Show Business: Rhoda and Lou and Mary and Alex

Here's the writer behind all those lovable funny folks

Listen carefully and you can hear his laugh on reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Sometimes you can hear him even without listening carefully: just wait for something that sounds like a Canadian goose with a terminal hangover. "It's in every show," says Producer Ed Weinberger. "It's like a signature. It's unique because he's not laughing with everybody else. He hears things that other people don't."

Both the honk and those extrasensory ears belong to James Brooks, and if he breaks up at his own jokes, he has a good excuse: Brooks is one of the funniest writers in television history. His offbeat humor animated The MTM Show, a TV icon; it is the moving force behind a hit from last season, Taxi; and it is now making The Associates into perhaps the brightest, if not the highest rated, sitcom of the new season. Movie audiences can also sample his wit in his first film, Starting Over, which stars Jill Clayburgh, Burt Reynolds and Candice Bergen.

Surprise is the key to Brooks' style; viewers can never guess the next line or the next move. In the premiere episode of The Associates, for example, there is a battle between two young lawyers for a partnership. One (John Getz) is sympathetic; the other (Joe Regalbuto) is a sycophant. Based on his experience with 10,000 other sitcoms, the viewer thinks that the good guy will win and expects them to play off one another for the rest of the series. But Brooks has Mr. Good not only lose the job, but also quit the firm —and leave the show forever. "Once you make that move," he explains, "then you are no longer predictable."

Brooks' comedy depends on individuals, not situations, and in most shows a viewer would be hard put to retell the plot. Ted Baxter's cheapness on The MTM Show is as funny to this generation as Jack Benny's was 30 years ago, and Lou Grant's scowls are as familiar now as Groucho's raised eyebrows were back then. "Character is what fascinates me," says Brooks. "I love populated things. The great thing about literature is that it tells you that you are not alone."

Actually, most of his characters are really aspects of himself. If Flaubert could say "Madame Bovary, c'est moi,"Brooks could c'est the same of Lou, Ted, Rhoda, Phyllis, Murray and the always resistible Sue Ann. "I've identified with everybody but Mary," he admits. Ted's meeting with his long-lost father, the plot of one of the best MTM shows, was based on Brooks' meeting with his own dad, whom he also had not seen in years. Told that he was in a hospital in New Jersey, Brooks walked in and saw a man so old and decrepit that he was stunned. "I said, 'Daddy!'—and it wasn't him." His real daddy was in the next room, looking fit and youthful.