Tom Gammill’s comedy credentials are hard to beat.
Part of the first generation of Harvard Lampoon alumni who packed writers’ rooms, he, along with his partner, Max Pross, wrote for the original cast of “Saturday Night Live” before helping start “Late Night With David Letterman.” They moved on to write for, among other seminal shows, “Seinfeld” and “The Simpsons,” where he worked for 22 years.
Gammill has also written for Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Garry Shandling and Larry David. Now, at 69, he is stepping into the spotlight, playing the comic artist who has perhaps mattered to him most of all: Ernie Bushmiller, author of “Nancy,” once a staple of daily newspaper comic pages going back to the 1930s.
Over the years, Gammill’s love of “Nancy” has puzzled some comedy writer peers. How could someone whose fingerprints are on such a broad swath of cutting-edge, irreverent comedy be devoted to an old-fashioned strip about a resourceful girl and her friend Sluggo, a series rooted in wholesome jokes about dropped ice cream cones and water-gun fights?
The cartoonist is “like Chaplin or Keaton because his sensibility is like a silent movie star,” Gammill said, speaking in his apartment near Union Square in Manhattan, where he is also rehearsing the debut play he wrote and stars in, “A Morning With Ernie Bushmiller” (at the Mark O’Donnell Theater in Brooklyn through Oct. 17). “No one could craft a funnier comic strip.”
At “S.N.L.”, the longtime writer James Downey thought Gammill’s fandom was an Andy Kaufman-like prank. “I still insist Tom doesn’t really think Ernie Bushmiller is …” Downey said on a phone call, pausing before backtracking. “Maybe he does, I don’t know. Even as a kid, I thought ‘Nancy’ seemed antique.”
Steve O’Donnell, former head writer at “Late Night” who is producing Gammill’s play, told me he originally thought Gammill’s love of “Nancy” was an eccentricity, because the strip seemed so “elementary.”
“Nancy” isn’t just a popular comic strip. It is, in some ways, the quintessential one. For years, the American Heritage Dictionary included a thumbnail of it alongside its definition of “comic strip.” But this play is part of a critical re-evaluation over the past few decades pushed along by books like “Three Rocks” (by Bill Griffith, author of the strip “Zippy the Pinhead”) and “How to Read Nancy” (an exegesis of one three-panel strip).
“I don’t know a hipster cartoonist who doesn’t love ‘Nancy,’” Matt Groening, a creator of “The Simpsons,” told me, before noting, “‘Nancy’ is polarizing. There are people who think it’s horrible, the worst.”
There’s something absurd about such a gentle, inoffensive strip being divisive, which “A Morning With Ernie Bushmiller” leans into. Gammill’s play was initially aimed at fellow fans, staged at cartoonist conventions and at his Los Angeles home, surrounded by original prints of “Nancy” that he bought for $40 each in the early 1980s.
With the latest version, however, he said he was looking for converts. “Bushmiller is like Jerry Lewis,” he told me. “Looks stupid at first, but the closer you examine it, the more brilliance you find.”
Gammill has the unfailingly cheerful, slightly dorky presence of a popular high school Latin teacher. In a recent run-through of scenes, mixing jokes, songs and plenty of cartoons on a video screen, Gammill, wearing a tie owned by Bushmiller, hustled through a monologue with vaudevillian energy. His Bushmiller periodically spouts theories, nurses grudges and explicates various comics. This is the cartoonist late in life, grumpy about nightclub comedy and fashionable politics. (He mocks Garry Trudeau as “Mr. Bell-Bottoms”).
The Bushmiller character emphasizes that comics must be simple enough for anyone to understand and rely on visual humor, and Gammill’s show lives up to this mandate, with plenty of prop comedy. At one point, Gammill crashes cymbals together and puts a metal bucket on top of his head.
This clown car of energy only slows when Bushmiller’s wife (played by Lauren Servideo, a popular character comic online who takes multiple roles here, including Nancy) tells him that he has been mentioned on “Saturday Night Live.” In 1976, at the height of its cultural cool, the sketch show ran a scroll written by the acerbic Michael O’Donoghue that read: “These people are definitely not as smart as dolphins.” The list included Gerald Ford, Cher and Bushmiller.
The author was in his 70s, toward the end of his career. Gammill told me we don’t know what he thought about the “S.N.L.” insult, though Gammill did find a letter from a friend taking umbrage. In his play, Gammill’s Bushmiller is confused by the slight, then angry (“TV stinks”) and forlorn. “A few minutes later, Servideo enters playing Tom Gammill in a scene with the real Gammill as Bushmiller. The Gammill character explains that he worked for “Saturday Night Live.” Gammill as Bushmiller looks disappointed.
It’s one of many moments that suggest “Nancy” may actually share some DNA with the comedy institutions Gammill helped create. The meta-humor that powered “Late Night,” “The Simpsons” and “The Garry Shandling Show” was a hallmark of “Nancy,” which broke the fourth wall more often than many of its peers.
After rehearsal, the director Owen Kline (the movie “Funny Pages”) discussed how the combination of smart and dumb in “Nancy” can also be found in Gammill’s work. Gammill (and Max Pross) are responsible for what is regarded by many writers as the greatest sketch in the history of Letterman’s shows, the after-school special parody “They Took My Show Away,” in which the host uses the clichés of the birds and the bees to explain to a boy how sometimes a beloved show can be canceled.
Groening said Gammill’s sensibility involved a pivot you find in “Nancy” panels. “It’s a switcheroo,” Groening explained. “He loves sophisticated comedy but is an aficionado of cornball straight-down-the-middle jokes, of which Nancy has some. It’s also very surrealistic on one level and completely square.”
Like Bushmiller, Gammill is drawn to visual plot devices. He came up with the idea of killing off George Constanza’s wife on “Seinfeld” by licking a poisoned envelope. What is simple to some people looks like minimalism to others.
“I really do think of ‘Nancy’ as being the comics version of the Ramones or the Three Stooges,” the graphic novelist Adrian Tomine said in an email, “something so simple and unchanging and basically pointless that, for those very reasons, ends up achieving some level of the sublime.”
Gammill is more likely to make the comedian case that “Nancy” is focused on nothing else but getting to the joke. When I asked if it could be considered a comic strip about nothing, echoing the famous line about “Seinfeld,” Gammill considered the point. “If you asked Ernie Bushmiller, he’d say it’s all about the gag,” he said.
Gammill made the point in a comparison with “Peanuts”: “If Charlie Brown dropped an ice cream cone, you’re going to hear ‘Oh good grief, woe is me,’” he said. “Nancy just licks it off a globe. I mean, I think that’s funnier.”
Gammill said he wrote the play at a time in his life when he understands and even identifies with the cartoonist. “Look, in 1976, no one was cooler than Chevy Chase and now look at him,” Gammill told me. “I’m sure Chevy is at the Ernie Bushmiller stage. He doesn’t know why people are goofing on him.”
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