When I was a kid I’d always see comedy albums by Nichols and May in the cut out-bins and eventually I became curious about them after hearing their classic Telephone routine on the radio. Mike Nichols played a hapless man, stranded and down to his final dime, trying to use a pay phone with disastrous results. Elaine May played three different telephone operators, none about to give him his dime back.

In the landscape of 1960s comedy, Mike Nichols and Elaine May were quite unique. They were more “sit down” comics than stand-ups, and their sophisticated dark satire was more about motivation, psychological set-up—and torture, usually directed at the male characters—than of going for easy laughs and gags. Which is why, of course, the comedy recordings of Nichols and May are still so highly regarded today. All comedy snobs will eventually discover the genius of Nichols and May. It’s the canon!

In this black and white kinescope of Nichols and May doing their classic “$65 Funeral” skit on the Jack Paar Show, we get a rare glimpse of their particular chemistry and comic magic as they take on an industry that was then very much in the news due to Jessica Mitford’s best-selling book, The American Way of Death, which Paar alludes to in his introduction. Check out their timing! They’re both wonderful here, of course, but in my opinion Elaine May was the Tina Fey of the 60s, a comparison which should flatter both.

A Comedy College show on Nichols and May (NPR)
 

 
Thank you Anthony Miller!

What is that that pops up just for a frame or two as Nichols is giving the address of the deceased?

Wow, DM is working overtime with great material lately. The Nichols and May story is indeed interesting for the modern, neurotic chemistry between them, and equal status, which also seperated them from the other male-female couples in comedy preceding them. I think the comparison to Fey is maybe reducing it too much to fit, although surely complimentary to both in some ways, but May was always a certain figure, not many different ones, she was doing improv but was herself-as-a-character, and exuded sexuality, and her comic side was expressed by working with language and ideas, or reacting in improv and the like. Fey is the generaiton who was not afraid to play herself as a “loser” of sorts, really do shtick as it were, nearer to slapstick or farce, and hardly manages cool and cereberal, although when one follows the various character’s dialogs that she writes for 30 Rock, they are amazing. Just saying, May sort of managed a moment, and captured it brilliantly, but hardly moved on from there, truth be told, because she so summed up that atitude and zeitgeist. I don’t think she was so willing to go “out there” as a comedian in the sense of Fey, but a writer who was doing her own material, and worked it out with Nichols to an insane degree of rapport and success.

On another note, there should be an HBO series done around the explosive moment of the early 60s comedy scenes.