the world had ever known.
Jonathan entered, did a little Candid Camera "take" when he saw the naked people —
— and then, chuckling, just walked off the set and over to Rich Little. He did not, as I'm sure was expected, fall into a character and do a scene talking to them.
It was a spectacular thud…and of course, they couldn't go back and do it again. The show was called Take One because each scene had to be done in one take.
I never asked Jonathan about it but my sense was that by the time they got to that last bit, he knew the experiment was D.O.A. and his attitude was, "Get this over with." As far as I know, no one ever tried to star him in a prime-time show again.
After it aired, I found myself at dinner one night with a bunch of comedy writers. We'd all seen it. We'd all been stunned that an hour built around Jonathan Winters could be so totally devoid of laughter. The problem, we decided, was that they'd tried to formalize spontaneity. The glory in what the man did was in how simple and organic it was, spilling naturally out of his mind and mouth. Take One had treated it like a game show challenge and oversold it. When I asked the table what kind of show Jonathan could have done that would have showcased his unique skills, no one had an answer.
I don't think there was an ideal format for Jonathan Winters. He was funny when someone like Paar interviewed him in an unrehearsed talk show setting but that only worked in short doses. He was funny standing on a stage, just free-associating in character but that's not a prime-time series. To me, he was funniest when you were standing outside Honeybaked Ham on Riverside Drive with him, just listening as he turned from a prancing hair stylist into the last Japanese soldier fighting World War II. Once, I practically fell over when that Japanese soldier bragged about how he'd managed to use his long-range artillery gun to shoot down Bob Hope's airplane and "You could see cue cards fluttering to the ground." It was hilarious…and a good reference to how Jonathan differed from his Toluca Lake neighbor, Robert "All the Money in the World" Hope.
So letting him improvise on TV never amounted to much more than short bits on the kinds of TV shows they stopped making years ago. It also didn't work very often to stick a script in his hand. In his earlier days, he was able to dial down the improvisations and deliver great comic acting jobs like he did in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or The Loved One or The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. The only time after about 1968 I thought someone knew how to cast him and direct him in a scripted role (not that he probably followed the script verbatim) was in '91 when he had a supporting part on a sitcom called Davis Rules. He even won an Emmy for it but the series didn't last.
What clearly didn't work was when he was added to the cast of Mork & Mindy. That was what he did right after that Take One pilot failed. Robin Williams' sitcom was on the downslide and they brought Winters in to try and save it. Having two guys — even them — wandering off from the script in often different directions, just made things seem disconnected.
It was sad to see some of Jonathan's obits sport the headline that a star of Mork & Mindy had died. I guess we should be grateful they didn't say, "Spokesman for Glad Trash Bags Dies."
I loved listening to Jonathan Winters. He was funny in a way that no one else, not even his imitators, was ever funny. I want to hold that thought and remember that above all but I can't quite get around the fact that for the last few decades of his life, his greatest talent went largely unexhibited. No one ever really knew what to do with him…and he could never quite understand why he wasn't working much. Those are probably the two great curses of being the only one of your species. Oh — and there's also the sad fact that we'll probably never see anyone like him again.