Tuesday Voice: Rest in peace, Mike Nichols

A memory of an earlier time

By Bob Boldt

He brought fierce wit, caustic social commentary and wicked absurdity to classics such as The Graduate, The Birdcage, Angels in America, and, for the stage, Monty Python’s Spamalot, in a career that spanned six decades.
    His directorial golden touch led him to be one of only 12 people to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and numerous Tony Awards.

    Nichols was married for more than 25 years to TV news anchor Diane Sawyer, whom he described as bringing him “ultimate happiness.”
                    –“[Tearful stars] pay their respects....,” Daily Mail, November 22, 2014

The time was late 1962. The Cuban missile crisis had just played out after having scared the bejesus out of the whole country. Joe Kennedy had rendered Mort Sahl, the reigning stand-up comic of our generation, unemployed for satirizing his son the President. Mort’s annual salary went from a million dollars a year to under $20,000. (He always warned audiences he was an equal-opportunity offender.) Lenny Bruce was being busted by Chicago’s finest for, among other things, making fun of the Catholic Church. 

Lord Buckley

That winter one could still hear the echo of the uproarious laugh of the ghost of the grandfather of all the “sick” comics, Richard Myrle Buckley, aka Lord Richard Buckley, driven to his grave two years before by the “greedheads,” as he called the people who ran society, who called on the New York City Police to revoke his cabaret license (on a technicality).
    It had not been a good couple of years for comedy. I was studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago when I first found out about a comedy club on Wells Street called “The Second City.” Until that time I was unaware of improvisational comedy. Of course, I was a big fan of the comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May,

May & Nichols

 whose records were a regular staple of my favorite radio program, the Saturday night broadcast of “The Midnight Special” on WFMT-FM. At the time I had no idea of the historical connection between Nichols and May and the Second City. Mike Nichols was a student at the University of Chicago in the 50’s when he met Elaine May and other fellow students who founded the Compass Players. By 1959 the troupe had moved north to form The Second City. The rest is history.
    Nichols’s passing is something of a passage for me as well, a closed chapter, even the end of a whole volume. The comedy of folks like Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, and all the legion of “sick comics,” as they were known, opened comedy into a whole new dimension of social criticism and innovative dimensions of the mind that popular culture had seldom dared to venture into. Nichols and May explored the whole landscape of communication between the sexes: husband and wife, lover and beloved, telephone lady and frustrated man, and not least, mother and son [6:30]:

Their comedy was inventive, improvisational, intelligent, beautifully timed, and above all funny. Who else besides Elaine May could get a laugh with a line like, “I can never believe that Bartok died on Central Park West.”
    In 1961 the pair went separate ways. May wrote screen plays and did small acting parts while Nichols went on to a prominent career directing films. They remained close and staged a number of reunions over the intervening years. Here is Elaine May’s hilarious tribute to Mike at the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2010 [4:03]:

(According to research done by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University, in 2010 for the PBS series Faces of America, Nichols actually is related to Albert Einstein, who was a third cousin on his mother’s side. —Wikipedia)
    I cannot say that I liked all of Mike’s films or that I even saw all of them. If there is any common thread in nearly all his work, it is that of an incisive examination of the morals and mores of the decade he was working in. Who can ever forget “plastic” from The Graduate, Nichols’s follow-up film after his Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? To a generation raised on J.D. Salinger and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence,” The Graduate was a confirmation and a revelation.
    As I said, his passing has closed a book on a whole era of comedy and incisive feature film commentary on life in our time.

Copyright © 2015 by Bob Boldt