In California: Learning to Laugh

By Gregory Jaynes

Regard Malcolm L. Kushner, humor consultant, and how he got to be this way.

Boy grows up in Queens, N.Y., thinks he's funny, but cannot see how to turn his mirth into money. Young man gets a degree in communications, then a graduate degree in language theory, but cannot make heads or tails of what he's up to. "There is never any resolution in this," he says to himself. "You come in and argue theories, social sciences, and the next week you come in and argue all over again."

Then a thought hits: "Law. Law is an applied science. O.K., you cite other cases, but eventually a judge at least gives you an answer." Man gets a law degree, practices two years, then brings himself up short again: "I didn't ever really want to be a lawyer. I was just a professional student. All I figured was that at least I could talk to my cousin the lawyer. I've been representing a lot of airlines, but how many crushed cargo cases can I stand?" Thus Malcolm L. Kushner, 32, becomes a humor consultant.

His geographical path has been as circuitous as his career. In New York City, driving a cab in between studies, he went onstage twice at Catch a Rising Star, an auditioning house for promising comics, only to be adjudged on the descent. In Los Angeles, ever the scholar at the University of Southern California, he went on The Gong Show, a sort of television Ship of Fools, and won second place with a trained plant act. (He put a fern through a hoop, shot a plant out of a cannon, sawed a plant in half. An old lady from Santa Monica beat him with a Sophie Tucker impersonation.)

In San Francisco, practicing law, he took sum of his assets: a background in communications and language; solid perception that a stuffed-shirt world could stand to lighten up; natural wit; a smile that could sell used snuff. Then he took to the streets.

That was two years ago. In the course of his humor counseling since, he has tried to find a funny bone in the Internal Revenue Service, the San Francisco police department, the board of directors of the California Business Bank, any number of software manufacturers in Silicon Valley, the University of Santa Clara business school, a group of Navy missile engineers and the National Conference of State Legislatures, all of which have paid hundreds of dollars to hear him out. Though Kushner has had to shore up his income by writing for legal newspapers, his oddball calling just now appears to have reached the brink of earning him a living.

"So what do you charge?" an advertising executive asked Kushner one morning. It was one of those soft San Francisco days--a day that makes a fellow feel like tossing his hat in the air--and Kushner had gone into it wearing his best three-piece blue suit ("Hey! When you're a humor consultant, you can use all the credibility you can get!"). The air in his conference room, however, was not as rosy as that outside. The executive, not a warm man it would seem, had conceded Kushner 30 minutes only after lengthy persuasion. He had already brushed aside, without seeking the price ($1,500), an internal training program that would, among other things, help diffuse tension in the office. "We manage by fear," he had said.

The man had briefly toyed with the idea of having Kushner prepare a speech ("$800, and that's peanuts to a guy like you!"), but then appeared to let it drop. The talk had come down to jokes. For $250, Kushner would insert ten one-liners, where appropriate, into a company speech.

"We're structuring a modularized speech . . ." the executive was saying.

"It could use some humor," an assistant piped up.

"Especially when delivered by you," the head man said. You could have heard a tear drop.

Kushner passed out some of his self-advertisements--"Hey, if you have a puppy or a bird cage, they love this stuff "--and left with the vague prospect of punching up a speech, the kind of work he likes least.

In a restaurant on Fisherman's Wharf, the humor consultant described his unusual vocation. "All I'm trying to do is show where humor fits in. It's not a yuk a minute. It's not a bunch of jokes. Humor forces you to think about every point you're going to make during a speech. All it does is reinforce traditional practices but in a more pleasant, fun kind of way . . ."

A woman sitting at the next table had just spilled her drink, and it began to drip slowly into Kushner's pocket. "Hey! That's all right. I like to see that gravity still works once in awhile. Otherwise I get worried."

". . . all I'm doing is fitting humor into traditional communications theory, into traditional management policy. In Silicon Valley, my message is that high tech doesn't have to be dry tech. There you have techies talking to techies, and even techies think it's boring."

That said, the humor consultant had a date to address the sales representatives of a computer data-storage firm. He drove 30 miles out of town to a sterile hotel and was met by a company official, who gave him the rundown on the firm's work before Kushner made his speech. Kushner likes to tailor his talk to the trade of his listeners. "For example," he says, "in a marketing meeting you might say that trying to meet a sales quota during a recession is like writing a speech for Marcel Marceau."

The official explained that the company offers businesses storage for data backup against the threat of disaster. "Earthquakes, fires, these things are very positive for us." Saboteurs are also positive peddling points, he said, as well as employee drug addicts selling information for dope. He spoke proudly of "seismic bracing" in the company's storage vaults.

Kushner then asked him about nuclear war.

"With what's out there, firepower-wise," the official said, "we figure if we're nuked nobody's going to worry about data backup."

Kushner nodded and took a note. The official hypothesized without even bothering to check any facts: "If the Bank of America computer goes down, you're talking $500 million a day. Four days and a bank is history." He said that "data-processing managers are dull schmucks" and that what they offer is a "dull sale" and that was why the humor consultant was called in.

At the lectern, Kushner opened with "Whether or not you agree that the world needs a humor consultant, I think you'll agree that it can use one less attorney" and got a laugh. He went on to point out that humor was important in sales because "people pay more attention to humor. Maybe you don't think so, but remember the class clown? We always listened to him."

Kushner talked about the importance of brevity and gave an example of a one-two-three approach: "It is safe from sabotage. It is safe from drugs. But it won't clean your oven." The pitch, he counseled effectively, would be remembered more because of its humor than a pitch with three dry selling points.

In an hour he had his audience doing "relevant anecdotal exercises" and "ad libs for awkward moments." The audience plunged in with happy abandon, though the wit sometimes was about as sharp as a filleting knife left out in the yard for a year.

What if, Kushner asked, a loud noise interrupted their presentation? What could they say to retain attention?

"Gas," a woman said to giggles.

Another listener volunteered, "Hmmmmm, I didn't know my mother-in-law was in town." Kushner gave him good marks.

When it was over, he had them all thinking about humor, and he said that was the best part of the job. He recalled a bank president who had never cracked a joke, a man rarely given to laughter. After the Kushner treatment, the executive did not exactly become a barrel of monkeys, but he was able to cut loose with the odd one-liner. One venom-tongued supervisor, accustomed to dressing down tardy employees, now has the habit of saying, "So glad you could make it for lunch." The message is still clear, but it is not so much a brick to the jaw.

More than anything, Kushner seems to have set himself the task of softening harshness and livening tedium. If there is irony in this personal aim, it is that a good humor consultant earns far less than a bad lawyer, while a man who would choose levity over litigation is, by most lights, beyond price.