The movies of the late, great Mike Nichols will stand as a lasting testament to his talent, but until recently I was not aware of his earlier, funnier work with the equally marvellous Elaine May. This is a happy survivor from the Golden Years of American TV, a video recording of Mike and Elaine when they worked as Nichols & May. Its a classic of Jewish family-guilt humour, the Mother and Son routine, from the early 1960s, which was largely improvised on the night with little rehearsal or writing down. Nichols later spoke about the creation of the routine in Gerald Nachmans Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, recalling that the sketch idea came easily because we both had extremely difficult Jewish mothers”: There was the time my mother called me and said, “Hello, Michael, this is your mother—do you remember me?” and I said, “Mother, let me call you right back,” and I called Elaine and I said, “I’ve got a really good piece for us tonight.” And I gave her that line and we did the piece that night exactly as it exists now.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 01:03:21 +0000