Comedy Is Magic TODD SEIDENBERG for Harrison Greenbaum, It Began with “Pick a Card….” by Lydialyle Gibson
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Montage Art, books, diverse creations 60 Open Book: “The Luckiest Books” 61 “A Melodic Being” 62 Off the Shelf 64 Forgive, but Don’t Forget 67 Chapter and Verse Comedy Is Magic TODD SEIDENBERG For Harrison Greenbaum, it began with “Pick a card….” by lydialyle gibson arrison greenbaum was five took root. “I became su- when his father pulled out a deck per serious about trying to figure out how Harrison Greenbaum’s What Just Hap- of cards and told him to pick this trick worked. I used to go to the library pened? (left) combines his two creative obsessions: comedy and magic. And H one. Greenbaum did, and then and check out magic books. And we’d go to Greenbaum, who performs more than 600 BRODO BRODY watched his dad riffle the rest of the deck magic stores in New York” from the fami- stand-up shows a year, is a regular at clubs beside his own ear, saying the cards would ly home in Long Island. “Those are some of like the Comedy Cellar in New York. tell him which one his son had chosen. With my favorite memories.” He started attending a flourish, his father named the card. Green- magic camp every summer and discovered Magic led him to comedy. As a freshman, baum doesn’t remember what it was, just a whole world of other weird kids as nerdy he joined the Harvard Magic Society (“It that his father got it right. and magic-obsessed as he was. By the time had, like, three members—I very quickly “But he wouldn’t tell me how he did it,” he solved his father’s trick—he says now it became president”) and started spending says Greenbaum ’08, now a comedian and was probably the only one his father knew— Tuesday nights at the Mystery Lounge, a magician. And that’s when the fixation Greenbaum’s fascination was deep and wide. weekly magic show held above the Hong 58 November - December 2019 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE Kong Restaurant in Harvard Square. “My apprenticeship,” he calls it. The magic show Jack Goldsmith is Shattuck profes- was hosted by the stage’s main tenant: the OPEN BOOK sor of law. As such, he is known for his Comedy Studio. “So that started rattling work on the legal aspects of terror- around in my head, the idea of stand-up.” ism, national security, and other Later that same year, he tried it out, per- Hoffa and fraught topics in international law. But forming a few jokes in a student-organized like all faculty members, he has a life campus show. beyond the classroom and his scholar- He was hooked immediately. Partly it Harvard Law ship. In his case, the complications of was the adrenaline: “Doing stand-up is like that personal life are the subject of the jumping out of a plane without a parachute,” new book, In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search he says, “and you hope you can build a para- for the Truth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28). From the introduction: chute while you’re falling.” Partly it was the stripped-down purity: “That’s what makes One evening in early December it almost a blood sport. You remove so much, 2003, I found myself alone in a brightly until it’s just you and a microphone. It’s very lit cavernous office on the fifth floor of raw and visceral—you feel everything.” But the United States Department of Jus- even more exciting was the freedom. He was tice, reading a stack of Supreme Court used to performing magic in a blazer and decisions about the Fourth Amend- khakis. In stand-up, the dress code, and the ment’s prohibition on unreasonable expectations, were wide open. searches and seizures. At the time I He spent his college summers in New was serving as the assistant attorney York City, working an internship at MAD— general in charge of the Office of Legal “comedy boot camp”—and barking comedy- Counsel, a position that made me a club customers in off the street in exchange senior legal adviser to the attorney for a little stage time. Back on campus, he general and the president. A few weeks helped found the Harvard College Stand Up earlier, I had concluded that President Comedy Society (HCSUCS; “To Harvard’s George W. Bush’s secret two-year-old Close to home: Jimmy Hoffa (foreground) credit,” he says, “once they figured out the warrantless surveillance program…was and Chuckie O’Brien near the federal courthouse, March 1, 1964, after Hoffa’s acronym, they never made us change it”) shot through with legal problems.… trial for jury-tampering and wrote a prize-winning senior thesis My thoughts that stressful December on the effect of racial humor on prejudice. evening began with a crisis about national the government had eavesdropped on After graduation, his parents implored him security and presidental power but soon Hoffa and O’Brien in possible violation of to take the LSAT, but instead he leapt into veered to a different turbulent period of a new governmental policy and develop- performing full time. He moved to New York my life. One of the cases in my “to-read” ing Supreme Court jurisprudence.… and gave himself two years to make it work. pile was a 1967 Supreme Court decision… After reading the decisions, I immedi- Eleven years later, “work” is the opera- that restricted the government’s use of ately saw their connection to each other, tive term. Greenbaum performs more than electronic bugs to capture private conver- and to me. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jimmy 600 shows a year, locally and internationally, sations by stealth. As my tired eyes Hoffa was the nation’s best-known and headlining at places like Carolines on Broad- reached the end of the opinion, two cita- most feared labor leader.…Chuckie ROBERT KELLEY/THE W. LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES way and the Comedy Cellar. In 2010, he won tions leapt off the page like ghosts: “O’Brien O’Brien met Hoffa at age nine and later the Andy Kauffman Award, given to promis- v. United States, 386 U.S. 345 (1967); Hoffa served as his most intimate aide for more ing comics doing unconventional material. In v. United States, 387 U.S. 231 (1967).” than two decades. Chuckie helped Hoffa 2015, he reached the semi-finals onLast Comic …The Hoffa case involved the pension bulldoze to the president of the Team- Standing and later appeared on America’s Got fraud conviction of James Riddle Hoffa, sters. He was Hoffa’s trusted messenger Talent and Conan. More recently, he created a the autocratic leader of the International to organized crime figures around the Web series for the United States Tour Opera- Brotherhood of Teamsters, who would country, and was by his side during his tors Association, called Recalculating. It’s kind later vanish, on July 30, 1975, in what re- seven-year battle with Bobby Kennedy of a video travelogue with a quirky comic mains one of the greatest unsolved that ultimately sent Hoffa to prison.… touch: Greenbaum samples Aztec mosquito- crimes in American history. The O’Brien But in 1974, he and Hoffa had a falling egg pancakes in Mexico City, drives a dog- decision concerned the conviction of out.…Soon after Hoffa vanished, Chuck- sled outside Vancouver, eats fire at a Coney Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, also a Team- ie became a leading suspect.…Based on Island sideshow, and rappels down a wall sters official, for stealing a marble statue a slew of circumstantial evidence, the FBI in Slovenia in search of aquatic salamanders of St. Theresa from a U.S. Customs ware- quickly concluded that Chuckie picked up said to be the offspring of dragons. “My ca- house in Detroit Harbor Terminal. The Hoffa and drove him to his death. reer has been a bunch of random, crazy jobs,” Supreme Court vacated both convictions I knew this history well because he says. “I like to say yes as much as I can.” so that lower courts could determine if Chuckie O’Brien is my stepfather. Last August, he debuted What’s Your Prob- Harvard Magazine 59 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE Greenbaum samples local culture in Vancouver and Mexico City in Recalculating. posterous prescription. That’s how Green- baum comes across in his stand-up routines, too: easy, relaxed, full of gentle bemusement. USTOA (2) He takes obvious, dis- lem? a series of improvisational Facebook ated summa cum laude in psychology, stops arming delight in bantering with the audi- videos in which he plays a “comedian ther- New Yorkers on the street and invites them ence, including (maybe especially) hecklers. apist” to unsuspecting passersby. Dressed to sit and talk (and joke) about their money Partly that’s a comedian hitting his stride in a cardigan, and trailed by a small entou- woes and dating quandaries and, in at least after years of practice and study; he recent- rage carrying an upholstered couch and a one case, “a cat issue.” Each “session” ends ly gave an interview to a comedy podcast framed diploma, Greenbaum, who gradu- with a hug and a hastily written, mostly pre- that amounted to a two-hour master class OPEN BOOK “The Luckiest Books” In an era of omnipresent digital media (and distractions), Leah Price ’91, RI ’07, is an anti-alarmist about the future of reading and of tangible books.