If You Ask Me by Betty White Read Free Book Online

entirely different beast.
    Witnessing good stand-up makes you appreciate what people like Craig Ferguson and David Letterman and Jay Leno do every single night, night after night. Sure, they have writers, but they have to put their stamp on it, too. Night after night. Did I mention that?
    I asked Craig once, “Are you getting a little roadweary?”
    And he said, “Not all the time.”
    When you’re a guest on one of these shows, you’re successful when there’s great repartee. Now, we know the hosts are accomplished comedians, so the question is, can guest and host play well together?
    The producer has some assistant call you for a preinterview, which I hate. The assistant calls, and then you end up giving your whole interview to them, and you don’t want to repeat it when you’re on the air! It’s obviously a safety net for the host, so he has something to fall back on.
    But when I’m on Craig’s show, we never go near those notes. He’s got them all there on his desk, but we just start talking.
    Usually when I appear on his show, I’m doing a sketch involving some kind of costume, and I’m always short of cash. That’s a running theme. But recently I was on and we didn’t have any idea where we were going.
    And Craig, like Tim Conway, is one of those people you have trouble making eye contact with for fear of cracking up. He has these eyes that just dance. So when I’m on his show, on the couch, I talk to him looking down at the floor, and he talks to me peering intently into my eyes.
    So we sat down and just started having this easy conversation, and we didn’t know where we were going or how we were going to end, but somewhere along the line it just got funny. I can’t tell you how or when, but it did. And then it just came to its natural end. So at the end, the crowd was clapping and laughing, and he hugged me and whispered in my ear, “We did it! What did we do?”
    It goes back to that repartee and comedic timing both. You have to listen and play off what someone else says. You can’t be thinking of what you’re going to say next or it dies right there. If you listen to people, it triggers something in you to which you can respond. It’s about both really listening and hearing that funny track that you can pick up and deliver back.
    I can’t tell you it’s innate. I don’t think it is. But I think you have a propensity for it. And after that, practice helps a lot.
    But this is not stand-up comedy.
    With comedy, as opposed to drama, you get an instant review. With a dramatic performance you act up a storm and hope it works.
    Doing comedy—if you don’t get the laugh, you know you bombed.
    It’s a tough business.

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    W hen a script comes to me, I read through the whole thing so I know what the story is about, who the other people are, and where they’re coming from. It gives me an overview.
    Then I go back and start learning.
    I have trouble acting with a script in my hand, so I memorize as quickly as I can to get both hands free.
    Other actors that I’ve worked with are more comfortable holding their script through dress rehearsal, like a security blanket. Everyone works differently.
    On a series, every week it’s inevitable that at some point someone forgets what the next line is. In front of a live audience, there is that deadly silence. You all look at one another, wondering, Is it me? So we just stop and start to giggle in spite of ourselves, which spreads like wildfire in the audience. We have a good (??) laugh, then we just go back a couple of lines and start where we were before.
    Similarly, if you stumble or your tongue gets twisted, you can stop and start up again with the line before, and the editors can make their magic.
    Though technology has advanced so dramatically and the equipment is better (since, say, The Mary Tyler Moore Show ), the actors do it more or less the same according to whatever works for us, personally.
    You go with it—and pray a