The Rise of the Nebbishes: a tribute to Herb Gardner (part 1 of two)

The time, mister... it's not a thief at all like they say; it's something much sneakier... an embezzler; up nights, juggling the books so you don't notice anything's missing. -- from Who Is Harry Kellerman...?

I wish I could speak like a character in a Herb Gardner play. Gardner's people communicate their ideas and feelings in a beautifully straightforward way, which is either funny or heartbreakingly true (often both).

I've been a cultist for Gardner's work since I saw A Thousand Clowns as a teenager. That play and film say more about nonconformity and everyday rebellion than any number of “youth culture” tracts from later eras. It's somewhat odd for a teen to identify with a middle-aged man, but Clowns makes every one of us want to be Jason Robards' Murray Burns (if we aren't already).

Since the Funhouse TV show began in '93, I've paid tribute to Gardner a few times — first with scenes from Clowns and then from his later films (all of which sadly failed at the box office but have developed small but dedicated followings). I've often spoken on the show about Gardner being the “anti-Neil Simon.” Much as I love several of Simon's plays, they work best as comedies (I would set aside the superb Prisoner of Second Avenue from this) and their sentimental aspects are pat and mawkish.

Gardner was an unabashed sentimentalist, but his brand of sentiment was tinged by a rebellion against conformity and a streetwise NYC sensibility, bringing his work closer in tone at points to his friend Paddy Chayefsky than “Doc” Simon (lacking the former's bombast and the latter's taste for easy joke lines).

The only downside of being a Gardner devotee is that he produced a rather small amount of plays and film scripts in a four-decade career — five plays and four film script adaptations of same, one original screenplay, and the libretto and lyrics for a failed musical.

There are a handful of other writings, however, and it's those I want to talk about here (since I heartily recommend you get Gardner's terrific Collected Plays, which is easily found online at vendor sites for books). A Thousand Clowns is always the best intro (the film is currently available in its entirety on YT. Incidentally, why are all digital copies of the film so goddamned dark?). My goal, here, however, is to discuss the out-of-print side of Gardner's work.

There are a handful of uncollected short stories and one acts, but the key item that eluded me until recently is his only novel, A Piece of the Action (1958). Like his plays, the book is semi-autobiographical and to better explain what it's about I first have to explore the singularly unusual phenomenon of “The Nebbishes.”

In preparing this piece, I searched high and low for one source that provided the correct sequence of events. Every obit for Gardner mentioned the Nebbishes and so did every tribute article, but none provided a clear chronology for this seminal period in his life before Broadway.

Given the disparity between the different dates and accounts of Gardner's work on the Nebbishes, I decided the only reliable source is this article posted on the "Fabulous Fifties" blog in an invaluable entry on the Nebbish Sunday cartoons. In the article it's stated that Gardner created the Nebbishes as a cartoon for the Antioch College newspaper. (No information on whether it consisted of one-panel jokes or full cartoons.)

Gardner's initial ambition was to be a sculptor and so, upon graduating college, he worked at a toy company making Nativity scenes (a soul-numbing job shared by the lead character in his play The Goodbye People). He began creating mini-sculptures of these goofy-looking schlemiel figures (presumably the same ones from the Antioch cartoons, although we have no examples of those), presumably doing it for his own amusement. 

They became the ticket to an odd sort of fame for him, though, as he scored a deal in 1954 with Bernad [not Bernard] Creations in Yonkers, NY, who not only sold the Nebbish mini-statues he had designed, but also put one-panel cartoons he created featuring the characters on an insane array of “giftware.”

To quote a small list from a box of paper coasters I bought with the cartoons on them: “The Nebbishes(TM) are available in: cards, notes, banks, ashtrays, pennants, matches, napkins, mugs, gummed labels, coasters, stationery, desk sets, framed prints, glasses, bar towels, buttons, cuff links, tie bars, bar towels, miniatures, dolls, paper weights, waste and desk baskets.”

Gardner spoke about the characters in a 1962 interview for The Evening Independent:

“A Nebbish, by definition, is a lost soul,” Gardner said. “People used to think that a nebbish was a slob. No, a nebbish is the victim of a slob. A slob spills things — and the things get spilled on the nebbish.”

“A nebbish,” Gardner merrily rolled on, “always seems to be wearing galoshes. You look down and it's shoes, but you still think he's wearing galoshes – and it's not even raining. A nebbish is a spectacular nobody. When he walks into a room, it's as though someone just left.” He shook his head sadly.

The best-known cartoon (which was indeed featured on all the objects I listed in the last paragraph) is the one you see above. It became a pop culture touchstone again when Paul Schrader included a variation on the line in Taxi Driver (the wall-hanging with the variation seen in the film would appear to have been a Seventies novelty item that ripped off Gardner's concept — if anyone knows anything further concerning this, leave a comment).

Courtesy of ibdennis.com

The merchandise featuring the Nebbishes were bestselling items for several years in the Fifties. These days you can acquire some of the items for very low amounts on eBay (the postage and shipping costs are 2-3 times the actual price of the item). The mini-statues go for much higher prices, which seems to indicate that they were either thrown away in mass amounts when people grew tired of them, or the soft rubber they were made of didn't age very well.

The most interesting wrinkle is that, in the mid-Fifties, Gardner did segments about the Nebbishes on Shari Lewis's local NYC kiddie show Kartoon Klub. Herb would apparently tell stories about the characters while drawing them on a pad for the kids in the audience and at home. (Also: one of the Nebbish items I bought off eBay proudly announces “as seen in Pageant magazine.” I’m assuming this was simply an article about the merchandise, or the appearance of a one-panel cartoon or two.)

In the meantime, what is most fascinating about the Nebbish gift items is that the cartoons contained on them parallel the work of Jules Feiffer, albeit in a one-panel format (and presented, obviously, in a far more commercial format than a weekly newspaper). Feiffer, in fact, became good friends with Gardner around this time, as he discusses at length in his memoir Backing Into Forward. He got to know Herb after hearing him on the Jean Shepherd show (none of Shep's shows with guests have survived — to date I've only heard of two guests he had on: Gardner and John Cassavetes!).

The Nebbishes cartoons communicate the Fifties fascination with psychotherapy and are definitely another manifestation of the “sick humor” being practiced in the comics of Harvey Kurtzman and Feiffer, and in the standup of Berman, Nichols & May, Winters, and, of course, Lenny Bruce. Gardner's one-panels – which he joked were on “just about every white surface but surgical masks” – obviously anticipate Woody Allen's humor as well. (At that time, the perfect Nebbishes were Arnold Stang and Funhouse deity Wally Cox — the latter was the direct predecessor to Woody, because he was indeed allowed to “get the girl” on Mr. Peepers.)

The gags still work, but what is more fascinating is the copy that appears on the products that attempts to “explain” the Nebbishes. There is no verification that Gardner himself wrote this copy, but it's amazing that the Bernad company went right ahead and joked that the gift items had no real purpose, and the characters depicted on them were total losers (who happened, granted, to be cute and cuddly — there had to be some reason for people to buy the stuff!).

Thus, a person in a card or gift store would read advertising copy like this: Congratulations! You are about to take into your home the one thing more useless than a parakeet... the Nebbish. For a better understanding of the Nebbish, its care and feeding, we suggest you take note of the character analysis within. 

Today the Nebbish, while never a leader of men and not quite suited to the debonair role, still runs on with the human race, wearing his galoshes. He is ever with us: stalwartly nebulous, zealously unaware, eyes forever fixed on his own fuzzy star.

The evil anti-Nebbish.

The neurotic, self-loathing side of the Nebbishes was eliminated from the later version of this “giftware” phenomenon, namely the figurines from the Paula company (pictured to the right) that were obnoxiously sentimental. These little statues haunt my memories of visiting card stores and five & tens in the Seventies.

By the late Fifties, Gardner could apparently write his own ticket with the Nebbishes, so he eventually took them back into the cartoon realm in 1959. He did full strips for two years, crafting very neurotic comedy, clearly drawing on the twisted humor of Krazy Kat and Pogo, without using anthropomorphic animals (the Nebbishes look more like cavemen and women).

Thanks to three extremely generous bloggers we now have copies of some of the Nebbishes strips, since they never were collected in a book. It's definitely free-wheeling stuff that foreshadows the fixation Gardner's theatrical characters have with vaudeville, dixieland, and old-time entertainment.

The first blog entry with scans of Nebbish cartoons can be found on Allan Holtz’s “Stripper's Guide.” Holtz clarifies that the strip began not in 1954 (as claimed by so many cartoon websites) or '55 (as claimed in the bio on the dust jacket of Gardner's Collected Plays), but in January ’59 as a Sunday-only comic. It was distributed through the McNaught Syndicate until January ’61. See Holtz’s entry here.

The first strip, courtesy of Mark Kausler's "CatBlog."

Mark Kausler’s “CatBlog” does us Gardner-ites the favor of seeing scans of Mark’s original paper copies of five strips. He also proceeds chronologically, so we can witness Herb introducing the characters to his readers. Interestingly, Mark compares the Nebbish characters’ contemplation of “truth and beauty” to Dobie Gillis, thereby introducing the specter of the late, great Max Shulman (whom I wrote about here).

Not Herb Gardner.

Mark’s entries also show that Herb was credited as “Hy Gardner” — which is strange, given that a nationally famous newspaper columnist of the day had that name (it’s particularly odd, given that Herb signed “Herb Gardner” in the cartoons themselves; one assumes someone from the syndicate screwed up). Being a diehard fan of print publications, I am always happy to see a non-touched-up, non-“restored” copy of something that appeared in a newspaper, so I urge you to check out Mark’s Nebbishes collection here, here, and here.

The mother lode of Nebbish-mania comes via Ger Apeldoorn’s “Fabulous Fifties” blog. Apeldoorn has also scanned his own copies of, count ’em, eleven original strips. His collection can be found here.

Gardner often remarked that he realized he had to move on from cartooning when his dialogue balloons took up more space than his characters did. His forte as a writer, most certainly, was dialogue, and so he moved into playwriting.

Courtesy of the Fabulous Fifties blog.

But, discounting a few one-act plays and a short story published in an anthology of college writing, he had only one previous piece of published prose writing. I'll focus on that work, his novel A Piece of the Action — which is very definitely a nightmare take on what could've happened with the Nebbishes — in part two of this piece.

Let’s Have a Puppet Show: Hal Willner’s residence at the Stone, Summer 2016

I’m not sure if Hal Willner is a national treasure yet (despite grey hair, he’s not that old). He most certainly is a NYC treasure, though, thanks to the tribute concerts he produces each summer. This year, the Willner shows came early — a week of curated events at John Zorn’s Stone club ran last week, June 14-19. I attended four of the seven shows and was, as always with his work, bowled over by the high quality of the events and the complete lack of press/Net recognition that they even occurred.

So it’s time for another Willner round-up (I wrote about his 2014 events at the Stone here). All four of the shows were sublime but the first and last were extra-special for a number of reasons. In fact, the first was so terrific that I’d count it as one of the best shows I’ve seen in many a month. There is something about the no-frills nature of Willner’s shows that makes them more impressive than big-budget extravaganzas.

It’s been 25 years since Willner produced Amarcord Nino Rota, the first of his famous tribute albums (every one of which is worth your time and attention). To celebrate this milestone he gathered an 11-person band that performed most of the album, with Rota’s Godfather theme thrown in for good measure.

The Rota tribute. Photo by Bruce Pross.

The result was an incredible hour and a half of beautifully played music. Without a single Fellini image being projected, it was one of the finest tributes to Il Maestro than I could imagine. It would be unfair to single out any one of the musicians, so I’ll just mention the four arranger-performers: Karen Mantler, Steven Bernstein, Giancarlo Vulcano, and Steve Weisberg.*

Willner served as the m.c. for the event, offering accounts of two meetings with Fellini. He initially played him the album over a Walkman, and Fellini gave him the title for the project. The second time around he presented the finished album to the filmmaker, not realizing that the lady who is emblazoned on the front cover in a great photo from Juliet of Spirits, Sandra Milo, had written a tell-all memoir, which had recently been published and told stories about Fellini that he was none too pleased with.

Willner’s other “editorial note” concerned The Godfather score, which had its Oscar nomination pulled because Rota was accused of having recycled themes from 8 1/2 . Hal then noted that The Godfather Part II did win for its score, but that it reworked themes from Rocco and His Brothers.

Thankfully, a poster named "Il Grand Waz" has posted an eight-minute segment from the show on Facebook, and has kept it "unlocked" for public viewing. See it here.

The sheer joy of being in a small venue with eleven top-flight musicians playing the chronically bouncy (yet strangely wistful) music of Rota set the bar so high that I couldn’t believe anything could match that performance. The second night was a bit looser (Willner noted there was little rehearsal done for one half of the show). It was a blending of two humorous takes on “beat” language, Ken Nordine’s “Word Jazz” albums and Del Close and John Brent’s 1959 comedy LP How to Speak Hip.

The show was driven by a small jazz ensemble, with four performers providing the verbal silliness. Laurie Anderson and Willner handled the Nordine pieces, while Adam McKay (yes, the director of Will Ferrell vehicles and The Big Short) and Steve Higgins (the announcer on the Fallon Tonight Show) tackled the Close/Brent shtick. Willner and McKay were good, but Higgins was surprisingly great as a late Fifties hipster and Anderson was naturally note-perfect doing the Nordine bits.

On the third night, it was Willner and two DJ friends, Martin Brumbach and “Mocean Worker” (Adam Dorn), creating an imaginatively weird and lively tribute to producer Joel Dorn. Willner named the event after his only “solo” album, Whoops I’m an Indian, but the items being mixed and sampled were quite different from the contents of the original LP.

Using Dorn’s recordings as a base for the soundscape they were creating, the three DJs — Brumbach and Dorn on computers, Willner on a portable record player — overlaid beats, orchestral and jazz snippets, gospel vocals, random noises (at least one courtesy of the indispensable Spike Jones), and odd instrumental sounds Hal created with his iPad as well. Comedy record geek that I am, I was most impressed that Willner interjected bits of W.C. Fields (“The Temperance Lecture”), Laurel and Hardy (from Blockheads, Lord Buckley (“The Nazz”), and a Yiddish-oriented comedian I’ve never heard of (Marty Gale, the LP title: Sexy Stories with a Yiddisha Flavor).

The Dorn tribute. Photo by
Steve Weisberg.

One could sense the respect the trio of mixers had for Joel Dorn’s work because, as the show went on, the Dorn-produced pieces of music were increasingly left alone. Also interesting was Willner’s “mad professor” approach to DJ-ing — he clearly has an amazing record collection and an encyclopedic knowledge of popular music. He also was, oddly, tossing the LPs and record covers onto the floor, leaving me wincing about possible scratches (although when he did this you could indeed get a good gander at some of the covers — including items he chose not to sample, including the kiddie record Let’s Have a Puppet Show).

Willner crafted three “finales” for this week of shows. I couldn’t go to the final two — a prior appointment with a movie festival kept me away from a show centered around Band legend Garth Hudson, and I had seen a prior performance of “Doing the Things We Want To,” the tribute show that found Hal and actress Chloe Webb reading the works of Lou Reed, Kathy Acker, and Allen Ginsberg, while backed by a great rock-jazz band. (For posterity, I will note that there was a late show earlier in the week at the Stone in which Willner read from Ginsberg’s work with piano accompaniment by NRBQ’s Terry Adams.)

The “finale” I did see, which rivalled the Fellini/Rota show for its tightness and joyous “party” vibe, was “Let’s Eat — Feasting on the Firesign Theater.” I should confess at the outset that the Firesign has never been one of my favorite comedy acts, but watching their bits performed as scripted radio comedy — again, with a sublime jazz backing — was sheer bliss.

As always with Willner’s shows, the ensemble he put together was a primary attraction (in this case I knew the work of several of the acting participants, but even if you don’t, Hal’s shows are a terrific gathering of talent). A total of seven musicians under the direction of Steve Weisberg offered a beautiful jazz backing to the comedy (with Weisberg on keyboards and Rob Scheps on sax qualifying as MVPs).

The cast of actors playing multiple roles in each Firesign sketch was equally impressive. Willner, SNL writer Jim Downey, Altman collaborator, scripter, and composer Allan Nichols, and John Ventimiglia (The Sopranos) played the male parts (the first three gentlemen demonstrating that they may have indeed listened to these albums over and over again when they were younger). The welcome twist put on the original material — besides the insanely good jazz backing — was that three women played the female roles and random other voices: Vera Baron, Janine Nichols, and Chloe Webb.

The original cast: the
Firesign Theater in "Nick Danger"

The ensemble performed one of my favorite Firesign bits, the parody of old-time radio private eye shows “The Adventures of Nick Danger” (in this case the full-length episode from the second side of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All)). The show had relatively low attendance (NYCers will only come out to shows that have been declared cool, hip, or otherwise “essential” by some website or publication). But that didn’t change the dynamic of the performance, which was indeed like a party — a party at which surreal, conceptual humor from decades ago was celebrated with many odd but welcome twists and turns.

As with the Nordine/”Hip” show, a full jazz band wasn’t required by the material, but they were indeed a bonus for those in attendance. Willner’s small-venue shows find him indulging all his tastes, and the players he recruits make the events all the more memorable. Hal is producing a free tribute to his friend Lou Reed at Lincoln Center on July 30. I’m not sure who or what material will be included, but it’s certain that this won’t your average “songbook” concert.

One can’t help but be grateful for Willner’s annual salutes in NYC to poets, legendary film composers, conceptual comedians, music producers, and cult performers and musicians. It’s just a matter of waiting for the next show he produces and wondering what he’ll take on next year….

*The other musicians should be named as well: Doug Wieselman (guitar, clarinet), Lenny Pickett (woodwinds), Marcus Rojas (tuba), Curtis Fowlkes, Brian Dye (trombone), Brad Jones (bass), and Kenny Wollesen (drums).