I have a whole bunch of e-mails asking me why, in the commercial we were discussing for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, someone decided to only have Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Jonathan Winters and (in absentia) Sid Caesar. Why not Edie Adams? Why not Terry-Thomas or Dick Shawn? Why not the major star of the movie, Spencer Tracy? Or someone else?
I have no verifiable insight into that decision but it’s a pretty safe bet that there was a joint decision between Stanley Kramer, Stan Freberg and the promotional folks at United Artists not to crowd a very short commercial with too many people and to pick comedians who were instantly recognizable to the target audience.
Seven people were plenty. The commercial was only sixty seconds and I’ll bet Freberg had trouble getting it down to that length.
Including Spencer Tracy, even assuming he’d do it or was available, might have not helped sell the idea that the film was full of comedians and that it was a comedy. Dick Shawn wasn’t that well known then and Terry-Thomas was largely unknown to American audiences. If you included Edie Adams then why not Dorothy Provine? (There may have been equal billing clauses in their contracts.)
I constantly get questions about why this star or that star wasn’t in the film. There were only around fifty roles in the film, some of whom had one or two or zero lines. There were hundreds of people around then who qualified as comedians or at least comic actors. Some weren’t available or weren’t available when they might have been needed. Some wanted too much money. But the main reason a certain comedian wasn’t in the film was that there wasn’t room for them. It’s really that simple.
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