Connoisseurs of “breaking” have been understandably concerned of late. Bill Hader left the cast of “Saturday Night Live” after last season, and Seth Meyers’s upcoming departure will leave the show with no obvious candidate to carry on its long and distinguished tradition of cracking up during a sketch. (The practice is also known as corpsing, especially in Britain.)
But a “Weekend Update” segment during a November episode gave us reason to be heartened. The cast member Taran Killam was portraying “Jebidiah Atkinson,” who had supposedly panned the Gettysburg Address, back in 1863, and the conceit was that he could travel through time to review other speeches. Talking about F.D.R.’s Pearl Harbor address, this stern figure declares, “You know what date will live in infamy for me? December 8th, 1941, when F.D.R. gave a speech that was so boring-ass …” More words seem called for, but none show up on the Tele-Prompter, and Killam cracks a broad smile and (apparently) ad libs, “I think I misquoted myself.” By this time, Meyers, as news anchor, has escalated his customary smirk into a cackle of laughter. And, of course, the audience hoots and howls.
As promising as the display was, Killam will have to go some distance to match the breaking standards of serial smirker Meyers, or of Hader, whose greatest breaking moments occurred during the mock soap opera “The Californians” and, especially, his “Weekend Update” bits as the club kid Stefon. That character was designed to break: Hader would see some of his lines for the first time on performance night, and cracking him up was a challenge for the writer John Mulaney. He succeeded so often that Hader developed Stefon’s money-shot hands-to-face gesture to mask his laughter.
Yet no one on “S.N.L.” has ever matched Jimmy Fallon’s breaking standards, and probably no one ever will. His fellow cast member Tracy Morgan once complained in an interview about Fallon’s antics: “That’s taking all the attention off of everybody else and putting it on you, like, ‘Oh, look at me, I’m the cute one.’ I told him not to do that shit in my sketches, so he never did.” Both men left the show about a decade ago, but Morgan still seemed to have hard feelings in 2010, when, in an episode of “30 Rock” (the script is credited to Tina Fey and Robert Carlock), his character decides that it would be hilarious to break on an episode of the show within the show, “TGS.” He demonstrates in a rehearsal: “Uh oh, I’m doing something called ‘breaking.’ Blahahahaha. Snort. Heehee. Giggle, giggle. The audience loves this!” Seth MacFarlane’s “Family Guy” piled on in an episode in which the character Peter beats up a cartoon Jimmy Fallon, saying, “This is for laughing and looking at the camera during every comedy sketch you’ve ever been in! Who do you think you are, Carol Burnett?”
I first became aware of breaking (though I didn’t know the word) as a kid, watching Red Skelton on TV. Doing Clem Kadiddlehopper or one of his other characters, Skelton would regularly be overcome by the sheer hilarity of it all and start to giggle. I found this charming, until my father corrected me. He gave me to understand that the most important maxim of comic delivery is to keep a straight face: not to nod or wink at your listener, not to elbow him or her in the ribs, and certainly not to laugh at your own jokes. If you do, you might get a laugh, but a cheap one.
A few years later, reading “Hamlet” in college, I did a mental double take when I came upon a passage from Hamlet’s speech to the players:
That is to say, comic actors who ad lib, and who laugh at their own jokes, are pathetic. I triangulated this quotation and my father’s observation about Skelton, and emerged with the conclusion that breaking is really bad.
Shakespeare and Louis Yagoda to the contrary, audiences really seem to like this stuff. YouTube is filled with it. In this 1965 sketch from Dean Martin’s variety show, Bob Newhart plays a customer furtively trying to return a hairpiece to Martin’s salesclerk—though he’s an unusual sort of salesclerk, one who wears a tuxedo, holds a lit cigarette, and almost immediately starts to grin. When Newhart explains that the toupee fell into some cheese dip at a party, Martin cracks up. From then on, he can’t stop laughing. Eventually, he manages to get out his next line: “Now, do you want a … full exchange?” Newhart ad libs, **“**Well, I … I’d like a straight man who didn’t laugh!” He adds, “You’re sure you worked with Jerry?” Martin (wiping tears from his eyes): “But our stuff wasn’t this funny, I’ll tell you that!” The audience erupts with laughter and sustained applause.
As the “Family Guy” quotation suggests, TV breaking became routinized on “The Carol Burnett Show,” especially after Tim Conway joined the cast, in 1974. Virtually every time Conway was in a skit, the rest of the cast engaged in an epic struggle to maintain a straight face, and usually lost. The chief victim was Harvey Korman, perhaps most memorably in a sketch in which Conway, as a dentist, accidentally injects his hand with Novocaine. Korman, as his patient, cracks a smile at the twenty-four-second mark and, for the rest of time, engages in an unsuccessful struggle to wipe it off his face.
When Burnett was a guest recently on David Steinberg’s Showtime series, “Inside Comedy,” her hesitancy and defensiveness after Steinberg mentioned the constant breaking up on her show—more than thirty years earlier—suggest how sensitive a topic it remains:
The very appeal of breaking may have something to do with the scorn for it felt by many comedians and comic actors. One of these was Peter Sellers. To accompany the end credits of the 1979 film “Being There,” the director, Hal Ashby, inserted a series of outtakes of Sellers, as Chauncey Gardiner, trying to give a particular absurd speech. Over and over again, Sellers cracks up, and the filming has to stop. The actor was furious when he learned what Ashby had done, telexing the director, “It breaks the spell, do you understand? Do you understand, it breaks the spell! Do you hear me, it breaks the spell.” Sellers always felt that the outtakes cost him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Be that as it may, a series of breaking-up outtakes has since become customary for movie comedies, both next to the credits and as a DVD extra.
“S.N.L.” is a special case in terms of breaking because it is, as the name says, live, and breaking can’t be edited out. Interestingly, straight faces were mostly kept in the early—that is to say, pre-Fallon—years. One has a hard time imagining comics with the chops of John Belushi or Chris Farley ever breaking. In a compilation that the Web site Slacktory put together called “S.N.L. actors breaking character,” the highlights are the rare moments when such stalwarts as Will Ferrell, Bill Murray, and Phil Hartman fail to hold it together.
All the clips I’ve linked to so far—and, for good measure, “Colbert Moments: Stephen Cracks Up”—have one thing in common. The audience howls—howls—when the performer breaks. The more it goes on, the more hysterical the howling. Why is that? Burnett got at part of it when she talked about the childhood experience of trying not to laugh in the library or at church. Especially in cases when the actors are desperately trying to stifle the laugh—biting their lip, digging a knuckle into their cheek, nearly smacking themselves in the face—we feel their discomfort, and we laugh partly to try to make them feel a little better.
But there’s a more important reason, and Burnett got at that, too: “They”—the audience—“were in on it.” Viewers felt the thrill of being a part of something special. In a classic 1982 Esquire piece, Ron Rosenbaum went to Las Vegas to examine the notion, prevalent at the time, that Wayne Newton was a great entertainer—and one whose greatness could only be appreciated if you saw his live show. Rosenbaum went to the show and reported that, in the midst of one rousing number, Newton glanced at his watch.
Rosenbaum uses the future tense in the beginning of that description for one reason. He went to twelve Newton shows in a row, and the same thing happened every time.
Watching a comedian break is like being present “at one of those rare moments when the rules went by the board.” Or so we think.
Who was right, Shakespeare or the “barren spectators,” the untold millions who’ve screamed with joy at the spectacle of performers breaking? Not to put a damper on anyone’s joy, but good comic performers get paid a lot, partly to keep a straight face. Probably the most telling mark of Jerry Seinfeld’s limitations as an actor was the fact that, during the entire run of “Seinfeld,” he had a smile on his face. In a Slate piece, Jessica Winter reasonably suggests that the righteousness of breaking depends on the performer: “You’re allowed to break if the audience would never expect you to break.” Thus we can laugh guilt-free when, say, Will Ferrell loses it. But the ritualized eruptions of a Red Skelton or Jimmy Fallon ruin it for everybody else.
Ben Yagoda teaches journalism at the University of Delaware and is the author, most recently, of “How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them.”