Usually, an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” is a validation of cultural relevance, even coolness. Less so if your name appeared on the show in a list, from 1976, of “people who dolphins are definitely more intelligent than.” Among the sub-dolphinites were Prince Charles, Joe Louis’s accountant, and Ernie Bushmiller, the artist behind the beloved, then maligned, and recently re-celebrated comic strip “Nancy,” which he drew every day for nearly fifty years.
A new play—one-man-plus-one-woman, Off Off Broadway, at the Mark O’Donnell Theatre, in Brooklyn—takes place the morning after the “S.N.L.” slight. It depicts Bushmiller, aged seventy, desperately trying to cook up cartoon ideas despite various zany interruptions.
The other day, the writer and star of “A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller,” Tom Gammill (who previously wrote for “S.N.L.,” “Late Night with David Letterman,” “It’s Gary Shandling’s Show,” “Seinfeld,” “The Simpsons,” and is himself a cartoonist), prepared to rehearse in his Greenwich Village pied-à-terre.
“I bought my first original Bushmiller in 1983, at the Armory,” Gammill, who has a husky Yogi Bear-ish voice, recalled. It features a self-portrait of the cartoonist interrogating his characters (Nancy, her pal Sluggo, and her aunt, Fritzi), and cost three hundred bucks. The caption: “Who’s got a gag for me today?” “In the eighties, nobody took Bushmiller seriously,” Gammill went on. His wife would only let Gammill hang his collection in a dedicated Ernie Bushmiller room.
Gammill said, “He drew the strip for the gum-chewers, but now it’s really the intellectuals and the hipsters who are into it.”
“It was slobs over snobs originally, but now it’s actually snobs appreciating slobs,” Owen Kline, the thirty-four-year-old director of the play, agreed.
Gammill relayed Bushmiller’s biography: “Ernie dropped out after the eighth grade and then he flipped a coin. He was either going to work on a cruise ship or at a newspaper.” He became an “office boy” at the New York World—“one of his first jobs was doing the grids for crossword puzzles, so he got good at drawing straight lines.” He also dropped out of art school, where he’d labored over a bust of Dante and was rivals with Reginald Marsh.
Gammill, who wore a loose gray suit and Bushmiller’s own wide striped tie, snapped into character: “It sure is dusty living here in 1976!” A TV played a slideshow of “Nancy” cartoons and archival photographs that corresponded to lines in the script. “Now, I know what you’re thinkin’,” Gammill-as-Bushmiller continued. “Why did this crumb-bum cartoonist, this ink-stained idiot, this nitwit with a pen nib invite us here?”
He puffed a fake cigarette, then sang a tune titled “Who’s Got a Gag for Me Today?”: “Sluggo lives by himself. Nancy’s his goil. He was feeling all alone, then in dropped a squoil!” When he gets a call from the cartoonist Dik Browne (“We don’t joke about his name”) regarding the “S.N.L.” list, Gammill’s Bushmiller exclaims, “It just proves my point—TV stinks!” He later refers to himself as “the Lawrence Welk of cartoonists.”
Fast-forward through a lot of sound effects and prop work and a Dewars-induced dream sequence in which a violent, ventriloquist-dummy Sluggo shrieks, “Live from New York, you’re dumber than a dolphin, Ernie!” Throughout, the actress Lauren Servideo comes and goes, playing Nancy, a hippie, Bushmiller’s wife, an editor, a coed, a turtle, a teen-aged Tom Gammill, a rat, and a visitor from the future.
Finally, the dagger to Bushmiller’s heart: he receives a copy of “The World Encyclopedia of Comics,” which states, “Bushmiller’s work is best read from the start until 1940, when Nancy began. . . . The remainder will always be on tap at an institution or two for the stalwart and devoted research student: the rest of us would be happier forgetting it.”