four score and seven years ago improvised

He is not only the male lead but the master of ceremonies, and in the latter role he is debonair and self-assured enough.

Nichols is light-haired, light-eyed, and light-skinned. In view of the fact that family secrets, even when they are handled in a resolutely anti-soap-opera manner, are an inexhaustible source of best-selling copy, no one need be flabbergasted to learn that Nichols and May, neither of whom has yet reached thirty, have been deriving from their work in night clubs, television, and radio, and on Broadway, where their show “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May” is in its seventh month, gross annual receipts of nearly half a million dollars. Or “I wouldn’t respect you and I wouldn’t respect myself,” or “Darling, I’m so ashamed.” Not only is the acting of Nichols and May so substantial that they can construct believable characters out of literary rubble like that, but their literary discipline is substantial enough for them to know when a character is so solidly built that he can deliver a punch line. “I can’t stand to see you this way,” one of them, horrified by the agonies the other one is going through in an effort to give up smoking, will say, to the accompaniment of those circumstantial spasms of the larynx, the nostrils, and the jawline that are characteristic equally of a congenital clown and of a Method actor. How would either of them ever find anyone else he’d distrust so much?” One thing most Nichols and May characters are addicted to is clichés, spoken in tones of embarrassed and embarrassing sincerity. A comment that both of them feel is a just description of what they do and how they do it was recently made by the critic Walter Kerr, who wrote, “It’s a good thing Mike Nichols and Elaine May are partners. Their attitude toward the people they have invented is rigorously unsentimental but by no means unemotional as well they might, they often seem to be enraged by the way their characters are behaving.

As depicted by Nichols and May, mothers tend to whine, grown-up sons to snivel, adolescents to pant or prattle, unfaithful wives to simper, little boys to bluster, and husbands to drone. The result is a wholly original technique that allows them, at one and the same time, to make funny faces and wear funny hats and to deal accurately and candidly with what one man who has worked with them calls “the secrets of the family”-the appalling (to them, at least) relationships that habitually exist between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, or, in short, males and females. Nichols and May use the Stanislavski method of acting to perform comedy sketches in classic blackout form. Of the members of the group of suffering entertainers-though it may be disrespectful to use the word “group” to describe people who spend much of their time being disrespectful to groups-the two who have devised the most striking way of making their pain laughable are the team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Gone is the time when being jocose about Bing Crosby’s toupee, Jayne Mansfield’s structure, or the outcome of the daily double at Hialeah was fashionable the new comedy covers a bleak political psychological-sociological-cultural range that reaches from the way public affairs are conducted in Washington to the way private ones are conducted in Westchester. One surprising development in the entertainment business during the last half-dozen years has been the ascent of a generation of young comedians whose public attitude is indignation and whose subject matter is man’s inhumanity to man-of which, if their work is a reflection of their state of mind, they consider themselves to be outstanding victims.

Four score and seven years ago improvised