Shatner Rules

I’m glad that the second half of my career has allowed me more opportunities to make people laugh. And again that’s laugh
with
, not
at
.
    Performing comedy is like performing a knife-throwing act at a sideshow: When done properly it can amaze and awe, but one mistake, and there’s blood on the stage. Comedy is like an orchid: When tended to properly, it is a thing of beauty, but when it’s not, it withers and dies. Comedy is like chocolate soufflé: With careful monitoring it can rise to great heights, but if you slam the door too hard—flat as an unfunny pancake.
RULE: Comedy Comes in Threes. So Do My Metaphors.
    If you had asked me a few years ago, “What’s the purest form of acting?” I would have said “theater!” But after my experience on
$#*! My Dad Says,
I have to say that it’s sitcom acting. There’s a communication and concentration required that is unlike anything I have ever experienced as a performer.
    On a sitcom, you need to communicate with your audience and concentrate on what you’re doing. In drama, so many different opinions matter: the director’s, the producers’, the writers’, and so on and so on. In comedy, ultimately, the most important opinion is the audience’s.
    Doing comedy in front of an audience is like a juggling act (oops, sorry, I maxed out my metaphor limit). It’s all timing, and it becomes all rhythm. If somebody coughs in the audience, it screws up the laugh. If you have the slightest hesitation on a word—if you hesitate, if you can’t think of the perfect bon mot, the comedic moment is gone and the audience always knows it.
    The people who came to see
$#*! My Dad Says
had a tremendous impact on the show and on my performance. We would run a scene in front of the crowd, and if I failed to connect, they wouldn’t laugh. When they didn’t laugh, our producers, Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, would round up the writers and we’d try the scene again—but with different punch lines. Each thirty-minute episode was a mutual collaboration between performer, writer, and audience—more so than in any other genre.
    In doing comedy you have to listen, you have to adjust, but most important, you . . . have . . . to . . . take . . . your . . . time.
    A favorite comedian of mine was Dick Shawn, and he really personified both the ecstasy and the agony of comedy for me. I once went to see him perform in the mid 1980s. My wife and I arrived early, sat down in the auditorium, and noticed a large pile of paper and debris on the stage. I couldn’t figure out if it was part of the set dressing, or some garbage they forgot to remove from a previous performance.
    Either way, time passed, about twenty minutes or so, as people filled in to take their seats. Suddenly the lights went down, a voice came over the PA announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen—Dick Shawn!,” and Shawn leapt up from the pile of garbage.
    He had been waiting there, silent, for nearly half an hour, just for that big, crazy laugh of surprise.
    Patience. What a virtue.
    Shawn was a master of taking his time. He would do these long, rambling jokes—with laugh-free setups—that wouldn’t pay off until the very end. I so admired his courage—what if the joke tanked? As they say in comedy, “That’s a long way to go to find out that the store is closed.” Audiences hate it when they feel their time has been wasted. But Shawn was fearless.
    In fact, his commitment was such that when he was performing at a show in San Diego in 1987, he was doing a joke about the end of the world when he did a face-plant on the stage. The audience roared. And Shawn did not get up. The audience kept laughing.
    It had to be part of the joke, right? This was the guy who was known to hide under a pile of trash for thirty minutes just to get an opening laugh. And the audience was patient until the paramedics arrived.
    Shawn had had a massive, fatal heart attack while performing.
    Needless to say, I really admired Dick Shawn’s timing and patience and courage, but no comedian should ever die like that on stage.
    And I was thinking about him in 2005, when I was invited by the American Film Institute to celebrate the bestowing of a very special lifetime achievement honor. And even when I discovered that I wasn’t the honoree, I consented to stick around.
    Who was the man of the hour? George Lucas.
    The highlight of Lucas’s career was probably when he was the cameraman on a religious anthology program I once