by Jon Cryer
Though our film never made it into any of the big festivals, it had a nice life at smaller festivals around the world, from Rhode Island and Canada to Ghent, Belgium, and even Oldenburg, Germany. Though reviews were mostly positive, a particularly negative one came to be a major milestone for Richard and me. The critic referred to us as “the worst high-profile filmmakers currently working.” To which Richard and I rejoiced in unison, “We’re high-profile!”
Festival audiences, however, really took to it, and though it’s not necessarily a movie I would entertain making today, it holds a special place for me, as the title says, as a mission of sorts. Like David and his all-encompassing enthusiasm, Coney Island took hold of me for a while, and seeing it through felt like a major accomplishment.
Perhaps the most interesting side benefit of making it was that it documented most of old Coney Island, a lot of which is gone now. I’ve read comments on the Internet that say it captures the park at its most haunting and otherworldly, and I find those very satisfying sentiments.
My time in the trenches of independent film was an education in many respects. I learned Richard Schenkman is a great guy to have in your foxhole, and that all those people who tell you not to put your own money into movies are only half right: You won’t make a dime, but it will be worth it anyway.
Chapter 23
The Mechanics of Jokedom Department
What is it that I do best?
When I think about that question in terms of my career, it can be boiled down to two “aha” moments that I had while starring on a couple of sitcoms in the nineties.
The first was on Partners, a buddy comedy that debuted in the fall of 1994, and was created by two writer/producers from Friends named Jeff Greenstein and Jeff Strauss (known collectively as “the Jeffs”) and directed by Jim Burrows, perhaps the most highly regarded director of situation comedies, well, pretty much ever (Taxi, Cheers, Friends).
As we were rolling film on the very first shot of the pilot, the second assistant was having difficulty with the digital counter on the slate. She tried a couple of abortive claps and then started fiddling with it. In the meantime the camera was still rolling on a single shot of me that was being shown to our studio audience over the monitors.
As I patiently waited for the issue to be resolved I looked into the camera momentarily and the audience started to laugh—a nervous, low roller that subsided quickly. But as the time stretched on, my eyes drifted back and forth from my castmates to the camera again, and each time the laughs got bigger and bigger. I was not mugging or reacting or making any facial expression whatsoever. Just sitting there. And the audience apparently found this hilarious. When the slate was fixed, we proceeded with the scene and the audience was already on board, hooked into these characters and laughing from the first line.
After the scene I joined Jim and the Jeffs at the writer’s monitor. They were intrigued by the crowd’s reaction and, of course, as people in the business of comedy, trying to dissect it.
We batted it around for a while, and went at it from every angle, until finally I realized it was this: They were laughing at the very idea of me. That I exist in physical space the way I do is just kind of somehow inherently ridiculous. Now, most people, when they come upon this kind of information, would probably have been insulted, but not me. I was thrilled. From the moment I realized it, I accepted it as the gift I truly think it is.
It dawned on me that comedy turns everything I’ve ever been ashamed of about myself into an asset. My weaknesses, my fears, my anxieties, even my posture, all of them give the audience permission to laugh at me, and laugh they do. And something about the live-audience format for sitcoms came into play as well. Perhaps the close-up attention of the camera combined with the broad-stroke rapport with actual human beings who are watching the show and reacting in real time sparked a discovery in me.
I’d always thought movies were where I wanted to shine, but this was giving me a whole new direction.
The other “aha” moment came on another series I did with the Jeffs called Getting Personal, an office comedy that was on the air briefly in 1998.
One day Jeff Strauss gingerly approached me and said, “We have a scene where we might set you on fire.” He paused, perhaps waiting for a reaction. I had one.
“Might?” I said.
“We’re going to set you on fire,” he clarified.
The setup was that my character was going out on a blind date with a girl who was very clumsy. She was gorgeous, but she kept hurting me in various ways. It started slowly with a spilled drink, moved up to slamming a car door into my crotch, and ended in a restaurant scene in which we have an intimate moment, I reach across the table to hold her hand, and a candle sets my sweater on fire.
As written, I was supposed to react in a manner something along the lines of, “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod, I’m on fire! I’m on fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!” In other words, how anybody would probably react. The real joke was supposed to be what followed: My date grabs a champagne bucket and pours a bunch of ice cubes on me, which does nothing to put out the fire.
But I saw a chance to do something here. My character had been through so much already in the episode that it seemed funnier if his reaction might be as if he fully expected the evening would come to this. We rehearsed the scene, and the way I did it was I looked at my flaming arm, paused, and then said with the blankest expression on my face: “Oh, my God. I’m on fire.”
The producers enjoyed it, but I could see the worry in their eyes.
“You sure that’s how you’re going to do it?” one of them said.
“Let’s see what the audience says,” I replied.
It killed in front of the audience. I felt it was a gutsy move on my part, for three reasons. One, it was a choice my producer was unsure of. Two, it isn’t exactly a realistic response to suddenly being on fire. And last, if it didn’t work, I would have blown the gag and be sitting there ablaze. Not that I thought the crew wouldn’t douse my arm because I spoiled a joke, but you know, weirder things have happened in show business.
Ultimately, it was a moment in which I wanted to assert myself in the Mechanics of Jokedom department, and when it worked, it gave me the belief that I know a thing or two about laugh lines, that you can sometimes take an offbeat approach and it adds that extra bit of surprise. Knowing how much reality and how much ridiculousness with which to imbue a joke can take a lot of mental energy, and it’s actorly work I take much pride in.
Oh, wait. Is that what you thought was the big reveal about what I did best? Sitcom lines?
No, no, it’s fire gags. I am the king of fire gags.
This goes way back to when David Dennis and I used to play Careless Gas Station Attendant. (Again, not really a game, per se, but . . . ) David smoked, so he had cans of Ronsonol lighter fluid just lying around. We’d create a puddle of Ronsonol in the street, then run a line of it along the ground, ending in a trickle along either his or my leg. I’m not even sure we went so far as to playact the gas-station-attendant part. We just lit the puddle, and the flame traveled our little pathway until one of us was slapping at our leg going, “Ah! Ah! Ah!” while the other would scream with delight. I promise you I didn’t strangle animals in my spare time.
Anyway, when sitcoms offered a chance to learn the exquisite craft of fire gags, I accepted with the unflinching resolve of Kurt Russell in Backdraft. This specialty was going to be mine. The comedy gods would know my name by the look on my face when my character realizes his arm/leg/hand/whatever is ready to char marshmallows.
I’ve been on fire a handful of times on Two and a Half Men. Nobody approaches me gingerly anymore. Now it’s, “This week we’re setting you on fire in a new place.” Each time I look that producer back in the eye and say, “Bring it on. With accelerant.” The time I did a bit where they’d genuinely lit my crotch on fire for the close-up, but then decided to use
computer-generated flames for the wide shot, I shook my head and grumbled, “Pussies.” Then they thought they’d really gotten me when years later the producers said, “This time, Cryer, it’s Alan’s bathrobe. Get ready for an inferno, bucko.”
“Oh, when I burn,” I shot back, “I sizzle.” (I might be remembering this exchange wrong, but let’s just say I was ready.)
One does not take fire gags lightly. The things that can go wrong are legion, even though you’re slathered in flame-retardant gel. A burn that goes on too long leaves a scar. An improperly controlled burn could travel someplace else very quickly. If there’s a prop nearby nobody realized was flammable, you could burn down the set. The burning bathrobe was the hottest I’d ever gotten, because the heat travels up your arm if you’ve got it at your side, so it was important to keep my arm perpendicular to my body until the absolute right moment.
Take a fire gag for granted and it will bite you in the ass. You’ve got to have a healthy respect for the flame. She’s a cruel mistress, pretty and warm one minute, a storm of devastation the next. But I’ve got her number.
What do I do best? you ask.
Light up a room, motherfucker.
Chapter 24
We Who Labor in the Shadow of Giants
It’s not hard to fall into a narrative about yourself created in your own mind or by others. It’s one reason reality TV is so appealing: Think your life is interesting? Fear that it’s not? Let show-business professionals mold it into something TV viewers want to watch week after week! With actors, though, who can become public figures based on their abilities yet still carry plenty of doubt about their worth to anyone, the tendency to interpret your life as a story of destiny is ever-present. Frankly, the world is a lot less concerned about us than we think.
Here’s an example. In 1998, after Getting Personal was canceled, I got a call one day from Danny Jacobson, the creator of Mad About You, who wanted me to fill in on very short notice for a guest role on his latest endeavor, the ABC sitcom Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place.
Danny said, “There’s a character we’ve been talking about all season, we cast a guy, he came in, we did the read-through, rehearsals, run-throughs, and it’s just not working. It’s an important part.”
“Sure,” I said. “When do you need me?”
“Monday. We shoot on Tuesday.”
Today was Sunday. Yikes. “Absolutely, I’m there,” I said. I like Danny, and it felt good to help out a friend. I showed up Monday, started rehearsing, and quickly decided to base the delivery style of the character—a dickish college professor—on an old acting teacher of mine who was so soft-spoken that everything he said sounded incredibly condescending. The writers loved it, the actors howled, everybody enjoyed it, so I did it on Tuesday night when we filmed, and as if completing a circle, the audience was hooting with pleasure and having a great time.
Three scenes into the show, however, everything stopped. The producers came over to me and said, “Jon, the network wants you to stop doing that, the way you’re doing this guy.”
I was dumbfounded. “But we’ve already shot three scenes of me being this guy.”
“Yeah, well, we’re going to go back and reshoot them,” one of the producers said. “It’s coming off too arch.”
That may have been the case, but when I started up again, dialing down the character so that he just came off as a regular guy, you could tell the audience was confused. We finished the show, then stayed late to reshoot the first three scenes, and I was mortified. I felt like such a failure. What was supposed to be a lark, a save-the-day scenario that had been encouraged by the warm, laugh-filled reception of everyone around me, was somehow a fiasco. The network had to have been furious: stopping the show, ordering reshoots, getting an actor to change his whole concept. Now I was just as furious. Fuck these people! ABC is an asshole network! Fuck the whole history of ABC! This is why they struggle in the ratings! Hiring actors who do their best, then cutting them off at the knees!
I was really commandeering a freight train of self-loathing and outward disgust in my brain, and putting myself in the middle of this cockamamie narrative in which I had made the Wrong Decision, and ABC was blackballing me out of sheer hatred for how I’d screwed up their show. I went home in the darkest of snits, pretty certain that if Charles Schulz were to draw me at that moment as a Peanuts character, he’d give me one of those angry black squiggle clouds over my head to signal deep, abiding perturbedness.
Cut to a year later, and I received a script for a pilot called People Who Fear People. It was really funny, but on the day of the audition, I had a few minor crises that almost made me late. I arrived in time, though, with my adrenaline pumping, and subsequently crushed it. I killed in that audition room—laughter, applause—everyone was having a great time. Right after I left, though, I realized something. I had just read for ABC! The people who hated me!
Well, no, Jon, they didn’t hate you, I was forced to tell myself. You made that up. Last year you did a solid for a friend in need; the network thought you were going a little broad, so they asked you to tone it down. Everything was fine, and you turned it into a personal tragedy on a par with Waterloo. Grateful over having woken up from this self-destructive fantasy, I heaved another sigh of relief that I’d been distracted enough that morning by daily-routine hiccups to not remember the network I was auditioning for. I could only imagine the futile undercurrent of paranoid ire that might have infected my tryout otherwise. Instead I walked in oblivious to personal drama and, as I found out later, got the part.
Narratives are a big part of our enjoyment of life, but it’s good to remember occasionally that they’re not always reality. They’re something imposed on reality so that we can make sense of it. I was privy to another instance of this after I filmed that ABC pilot and learned that the network would be putting it on its fall 2000 schedule.
People Who Fear People—later to be renamed The Trouble with Normal—would be my fourth gig as a series regular in a decade, after The Famous Teddy Z, Partners, and Getting Personal. None of those shows lasted more than a season, although Getting Personal counts as two because it debuted in the spring with a short batch of episodes, got renewed, came back in the fall, and then was summarily yanked right afterward. And that does count as two seasons, nitpickers. Regardless, I was well aware that none of these shows had been a success.
In the industry, I was starting to be thought of as a guy who’d had his shot in both movies and television, failed, and was now on a trajectory downward.
Newsweek magazine was also cognizant of this aspect of my résumé, to the extent that they ran an item in a snarkily opinionated entertainment column called “Critical Moments” dated May 29, 2000, that essentially labeled me a show killer. Blessed with two—not one, two—sassy headlines—“TV’s Not-So-New Lineup” and “If at First You Don’t Succeed, a Network Will Hire You”—the piece read thus: “Ever wonder why TV is so bad? Maybe because the networks keep hiring the same failure-prone actors. Some of the recycled stars returning to television next season . . .” after which its nasty little chart named me, Lauren Graham (three failed shows), Mike O’Malley (two failed shows), and Jon Tenney (four failed shows).
Once again, that’s Lauren Graham, who later that year started a seven-season run on the beloved, acclaimed Gilmore Girls.
That’s Mike O’Malley, who later that year began a choice stint on the six-season hit Yes, Dear.
That’s Jon Tenney, who would go on to a seven-year run on The Closer.
Now remember, this was before the Internet had decimated the American newsweekly, so Newsweek and Time magazine were still the biggest of the four-hundred-pound gorillas in the world of news. It was pretty head-knocking to see a major publication tag you as certain death to a television series. This was a narrative, though. But no more. I felt that this insertion of me into the larger story about the state of network ent
ertainment needed a measured response.
Letters Editor
Newsweek
251 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019-1894
Dear Sir or Madam:
I, too, had been wondering why American television is so bad. So imagine my chagrin when I read your “Critical Moments” section this week and discovered that the reason American television is so bad is the fact that I’m on it.
Well, all I can say is: “Thank God!”
Thank God the crack “Critical Moments” research team has managed to isolate the cause. Now finally something can be done about it. So as soon as my “failure-prone” talents are released from my current ABC contract I shall unselfishly endeavor to inflict them on the television-watching public of some foreign power. Preferably one without the military capability to retaliate meaningfully. Right now, I’m leaning toward Finland. They are a preternaturally glum people and I hear they liked Pretty in Pink.
You should also be aware that since your article appeared I’ve been approached by several clandestine branches of our own government to be used as a TTQDD. That’s Tactical Television Quality Degradation Device, to those unfamiliar with cutting-edge military parlance. The idea is that I’d be inserted in hostile territory by ultralight paraglider. Once safely in country, I would then infiltrate my host’s situation comedy industry and bring it to its knees with my eminently resistible off-kilter grin, my only-semi-witty one-liners, and my not-quite-as-good-as-that-Chandler-guy prowess with physical humor.
While leaving my mother country would be devastating for me emotionally, I will do it gladly if it means that there would be hope for American television. For one cannot possibly avoid the observation that, paradoxically, while American television has descended into a foul, smelly, glutinous murk of utter trash, American television criticism is entering its golden age, enlightening billions both spiritually and philosophically, entertaining and educating, moving nations to action, creating entirely new paradigms of thought and revolutionizing civilization as we know it.
