Mike Nichols on standup comedy

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 3rd, 2004

I suppose that, since Nichols has been a director for nearly 40 years, folks run out of things to ask him… so they eventually gotta ask him about standup again. Ian Caddell interviews Nichols for Straight.com on the occasion of the release of his latest movie, “Closer”

“I think the line that connects to films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and [1971’s] Carnal Knowledge is that I started as a comedian,” he says. “All the best people started out as comedians, even surprising people like Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, and Harold Pinter, to name but a few. When I worked with Elaine May, I wasn’t very good at standup comedy. But we worked on what we called ‘people scenes’, and because we were a man and a woman, we did scenes that required a man and a woman. It was what we were best at and what interested us the most. It went on to be a part of our other work. Elaine’s movies The Heartbreak Kid and A New Leaf are on the same subject. It wasn’t particularly about the sex. I think that more than anything else, it was living in a relationship, or, in the case of Carnal Knowledge, a series of relationships. I think that’s where it came from and why it continues to interest me.”

Nichols (and, to a lesser extent, May) were the early models for those who left comedy for film after making an initial big splash. If, as Nichols maintains, he “wasn’t very good” at standup, he was good enough (or the team was good enough) that they made multiple, high-profile television appearances, cut a comedy album and probably flirted with a sitcom pilot or two before putting standup in the rear view.

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