Feature Wilde About Humor Larry Wilde is a local comedian with a national reputation in stand-up, and as an author of books of and about humor, he remains in a class by himself.

Don Huntington

Four decades ago Larry Wilde told his first joke in the auditorium of his Lincoln High School in Jersey City, New Jersey:

"A bee is such a busy soul; He hasn't time for birth control. And that is why in times like these There are so many sons of Bs."

It was a great joke for a 14 year-old! The kids all laughed, though Larry remember at least one teacher whose face clouded up like a thunderstorm.

Wilde's life has revolved around comedy and comedians. When he was young he never had sufficient money to buy a ticket to any Broadway show, but learned the trick of mingling with the crowd during the intermission of a comedy show and then, when the call came for the show to resume he would just saunter in with the others and take an empty seat. In this way he was able to see the second act of every show that came to town.

The trick worked just as well in any venue. He was able, for example, to see Danny Kay's second act 26 times in three cities. And it never cost him a dime.

He went into the Marines in 1946, enlisting in order to get the GI Bill. After boot camp on Paris Island he was stationed in Camp LeJeune, North Carolina where he noticed there was no entertainment except movies, so he put together a band of guys doing routines - putting on blackface and doing an impersonation of Al Jolson. It was a great success!

He put the show on in nearby Jacksonville for four weekends to standing-room-only crowds. Finally a Special Services officer invited Larry to put the show on in the camp theater. It ran three weekends. Six or seven thousand guys saw the show. The Commanding General gave him a commendation, a promotion to Corporal, and a special assignment so he became the Marine Corps' first non-commissioned comedian.

Wilde spent the next two years producing and putting on shows. Even on maneuvers he would have the entertainment lined up and ready to go.

After being discharged from the Marine Corps, Wilde enrolled in the University of Miami putting himself through school by doing the Jolson routine. One night the record player broke down. Wilde had to tell jokes and that night decided he wanted to be a stand-up comedian.

Larry Wilde is a comedian who has been granted the gift of walking in the company of the giants. He was on a first-name basis with Jack Benny, George Burns, Danny Thomas - more icons from the world of comedy than he could list or even easily remember. And he has published 53 works of humor with combined sales of over 12 million copies. The New York Times once called him, "America's Best Selling Humorist."

Recorder for Comedic Giants

Larry first major literary effort, and his magnum opus, was a volume called Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. He started the project because he had been trying to become successful as a stand-up and hoped to get some tips from successful comedians.

One day a friend told him that he was going to pick up Ed Winn. Larry told him he wanted to interview Winn, so the next morning the friend phoned from New York's Plaza Hotel and said that Winn would like to talk to him.

Larry said that he took his tape-recorder, which in those days was a reel-to-reel monstrosity the size of a piece of luggage, and met the man whom George Burns and others publicly declared to be one of the world's great comedians.

Larry found Ed Winn to be a gracious and interesting human being; they talked for a couple of hours.

A girl Wilde was dating at the time subsequently transcribed the session from the tape. It occurred to him that he had never read such material and decided to collect a number of these from various comedians and put them into a book.

So when he heard that George Jessel, the man whom President Harry Truman called "The Toastmaster General of the United States," was coming to town, Wilde contacted him, made an appointment, and showed up with his tape recorder.

Jessel could always make people laugh, and Larry said that he surely made him laugh out loud when he entered Jessel's room in the Aster Hotel and found him lying on his bed, smoking a big stogie, and wearing a cap with the word CAPTAIN prominently displayed above the bill.

Jessel turned out to have a fine mind behind the cigar and beneath his outlandish hat. Their interview led into discussions about education and philosophy.

At the conclusion of their time together Jessel asked him, "Who else do you want to interview?"

"Jack Benny has always been my idol," Larry replied.

Jessel walked over to the phone and placed a call to Beverly Hills.

"Hello, Jack. How are you? I just read in Variety that you were a big hit in Chicago last week."

"Listen, Jack, a young fellow here is doing a book on comedians and he would like to interview you. You should talk to him."

Larry told Jack Benny. "I'll be in Hollywood the next week. Can I come see you?" The joke is that Larry hadn't been planning to go to Hollywood, at all but was just hoping that telling Benny that he was planning to be there would encourage him to make an appointment.

And it worked! Benny told Wilde to come ahead, so he borrowed money, jumped on an airplane, and soon was sitting in Jack Benny's office. The great man must have been aware of the fact that Larry was very nervous.

"Just call me Jack," he said.

The three of them - "Jack," Larry, and that old brief-case-size tape recorder - spent a couple great hours together. Larry was flying high!

"Do you have access to everybody?" Benny asked when they finished.

"I would like to talk to George Burns."

"You call him at 734-0236 and tell him that I gave you a looooong interview, and he should too." Burns made an appointment to meet Larry the next Friday.

Before leaving Jack Benny's office, Larry asked his secretary if he knew how he could get in touch with Danny Thomas. He got the phone number and address and wrote to Thomas five times over a number of months without a single response.

Finally, Larry called the phone number he had been given and got Danny Thomas' son, Tony, out of bed at 11 in the morning. Tony gave him his father's current number.

Larry spent a nervous half hour pacing back and forth in front of the phone booth, and then finally called him at 11:45 with fear and trembling, thinking that he might be sleeping until the middle of the afternoon, as Tony was.

Thomas answered, however.

"Where are you?" he asked.

"I'm at 420 Oak Street."

"How fast can you get here?"

Thomas had planned to play golf, but made time to talk with Larry instead. The two of them had a great discussion together. There isn't space to talk about each comedian that Larry interviewed, but there was one other remarkable experience. The third person he interviewed was Maurice Chevalier, who was famous for being a singer and actor, rather than a comedian. However, Larry was very aware of the man's powerful comic talent because he had seen the second act of his one-man show on Broadway.

Chevalier would always do very effective stand-up comedy routines between songs.

Larry didn't have money to buy a ticket to the concert so he again pulled his trick of sneaking into his show with the returning attendees to watch Chevalier's second act.

When he arrived backstage the man, himself, came out of his dressing room wearing a blue terry-cloth bathrobe with a towel around his neck.

"After all these decades," Larry said. "I can still see him vividly in my memory."

Chevalier approached Larry, and told him that he looked just like Gilbert Beacaud, who was a famous French singer of the time. Chevalier made an appointment to meet with him the next week at New York's historic Delmonico Hotel.

It took Wilde three years to get interviews with all 16 comedians and to finally finish the manuscript.

Getting the book published took nearly as much persistence as writing it had been. There's a Catch-22 problem with the publishing field; they won't consider a book for publication even if it is a good one unless you've already had something published. Larry only found a publisher after receiving 15 letters of rejection.

Thirty years after his book was published, another publisher reissued the book. Larry wrote a revised introduction and added a chapter on Jerry Seinfeld.

After the first book, Larry decided to cover the comedy writers, and over the next two years wrote a companion volume called, How the Great Comedy Writers Create Laughter, which included interviews with such people as Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, and Neil Simon.

In part due to the success of the books Larry worked for decades as a stand-up comedian opening for such household names as Ann Margaret, Andy Williams, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Debbie Reynolds, and Jack Jones.

Larry had achieved an exhilarating level of success. He worked places like the Copacabana, which was the top venue for a comic.

"A Pole Walked into a Bank," and Other Offenses to Political Correctness

Larry's next big writing project was a semi-autobiographical novel. He pitched it to the Editor-In-Chief of Pinnacle Books, who sent him a really lovely rejection letter.

Much later the editor called him. "We just had a meeting," he said. "You would be a perfect guy to write a book of Italian or Polish jokes."

There's no explaining how the editor had picked him for the task, since Wilde had never told a Polish joke in his life. But he was going to send him a check for the project, so Larry took $50 worth of quarters and his tape recorder to the curb outside the Student Union Building at UCLA and posted a sign: "I'll pay a quarter for every good Polish joke you can tell."

He also carried out some serious library research, uncovering ethnic jokes dating back to the 18th century, and finally wrote a book called The Official Polish/Italian Joke Book.

It was a double volume. If you held it one way the title said, "The Official Polish Joke Book." If you flipped it over the title said, "The Official Italian Joke book."

The social milieu of the 1970s was radically different from the politically correct conscience that is in vogue today. A cultural shift affecting humor has made such books de classé but Larry's little volume became the largest-selling joke book in the history of the printing press.

He capitalized on the success of that first volume by coming out with a number of sequels containing other ethnic and social pairings including Jewish/Irish, Black/White, and to carry the offenses to another component of society, did the Virgins/Sex Maniacs joke book.

Larry says that he has gone to used bookstores in a thousand cities looking for copies of those books, but they are never available. People apparently hang on to them. (Or perhaps people have burned them all.)

Larry has written a number of other books including a book called Treasury of Laughter, which contains the subtitle, "Fastidiously Funny Stories, Jokes, & One-liners From America's Master of Mirth For Speakers, Speechwriters, Toastmasters, MCs, Executives, CEOs and All Who Love to Laugh."

He wrote another volume called "How to Tell Jokes for Fun and Profit."

In 1974 Larry established April as the National Humor Month, which is intended to heighten public awareness of the positive power of laughter. It begins each year on April Fool's Day. (When else?)

Larry and his wife Maryruth moved to Monterey 12 years ago. He had come to the Peninsula several times a year for speaking engagements and performances and fell in love with the place.

Larry is the founder and director of The Carmel Institute of Humor, which fosters research and discussion on the role humor plays in wellness, longevity, and optimizing human relations.

He had a third career for the past two decades as a motivational speaker, drawing upon the valuable insights into the topic provided by his years of experience as a comedian.

Larry published a book with the title, When You're up to Your Eyeballs in Alligators and subtitled How to Use Your Sense of Humor for Unlimited Success, Better Health & Staying Sane When the World Gets a Little Crazy.

The book is still a best-seller.

Larry has spoken for corporate audiences from such companies as AT&T, GE, Honeywell, and Unisys, as well as numerous groups of healthcare professionals.

Most recently he has begun a fourth career by putting together a show entitled, "Going on Ed Sullivan - A one-man show about life in comedy and the comedy in life." It begins with clips of his appearances on such shows as Sanford and Son, Rhoda, Mary Tyler Moore, and Barnaby Jones, as well as appearances on more than 20 TV commercials.

Then Larry tell the story of his life from his days as a shoeshine boy, through selling song sheets in front of Woolworth's, up through his becoming a comedian and author. "The show is intended to be seriously funny and funnily serious," Wilde said. The show opens in November at the Carl Cherry Theater, Carmel.

Wilde has done stand-up in all 50 states and in what seems like thousands of cities. His lasting mark, however, won't come from any of those innumerable shticks but from the books that he has written.

Wilde says that George Jessel told him something that stood him in good stead throughout his career as a writer:

"Everything dies except the written word. Men that have been gone for thousands of years still impact our lives because of what they put down on paper."

Some of Larry's books are in the Library of Congress, and will be around - and probably still be read - when memories of him have vanished in the mists of time.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay so appropriately wrote,

"Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die!" So Larry Wilde will never die - at least not as long as people love to laugh and remain interested in good humor and in the great people who provided this for us throughout the twentieth century. He is leaving a marvelous legacy!