Film

What is comedy? And what is the requirement for comic success today? Why should some perfectly intelligent people (never mind hoi polloi) – consider My Favorite Year funny? Such questions preoccupied me upon seeing Richard Benjamin’s first directorial venture, and though My Favorite Year is quite adequately directed, I was particularly pleased that it kept Mr. B. behind the camera rather than in front of it, my most unfavorite place for him.

The time is 1954 and the hit TV laugh show is Comedy Cavalcade, starring Stan “King” Kaiser (for which read Your Show of Shows and Sid Caesar). A slipping but still highly popular movie star, Alan Swann (i.e., Errol Flynn, as filtered through Peter O’Toole) is about to be the guest on the show to pay off his debt to the IRS. A notorious womanizer and even more spectacular toper, Swann is assigned a bodyguard (or bottleguard) for his New York stay in the person of Benjy Stone (ne Benjamin Steinberg), the youngest writer on the Comedy Cavalcade staff, and an avid Swann fan ever since he graduated from pablum to popcorn. (My Favorite Year was produced by Mel Brooks’s company, and young Brooks was a writer on YSofS.)

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John Simon

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What is comedy? And what is the requirement for comic success today? Why should some perfectly intelligent people (never mind hoi polloi) – consider My Favorite Year funny? Such questions preoccupied me upon seeing Richard Benjamin’s first directorial venture, and though My Favorite Year is quite adequately directed, I was particularly pleased that it kept Mr. B. behind the camera rather than in front of it, my most unfavorite place for him.

The time is 1954 and the hit TV laugh show is Comedy Cavalcade, starring Stan “King” Kaiser (for which read Your Show of Shows and Sid Caesar). A slipping but still highly popular movie star, Alan Swann (i.e., Errol Flynn, as filtered through Peter O’Toole) is about to be the guest on the show to pay off his debt to the IRS. A notorious womanizer and even more spectacular toper, Swann is assigned a bodyguard (or bottleguard) for his New York stay in the person of Benjy Stone (ne Benjamin Steinberg), the youngest writer on the Comedy Cavalcade staff, and an avid Swann fan ever since he graduated from pablum to popcorn. (My Favorite Year was produced by Mel Brooks’s company, and young Brooks was a writer on YSofS.)