From Crazy-Making Situation
It's a life most men would find tough to handle: three kids, including a set of twins, a wife who's about a thousand times smarter than you are, and your big-mouth, busybody mother living across the street. Makes you tired just thinking about it, huh?Yet out of this crazy-making situation, actor Ray Romano has spun one of the funniest shows on television. As almost everyone with a TV set and a pulse knows, "Everybody Loves Raymond," Romano's Top 10 hit, is so piercingly, hilariously real mostly because it's so close to Romano's everyday life. Until "Raymond" hit it big, he lived in Queens with his wife, Anna, three children (a fourth born in 1998), and his parents were just blocks away (not across the street).
Now Romano, 46, is breaking out of his life-imitates-art approach to comedy, and starring in his first big-budget film, Welcome to Mooseport, in theaters this month. He's also wrestling with one of those thorny 40-something questions: What am I doing with my life? "Everybody Loves Raymond" has been a CBS hit for the greater part of a decade, and earns Romano a reported $1.8 million per episode. But it also sucks up almost all of his time -- leaving him little to spend with his family or play golf.
Of course, Romano is different from the rest of us -- he could quit today, cash his TV paycheck and never work again. But when he says it's not about money, it's about whether to keep doing a hit show or quit at your peak, and still have time for family, you believe the guy. When he sat down with writer Sara Davidson late last year, he was in a philosophical mood after Halloweening with his twins, Matthew and Gregory, who went as characters from Willy Wonka.
RD: Does your wife think you're funny?
Romano: Not at the moment! Not now that she had to dress two Oompa Loompa men while I was on the treadmill. Right now life is very stressful. With four kids and the show, I'm never home. But she married me, and we're together, so she must have thought I was funny. Because she didn't think I was sexy, that's for sure.
RD: What makes it work?
Romano: One of the great things about our relationship is I love to make her laugh, because she won't laugh unless something is funny. You know in this business people laugh and "yes" you just to kiss up, but when I make her laugh, I know it's real and it's just one of those good feelings.
RD: Comics usually come from funny families. Were your parents funny?
Romano: My mother is a piano teacher -- a Juilliard graduate -- so there's a creative gene there, I guess. My father is very dry, very undemonstrative. He's kind of a -- here's one word, I hope I say it right -- misanthrope? Is that right? But he can be wacky, not wacky funny but bizarre, kind of quirky funny. I'm learning this now as an adult, 'cause when we were kids, he wasn't funny to me at all. I used to say that if my father had hugged me once, I would be an accountant, I wouldn't need to do comedy. He loved us, but couldn't show affection in any way.
RD: Please explain "bizarre, kind of quirky funny."
Romano: We put this in our pilot episode for the show: My dad learned the code to my home answering machine, how to play back the messages. He would call our house, play them back, hear the message, and then he would call up and leave a message. "Raymond, tell Anna that Linda called, she went to the gyno, blah, blah, blah." I thought it was just my dad being stupid, but my wife would freak out.
Is Comedy Inherited?
RD: I can imagine.Romano: I called him and said, "Dad, that's very funny, but don't do it." A day or two later he not only found out how to play our messages back, but he found out how to change our outgoing message over the phone. So, my wife and I are out somewhere. We call our house, but instead of hearing my voice, I hear my father, "Hey, you've reached Ray and Anna. If you want them, leave a message. If you want me, Al Romano, I'm at 268-20 whatever." He thinks it's funny, and my wife is literally in tears, in tears, furious.
So, yeah, is comedy inherited? I guess. But my brother could never do stand-up. Not that he's not funny, but he just doesn't have it in him to get up in front of people. He's a cop, and he's always said he'd rather face a man with a gun than have to go onstage.
RD: It's supposed to be the No. 1 fear of Americans. That and death.
Romano: So imagine if you had to speak at your own execution -- that could be someone's total nightmare.
RD: The show was based originally on your life and your family. Over the years have the two diverged?
Romano: Separated, you mean? Don't use big words, please. In real life my parents didn't live across the street; they lived about ten blocks away. I had a wife, I had twins, I had a daughter, my brother was a cop who was divorced, back living with my parents. The characters start from there, and they evolved into what they are. Even my character: I started as myself and I evolved into this guy.
RD: The TV Ray is emotionally dumber than you are, right?
Romano: Yeah, believe it or not. We actually have a contest on the set: Who's dumber, me or the character -- and he's starting to win. The scriptwriters on the show have a board on which they list what they call Rayisms, which are words I mispronounce. It's filled with big words that I think I know, only I say them in the wrong context or mispronounce them.
RD: Such as?
Romano: Let's see, this one's ironic: miss-pro-nun-see-a-shun. Or ein-steen.
RD: So Ray Barone says ein-steen instead of Einstein?
Romano: No, Ray Romano.
RD: I'm confused.
Romano: I'm talking me, not the character -- this is the sad part. So, that's just an example that this character is kind of, I don't want to say dumb, but I guess he is a little bit. There are simple qualities to him.
RD: Almost everyone who works on "Raymond" is married with kids. Does that give the show its reality?
Romano: Everybody lives it, you know? It's like on the old "Dick Van Dyke Show." Carl Reiner, who was the show's creator and lead writer, would ask the other writers, "What did you guys do this weekend?" And that's kind of what we do. It gets us in trouble sometimes with our wives and relatives. When we have an argument, my wife always says, "I better not see this on TV!" And my response is, "You have to see it on TV. Do you like that pool in the backyard? What do you think? It fills itself?"
RD: Do you ever stop and take notes?
Romano: Well, this happened to one of the writers: His keys fell down an elevator shaft and the kids were bothering him and he was getting so frustrated. His wife said, "Well, look at the good side. You can do a story about this." And he said, "No. This is just something crummy that's happening to me in real life. We already did a show about this."
"Everybody Loves Me!"
RD: Welcome to Mooseport -- what made you pick that script?Romano: It wasn't a super stretch, but it was different, quirky. A light comedy, a little romance, small-town charm. I don't want to play the guy I'm playing on TV, because people can see that every week, but then again you also don't want to shock your audience and play something like "Natural Born Killers."
RD: You have a serious passion for golf. Help me out -- I don't get it.
Romano: I love what I hate about it. I mean, first of all it's the great equalizer. I don't care who you are. Look at me: I got a show that's titled, "Everybody loves me!" You get on that golf course ... and too bad, you're never going to master it. I could beat a Super Bowl MVP on a golf course on any given day -- and then a ten-year-old kid with a lisp could beat me.
RD: That's true of any sport, why --
Romano: It's not true of any sport. I could never get in a baseball game and hit a Nolan Ryan fastball. I couldn't. But with golf, it's such a game of inches that if I was playing Tiger Woods, I could conceivably beat him on a couple holes. It brings out in me curses I've never said before, and it also brings this ...
RD: Gets you high.
Romano: It could make me high, it could. I forget the word -- it's cathartic, when it's going well.
RD: When you started out, did you think you would be this successful, that you'd become a household word?
Romano: No, of course not. I still don't. I mean, when I started doing stand-up, the goal wasn't to get a TV show; the goal was to be a stand-up.
RD: How did you come up with the title "Everybody Loves Raymond"?
Romano: Are you being facetious?
RD: No.
Romano: Believe me, I didn't come up with it. My brother used to say it very sarcastically, very sar-doan-ically, is that right? He would say, "Oh, look at Raymond. Raymond goes onstage. I have to chase criminals for a living, people with guns, and the public hates me. But look what Raymond does. Everybody loves Raymond."
RD: How did it end up as the name?
Romano: We used it as a working title. But when CBS wanted to use it for the show, I fought it hard. I even pleaded with Les Moonves, the head of CBS, "Please, that can't be the name!"
RD: And what did CBS say?
Romano: They said, "It tested well." I was desperate and came up with like six different possibilities. In my dressing room they've framed them. They're just ridiculous. "That Raymond Guy." "Raymond's Family." "Um, Raymond." That was my favorite. And of course, CBS tested them and "Everybody Loves Raymond" tested better.
RD: Why did it bother you so much?
Romano: First of all, when you're a comic, your esteem is very low and you don't want to go out there with a show saying, "Everybody loves me!" It's just going to breed contempt.
RD: So are you at peace with it now?
Romano: Yeah. The show takes on its own identity, you know what I mean? It's a good problem to have, I guess, where you live with everybody making wordplay on the title. Because, you know, if my movie comes out, some critic is going to write, "Well, I don't know who these people are that love Raymond, but not the moviegoers." I guess there are worse problems, right?