I’m a sucker for classic, really classic comedy. And yes I can totally appreciate today’s headliners – the Will Ferrells, Judd Apatows, Tiffany Haddishes, Kevin Smiths, et al. But harken me back to the days when dialogue was snappy and the jibes more creatively back-handed (you hockey puck!) Finding reasons to laugh while in jail posed its own unique challenges, but laugh I did at the ridiculous Farrelly Brothers co-joined twins caper, Stuck On You, starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear, and mercifully saved by Eva Mendes in a bikini.

Steve Martin famously named one his albums Comedy is Not Pretty, and I get it. In some ways making people laugh is like a sleight-of-hand magic trick or Hollywood stunt; something that looks incredibly easy until you see how it’s done. Realizing this is when I came to truly appreciate that the most clever comic entertainment, in all its forms, begins with the writing.

From slapstick to SNL, effective comedy is essentially a team effort. The best jokes and gags seem effortless, but in fact are created by hours of rehearsals and teams of writers. Silent era stars like Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton prepared endlessly for epic scenes, and barely had the need to create dialogue! (The stellar Keaton was lauded by later admirers more than once, starring in the 1961 Twilight Zone episode “Once Upon a Time” and with a fitting cameo in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie.)

After having cut their chops on vaudeville stages and in Borscht Belt resorts, comic legends like Milton Berle, George Burns, Sid Caesar and others went on to lengthy, memorable careers in film and television. (Caesar’s ground-breaking TV revues launched the writing careers of Brooks, Larry Gelbart (“M*A*S*H*”, Tootsie,) Buck Henry (The Graduate) and Carl Reiner (“The Dick Van Dyke Show.”)

(Please, do your funny bone this favor; go online and listen to Brooks’ and Reiner’s beyond-classic duet “The 2000 Year-Old Man,” in which the eponymous avatar testily declares, “I have 42-thousand kids, and none of them ever come to see me!”)

Sitcoms, late-night talk shows and even animated comedies created stables of writers to crank out their nightly and weekly laughs. Conan O’ Brien outdid himself as the “Simpsons” writer who penned the unmatched “Monorail” episode, a loving and hilarious paean to Professor Harold Hill and The Music Man. Seth McFarlane’s “Family Guy” pays endless sketch tribute to the classics, few better than the pre-legal “Bag of Weed” musical number, recreated almost note-for-note from “The Old Bamboo” dance scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. If you’ve never seen them, promise me that right after this you’ll click back over to YouTube and watch. You’re welcome.

Speaking of talk shows, the original king of Late Night, Johnny Carson, employed over the years dozens of writers to pen his breezy, seemingly effortless monologues (and it’s said that the host knew immediately when a joke failed with his studio audience.) In addition to trophy wives, Carson also jones-ed for discovering and promoting young talents, and is credited with breaking on “The Tonight Show” the careers of everyone from Jerry Seinfeld to Garry Shandling, Richard Pryor to Freddie Prinze, and others too numerous to mention.

If you really, really need some laughs, go back to YouTube and watch the classic Carson episodes featuring his favorite stand-up legends like Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Buddy Hackett and Rodney Dangerfield (who holds the record for most Tonight Show appearances, with 70.) Milton Berle, looking svelte and dapper on the couch to promote his 80th birthday TV special, had perhaps the best one-liner I’ve ever heard. When straight-man Carson gushed the compliment, “you have the body of a 20-year old,” Berle, without missing a beat replies, “I’d love to have the body of a 20-year old, but there’s never one around when you need one!

In the 6 weeks or so since I’ve had the “free” time to formulate this dispatch, I’ve read several books on the so-called “golden years” of cinema and television, and comic writers are often front and center. Playwright/director Garson Kanin, who won both an Oscar and Tony award for his Born Yesterday, chronicles many often-hilarious (and sometimes heartbreaking) episodes in his memoir, simply entitled Hollywood. And Kanin should know from funny; he was married to screenwriter/actress Ruth Gordon, who wrote the razor-sharp dialogue for the best comedies of Hepburn and Tracy, and who, in her ’70s, starred in the cult classic Harold and Maude. Kanin also helped bring east coast writers into the celluloid arena, like Algonquin Round-Tablist Dorothy Parker, who penned the paradoxical pearl, “Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have their head examined.”

Herein proclaimed: I’ll commit right now to a future post on masters-of-mirth Billy Wilder and Mel Brooks, who wrote and directed, respectively, my two favorite comedies of all-time: Some Like it Hot (1959) starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe plus some epic cameos; and Blazing Saddles (1974), a surreal western farce that, in my humble opinion, is also a bias-busting social landmark.

Let’s close this canon with a nod to “Merrie Melodies”, especially those cartoons from the golden era of directors “Friz” Freling and Chuck Jones, created at their “Termite Tenement” studio on the Warner Brothers back lot. (And if ya didn’t know, Mr. Jones also produced the classic animated Grinch, with added genius from the voice of Boris Karloff.)

The brilliant “Robin Hood Daffy” from 1958 gives us today’s post title, “Ho ho, very funny, ha ha…it is to laugh.” Or consider 1957’s “Ali Baba Bunny”, when Bugs and Daffy emerge from a long rabbit-hole journey to Bugs’ declaration: “At last, Pismo Beach, and all the clams we can eat!”, then whereupon finding themselves in the Arabian desert, disclaims his directions with “Hmmm, I knew we shoulda toined left at Albuquerque…”

But my fave kicker of all comes in 1953’s “Duck! Rabbit, Duck!” when hapless hunter Elmer Fudd, bewildered to the brink of sanity trying to determine what hunting season he’s in, finally loses it when he’s told by Bugs and Daffy that it’s actually….baseball season!!

So until next time, th-th-th-that’s all folks!