Mike Nichols’s film adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened 44 years ago today during a summer of tumult. Not only were massive protests against the Vietnam War hitting Washington DC, but the last trouble-free marriage sitcom, The Dick van Dyke Show, had just aired its last episode. It was on.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor took on the roles of inadequate associate history prof George and his drunk university-president’s-daughter wife Martha two years into their actual marriage, which itself was one of the most scrutinized in pop culture history. The then-thrice-divorced Taylor won the Best Actress Oscar, and Haskell Wexler’s stark cinematography scored him a statuette as well. Controversy over how much of the play’s profanity to include in the film would compel the MPAA’s Jack Valenti to convert the industry’s old Production Code into the rating system we know today.

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman ingeniously situates George and Martha’s relentless turning-point fight in a well-lit parking lot, giving Taylor the pacing space to sprawl out the argument across the psyche of tortured married couples across America. The pair’s agreement on “total war” seems almost chilling in its self-indulgence in the context of President Johnson’s escalating the horrific bombing of North Vietnam at the time.
 

 
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!