Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (25 page)

As someone who’s achieved her dream of becoming a successful professional comedy writer, do you now consider yourself a happy person?

For me, writing comedy is about being unhappy. It’s about being unhappy with the way things are, and wanting to write something that is critical of those things, but in a way that isn’t so self-serious. Or it’s about being on the outside of something a bit, feeling left out, and needing to create your own fun. Or wanting to create something that excludes other people—the people who don’t get it—in order to circle the wagons a bit around people who
are
like you. I think if you are happy and fit in, you have little reason to develop a sense of humor. There are always exceptions, but swimsuit models and Wall Street dudes aren’t funny. They have no reason to question the world. It’s working for them.
Life is sweet, bro!

I’m not actually an unhappy person. I’m not one of those angry or depressed comedy writers. I just think I am distrustful of the world and of accepting things at face value, and I guess that’s a result of my childhood.

I think things have to be better for kids these days simply because of the Internet. I’m just talking about weird, shy kids wearing the wrong jeans, not kids who are molested by their gym teachers or have degenerative bone disorders or who are getting shot at. They’re just fucked. But these days, slightly different kids can find other people with their interests. It must help them feel like they’re not total freaks.

Then again, maybe it’s a bad thing. I think young writers feel more entitled to be published now than ever before: “I can publish on my blog. Why won’t
The New Yorker
publish me?”

At the very least, I think comedy can help misfits cope. It’s not for everyone, so it becomes a place for someone to fit in, either as a consumer or as a maker of comedy. Any area of interest can help someone achieve that sense of community, whether it’s astronomy or a particular style of comedy. But comedy is better because it makes you laugh and it physically works those underdeveloped nerd stomach muscles.

What advice would you have for those high school or college students wanting to develop those underdeveloped nerd muscles?

As far as specific advice for those wanting to get into comedy writing, do a bunch of stuff for free. Even if you live in some godforsaken hellhole. There are so many blogs out there and humor websites, as well as people who act or produce and need scripts. Writing for free will make you write a lot, which is the only way to become a better writer. Everyone knows that reading a book about how to write comedy is a big joke. You just have to do it.

College kids used to show me their versions of
The Onion
—often called something like
The Scallion
or
The Bunion
—and they’d want me to be impressed. But it was hard; I was already doing
The Onion
. What could I say? I mean, now
The Onion
is a format, but years ago,
The Onion
was created and developed by a bunch of college kids. The
Bunion
staff would be better off doing something new. So take a two-prong approach—learn how to write for other people but also, in a separate project, find an original voice.

Another thing: If you want to write comedy, I think that you shouldn’t watch too much comedy. I think you start to rely too much on other people to tell you what’s funny and ridiculous. You become needy for comment. Or else you start to feel that everything has already been done and you inadvertently close yourself off to having an honest and funny reaction to things. This might be bullshit because I do know a lot of comedy writers who are big fans of comedy and who watch a ton of it. But I also know a lot of comedy writers who tell funny stories as opposed to retelling jokes. It just gets annoying when there are five public figures everyone is making jokes about, and the jokes start to take on the same cadence.

So keep writing for free and then almost free, and then after a while, if you are good, you will rise to the top. Good writers are actually in demand. If you are not good, well, you will hopefully start to enjoy your day job as a web designer at an Internet company that sells moderately priced, fashion-forward men’s pants. It’s a win-win.

Editor in Chief,
The Onion

Each week, the staff of
The Onion
reads an average of fifteen hundred headlines that arrive on Monday morning from both regular contributors and freelancers. Now, that’s a lot of goddamn jokes. It’s really more jokes than the human brain is able to reasonably and intelligently process within the span of five days. Only a handful of jokes are truly funny and exceptional enough to break through the benumbed haze of our writers’ room and see the light of day. The rest, meanwhile, are immediately thrown onto the corpse pile and, like my high school years, never spoken of again.

I have chosen nine rejected jokes from a recent Monday headline list and specified the reason why each joke, ultimately, was not picked. The individual reasons why these jokes were not picked tend to come up over and over again. We are constantly repeating the same death sentences about how a joke is “too this” or “too that.” This is how you develop consistency as a joke writer, but this is also how—slowly but surely—you begin to lose your mind.

I have also included five jokes and why they
were
picked.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Next Quentin Tarantino Movie to Offer Slick, Stylish Take on Rwandan Genocide

I could see how this would be written out, and we could probably come up with some funny casting choices and an amusing description of the film’s story, as well as a realistic-looking poster. But it just feels like the obvious joke to make about Tarantino at this point. Even though it might be a popular story for us to do, it would be popular because it’s telling people, essentially, a joke they’ve already heard before.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Nation’s Environmental Experts Quietly Moving Families Inland

Here’s something that happens to us, depressingly, quite often . . . we’ve already done this joke. “Nation’s Economists Quietly Evacuating Their Families” [August 12, 2012]. Hence, we killed this immediately. We have over twenty years’ worth of these headlines, so the chances of doing a joke we haven’t done before grows a little slimmer with each passing day.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Non–Time Traveler Warns Humanity of Dystopian Present

Here is a similar, yet different problem for us: Someone else has already done this joke. It was on
McSweeney’s
[“It’s Difficult Convincing Time Travelers That the Present Day Is Not a Dystopia,” by David Henne, January 3, 2011]. We generally kill any joke that is similar to another comedy outlet’s joke. The most common joke-killer, by far, is
The Simpsons
, because they’ve already made every joke ever.
Mr. Show
comes up, too, and, occasionally,
The Colbert Report
.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Study: Majority of Americans Covered in Layer of Crumbs

This is a halfway-decent joke, and not one we’ve made before, exactly, but it’s part of a genre of jokes that we’ve just made too many of recently. Sometimes we hit a certain genre too often and need to take a break. We’ve opted to take a break from writing about overeating Americans for a bit, although, I’m sure, not for
too
long.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Parents Who Spend Every Waking Moment in Anguish Proud Son Is Serving His Country

This appears to be an interesting juxtaposition and comment, but ultimately, it’s not enough of an escalation of reality. It just reads as too real. Also, feeling anguish over your son serving in the armed forces overseas is not necessarily a mutually exclusive feeling from being proud that your son is serving his country. I’m sure many military parents openly hold both opinions at the same time, and feel no conflict in doing so. It feels like a toothless piece of satire.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Instagram Photo Very Unique, Sources Agree

This would be a popular story, but, like the Tarantino joke, it’s the joke that everyone is making. We look pretty stupid when we make the same basic joke that everyone else is making, because we have a reputation for doing the opposite.
The Onion
has a long history of snidely pointing out how everyone is making the same point. We’re jerks in that sense.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Area Man Stocking Up on Computers for Impending Cyber-War

Something about this still amuses me—I like the idea of someone physically stockpiling computers like they’re rifles or something. But it’s just too odd, and the logic doesn’t actually hold. It’s the kind of joke we talk about for a few minutes in the room until the question of “How would you actually write this?” is posed, and then we drop it and move on.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Chuck E. Cheese’s Costume Only Halfway Off Before Screaming at Eight-Year-Old Daughter

I’m not a fan of this joke. It’s just too easy, and too constructed. You can see the thought process of the writer, thinking, I’m going to take an upsetting situation (a man yelling at his daughter) and then juxtapose it with an easy, go-to example of something silly and harmless (the Chuck E. Cheese’s costume). But it has no basis in reality. It’s a situation that exists only in Comedy Writer Land.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Only Way to Prevent Gorilla Attacks Is Bigger Gorillas Everywhere, Says NRA Head

This one was not technically a reject, per se, as it led to a reworded headline using the same concept. The gun control joke was, I felt, too convoluted and too jokey. It seemed to parallel the real-life headlines I was seeing. The writers’ and editors’ room batted around a few rewordings and came up with “Gorilla Sales Skyrocket after Latest Gorilla Attack” [January 10, 2013], which just reads cleaner and sharper. A lot of headlines are submitted to a similar brand of torture.

And now for five jokes and why they
were
chosen as headlines:

Ten-Year-Old Wishes Unemployed Father Couldn’t Make It to Just One of His Little League Games

It’s a switch I haven’t seen before. There is something really elegant and satisfying about a headline that looks almost exactly like its real-world antecedent, the only difference being the addition or subtraction of a few key letters here and there, and suddenly the meaning becomes
completely
different. And yet, there is still a logic in place that completely holds. We all know the cliché of the busy, careerist father who can’t make it to his son’s Little League game, but anyone who has ever played Little League is just as familiar with the somewhat pathetic, embarrassing father who is way,
way
too into the game because he may not have much else in his life at that point. To me, that’s a perfectly clean switch.

Film Character Moves into Beautiful Brooklyn Brownstone after Getting Dream Publishing Job

This is sort of a mini-genre within
The Onion
, wherein we report on a movie or television reality in our dry editorial voice as though it were
actual
reality. The subtext generally being that the reality presented in movies and television is just utter, lying horseshit. Most of our writers are thoroughly—perhaps unhealthily—pop culture literate, so it is generally fairly easy for us to get into this world, inhabit it, and, in so doing, expose exactly what is manipulative and false about these narratives we are fed over and over again. Also, there is always a slight warmth to these pieces, because I think a lot of our writers have an inherent nerdish fondness for bad, junky movies.

Report: Chinese Third Graders Falling Behind U.S. High School Students in Science, Math

I was unsure about this one at first because, while it’s a cleverly worded joke, I wasn’t sure the story itself would have legs. I also worried the joke might be more “clever” than funny. Ultimately, though, I think it’s good for an issue of
The Onion
, or a week’s worth of content, to have a certain ratio of smart to silly, and this is just a solid satirical joke. It is all couched in this very official “report” language, as though this were an alarming, surprising trend. It looks
just
like a news headline, which helps, and it calls up so much unspoken subtext for the reader to think about: the state of the U.S. education system, the rise of China, the economic realities that await both countries. And yet you don’t have to come out and say any of that; it’s all perfectly implied by the perspective of the joke.

Torrent of Soap Issues from Wildly Unexpected Part of Dispenser

This is another entry in the cherished
Onion
subgenre of Small Made Big, in which we take the must prosaic, insignificant, ordinary event that could ever occur and report on it as though it were huge, breaking, front-page news. “Rubber Band Needed” is another entry in this genre. I like this one in particular because the language in the headline is so heightened, so dramatic. And I immediately smile when I see a headline like this—something so incredibly minor—and then see that there are fucking eight hundred words of text beneath it. Overkill like that makes me laugh.

Robert Mapplethorpe Children’s Museum Celebrates Grand Opening

Sometimes just the thought of what the finished Photoshopped graphic will look like is enough to sell me.

Writer,
This American Life, Funny or Die
, McSweeney’s, Gawker, Huffington Post,
ESPN, CNN; Founding Editor,
Videogum

When it comes to advice about humor writing, or really any type of writing, two things seem to stick out. The first is that you should really be looking for better advice. Humor writing? Give me a break! How about advice that might actually lead to the earning of actual money? Or even advice on which specific advice classes to take? That might prove more fruitful. The second thing that sticks out is something I was once told, which I am paraphrasing here: “You aren’t good at writing, but if you can get over that, then one day maybe you will be okay at writing.” I think that’s really solid advice. If you’re reading this right now, you might not be a great writer—in fact, you probably aren’t. No offense! But if you accept that, then maybe you can start working your way toward the holy grail of writing: not being a terrible writer. But this takes time! You know who starts out great? High school football captains. And you know what they do now? They sell insulated hot tub liners to pay for their alimony. So relax.

When it comes to writing advice, there really is no such thing. No one who’s successful knows exactly how their path has led to their success. Every journey is different. It doesn’t matter how Erma Bombeck did it because your path is your own and no one else’s.

With that said, these ideas have worked for me:

#1. Write what you think is funny. This does not mean anyone else will agree, but if you write what you
hope
others will think is funny, you have already alienated at least some readers.

#2. If you aren’t willing to do something for free at first, no one is going to pay for it later. It is called “paying your dues” for a reason. Truth be told, you might never get paid, but how is that different from no one paying for it now? Besides, if this is about money for you, you are very confused about where all the money is hidden.

#3. It is almost never worth arguing with someone on the Internet about anything—
ever
. Unless they think 9/11 was an inside job, in which case it might be funny.

#4. If you are lucky enough to get an audience for your comedy, be nice to that audience. You are lucky to have them.

#5. You don’t
have
to be a writer or a comedian. Quitting is allowed. I’m not saying you should quit—I’m just saying that it’s an option that a lot of writing and comedy advice books don’t provide, even though they should. Writing is boring and solitary and lonely and awful. Comedy is even worse. You’re not living in ancient Sparta, Greece. Stop fighting. You can do whatever you want in life. Make a baby with an insulated hot tub lining salesman. He’s still got it! Or go back to choosing which advice classes might be most useful.

#6. Make friends with smart, funny, highly motivated, encouraging, wonderful people who are more talented than you. This is obviously easier said than done, so you should stop reading this immediately and go get started on that.

Good luck.