The current generation knows him as the serenity-seeking Frank Costanza from Seinfeld. An older generation knows him as one half of the comedy team Stiller and Meara. But as his memoir, Married to Laughter, reveals, Jerry Stiller has had a lifelong love affair with entertainment.Jerry Stiller discovered the power of comedy when, as a child, he saw Eddie Cantor transform an audience. Jerry's father often took him to vaudeville performances, where Jerry decided that he too wanted to make people laugh. After studying drama at Syracuse University, Jerry returned to New York to begin a life in the theater. Jerry soon met Anne Meara. At first they encouraged each other in their separate performances, but eventually they began doing a comedy act in the coffeehouses of New York's Greenwich Village. They created a brilliantly successful act with two characters who were exaggerated versions of themselves. Before long, they were regulars on The Ed Sullivan Show. Stiller and Meara was a smash hit.
But Jerry's first love has always been the theater. He tells us about his nearly 50 years in show business - from summer stock to the early days of Joe Papp's pioneering Shakespeare in the Park, from his Broadway performance in Hurlyburly to his roles in such films as The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Seize the Day, and Hairspray. But most of all, he describes life with Anne, showing us his admiration for her as a performer and describing how she gave him the insight into acting that he'd long sought. Married to Laughter is a great love story about two people who found their place in show business without ever losing sight of each other.