ARE national honors, such as the title of National Artist, appropriate for a comedian? The French thought it was proper to confer the Legion of Honor on Jerry Lewis. Queen Elizabeth named Charlie Chaplin a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. And Bob Hope not only received the Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award, the airport in Burbank in Los Angeles County, is also named after him.
If joy is one of art’s main reasons for being, and if excellence in one’s profession is the measure for conferring honors, there should be no doubt that our own King of Comedy, Dolphy, deserves to be named a National Artist..
Regretfully, the Supreme Court, notorious for virtually permanent TROs, still has to sort out the last conferment of this title, which was tainted during the tenure of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
For this reason, according to Malacañang, Noynoy Aquino’s hands are tied, even while he acknowledges the clamor to confer the title on Dolphy before it becomes posthumous.
Meanwhile, let us savor the Great Comic’s precarious presence on this earth by recalling the gift of laughter that he so generously gave for as long as we can remember. To mark Dolphy’s 80th birthday, I wrote a piece entitled, “Pidol,” in Filipinas Magazine in the US Allow me to share it with you.
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Long before the nickname stuck to Joseph Estrada, Armando Garces, the top director of Sampaguita Pictures in the late 50s, was already calling everybody Erap (pare, meaning close friend, said backwards).
Dingma, like most movie folk, had a habit of saying people’s names backwards. Not surprisingly, when I first met Dolphy at the Sampaguita lot, Dingma introduced him as Pidol.
Because Dingma gave me my break as a screenplay writer, I was a regular hanger-on at Sampaguita even while I wrote mainly for neighboring LVN Studios. Despite being in my teens, I often went along with Dingma and Eddie Garcia (they couldn’t call him Die-e for obvious reasons) for all-night binges at Kapitbahay Sa Riviera and Bayside on Dewey Boulevard (that was what Roxas Boulevard was called then), where Carding Cruz and the Tirso Cruz Band played.
Pidol was always there, too, doing the nightclub rounds, night after night after night. Even in those days, he was quite a charmer with the women.
But, most of all, he was a charmer with the moviegoers. After doing Jack En Jill and Facifica Falayfay” in both of which he played a hilariously lovable gay who always turned out in the end being simpatico with the heroine, Pidol could do no wrong in comedy.
Those were the days when the movies, TV, radio and stage had some of the most formidable names in the annals of showbusiness. Pugo (also known as Mang Nano, his name being Mariano Contreras) was the grand old man of comedy. But Chiquito was holding his own, and so did a slew of old and new comics like Lupito, Patsy, Chichay, Aruray, Pugak, Tugak, Casmot, Cachupoy, Dely Atay-Atayan, Apeng Daldal, Menggay, Eddie San Jose, Sylvia La Torre, Oscar Obligacion, Jose Cris Soto and Panchito.
Note the obviously comic names of most of them. You were supposed to immediately know that they were comedians by their names, as in, “What do you guys call yourselves?” Si Goto at si Kare. “Oh, you must be comedians.”
I guess this was why, when he started out on the Opera House stage during the Japanese occupation, Pidol called himself Golay, like “Vegetable.” Eventually opting to be called the more sedate Dolphy, a derivative of his given name, Rodolfo Quizon, didn’t seem funny.
But there was a quality in Pidol’s comedy that made him stand out, which was a reverse effect, because he preferred self-effacing, low decibel gags that portrayed him as vulnerable and an underdog. None of the garrulous cuss-laden language of Eddie Murphy or the hardsell antics of The Three Stooges.
Pidol could make you laugh till you realized you were weeping. The closest comparison would be Charlie Chaplin in “Limelight.”
I wrote a few films that starred or featured Pidol, among them, Larry Alcala’s Kalabog En Bosyo, a spy comedy that also starred Chiquito, the title of which I can no longer recall, and Nardong Putik and Karate Champion, in which he played cameo roles. But it was not until I became executive producer of Buhay Artista, that I really saw him up close as a performer.
Buhay Artista was ABS-CBN’s highest-rating show and the forerunner of Pidol’s other TV hits, John En Marshaand Home Along Da Riles. It also established his team-up with Panchito Alba, a combination as great as that of Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin and, oh yes, Pugo and Tugo.
For sure, one of the secrets of Buhay Artista’s success was writer-director Ading Fernando, creator of many of television’s greatest sitcoms.
But Ading never really wrote a script for Buhay Artista, a fact I would find out soon enough, being the concurrent head of Script Quality Control of the network. It was my job to go over all the scripts churned out for taping. Ading would only give me a piece of paper, no bigger than a restaurant receipt.
“That’s the script,” Ading would say in his usual deadpan way.
But on the set of Buhay Artista, Ading only needed to tick off some gag ideas from his “script” and bounce them off Dolphy.
“What do you think?”
“Ayos iyan,” Pidol would say, breaking into a grin that meant, the idea had opened a reservoir of comedy routines filed in his system, going back to Golay and Opera House days. The rest of the night would see him shooting gag after gag at Panchito and the latter parrying, dodging, grimacing and shooting back, to ensure a full hour of laughter.
On dry idea nights, the old reliable skits could always be summoned, chief among them, Panchito singing an English standard and Pidol providing the Tagalog interpretation.
But Pidol’s jokes weren’t just funny. They had a way of making you see certain truths. They made you laugh because they reminded you of your own vulnerability. If the joke was on Panchito and on him, it was also on you.
But hey, don’t take it too seriously, Pidol seemed to be saying. And don’t let it go to your head. Learn to laugh at yourself. At your foibles and weaknesses. And at the things you aren’t and can’t ever hope to be.
A Pidol classic was his riposte when asked if he had any plans to become president of the Philippines.
“No,” was his reply.
“Because you might lose?”
“No,” he said again. “Because I might win…and I wouldn’t know what to do.”
Some of his colleagues could have learned something from that Pidol quip. It would have been good for them. And for the country, too.
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