WKXL - New Hampshire Talk Radio

NH Unscripted with Kevin Collins

NH Unscripted was originally crafted with the idea of letting the listening audience get a glimpse of what and how our artists do the things they do to bring the magic to our stages or screens. Today I had the honor of speaking with a longtime friend and brilliant mind Kevin Collins. Kevin’s has been an actor, director, writer, teacher, principal and mentor over the years and during that time he wrote/created a series of vignettes that made me think of early radio programs like The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Jack Benny, etc. and it gave me the idea to see if he’d be interested in airing them maybe on a weekly or monthly basis for the NH Unscripted audience. But, I also wanted to let the listeners in on the process of creating the show/characters and today's episode is the beginning of that task. We start by talking about humor. It’s history, how it’s in our DNA, why we laugh at certain things and not others. It’s a fascinating delve it the topic and we barely scratch the surface. I think this will turn out to be a tremendous series and I hope you find it as captivating as I do.

Duration:: 44m
Broadcast on:: 02 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) - Welcome back to NH Unscripted, where we kind of kindly ask just lay a little loving on me. I am your Robin McNamara like host Ray Dudley. We are coming to you from a fantasy island like Diggs of the WKXL studio. (indistinct) It never comes out like I think it's gonna come out. I don't get it. I am your host Ray Dudley. Happy to be out of bed. Happy to be out of the home. Got my bunny slippers on and I am ready to go. You are listening to us on your Sony Walkman's probably 1450 AM or 103.9 FM. If you are conquered based, 101.9 FM, put the God you're sold in Manchester. We love you folks down there, 'cause we love everybody, but special loves going out to those folks. NH talkradio.com is our URL. Now, I need to thank my sponsor. Doo doo, put on my sponsor, thanking hat. Lakes Region Fence and Guilford. Okay, we are getting towards the end of the year. I mean, summer, not year, summer. Heading quickly into school, back to school days. All your money's gonna start going towards clothing for the little ends. Time to fork over some dough real quick. Get that new fence in your backyard or on your property line or around your pool. Come on, break down. You cheap son of a gun. Get rid of that old thing you got. Everyone hates it. You're the talk of the whole neighborhood. You know that. Everyone hates that fence. Get rid of that thing. LRfence.com is the URL for Lakes Region Fence. Go out to LRfence.com. LRfence.com is a link out there. We can get a free estimate. Come on. We know you're cheap. That's why you haven't bought a fence already. You click the link, get a free estimate. That'll come out. He'll walk the property with you. Tell you what it's gonna cost for whatever you want. They do it all. They do cedar. They do PVC. They do property like they do it on commercial even. And I'm gonna warn you, they're 46 weeks out 'cause you waited. Now you're gonna be really pushed into the fall. But they do tremendous work. You can find photos of all the stuff they do and I do mean it's high quality. It is really exemplary stuff they do out there. Lakes Region Fence, they are a sponsor. Matt, we thank you for all you guys do. LRfence.com is their URL. Okay, I have been waiting and waiting and waiting for this episode. Kevin Collins is back in the studio. Good morning, sir. Good morning. How are you feeling? I feel very good today. You do. Okay, all right. We had to postpone once or twice because certain people got sick. I'm looking at right now. But so I'm hoping that this is the beginning of a series of episodes. So I'm trying to give the audience a quick overview of what we think is gonna happen here. Kevin is the author of a series of, what we call them, vignettes kind of, of a character called Spike Slotnik, private investigator. Right. And I have fallen in love with them. And they're hilarious. And I thought, oh man, those would be really good to do on the radio. And so I contacted Kevin, I said, Kevin, what do you think? Can we do this? And he's like, let me put the pencil to it. So he did and he's been working on it. And then as kind of an addendum. So we're gonna try to do that at some point, get those done and we maybe do one episode, which might run 15 minutes maybe. And we'll do it on our show, but we really need other things to talk about as well. And so Kevin has like this history of comedy that he thought might be a good addendum. Am I still in track here? Yeah, exactly right. So what do you envision happening here? When you first proposed it and we talked about, what would we talk about after doing a skit? You know, the typical, you know, film noir kind of character, spice lot, I think. But he's, you know, it's a joke. It's kind of like Guy Noir that Garrison Keeler did on his radio show. And but the kind of script I was working on was full of non-sequiturs, you know, just really very silly humor. Yes, I loved it. It was bizarre. And I thought, well, I sort of have to explain what that humor is, or what, and why it makes us laugh, why it made you laugh. And so it occurred to me that it would be worthwhile thinking about what is it that we humans find funny? Why do we laugh at some things and not other things? What kind of things do we laugh at? And of course, I thought about you and I in particular, you know, having known each other for almost 50 years now, and actually over 50 years. And your humor was always very much like Robin Williams, you know, a spur of the moment. And also because you were a gymnast, you were also very physical, you know. So I mean, I can't imagine you doing some of the pratfalls you did in the-- Brother. A fun thing happened in the way to the forum back in 1972 or '73 when they did it. Or even when you were in, as you like it, because your character Orlando was a wrestler and you were being tossed all over the stage by a big bill, I can't think of his name. Dude, that dude was big. He was about six foot seven. Yeah, he was alert, kind of a guy. (laughs) But, and my humor has been because I started writing plays for high school kids was always, so my humor has always been more scripted. So I was interested in how do I develop a plot? How do I develop characters that the audience would find funny? How do I find a way to work in music? Because most of the stuff I had done were, as you said, a series of vignettes and the linkage might be, you know, music. So I started thinking about that. I said, "Okay, what is it that makes us laugh?" Why do we want to find things funny? And so, you know, I look back at, you know, various, you know, people who wrote about humor. And there was a, there was a, supposed to have been, Aristotle was wrote one treatise on a tragedy. And then supposedly was going to write one on comedy that never came to be. And I don't know if you ever saw the movie, "Blazing Saddles." Because enough, "Name of the Rose," which was a, which was based on a book by Umberto Echo, who, and the plot revolved around murder in an abbey in the Middle Ages. And the centerpiece of it was, supposedly in this abbey was Aristotle's treatise on comedy. And the head monks didn't want to have any humor in God's world, so that that's how the murder takes place. But the quotes about a humor that I found most fascinating were this, "The secret source of humor is not joy, "but sorrow, there is no humor in heaven." Mark Twain said that. - He did? - Yeah. And Dante said, "A tragedy is a story that begins in joy "but ends in pain, and comedy is a story that begins in pain, "but ends in joy." And so that really, that struck me as something that, especially in this post-COVID era, we're looking for opportunities to find things funny. And yet, oddly enough, comedy has changed so much over the years. - A lot. I mean, you don't find jokes anymore. Do you remember there was a time when, if something happened, there was a joke. And I don't know how it came to be, but it's sort of like passed along by word of mouth. And so, hey, did you hear the one about the, nobody ever says, did you hear the one about, did you ever hear the joke about the-- - Oh man, I hadn't thought about that. - You know, and especially topical. And I think what's happened is that everything is visual. The incident, there is a meme, or a TikTok, or something. So that what happens is the jokes that get shared are people send you on your phone a clip of something that they saw on a reel, or a, yeah. And that's where the humor is. I don't know if you saw the one of the two Irish girls that are like twins, and they're complaining about what the guy in the ice cream truck wanted to charge for ice cream. - You've seen that one? - No. - She says, well, it's a little 10 quid for two ice creams. He's not gonna give a fart with that, you know? And everyone's seen that one. And it's not a joke. It's just two girls who were upset. And the mom just happened to get her phone out. And that's so much of what we're finding in humor is not jokes anymore. You know, we don't really, you know, have a series of, you know, of comedians like in the old Borsch Belt, you know, comics in the Catskills. - Yeah. - The places like you, if you've seen dirty dancing, it plays like in dirty dancing where the people would go and spend some time there. Welcome back. - All right, boom. I love how he says that. We'll put a pin right in there, right there. He was in the NIH, unscripted. Time you're so, so, so, so happy to be out of bed, host Ray Dudley, got my neighborhood jacket on and my bell bottom pants. Yes, I do. You were listening to us on 1550 AM or 103.9 FM in Concord. That's probably in your transistor radios. 101.9 FM for the beautiful souls and Manchester NH TalkRadio.com is our URL Kevin Collins is in the house 'cause we got a lot to chat about. I'm looking forward to this one. Be right back. (upbeat music) Welcome back to NH unscripted where I am a struggling old man trying to open a can. Oh my God, I'm your host Ray Dudley. What is happening to me? Oh, you were listening to us either on 1450 AM or 103.9 FM in Concord. 101.9 FM for the beautiful souls and Manchester NH TalkRadio.com is our URL Kevin Collins is in the house because I wanted him here. And we're talking about comedy. And that, believe it or not, is a very, very deep subject. And it's evolution is actually fascinating. You know, Kevin, one thing I liked about, or I found beautiful about Slotnik is it reminded me so much of the Cowell Burnett days. And first of all, let me say, I don't know how they did those things live. And you know, without even like a delay or whatever, the shows were great, the pressure to do those shows live, I cannot even imagine it. And they were brilliant. They were, I mean, the early days of TV, when you didn't have film, you had an audience there. It was, "I Love Lucy" or "Sincezier Show of Shows." If you've ever seen this terrific film called "My Favorite Year," which is about the early days of TV with a Peter O'Toole is in it. And it's about that time when everything was live. And if you've ever got to see it, it's brilliantly done and a lot of fun. When we did a production of "Laughter on the 23rd Floor," which is a Neil Simon comedy, I believe, but it was referencing the Sid Caesar days of "Show of Shows" and it was that room where all the writers were in there. And I did some research on it and it's fascinating what they went through to come up with a show. They would all come in on a Monday after having maybe gone to the theater or the movies or something over the weekend and they all come in with ideas and they all sit around and they had like, Carl Reiner was in there and Woody Allen at one point was in there. - Mel Brooks. - Mel Brooks, what an incubator for humor. But they would work on these skits for the whole week. And they would all like fight to be Sid Caesar's like, favorite that week so they could get their skit on, you know? But I can't imagine having to work a whole week tuning these jokes, tuning those skits and then having to perform them live on TV. - Yeah, I mean, with this no delay, as you say, no delay, you know, they didn't have, the video was live, you know? And then eventually they got to the point where they were filming these things. But I remember one interesting story about Mel Brooks. He said they tried to outdo each other with the funniest jokes and one time it was the "Eating Carrots" joke about improving your eyesight. And Mel Brooks was bound to determine to come up with the best one of all. And he came up with the one they said, "Guy ate so many carrots he couldn't sleep at night 'cause he could see through his eyelids." (laughs) And so, you know, that's the kind of thing that that's the kind of joke I'm talking about. - Yeah, yeah. - They do, it was work, that was brilliant. It was just, they were brilliant. And you see it, there are several shows that tell what that like the old Jake Van Dyke show, which was about the same idea, where Rosemarie and Maury Amsterdam. - Are you talking the shoehorn joke? (laughs) - I don't know the shoehorn joke. - Well, you certainly do. - Oh my gosh, I thought for sure you did. All right, so Maury Amsterdam, I think I told this one before, but what was the name of Mel, was the name of the bald-headed guy that would try to keep corral them all? - Call right his brother-in-law, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, Maury Amsterdam was explaining to, what's the woman? - Rosemarie. - Rosemarie, about jokes, right? And that there are some people who just laugh at anything, right? And Mel walks in, he just, right at time, he's like, well, you know, some people laugh at anything, in walks Mel, and Maury turns and he goes, "Shoohorn!" And Mel goes, "Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah!" And he walks back out. - That's right, shoehorn, yes. Okay, yes, I do remember that. No, that's what you mentioned. - Yeah, we were talking about, I think, going back to the quote about, humor is the foundation of humor is actually sorrow. And I think probably one of the greatest examples of that is the classic Mary Tyler Moore Chuckles the Clown episode. Where Chuckles the Clown dies. - Oh, my God, I don't remember that. - Oh, of course, it was, you know, the old Mary Tyler Moore television show was about a TV station in Minnesota. And so, they had various shows, like there was The Cooking Show with Betty White, and there was Chuckles the Clown. You never see Chuckles the Clown, but you always heard about Chuckles the Clown because he was very popular with the kids. And he was the Grand Marshal at some parade, and he was dressed as a peanut. And the elephant saw him and showed him to death. And so, when they get to the word in the newsroom that Chuckles the Clown has died, they're sitting around there. At first, they are, you know, aghast at one of those horrible. Then they start making jokes about it because it's funny and it's a great episode because Mary Tyler Moore is upset with them making all these jokes and they're trying to explain, "Ah, it's, you know, it's funeral humor." We, you know, we're getting out some of our angst because of, you know, losing a friend. And then when they get to the funeral, Mary Tyler Moore can't stop laughing, you know? - I remember seeing that part. - Yep. And, you know, a little song, a little dance, a little salsa down your pants, classic stuff. Anyway, I'm going back to the history of humor. What's interesting thing is that some of the characters that we find funny have been around a little for thousands of years. Back when we were called the Italian farces, there are no still existing scripts. But there were other playwrights, especially Roman playwrights, Terrence and Plautus who took these characters and, you know, variations of these characters and created them. And they were, they became standardized after a while. And then some years later, in the Renaissance era, there was the, what was called the tomato del art, but they had the same characters. And the characters were Alikino, Harlequin, who was the clever servant. And sometimes his female sidekick was Colambina, also a clever servant. Then there's Pantelone, who was the foolish old man. El Capitano, who was the Braggot soldier. Pulcinello was another servant, but he always had a big nose. That's where the punch and duty character came from. Pulcinello. There was the young lovers, the Inamorato was the male, and the Inamorato was the female. There was Dotswari, the incompetent doctor, and all of the other characters were known as the Zani. That's where we get the word Zani. And so many plays came based on these characters, including Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. What's interesting is that a funny thing happened in the way of the forum, which is one of the early plays that you and I had done, was based on the plays by Plautus and Terrence. And the main playwright that he was just Steven Sondheim to the music, but Larry Gelbot wrote the script. From Mash fame. From Mash, and of course he took, carried those characters over into Mash. God, yeah. When you think about it, the incompetent Dotswari. So he wrote that before Mash. Yeah, he wrote that probably in 1962, something like that, '63. And then he did Mash in the '70s. And he carried some of the same ideas over because Mash, the TV show, was much different than Mash the movie. Mash the movie was kind of black humor. It was done in the middle of Vietnam and Robert Altman was more of an avant-garde director than anything else. But when they did the TV show, they really went for the jokes. They really went to have a very clever Hawkeye Pierce, who would have been Arlachino, the clever servant, in a sense, he didn't like being a soldier, but he was as funny as hell. And then you had the Braggot soldier, which was Colonel Flagg, I don't know if you remember him much, or Loretta Swift, hot-lipsool hanger. I remember that. And the incompetent Dr. Frank Burns, and they even had their own Pulcinello in the form of Klinger with his big nose. Yeah, yeah. All of these characters have in their history, a link to the Italian farce of ancient Rome. So that, there's a lot of those characters that for some reason or other still stick with us, you know? And just to get a little bit more psychological, one of the reasons that perhaps we've, for thousands of years have enjoyed these characters, goes back to, believe it or not, Carl Jung, who was originally a student of Sigmund Freud, and then he broke away from them. And he had this theory of the universal archetype, that we are born with, we find a connection in some things, probably these characters, but he was talking about primarily the epic hero. And that the epic hero's life cycle, the story of the epic hero who is, well, what's the comeback? Oh, the man, man, oh, a cliffhanger. I was right there with you, baby. Whew, you are listening to NH Unscripted shows like this. Oh, why I'm so happy WKXL asked me to be a host. My name is Ray Dudley. You, we have it coming to you from the car 54 life digs of the WKXL studios. Yeah, I got a reasonable 2D model, dude. Not a little bit, not a little bit. 1450 AM 103.9 FM. Those are conquered based 101.9 FM for the gorgeous souls of Manchester. NH.gradio.com is where all the cool kids hang out. That's our URL, Kevin Collins is in the house, and we are getting deep. We will be right back. (upbeat music) - Welcome back to NH Unscripted. We are the happening, and I am your Supreme's like host, Ray Dudley. We are coming to you from a Titanic-like digs of the WKXL studios and conquered. 1450 AM 103.9 FM, 101.9 FM for the beautiful folks in Manchester. NH.gradio.com is the URL. I'll tell you a little bit more about what's happening up there. Next segment, Kevin and I are talking about comedy. I know you wouldn't think it's that deep a subject. - Yeah, it really is, the history is fascinating. I was saying-- - Good question for you. - I'll go ahead. - I'll go ahead but I have a question later, go ahead. - I was saying that the reason why we may find so many of us across the centuries have found the same character as funny, and the same character is just she's coming back and coming back, and you see them in shows like "Modern Family," and you name it. There's the same characters that are in the Italian forestes and the plays of Plautus and the "Commated Del Art," show up in modern TV shows, "Cramer," it's a classic example of a "Commated Del Art" kind of character, you know? But one of the reasons why, theoretically, why we respond to them is that they're innate to us, that it's almost better than our DNA. And I said Carl Jung had believed that they were, that they were in terms of the epic stories that so many cultures have that the differences are minor compared to the similarities, and one of the similarities that he found was that the epic hero in almost every culture follows almost the same pattern. And there was a fellow named Joseph Campbell who wrote several books about it, one of them was called "Hero with a Thousand Faces," and that the epic hero tends to be someone who either has, doesn't know who his parents are, or is an orphan, or was born magically. And somewhere in his early life, he discovers that he's different, and then a herald comes in who comes and lets him know that he is different. And then when he discovers that he's different, he goes on a quest to discover himself, or discover who his parents really are, and then he has a premonition of his own death, and he is buried in secrecy to rise again. And George Lucas read that and said, if I can create a story based on that epic hero life cycle, using all of those elements that Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell said are so innate to us that we would be unable to not fall in love with the movie, and that's what happened with "Star Wars," because he had, and so many of the characters out of the same followed that same pattern. Either having no parents or unclear where their parents just king-author. He's not aware that his father is Uthapendrag, and he raises as an orphan, Harry Potter. He doesn't know about his parents being witches or anything else like that. Moses found the bulrusher. Jesus, you know, and Neo from the Matrix. I mean, they all have that, and then somewhere in their early life, they learn that they're different. And so in the case of Luke Skywalker, along comes Obi Wan Kenobi, in the case of Harry Potter, along comes Hagrid, in the case of Neo, along comes Morpheus. I mean, just one thing after the other, and you look at these stories, and they are almost all the same. And all of those stories are remarkably popular and so much a part of our culture that we realize, wow. Yeah, that there is so almost no difference between Neo and the Matrix, and the story of Jesus, or the story of Harry Potter, the story of Luke Skywalker, the story of King Arthur. It's very much, it's all part of our emotional and mental DNA. But you were gonna ask the question. Well, only you made a reference earlier about which one had the big nose of-- Well, you know, yes, and it made me think of Cyrano de Bergerac. And he kind of encompasses a lot of those. He's not just one character, 'cause he's also the hero, right? And he's the lover, kind of in the background is, you know? And I was wondering if you felt that that, I know it's not a comedy, per se, 'til Steve Martin got a hold of it, but, you know. Yeah. But did he follow that same pattern, do you think? Is it into that same? 'Cause he, obviously, his nose was an issue for him and it became dark humor, kind of, you know, his volleys with these people were based on their perception of his looks. And he was deliberately funny when he had that great sword fight in the beginning of the play, you know, he tries, he said, "You, you, you're insults a minor." I said, you know, and then he was off. Where is that self-deprecating humor, which is something I also want to talk about. We may not get to that today, but I think that the idea that we make fun of ourselves is probably the heart and soul of comedy that really matters to us. And Cyrano does that, you know, terrifically. And you think about so many characters like him that they use themselves as their own backboard, you know, against which to, you know, one of the other things I was thinking of was, as I mentioned, that I think the heart and soul of humor, once again, is when we're willing to laugh at ourselves like a Cyrano de Bergerac. And I thought that one of my, the thing that I've never forgotten is probably the only bit that I remember from, when I saw Trevor Noah at the Hampton Beach Casino several years ago, who was just hilarious. But he starts out talk 'cause it's at the beach, Hampton Beach Casino, and he says, "What is it with white people and the beach?" He said, you know, you know, I grew up in South Africa, and I had no interest in the beach. But I said, there are three things that white people like more than anything else. Number one, being white. Number two, the beach. And number three, singing Sweet Caroline. And he starts singing it, you know, Sweet Caroline. The entire audience goes, "Dada, da, da, you know, "so good, so good, so good." And we're all laughing and realize that, yeah, we are so damn funny, and we don't, and we don't even know it. And I think that that was probably, and that has stuck with me because I think that's the, that's the thing about the humor that probably resonates with us more than anything. And I think Spike Slotnick has that 'cause Spike Slotnick is, you know, he says these silly things and I think that there has to be a certain amount of awareness of himself. - Yeah. - That he is kind of-- - Why do you think some people can't laugh at themselves? What's going on there? - Yeah, I think that's a, I don't see the humor, you know what I mean? There's something missing there that they're more offended than they are in on the joke. I think people who, yeah, I agree with you. I think there's a segment of the population that sees themselves as victims of whatever. So that instead of, you know, a comedian like John Stewart will say, you know, "I'm making fun of us." There are some, there's a segment of the population that says, "You're making fun of me." - Yeah. - And so, and you're right, they-- - It's the same joke. - Yeah, it is, and it's just that, so if you take yourself too seriously, and I think that's, you know, your example of serial diversion rack is dead on because he doesn't take himself seriously. He, you know, he's been in love with this woman for years, you know, Roxanne, his cousin, and he doesn't tell her until the day he dies. - Yeah. - And so there is, you know, a certain amount of tragedy in that, but it's also, you know, in an odd sort of way, that's a, that is also a kind of humor, you know, that irony. - Yeah. - That, you know, he finally gets the guts to tell her that he's had been in love with her for years, and her line is, you know, "I've only been in love with one man once, with one man, and I've lost him twice." You know, meaning, Christiane's a nerve alert as well as a serial diversion rack. But yeah, I think that that, and I think going back to Trevor Noah, I think the history of black comedy, and I mean that comedy by black comedians, is probably the most powerful one for Americans because that's the, you know, that's the tragedy of being an American that we founded a country on freedom and, you know, and the rights of man, except denied to one group. And I think Americans have always been, you know, even back during the days of the Civil War, even people from the South, were aware, deep down the side, that that was their flaw. And so it was interesting, one of the most interesting parts of the history of comedy is the character of Jim Crow, who was created by a white guy, whose name was T.D. Rice back in the 1830s, he was in a train station, and there was a black man, probably a slave, and slave person. I'll come back to that story. - Man, that's another cliffhanger. Are you kidding me? Oh, this is great. This is exactly what I thought this show was gonna be like. You are listening to NH Unscripted, you lucky, lucky listener. We are coming to you from the green acres like digs of the WKXL Studios. I'm kind of your Mr. Haney type character here, I'm your host, Wade Dudley. Get out your Walkman's 1450 AM, 103.9 FM and Concord, 101.9 FM and Manchester NH.Radio.com, is the URL, and we are just scratching the surface on comedy. Kevin Combs in the house will be right back. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Come on, two cliffhangers in one episode. I'm breaking records here. This is crazy. You wanna listen to what should be another award-winning episode of NH Unscripted? I am here, happy to be out of the home host, Wade Dudley, 1450 AM, 103.9 FM, in Concord, 101.9 FM for the folks in Manchester. NH.Radio.com is our URL where you can find this show, archives of this show, plus all the other great programs here, out there at NH.Radio.com. There's also a button where you can listen to things live. This show comes to you every Wednesday and Friday morning at 9 a.m., click the live button. Yeah, I'll be right there, smiling right back at ya, sending you all the love from the '70s, baby. Kevin Collins is in the house. Kevin, I know we have so much to talk about, but I wanna frame Slottnik and what we wanna do with it. Just for a couple of minutes, if you don't mind. Where do you see this kind of sitting in that that gradation of humor and what can people expect as it kind of evolves or we bring it on? Yeah, I think what you and I have envisioned and what we'll be heading with Slottnik is, as you say, one 15-minute segment of "Vignette" of pure silliness, very much in the style of 1930s radio show. Ferre McGee and Molly and all those other, the shadow, you know, what evil looks in the heart of mind, minds of men in the shadow nose, except that it will be, you know, playful laughs. So I think because you have this radio show, I think that it lends itself to the kind of humor that is purely oral. It is funny lines, funny characters, funny voices, and it will lack that visual part of humor that has so dominated everything these days, you know? So that's my hope that this character keeps coming back and hopefully will become like an old friend and what sort of wackiness is he up to now? I love it because it's such a throwback. I'm with you on everything's visual nowadays and I do love the idea because it's like a book when it's oral. You have to put your own images into the, what you think the character looks like, how you think that they're moving and all that kind of stuff. And I think that's the beauty of books is it lets your mind run freely as opposed to watching a character and now that's the character and it would always will be. And so I'm hoping, and we can bring other people in as the episodes increase in cast wise 'cause it's not always just slot neck. He's not doing monologues all the time. And so I'm really hoping that we can get this to be a biweekly or monthly kind of thing or a weekly thing depending on how it goes and how much you can write. And so I hope for the audience that it turns out to be this kind of a, like a gift. You know, it's funny, I'm getting so in my older age. A lot of what I do now, I'm finding that I really want it to be a gift now to the audience, you know, performances that I would need them to have a little bit more meaning and the early years you'd do them just because you can do them, you know. But nowadays, I really, and I just told Joel up at Jean's Playhouse where this year we'll be doing Christmas Carol up there again and he's inviting me back to play Scrooge. And I told him I'm not well in that I'm having a problem with getting deep breaths and they're working on that and trying to figure it out. But I told him, I said, I don't care if I drop dead on stage. I love the character, I love what you've done with it. And I love the gift that it has become to the audience. And I hope a lot of these things become that way. I hope slot neck, people become enamored with it. You know, and fall in love with it. Even if it's just 15 minutes, you know. Because we did with the old ones. - Yeah. - The Lone Ranger and all of these characters, they're Superman even on, you know, on the radio. We fell in love with those characters and couldn't wait. So, and I'm hoping that that turns out to be the same thing here. - Yep. And we don't have, you know, as many DJs as we used to have who are watching. - Boy, that. - Or characters, yeah. - I mean, look. - With a Charles Lockwood there or Ernie Ginsburg or Juicy Brucey Bradley and some of these other characters that we grew up with back in Boston. That would just, you know, important to us. They were as important as the music. And I think the other thing is that now that you're an actor with a number of years behind you, you have so many things to draw on to create a character that when we were kids, you know, and I mean, in our twenties, you know, we just pulled out, you know, funny guy, number two, 27A, you know, old man, 32B. - Right. - And that was, that was acting to us. And then as time has gone on. And we are looking for richer and richer scripts and things that so that you can take, you know, you can take a Scrooge and you can make him a sympathetic character, you know, rather than just a two-dimensional miser. - Right. - And a nasty old man. And then he becomes, he becomes in the course of the, of the musical, you know, you know, human. He's, he becomes human throughout it, but you have to let the audience want him to become human here. - And that's, and I think that's an important thing, you know, so that as we work on the script and hopefully the character may evolve. And there, you know, there is an opportunity for not just non-secret or kind of silly humor, you know, but also a bit of, you know, pathos perhaps, you know, that maybe there's a moment that, you know, there's something about Spike that gets revealed in his background, you know, which, you know, I haven't got any, any plans. What happens is oftentimes when I write, you know, there's this stuff sort of emergence. - We have met his dad. - Yeah, we have met his dad, the audience has him, but I have, and he, and at one time he had no nose. And how do he smell? Terrible, but also get to, to create the ambiance. You know, so the, you know, it's a, it's a dark night in the city of New York and often the distance, we hear the whaling of a saxophone under the 49th Street L, you know? I love New York in the rain, it makes its own gravy. You know, that kind of... - That line just cracks me up. It's so crystal clear. I mean, to apologize, you were telling a wonderful story about the Jim Crow character. - Hopefully we'll be able to get through the, and if not, you know, maybe on the next step. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But the idea that for Americans, the darker side of our history is that we enslave the whole race of people, just because we couldn't, and just ignored all the things that were wrong, that was evil about it. And I think that the, you know, even the Americans who enslave people had some sense at some level that this was a major flaw in their Americanness, and how they saw themselves as a person. And so back in the 1830s, it was a fellow named TD Rice, who was in the train station, he came across a black man who was singing. Every time I get up, I wheel about and train about and turn just so, every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow, and he thought to himself, "Wow, I've got a character." So he started putting on blackface, you know, very, you know, with exaggerated features. And the character of Jim Crow was, when you think about it, it was a white man pretending to be a black man who was pretending to be a white man. I mean, those are several different layers. And of course, the black-faced minstrelsy lasted, actually it lasted until I was probably like 11 or 12. My parish in Boston had an annual minstrel show, including blackface. Until about 1963, I'd say, somewhere around there. I think at the time when people began, you know, become more aware during the civil rights movement that there was something inherently wrong with the whole idea. And, you know, people often said, "Well, it became illegal." Now, it didn't become illegal, it just people just simply stopped doing it because they realized it was wrong. But at any rate, why did it persist from 1830 until the 1960s? And I think part of it was that there was a sense that these characters were were freeing in the sense that a white man could not, you know, you were talking earlier about that people, you know, see themselves as victims and don't get the joke. But if you can poke fun at yourself, if you're not actually yourself. So in a sense that I think that this character, this blackface minstrel character, which Al Jossen, it was actually a black man in the 1920s, 1930s, and his Bert Williams, who did minstrel see, and he actually put on, you know, blackface, so much to talk about. Oh my gosh, I cannot believe. And I was hooked, I was hooked, I was hooked, I was late for the rest of the story. Oh yeah, this is why NH Unscripted exists. Thank you, Kevin. You have been listening to NH Unscripted. We are coming to you from the Rowan and Martin-like laughing digs of the WKXL Studios. 1450 AM 103.9 FM, that's conquered 101.9 FM for the beautiful souls in Manchester. NHTalkRator.com is our URL. I hope you are enjoying what it is to be. I think a great series of discussions between Kevin and I about comedy. And as we try to put Slodnik up on its feet, we hope you will continue on with us, Kevin. Thank you for being here today. You're welcome, thank you for having me. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)