"Is that allowed?": The Lethal (but Kind) Charm of Nichols and May

First, a few pertinent thoughts on Nichols and May from fans, friends, critics, and themselves:

"I thought they were absolutely sensational. Sensational. They were totally different than all comics. It was really deeper and very gentle humor . . . It was just really subtle and gentle and based on things that were really highbrow. Like the rocket scientist whose mother wants to know why her son doesn't call. And, of course, there was a Jewish slant to their humor . . . "

—Phyllis Diller

"I went to sleep at night listening to those records for weeks, for months. And the rhythm of their voices rocked me to sleep. I was listening to their voices—the sound, the intonation. Not so much the jokes. They influenced us all and changed the face of comedy."

—Steve Martin

"The nuances of their characterizations and the cultured types that they were doing completely appealed to me. They were the first people I saw doing smart, hip character pieces. My brother and I used to keep their Improvisations to Music on the turntable twenty-four hours a day."

—Lily Tomlin

"[with] extraordinary powers of observation to locate clichés of conventional middle-class life [stripped] to their essential absurdity . . . the action tends to criticize itself. [May] often threatens to break out of comedy altogether."

—Robert Brustein

"Nichols and May are still just as funny to me as ever because they wrote the kinds of things that you can listen to over and over again . . . [They] have such wonderful routines that even though if I know them by heart, I want to savor the next line."

—Tom Lehrer

"That kind of comedy requires acting talent. It isn't a matter of punch lines, gags, but it's personifying the targets."

—Bernard Sahlins, co-founder of Second City

"It's a good thing Mike Nichols and Elaine May are partners. How would either of them ever find anyone else he'd distrust so much?"

—Walter Kerr

"We were safe from everyone else when we were with each other. And also safe from each other."

—Mike Nichols

"The nice thing is to make an audience laugh and laugh and laugh, and shudder later."

—Elaine May

"How can I explain to dinner guests that relative time equals distance over speed without sounding pedantic?"

—Albert Einstein (actually Elaine May, channeling Mike Nichols's third cousin)

And finally, on the Creative Flow:

"A process at best tenuous, evanescent, fleeting, shimmeringly mobile, like those strange creatures, all moss and glitter, that we carry with us as our first tremendously exciting memories of church or Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras—that wonderful, vulgar, syncopated, strangely shimmering symbol of sexuality so avoidable in our present ambiguity."—Distinguished Southern playwright, Alabama Glass (actually, Mike Nichols in character, from the Broadway show An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, circa 1960, as referenced by John McCarten in The New Yorker, October 15, 1960)

When today's talented media historians weigh the impact of early 1960s comedy, the former longstanding skew towards Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl has been dwarfed by an overdue embracement of the great Nichols and May. No one disputes the gifts of Sahl or Bruce, but over the years their angles-of-attack have worn down the audience. A surfeit of Sahl-style political satire clobbers us daily on late night television. And Bruce's legacy—much as one might admire his brilliant freeform candor—can be heard in watered-down form on any number of HBO comedy specials, each stuffed with enough curse words to have sent Bruce to prison on obscenity charges for a millennium. Among the most exemplary works reflecting on Eisenhower-era comedy that look admiringly at the work of Nichols and May, the following were the most informative for this essay: Yael Kohen, We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy (2012), Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny (2003), and Janet Coleman The Compass: Improvisational Theatre that Revolutionized American Comedy (November, 1991).

Background

For the first eight years of his life Michael Igor Peschkowsky was one of the unluckiest people on...