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The Family Business
But Stiller would rather talk about the intricacies of his craft—the painstaking process of scripting, casting and shooting a funny movie—than analyze his motivations for practicing it. That’s not surprising, given his background. For Stiller, the son of comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, making people laugh is simply the family business.
Growing up in Manhattan, Ben and his older sister, Amy, saw their parents onstage as often as at the dinner table. A key member of the household was Hazel Hugh, a Jamaican nanny who had seven children of her own. “She gave us so much,” says Stiller, who is still in close touch, “when I think back on how she had to sacrifice, taking care of her big family as well as us. She’s 80 now and a beautiful person, inside and out.”
His parents’ comedy act, Stiller and Meara, was a staple on The Ed Sullivan Show; the couple did summer stock, played Vegas, rode the nightclub circuit from coast to coast. The kids tagged along whenever possible, sometimes catching their folks’ act from front-row seats. “I remember wanting the audience to laugh and to like them,” Ben recalls. When the elder Stillers did make it home, the atmosphere was often festive. There were dinner parties with illustrious guests like Francis Ford Coppola and Rodney Dangerfield. And because Dad was Jewish and Mom was raised Irish Catholic (she later converted), there was a double dose of holidays. Says Stiller, “We’d do Christmas and Hanukkah and Thanksgiving and Passover and everything. Easter egg hunts, whatever. Anything that involved food or toys.”
While his father was influenced by vaudeville comedians like Eddie Cantor, Stiller’s mother brought a different approach to funny. “The Irish have a great sense of humor,” Stiller says, “that black, dark sense of humor about death. My mom, especially. She dealt with so much when she was a kid, lost a lot of people. She wasn’t a Three Stooges or Abbott and Costello kind of person. She was always more into the people who didn’t push as much.”
Stiller absorbed both of his parents’ traditions, as well as that of the Stooges and their brethren. He soaked up contemporary comedy, too, idolizing the casts of Second City Television and Saturday Night Live. He performed Shakespeare for the family and shot his own mini-movies with a Super 8 (recurring plot: A bully picks on our awkward hero, who exacts a clever revenge). At age nine, Stiller made a guest appearance on Kate McShane, his mother’s short-lived CBS series. He graduated from high school, did a nine-month stint at UCLA film school, then headed for Broadway. In 1987 he scored his first film role, a walk-on in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. The following year, SNL aired one of Stiller’s home movies, a ten-minute parody of The Color of Money, involving bowling hustlers instead of pool sharks. By 1990 he was hosting The Ben Stiller Show on MTV.
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