High Good Humor

A Thousand Clowns (by Herb Gardner ) performs the delightful trick of turning nonconformity into a comedy instead of a cause. It is a first play written well enough to be a third or fourth play, and a bracing spring tonic for Broadway's ailing comic muse.

Murray Burns (Jason Robards Jr.) has quit his job as writer for a children's TV show called Chuckles the Chipmunk ("When Sandburg and Faulkner left, I left"). His one-room apartment is an insult to the Ladies' Home Journal. Amid the debris is Murray's prize possession, his twelve-year-old ward and nephew Nick. Winningly played by Barry Gordon, Nick is polysyllabic without being precious. Murray and Nick share a zany palship. On a crowded elevator Murray levels an admonitory finger at Nick and says loudly: "Max, there'll be no more of this self-pity. You're 40. It's about time you got used to being a midget."

The school for brainy tykes that Nick attends is bent on detaching him from his kookie guardian, and sends a man-woman social worker team to investigate. With the arrival of these visitors from the small, strange planet of Social Science, the evening rockets into hilarity. The woman (Sandy Dennis) is a girl with dew-behind-the-ears charm and a tendency to fountain into tears of self-reproach at her own unsociological impulses: "I hate Raymond Ledbetter. and he's only nine years old."

To keep Nick. Murray must go back to his old TV job. Murray's notion of re-ingratiating himself is to look out of his agent's mid-Manhattan office window and remark casually. "Why, there's King Kong sitting on top of the Seagram Building. He's crying. Someone should have told him they don't make buildings the way they used to." Out of the squawk box on the agent's desk comes the brassy voice of Chuckles the Chipmunk (Gene Saks) to put the whammy on Murray's whimsy. The ensuing duel between man and machine may be the only known instance in which a squawk box lost a decision. In the final uproarious act Chuckles the Chipmunk does a prostrating parody of a slope-shouldered, splay-fingered humorless comic from TV's human menagerie.

Despite the crisp rifle fire of its gags, A Thousand Clowns would not be so irrepressibly amusing if its characters were not so appealingly human. Playwright Gardner gives each of them the chance to show a core of dignity beneath the crust of daffiness. Like most plays about nonconformity. Clowns fudges its theme by leaving its hero where it should find him, with a job, a girl and responsibilities. The play is very New Yorky in tone, but its high good humor knows no geography. In a uniformly superb cast, Jason Robards Jr., previously starred in somber roles, emerges as the new clown prince of Broadway.

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