Carol Leifer Can Make You Funny

Carol Leifer, the prolific sixty-eight-year-old comedian and television writer (“S.N.L.,” “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Hacks,” etc.), has many skills. One, perhaps unsurprisingly, is delivering funny speeches, a gift for which she’s now giving back, with a book titled “How to Write a Funny Speech . . . for a Wedding, Bar Mitzvah, Graduation & Every Other Event You Didn’t Want to Go to in the First Place,” co-written by Rick Mitchell. Another talent: dancing, which might come as a surprise to those who’ve heard the rumors that the rhythm-challenged “Seinfeld” character Elaine is based on Leifer, who dated Jerry Seinfeld in the late seventies.

The other day, Leifer—“schlubbed out,” as she put it, in a white hoodie and glasses—sat in her office in front of a cue card for a Bob Hope special she appeared on (“Hope: Milton, you played them all, didn’t you?”), a poster for “A Hard Day’s Night,” and photos of the Beatles, whose 1966 Shea Stadium show she attended. (She had also just gone to a Paul McCartney concert at the Bowery Ballroom with Seinfeld.)

Her book has some handy rules. For instance,“Don’t drink too much,” “Keep it classy,” “Avoid platitudes,” and “Keep it under five”—“the Gettysburg address was 272 words, and it lasted around two minutes,” she writes. “There’s a reason Lincoln’s on the penny.” She noted that, although there are a lot of books about speechwriting, they’re mostly “from the fifties, on how to do a thing at the Diners Club.” She went on, “The point of the book was that anybody can give a good speech. It really isn’t that hard, and it’s really not that hard to make it funny, even if you’re not a professionally funny person.”

“How to Write a Funny Speech” does draw from the comedy playbook. Leifer invokes such Catskills terms as “callback,” “the rule of three,” and “runners,” as well as advice such as “Always be ready to pivot” and “A lot of time, profanity is a crutch.” “Standup is essentially a speech every night,” she pointed out. “The funniest question I get as a standup is ‘Do you hear the audience when you’re up there?’ It’s, like, Do I hear the audience? I have a stethoscope on the audience the entire time.”

In 1982, Leifer opened for the Beach Boys, and the band broke a number of cardinal rules of both entertainment and etiquette. “First of all, they would tune up while I was on,” she said. “I had to go backstage after the first show and say to them, ‘Beach Boys, can you please not?’ ” When it comes to speeches, she said, “if you’ve asked people to give a speech and you put this pressure on them to go out of their comfort zone, you have to create a really nice environment.”

In the book, she tells of a friend seeking help writing a toast for her daughter’s wedding. Leifer asked some of her go-to questions: What’s a funny story about the happy couple? What are the best and weirdest things about them? What outrageous things have they done? What loving or generous things? The mom’s resulting speech was sweet (“As a little girl, she didn’t love playing with dolls; she preferred playing with snails from our garden. You laugh, but, trust me, I saved a ton on Barbies”). As a control, Leifer fed the same anecdotes to A.I. and got a speech riddled with clunkers (“I tell you, she had more gastropod friends than human ones!”).

Some people are naturals. “Barack Obama, he’s the master,” Leifer said. “The power of what he was talking about not only came through, but with eloquence and grace.” President Trump, on the other hand, “violates a giant rule of speech-making, which is whoever you’re speaking to, you need to be inclusive. That makes a good speech, because you’re not alienating half the audience.” (Ergo, don’t tell a filthy frat-house tale with grandparents present.)

Leifer, who estimates that she’s given between twenty-five and thirty nuptial toasts, hasn’t ever bombed at a wedding, though she did have an early bad experience at a comedy club: “A guy was heckling me and I thought he was doing a Darth Vader voice.” From the stage, she riffed on his “impression.” “You know what’s coming—he had a voice box, because he had throat cancer.”

Larry David is an excellent speech-giver, Leifer said, “because people know his character, and the parameters of what he can get away with are that much bigger—he can go off the rails where normies can’t.” Leifer asked David to speak at her second wedding, but he declined, saying that the stress would ruin his morning golf game. Jay Leno and Bill Maher did speak, “and they were both killer.” But the biggest laugh that evening, Leifer recalled, was for a bit she wrote for her non-comedian wife: “My wife said, ‘Carol, you are the most loving, warmest, most beautiful, caring person I could ever meet.’ And then she tore up the paper and said, ‘Ah, enough with Carol’s draft.’ ” ♦