Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny by Marlo Thomas Page B

most of the boys, a lot for my dad. They were great pals. Harry had a very dry delivery, and he was fun to be around. Good thing, because he was always at our house for dinner.
    Deadpan and sarcastic, Harry had a tender heart and I loved him dearly. He knew I wanted to be an actress from an early age, so when I was around twelve, he gave me a subscription to the Fireside Theatre book club for Christmas. Fireside sent a different play every month. I had never read plays before, but I immediately got hooked. Once I had read the first one, I couldn’t wait for the next one to arrive. Odets, Hellman, Miller. Harry opened a whole new world of ideas and feelings for me.
    He was also a true New Yorker, impatient and aggressive, and he’d never wait in line for anything. Once, Dad, Harry, and I were on a plane to Las Vegas when the pilot announced that the equipment had a problem and that we’d have to disembark and change planes. Our tickets were still usable, the pilot said, they just had to be stamped at the next gate.
    All of the passengers rushed out to get in line for the other plane, but by the time we gathered our things, the line was quite long. Harry took one look at it and snapped into action. He grabbed the tickets out of our hands, marched to the front of the line and angrily approached the attendant.
    “You didn’t stamp these tickets!” he said to her accusingly.
    The attendant, clearly contrite, apologized to Harry and immediately stamped the tickets. Then he turned around with that impish twinkle of his and walked back to us, his adoring audience. Pure Harry.
    Even in the worst of circumstances, Harry was genetically incapable of resisting a punch line. He had hypoglycemia and often needed to get sugar into his system. One day, he was shopping in Beverly Hills, and feeling an urgent need for sugar, he ran into Nate ’n Al’s deli and said to the guy behind the counter, “Quick, give me an orange!”
    “We don’t sell oranges here, sir,” said the counter guy, who was too busy making pastrami double-deckers to help a man about to go into a serious swoon. “Have the hostess give you a table and your waitress will be right with you.”
    “Can’t wait,” Harry said frantically. “Please give me an orange right away!”
    The counter guy stuck to his guns, but before he could even get out another word, Harry keeled over in a dead faint. He was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
    Joey Bishop heard about the news and called Harry at the hospital.
    Joey: “How are you feeling?”
    Harry: “I’m fine now. Thanks for calling.”
    Joey: “Where are you?”
    Harry: “You know where I am. You just called me here.”
    Joey: “No, no—I mean, how do I get there?”
    Harry: “Just go to Nate ’n Al’s and order an orange.”
    Harry also loved practical jokes. He and Jerry Lewis would concoct outrageous crank telephone schemes, tape the calls, then bring them over to our house for us to listen to. They’d go through the newspapers looking for ideas. The transcript that follows is from a call they made answering a classified ad placed by a guy who’d found a stray parakeet and wanted to locate the owner. In this one, Harry got to be the caller, while Jerry hung in the background, laughing and egging him on.
    Most people get crank calls out of their system during adolescence. But The Boys were like big kids—they’d do anything to make each other laugh. And this is how they entertained themselves when they weren’t entertaining an audience.
    T HE L OST P ARAKEET
    Guy on Phone: Hello?
    Harry Crane: Hello. Did you advertise that you found a parakeet?
    Guy: Yes, we did. It’s a green bird.
    Harry: That’s right. How long have you had it?
    Guy: We found it Monday, I believe.
    Harry: Oh, you’re so kind. What did it do, fly in the window?
    Guy: No, my sister was out on the back porch and she saw it. Then my mother came out, and it jumped onto her finger and we brought it in.
    Harry: Isn’t that nice. I