Customer Reviews

Let Me In, I Hear Laughter - A Salute to the Friars Club

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I saw this when it played on Cinemax about a year ago. Very funny stuff. It has great interviews with legends like Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Sid Caesar and Steve Allen. Also, unbelievable, and incredibly rare, roast footage. Very, very entertaining.

All you get from this is a bit of history, a lot of talk about how great it was for a bunch of guys to get together to insult each other, and very few actually funny moments.

The Friars Club is an organization where comedians and entertainers were able to get together and share jokes, stories and ribald entertainment. Nearly all of the great entertainers were there and in the early days it was so exclusive that women were not allowed and even the waiters had to leave the room before the entertainment began. Membership was by invitation only, so the members were free to be as raunchy as possible as they roasted a fellow entertainer.
There is some footage of the roasting of fellow members and it was a bit surprising to see the old comics like Milton Berle using such fowl language. We are accustomed to seeing that from the modern entertainers, but it was interesting to see the older men entertain. This is defended by some of the members such as Jan Murray in interviews; they said that working in private allowed them to drop all of their inhibitions and use whatever words and phrases they wanted.
One of the funniest stories was by Buddy Hackett when talking about Jonny Carson. Carson was next to Hackett at the table and said he had to urinate very badly but didn't want to leave. So Hackett slid the champagne bucket over and Carson relieved himself in it.
Eventually, there was a legal action that forced the group to accept women, but that only provided more avenues for the direction of the raunchiness. Whoopi Goldberg's description of what was said about her during the infamous meeting where Ted Danson appeared in blackface demonstrated that nothing was out of bounds. She expressed disgust at Montel Williams' taking a high road of offense at the antics.
Due to the language, this is not a tape that one could show to high school classes, but it is a very good item to show to college classes on the history of entertainment. It was nice to see so many of the old comedians once more. Despite the restrictions on what they could do, they were funny and here we get to see them in an environment where nothing was out of bounds.