Marlo Thomas' Funny Life

When Marlo Thomas was growing up in Beverly Hills, her father—legendary comedian Danny Thomas—used to send her letters and postcards from around the world, she said during a Q&A Wednesday night at the Saban Theater.

For one trip to Russia, he told her that if his letters were in blue ink, they were true, and if they were in red ink, they were false. When a letter arrived for Thomas and her siblings, her father was full of praise about Russia.

"It's beautiful and there is no communist oppression here," he wrote them. "People live as well here as they do in America. The only thing they don't have is red ink."

Thomas' father was the star of the 1950s sitcom Make Room for Daddy, which was later retitled The Danny Thomas Show. At the Thomas home, greats like Bob Hope, Milton Berle and George Burns would gather. The men would smoke cigars and drink brandy late into the night, cracking one another up while young Thomas listened from another room.

"My father was a really good audience," said Thomas, who starred in her own sitcom as Ann Marie in That Girl, which ran in the late 1960s and early '70s. "He would encourage us at dinner by saying, 'Tell me something funny that happened today.' He wanted to laugh with us."

On drives from their family home to the movie studios, Thomas would run lines with her father, playing the part of Margaret O'Brien.

"He said I was every bit as good as Margaret O'Brien," she recalled. "When we got to the studio, I secretly prayed she would drop dead so I could play her part."

In Growing Up Funny: My Story and the Story of Funny, a new memoir about her humorous family, Thomas finally started writing down the stories her friends had been laughing about for years.

"I wanted to look at myself through the lens of comedy," she told the audience. "As I started to write my memories down for this book, they became clearer. I suddenly remembered the colors of things I hadn't thought about in years."

Between each chapter of her memoir, there are interviews with today's biggest comedians about how they grew up to be funny. One interview with Jay Leno sheds some light on the question.

"Jay's father was an insurance salesman, and when Jay was a little boy his father used to try out his jokes on him before he went out to work," Thomas said. "Jay thought, 'What a great job to be an insurance salesman, because you get to go out and make people laugh.' "

Thomas also interviewed Kathy Griffin, Conan O'Brien, Jon Stewart and Chris Rock. Griffin was the only comedian in Thomas' book who identified as a class clown when she was a teenager. Conan O'Brien told Thomas that successful comedians aren't usually class clowns, because class clowns are the kind of people who "wind up in some sort of motel shooting."

"Chris Rock spoke beautifully about building an act," Thomas said. "I asked why he paced back and forth and he said, 'If you stand still they can talk to their friends, but if you move, they can't take their eyes off you.' "

Keeping the audience's attention is something Thomas has practiced since she was a young girl. As a student at Marymount High School, she and her best friend stole the bells used by the priest during Mass. When her father was called in to talk to the reverend mother, he was told that his daughter didn't "have the poise of a Marymount girl."

"I know, mother. That's why I gave her to you," he replied. On the car ride home, he was stern with his daughter, but the two of them eventually ended up laughing at what a good joke she had played, and how well he had put the reverend mother in her place.