Larry Miller
written by Ken Carlson
“If I was 23 today, I would be a comic today,” says comedian Larry Miller, “and have certain trappings they have today. I know certain stylings are timeless. If I were in the ninth century I would join an acting troupe. In 1902, I would’ve trained to be a song and dance man in Vaudeville. I’m a performer. I’m an actor, performer, and comic.”
COMIX on 14th Street has the eclectic hallmarks of a tony Manhattan hotel or martini bar as you enter. Like most fashionable establishments there is the face they show the public; formal and buttoned-up, and the more austere, yet functional side that lies backstage. Take any five-star restaurant with priceless artwork in the dining room and peak behind the curtain to where the staff punches in and you’ll find twenty year-old office equipment with lockers and hooks for personal effects that work just fine.
The Green Room at COMIX is miles ahead of the dank cubby holes that pass for dressing rooms in many clubs. Still, the furniture there, far from being in vogue, with it’s last decade’s colors & stripes, is reminiscent of run-of-the-mill airline lounges or bus depots. Still, it’s comfortable and suits their needs, especially in this economy. There is haute couture and there are worn flannel shirts and jeans. Both serve the purpose of comfort.
Larry Miller has appeared in over fifty films and too many television shows to mention. He’s spent more years in the business than many of his opening acts have been alive. Now that he’s back on the road, he takes the stage donning a suit and tie, as he has for years, as a sign of respect and professionalism. But, back in the green room between sets, it’s a sweatshirt and white socks, perfect for putting feet your up while watching the game. It’s not a big deal, just something to do to relax for a few moments. Like other facets of Mr. Miller’s career, it’s a little something he picked by listening to others.
“I saw Myron Cohen back when I was a baby comic,” says Miller, “I was at the Cleveland Comedy Club. He was doing two shows at a theatre in the round outside of Cleveland. I went to see him before the second show. I went backstage, told him I was a comedian, and he invited me in. He was a great, great joke teller – just a heck of a performer who didn’t start in comedy until he was 55. He was a garment salesman before that. I walked in and he was wearing a bathrobe with dark socks. He hung his suit up in between shows. For some reason it [changing out of the suit]feels comfortable to me too, even if it’s just ten or twenty minutes.”
For Larry Miller on this evening, it’s more than the sweatshirt that’s providing comfort. He’s doing what he loves back in the city where he started his career. “A week ago,” said Miller, “I would’ve said, it was like performing anywhere, and meant it, in the good sense. I don’t care if I’m in Cedar Rapids. Every theatre, melody tent, when the lights go down, I get up there and try my best. But you know what? Having just spent just a couple of days in New York, it reminds me I’m a New Yorker. There are 50 cities here – every eight blocks is another city. I love it. LA’s a wonderful place. But if you asked me [what I thought about it], well, I live there. I work there. My kids play ball there. It’s the center of our business, so I like it.”
There’s a chapter in his book, Spoiled Rotten America, where Miller looks back at his early NYC days at the Comic Strip – performing seven nights a week ‘til the early hours of the morning, taking home not even a pittance in pay but a bankroll of free burgers, free drinks, groovy Comic Strip t-shirts. Those twenty-odd pages, like Robert Klein’s The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue and Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up vividly describe the struggles and emotions from that less complicated pre-boom era. Today, even for someone at Miller’s level of success, he’s experiencing some of the adventures that come with playing the road. Naturally his reaction to those events have changed from a more adventurous time.
“I’m staying at the Gansevoort,” Miller says with added gestures to the younger comics also hanging around. “I hadn’t heard of the place before. It sounds like Lord Voldemort’s younger brother, the one who didn’t become evil. He was saying all the time, ‘Why do you have to carve lightning into the dog’s head all the time? Leave him alone. Why can’t we go into the hotel business?’ I’m pretty easy about hotel rooms, as long as the bed is good and the room is clean. But this is a hip place. Fine, whatever they want to do is fine with me. Unfortunately, the last two nights, I’ve had impossibly loud parties in the room next to me. They’re starting at three in the morning. I’m doing radio and TV [to promote his appearances] and have to get up. I hate to be a party pooper, but I have to knock on their door at four when people are just showing up. Metal doors are slamming. I called security finally around four, and had to read for an hour so I could get at least two and a half hours sleep. Tonight, before I left [for the club], I saw two of the guys walking into their room. I’d seen them before and there was a tiny bit of tension. I felt awful, but you can’t have parties that start at four. I went to the front desk and asked them to say something to them because I had to stay two more nights. And there was a guy standing a few feet away, and he turned tell me he was a really big fan of mine. He was so nice. He introduced himself as a member of the Black Eyed Peas! Turns out they were in town to be on Saturday Night Live. Then he says, ‘Hey, here are a couple of guys from the band!’ They’re the guys from the room next door! I swear before I turned to greet them, I knew it. It wasn’t a giant revelation, but I figure it had to be. They saw me as the guy in Brooks Brothers pajamas and slippers, asking them to turn the music down.”
If you have a chance to see Larry perform and then take a moment to revisit his body of work online or in an HBO special, you can’t help but be struck by the consistency in his point of view and timelessness in his tales. His storytelling pattern ranges from erudite to frantic and hapless. He patiently describes his characters, like his family guest at thanksgiving dinner, family members as characters, gently adding details like sound effects of cars and radio signals.
He’s careful to stay in the moment and not to give away his plans for his return to stand-up, ‘Calling it a tour is perhaps an elaborate term for it. I’m just trying to assimilate. I’m glad I’m here now. I’m going to do this show, do as well as I can. I’ll sell a couple of books, hang up the suit, go back to hotel, and see if that party is going on.”
“Dangerfield and I,” says Miller, “or any other comics are alike in that we’re storytellers. Like Steven Wright, it’s a haiku, a flight of fancy. The fact they may last six to seven seconds versus a forty minutes doesn’t matter at all. We’re storytellers. A painting is a story. A song is a story. Anything based in creativity is a story. One liners are once-upon-a-time jokes. Good comedy doesn’t have to tear something down. It’s not frivolous. For the most part I like to write things I feel were funny a hundred years ago.”
“Well, before I was a comedian,” says comedian Tom Papa, “I was a fan of great comedy. Somewhere towards the end of high school I sought out comedians on TV on a nightly basis. One of my favorites by far was Larry Miller. All these years later, I can attribute his appeal to smart writing, amazing timing and unwavering confidence. I am still impressed with the way he stands before an audience showing literally no effort at all and yet brings the entire crowd to their knees. But that is based on what I now know about how comedians work. Back then, I only knew one thing and it’s really all that matters - Larry Miller is hilarious!”
Trust. Comedians speak of it often. They have to trust their abilities and have confidence in their material. The crowd has to trust that the comic knows what he’s doing and will carry the show on their back. For Miller, who has spent so much time on sound stages and club stages, that level of trust extends beyond what most performers will accept in the way of feedback, in particular, from the day-to-day film project community.
“You either like audiences, or you don’t,” says Miller. “I do. The audience tells you in a second whether they like you or not. Lenny Bruce said about audiences, ‘Individually they may be idiots, as a group they’re a genius.’ They know everything, they sense right away whether they like you or not. Audiences are the same as people off stage. You either like them or you don’t. I’m not skipping through life. I have dark moods just like everyone else. But I like people. This doesn’t make me some kind of hero or some kind leader. What it means is, I like them. I like going to Cedar Rapids and talking to people in the hotel lobby if they say Hi. On the set of Ten Things I Hate About You, (a show he’s starred in on ABC Family) anyone – from the cue card guy, to props, one of the grips, the kid with the sandwich tray I can ask them, – which take did you like, the first one or the second one? It comes around to what we were talking about. I like the kid with the sandwich tray. I like thinking. It’s not asked manically, but they know I mean it sincerely. But I know, they get me when I get them. They don’t get intimidated or offput. I know I can get a good read from them. On action, I know to go that way. Taking suggestions from people, it’s important.”
However, when asked if some club owner he didn’t know had a suggestion for his stand-up act, Larry was quick to draw a line. “There, you just said it,” said Miller. “It’s some ‘so-and-so you didn’t know’. If I didn’t know him, it’s a huge difference. The grip or kid with the sandwich tray is not someone I don’t know. Within a day or two [of being on a movie set], it’s like being on a ship in 1803. Once you leave London behind, once you go over the horizon, you’re on that ship together. That’s what I mean when I say I know them. It’s not blind. It’s whether I know them.”
“Clubs are different from a movie set,” Miller continues, “As hectic and crazy as movie sets might seem, they’re not. Really, they’re like that ship from 1803. There is a process in setting up, and when the first bell rings, they’re scrubbing the deck with the holy stones and every day on Tuesday it’s peas... It’s very ordered. Here [in a comedy club] it’s a little more hectic. The manager has better things to do 99 times out of a hundred than to come back here and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea I wanted to talk to you about that bit.’ In my experience it doesn’t happen that way. That’s what I mean about knowing people. Plus, stand-up is very different from acting. Stand-up is distilled. It’s very personal. It has a very strong voice to it. I think a lot of my acting has that too. If you look at my essay writing, my book, if people landing from Mars read that book without ever meeting me, they’d say, ‘It sounds like that guy.’ That’s very positive. Stand-up writing is distilled, like a still, where it goes through the copper pipes, curls around, and comes out a drop at a time.”
“What I love,” said Miller, “and what I’m grateful for, is that I work enough and have worked enough at something I love. As a sign of that, people are very nice to me. Comedy is very personal. People come up to comics in the way they won’t walk up to some big star, like Nicholas Cage or Brad Pitt. You wouldn’t go up to them but you would talk to comic. It’s flattering and very cool. It’s not so much they know about your life, technically, it’s that the experience of laughter is very intense. That’s’ why it has a wisdom to it. So if you make someone laugh, live or on TV or in a movie part, it feels timeless and personal.”
Michael Dobson was a character Miller played on two episodes of Law & Order, in 1994 & 1996. Dobson was an insolent villain, accused of murdering the women in his life. How Miller landed that role says as much about how the business works, what he gave to the part, and what he took.
“Michael Chernuchin wrote that episode,” recalls Miller, “and later became a great friend of mine. He ran Law and Order for a decade. He’s a friend now so I’m biased, but I think he’s a great writer, and also was a really good lawyer in New York for a handful of years before he started writing scripts. He was on Wall Street. His wife was a writer. My wife is a writer, a multi-award winning writer. The couples met because we had the same business manager. This was fourteen years ago. We used to get together to drink and smoke cigarettes. We were members of the Jews that Drink Club. He told me about this idea he had of a nightclub owner who murdered his wife, or didn’t murder his wife. He got the idea; Dick Wolf and Ed Sharon agreed, so they just cast me. It was his show. I did it a couple of other times. They’ve never brought a character back, except for that one.”
“I also got to know Jerry Orbach very well,” says Miller, “I just adored him. He’s passed on now. What a great, great actor. He used to go up to Paul Sorvino sometimes and say, ‘Thank you for quitting that part.’ He loved it. You can imagine how cool it would be, to be Jerry Orbach in that role, walking around New York for 12 years, or however long it was. He stopped drinking, used to be a big drinker. But, you figure any restaurant he walked into must have gone nuts. ‘Hey Lenny!’”
“I learned acting lessons from Jerry,” Miller continues. “One tip I learned from him, an acting tip that applies to anybody in show business: He recited Humphrey Bogart’s speech from The Caine Mutiny; the one about the strawberries. ‘Ah, but the strawberries! That’s, that’s where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, and with, with geometric logic, that, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist...’ He went through the whole thing. It sounded just like Bogart, not in his impression, but in the rhythm of it. He [Orbach] said, ‘If you listen to it, notice he doesn’t take what we call actors’ pauses in that. He doesn’t anguish over anything. He lets his character come through his personality and through the words, but more or less just fires the words out there. It’s a certain kind of acting. The speech lasts about two and a half minutes, which is very long. It just comes through the words. If that were today, most actors would, and I think he was right, would take each word would make a meal out of it with pauses, ‘The strawberries... oh, that’s... that’s when I knew!’ Even if it’s great acting, not indicating, it’s a lot of pausing and stretching. Heck of a lesson. Like the old Spencer Tracy line, ‘Just say the words and don’t bump into the furniture.’ It doesn’t mean you’re not acting with craft, it’s like comedy, say the words and let them hear you. Don’t want to be self conscious about topics. You’re funny or you’re not funny.”
“I’ll gauge your eye out with my thumb! I shit you not!” said Larry’s Miller character, Max Berman, in Best of Show. Miller may be best know for his work with Christopher Guest’s collective of talented performers in his string of acclaimed hits.
“I have tremendous respect for those guys,” says Miller. “When they call, it’s a really cool call. In show business, so it’s a just a simple call at home. Everybody knows, you tell your agent, take whatever they send over. I think they’re wonderful folks, great story tellers. I hope they make a bunch more of them [films] and I hope they call again.”
“Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy are essentially the creative partners. Karen Murphy is their producing partner. They’re a great team. Christopher is a great director. They have an outline that he and Eugene write. They have a general idea of the direction the storyline will be. It’s improv. As everyone on the set knows, they’re such funny people, you always prepare ten things before you get there. The second you get there, you decide, ‘That’s no good, it’ll never work’. You put it aside, then he guides you through it. He’s very perceptive. Sometimes, they’re very long takes. He has a really great ear and eye. It’s a cool call to get. Plus there is a kind of cool part to it. Some of the people I’ve met, like Jane Lynch, Jennifer Coolidge, wonderful story tellers, they have a lot of leeway.”
“Until I booked the gig opening for him,” said comedian Baron Vaughn, the host this evening at COMIX, “I hadn’t realized what an influence he’s been on me. Leading up to the date, I started to recall the stand-up of his that I had seen. It was all surprisingly vivid in my head and I realized the things I had picked up from watching him: his comfort on stage, the precision and economy with which he had constructed his jokes. I felt his influence on other comedians I love like Patton Oswalt or Paul F Tompkins. Saw it again days before working with him in Ryan Stout. I suddenly remembered he was easily one of my favorite comedians when I was growing up. I found I wasn’t alone as many other comedians I told about the show gasped like I said I was having dinner with Desmond Tutu.”
“He said something to me backstage,” Vaughn continues, “as an aside that I’ve been thinking about a lot and telling other comedians, ‘wherever they are is exactly where they are.’ He’s talking about the audience. There’s no need to whip them up into a frenzy. Every show can’t be the same. He continued, “Play it where it lays.” That’s an expression from golf, but he applied it to comedy. It’s very zen. Watching him backstage dressing up before the show and dressing down after, was seeing him in his meditative state. He gave special care and attention to his suit like it was his act. Making sure everything fit just right, everything was accounted for and in it’s place. It was his and only his. Other people have suits, but this was HIS suit and it needed his touch to work.”
“The comics today?” says Miller, “There is no ‘comics today’. Every generation is tempted to say, in or out of show business, about the music today, about comics today... But you know what? There are only two sexes in comedy. Two races in comedy. Two ages in comedy. Funny and not funny. You know what? I don’t care is someone curses. I don’t curse, but I think Kat Williams is really funny. He makes me laugh a lot. He has a special that’s been out for year and I’ve seen it six or seven times. Makes me laugh every time. Now, are some of the things he talks about out of my experience as a bald, suburban jew? Not necessarily. But that doesn’t matter because I’m laughing at it.”
For more on Larry, visit LarryMillerHumor.com.