Editor’s Note: This is the 42nd and final installment in a series of stories researched during Don and Nancy Harrison’s 50th Wedding Anniversary cruise from Sydney, Australia, to San Diego. Previous installments of the series, which runs every Thursday, may be found by tapping the number of the installment: 1, 2,3,4, 5, 6, 7,8, 9, 10, 11, 12,13, 14,15, 16, 17, 18,19,20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41
By Donald H. Harrison
AT SEA, Aboard MS Maasdam — The last day before disembarking from a long cruise can be a melancholy affair for some. Besides having to go through the hassle of packing everything brought of bought and hoping not to have to pay extra luggage fees for the uncomfortable airline ride home, the day is one that the realization sets in that the vacation is just about over, and that reality awaits.
Nancy and I were spared the melancholy for three reasons. First, and most important, the day before disembarkation was our 50th wedding anniversary. Shipboard friends feted us, stewards decorated our cabin, and we even got to celebrate a renewal of vows ceremony conducted by Captain Arno Jutten. Second, our final port was San Diego, the very city in which we live. No uncomfortable airline flights for us. Our neighbor Bob Lauritzen would pick us up. And third, we spent a good part of the day laughing with comedian Gabe Abelson, who was performing that night aboard the Maasdam.
Abelson is a landsman, who proudly told us that his grandfather, Alter Abelson, once served as a rabbi at the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, one of the nation’s very oldest congregations. It was to that congregation that George Washington wrote his famous letter in which he stated that the United States would give “to bigotry no sanction.” That congregation also was a stop for runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. There was a trap door leading from the bima to an escape tunnel.
Abelson, who for four years wrote the monologues for the David Letterman show, naturally had some Jewish jokes to share. Some were ones he told; others were the ones that he savored from other comedians.
For example, he related that on one occasion Jerry Seinfeld was a guest on a pod cast show hosted by Norm MacDonald. Seinfeld announced that he would tell a joke that neither MacDonald nor the show’s producer would get, but that every Jew listening to the podcast would enjoy. MacDonald, doubting he wouldn’t get it, said go ahead, tell the story. Seinfeld said okay, two Gentile businessmen met in the street. One of them asked the other, “How’s business?” The second responded, “Great!”
According to Abelson, the joke was greeted by silence. But almost every Jew listening knew that if the two businessmen had been Jewish, the second man’s answer would have been “Don’t Ask!”
Abelson also related that Robin Williams once was visiting Germany, and was asked by a German reporter why Germans are not known for their sense of humor. Williams responded, “That’s because you killed all your funny people.”
While writing Letterman’s monologues, Abelson wasn’t quite so acerbic, but he was responsible for a good number of zingers. He worked for Letterman during the Clinton administration and the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency. “When the Monica Lewinsky scandal came up, it had to be a dirty joke that was clean enough for television,” Abelson said. When Clinton retained some spiritual advisers to come to the White House to pray with him, Abelson’s joke for Letterman was, “Just what we need: More people in the Oval Office on their knees!”
Abelson said the joke got the biggest laugh because it dealt with a forbidden topic. He said there is a science to writing jokes for late night audiences; you have to tie together two ideas in an unexpected way. When the Monica joke was written, he said, he first thought of Lewinsky performing oral sex under the President’s desk, then thought about the spiritual advisers. Spiritual advisers may wear robes, he thought. Maybe something about Monica’s dress (which was stained, with presidential semen.)? No, that won’t do. What else do spiritual advisers do? “They pray. They are on their knees. Bingo! That is where the two ideas intersect. It is almost like solving for a mathematical equation,” Abelson explained.
I told Abelson that I had anticipated that he was going to somehow juxtapose the words “pray” and “prey,” but he told me that “word play doesn’t work on TV. I almost got decapitated by a cue card; Letterman hated puns. There is a group consciousness. If you tell a pun, they feel that they have to groan. So as Dave would always say, ‘You want to paint a word picture.'”
Another line of which Abelson is proud came after Letterman returned to the air following a quintuple bypass. “When I found out that I needed a quintuple bypass my entire career flashed before my eyes, and, honestly, it was mostly awkward silences.”
On another occasion, Letterman had then First Lady Hillary Clinton as a guest on his show. So Abelson successfully suggested that Letterman introduce her as follows: “I will tell you ladies and gentlemen, if you told me years ago that Hillary Clinton would be on our show tonight, do you know what I would have said? ‘We’ll be on the air six years from now?'”
Abelson’s career started as a teenager telling jokes and stories in comedy clubs. Additionally, he used to send jokes by facsimile machine to the writers for Bill Maher’s Comedy Central. If they used one, they paid $50. One night, of the six jokes Maher told, three had been contributed by Abelson. Before long, he was put on retainer. That meant he would make several hundred dollars for sending in 20 jokes a day exclusively to Maher.
Later in his career, he began faxing jokes to the Letterman show, and again he was put on retainer. However, when the chief monologue writer left the show to write a book, Abelson was asked to fill in as head monologue writer. He kept that job for four years, until the man he replaced, who was a good friend of Letterman’s, came back.
Abelson also wrote for Craig Kilborn, whose show was a Letterman production. Later, he moved from New York to Los Angeles, where he started writing for Jay Leno. Asked to compare the two former titans of Late Night, Abelson started with Letterman:
“Dave is one of the brightest guys I know. He jokes about going to Ball State University; it’s not as if he has 10 PhD’s but he is an avid reader. When he is not doing comedy, he is reading. You can talk to him about anything from comedy to literature. He is really bright, as is Jay. Dave is a much more private person. He keeps to himself. I was the only writer who had face time with him every day, for about an hour, because the monologue was so important, so we would be going over the jokes in the dressing room.”
“Jay was the opposite,” Abelson continued. “He loves to be with people. He will go out for a slice of pizza with you. He is really a down-to-earth, open guy. There was a great lay back atmosphere at that show.”
The two comedians had different tastes in jokes, he recalled.
“Dave would do jokes that probably comedians would get, or people in the industry would get, but no one else would take the chance. My favorite joke ever that he did was written by two guys who used to fax things into Johnny Carson. The joke was, ‘Everybody in New York is sick with the flu right now; in fact the two guys who wrote this joke got sick with the flu, had to go home, and couldn’t finish it.’ Nobody else would perform that joke.”
“Jay did a much longer monologue,” Abelson said. “His popularity was because he was very fair and balanced, more of a carry over from Johnny Carson. …It was all about the joke, never about Jay or anything. The joke had to stand on its own as a solid strong joke. Jay poked fun at both sides equally; you never knew where he really stood politically.”
Assessing the current late night hosts, Abelson said each one is doing his own thing. “Jimmy Fallon is variety, and he’s an incredible musician. He carries over some bits from Saturday Night Live. Seth Meyers does too, with the over-the-shoulder photos. He has a shtick: ‘Jokes that Seth Can’t Tell,’ in which he has two women, one Black, the other Latina. One is a lesbian. They tell jokes that he couldn’t, but it’s okay when they tell them. Steven Colbert is the intellectual, very political. And Jimmy Kimmel, who was not political, has become very outspoken. His monologue is very different, it’s not set ups and punch lines. He is very much a spokesman if something bothers him.”
So, why isn’t Abelson doing late night anymore?
“I do some jobs, I’ve worked on a couple of shows,” he responded. “There is agism in television and in comedy. So, I go back and forth between writing and performing. Now I’m doing this mentalism act, which is new for me. I’ve always wanted to do it.”
He demonstrated for Nancy and me a bit he would do later on stage. He had two sets of five matching cards. He asked Nancy to put them in any order, and that he would predict, card by card, which ones she would lay out. He put down one card first, and Nancy followed. Then the next card, and Nancy again followed, and so on through the five cards. When they turned over their cards, he had correctly predicted the exact order that Nancy would choose.
“How did you do that?” asked Nancy, who was amazed.
“Quite well,” he responded.
That was true. And Abelson also does set up and punch lines very well. Also voice impressions of famous people.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com