"Raymond" creator writes what he knows best

Roughly two minutes after CBS announced that the ninth season of “Everybody Loves Raymond” would be the last, critics like me surveyed the bleak landscape of situation comedy and wondered, will another decent sitcom come our way again?

  “No,” says Philip Rosenthal, who created “Raymond” with and for comedian Ray Romano. “Comedy is dead. When we left, there was no more sitcom. Not only that, the end of laughing, and soon, the end of smiling.”

  It's a funny line. Even funnier coming from the mouth of Rosenthal, a former standup comic turned writer who has just gifted the world with a laugh-out-loud memoir, You're Lucky You're Funny: How Life Becomes a Sitcom. 

Ostensibly a book about a TV show, it is in fact the sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes score-settling, always amusing account of how a nice neurotic boy from Queens, N.Y., took the craziness of his family life, and that of his colleagues, and distilled it into pure comedy magic through a TV show that America almost instantly embraced, even though CBS thought it didn't have a chance.

  Unlike most books of this genre, You're Lucky You're Funny is a hoot to read. It may be the funniest book by a TV personality since The O'Reilly Factor for Kids. And Rosenthal, who clearly has made so much money off “Raymond” that he doesn't need to care whose ox is gored, generously shares some jaw-dropping moments of stupidity and venality to which he bore witness during 16 years in the TV business. Like the response he got to making what could have been a brilliant sitcom starring Peter O'Toole (an NBC suit told Rosenthal, “I'd rather not have someone with an accent on the network”).

  Or the disaster that was “Baby Talk,” the 1991 sitcom that starred, briefly, George Clooney and a roomful of unmanageable, crying infants. Rosenthal writes: “The second week (of taping) was like a train derailment. A train derailment where the train is filled with exploding manure, and no one in town escapes without throwing up.”

  After five years of disappointments and aggravation, Rosenthal writes, “I was starting to wonder if perhaps there wasn't a better way.” And then he met Ray Romano.

  Rosenthal makes clear that it was not magic at first between himself and Romano, who was just coming off a terrific debut on “Late Show with David Letterman.” Dave's people had signed Romano to a development deal, and he interviewed several writers including Rosenthal. “I was not his first choice,” he writes, “but I got lucky. The other guy was from a new hot show, 'Friends,' but he was busy.”

  This revelation comes on page 73 of You're Lucky You're Funny, however, and by then we've already learned that the two men, one Italian and one Jewish, both from Queens, had plenty in common. Starting with their nutty families. It was Rosenthal's mother, not Romano's, who was the source of one of the more enduring scenes from “Everybody Loves Raymond's” first season. Ray decides it would be nice to get his parents a subscription to the Fruit-of-the-Month, but when the first shipment of a dozen pears arrives, Marie (played on the show by Doris Roberts) freaks out. The scene ends exactly as it did in Rosenthal's own life, with his mother screaming, “I can't talk anymore, there's too much fruit in the house!”

  Rosenthal knows structure. So, when it comes time to tell us about favorite “Raymond” episodes of his (such as “Tissues,” where Ray accidentally sets the kitchen on fire), he translates the comedy into prose, relaying every detail just right, so the reader doesn't feel cheated for not having seen the episode first. Only after this does Rosenthal share the production details.

  Along the way, he shares a number of embarrassing tales from his own formative years, and a couple from his current life (married to eventual “Raymond” cast member Monica Horan, shown here). These stories provide the “fuel for comedy,” as Rosenthal explains in laying out a theory for TV comedy that is remarkable for its clarity and common sense. “All the shows I valued took place on planet Earth,” he writes, “meaning, no matter what the situation, no matter how crazy, you believed that it could actually happen in real life.”

  And indeed, we learn that in real life, Ray Romano really does have a brother who is a cop and envies him, and who once actually said, 'It never ends for Raymond. Ehhhverybody loves Raymond.'”

  You're Lucky You're Funny -- the title comes from something Horan tells him when they fight -- is mostly about how he, Romano and the other writers on the show converted their crazy family experiences into comedy gold. Rosenthal says he tried to give his writers normal working hours so they could “go home, get into fights, then come to work and tell us about them.”

  By seizing on these particulars, no matter how minor, “Raymond” made itself a show with universal appeal. “Marriage isn't all nice and kissy,” Rosenthal says, “but a little bit of war, too.” And not just marriage: Letters arrive from all over the world, because “Raymond” is syndicated in 180 countries, from viewers who invariably tell him, “That's my mom.”

  There are great stories about how each part was cast; why Brad Garrett's character sounds so much like Eeyore from “Winnie the Pooh”; why everything that comedy writers say in the writers' room must stay in the writers' room; why Rosenthal hates going on vacations; why he will never work for the Weinstein brothers; how he and Ray landed lunch with Johnny Carson; and a wealth of other showbiz anecdotes, told with a great ear and a minimum of back-patting.

  The book jacket is adorned with testimonials from sitcom legends Carl Reiner, Norman Lear and James L. Brooks, so it's no surprise when Rosenthal confesses he always wanted to make a show for Nick at Nite as much as for CBS. What's satisfying about this book is that Rosenthal achieves his goal, even when faced with the kind of obstacles that led Hunter S. Thompson to declare the TV business a trench where good men die like dogs.

  Like the studio executive who plots to squeeze Rosenthal out as the showrunner of “Everybody Loves Raymond” during the first season, or the CBS executive who insists that a certain actress be cast as Ray's wife because CBS president Leslie Moonves dropped her name at a meeting. (The actress was all wrong, and Patricia Heaton came along a week later.) Each of these little stories ends the same way, with our neurotic hero worrying himself sick, only to be vindicated in the end.

  Rosenthal even makes somebody's else dream come true. It's the most incredible story of the book, and its details, I can report, have been confirmed independently. I won't spoil it for you, but suffice it to say there's a hit show currently airing on CBS whose producers should be sending hot pastrami sandwiches to Rosenthal's office every week.

Not everything he touches turns to gold. CBS passed on a pilot he worked on this year with two "Raymond" writers, and his on-screen presence on the new comedy "Help Me Help You" hasn't exactly made that show a breakout hit. (He's the slightly bug-eyed member of the therapy group that Dr. Bill, played by Ted Danson, attends when he's not leading his own group. The show's producers have referred to adding Rosenthal as "gratitude casting.") But he has "Raymond," and you get the sense from Rosenthal that that's enough.

"I mean, we did it. We did 210 episodes. That's a lot of anything to do. And I feel like we got everything out of it that we could that we wanted. We're very proud of the show. We're proud that it's still the number one sitcom in syndication. It's in 180 countries.. It's going to be on a long time. It's everything you could hope for. To want more than that is to be greedy."