Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (33 page)

Yes. That’s just what I mean. There’s the “sound” of the sentences, although for me this is internal. I sort of feel it at the back of my throat, which is not separable from meaning, or from the prose’s ability to convince. But language is the main tool you have in prose as you are trying to close the deal. Compelling language equals belief. Blah language erodes belief in the fictive reality. At least I think so.

You just mentioned Miles Davis, but Davis was not always a people pleaser; he was known to literally turn his back on audiences. Where’s that balance between wanting to create new music—or literature—while, at the same time, not alienating a large portion of your audience who might just want to hear “My Funny Valentine” over and over again?

For me, this hasn’t really been an issue. My work first got meaningful when it got entertaining. Maybe because of my background, I’m at my smartest and most intellectually genuine, I think, when I am trying to keep the reader reading.

You have an extremely strong writer’s voice, but you’ve said that it took you seven years to find that voice.

Yes, it took a long time. I think part of getting a voice is accepting the notion that one’s natural voice—the voice that’s first arrived at—isn’t necessarily one’s “true” voice. That is: That revision is as important as that first initial riffing impulse.

My early drafts usually don’t sound much like “me.” They’re overly clever and jump around a lot, and have more conversational fill in them—clichés and empty phrases and so on. And they meander in terms of their causality. Things happen for no reason, and lead to nothing, or lead to something, but with weak causation. But in revision they get tighter and funnier and also gentler. And one thing leads to the next in a tighter, more undeniable way—a way that seems to “mean.” Which, I guess, makes sense, if we think of revision as just an iterative process of exerting one’s taste. Gradually the story comes to feel more like “you” than you could have imagined at the outset, and starts to manifest a sort of superlogic—an internal logic that is more direct and “caused” than mere real-life logic.

The thing is, writing is really just the process of charming someone via prose—compelling them to keep reading. So, as with actual personality, part of the process is learning what it is that you’ve got to work with: How do I keep that reader reading? What’s in my tool bag?

When I was a kid, I had this Hot Wheels set. A car would approach the “gas station,” which was just two spinning rubber wheels that would push the car forward to the next “gas station.” A story could be thought of as a series of these little gas stations. You want to keep the reader on the track—giving them little pleasure bursts—with the goal of pushing them forward toward the end of the story.

So learning to be a writer could be understood as getting into relation with one’s own little gas stations—finding out what sort of micromoments you are capable of creating that will keep the reader moving through the text.

One of the things that interests me about writing humor is this: How does a writer for print, after the one-hundredth reading of a sentence, still recognize that intuitive “pleasure burst”? It’s all so internal. It could almost fester, it’s so internal. It’s not similar to performing a comedy routine where its success is immediately confirmed by applause or laughter.

That’s the crux of the whole thing. You become deaf to your own prose after many readings of it. I think that might be the main thing every writer has to learn: How do I refresh my reading mind? And I’d say that this is the one area where I can objectively say I’ve improved over the years. It takes less time now to clear my mind and read what I’ve written in a relatively fresh way. I just try to approach the prose as if I’m a first-time reader. I’m trying, in my reading mind, to imitate what I think a first-time reader might feel. Part of this has to do with trying to divest yourself of whatever concepts you’ve accrued about the story—sort of like wiping fog off a window. Concepts like:
Yes, this part is dull, but that’s because it’s essential to my critique of provincialism.
Absent those things, what’s left? Well, basically, that first-time reader is left: you, if you hadn’t already read the thing a gazillion times.

When you’re writing, how do you know when an ending feels right? How do you know when to stop?

Well, building off that “first-time reader” idea above: If we imagine that there’s this meter in our head, with “Positive” on one end and “Negative” on the other, our job is to keep the meter in the Positive zone. If it drops into the Negative, ask ourselves why it’s doing that, and edit accordingly; and better if the answer to “Why?” is an intuitive adjustment of the line rather than some big conceptual overlay.

So to finish a story just means that you can get through the whole thing with the needle up in the Positive—and then, at the very last minute, you are trying to put in something that will make the needle go all the way over. By that time, the theory goes, you will be so deep inside your story that your subconscious will be driving the car, so to speak. But there’s no general principle—each story has its own “epistemology of ending.” It’s maybe like a long car trip with a close friend. You cover so much ground, things get rough, you talk them out, all of that—and then it’s time to say good-bye. How do you say good-bye? Well, there’s no one answer. Depends on that particular friend and trip but, by then, being so deep inside the trip, you’d know how.

One thing I always do is try to read the story all the way through, remembering that a first-time reader is not reading individual lines but is inside the story. By reading, we enter into this odd mind-state where each sentence is a microadjustment of both our imaginative reality—what’s happening in the story—and what we might call our “sonic reality”—the cumulative effects of all those sentences and the internal dynamics and all of that. It’s so wonderfully complicated, the act of reading. But I understand it as a very visceral thing, just reading along as if for the first time, and what you’re doing is noticing whether you’re still charmed. Is the spell still in effect? If not, where did things go wrong?

And when you think of it, it’s an incredibly hopeful process—this idea that I, over here, in my place and time and mental state, can actively communicate with someone over there, in some other time, and some other mental state—that I can reach across time and space and circumstance and ring your bell. That argues for a sort of commonality of spirit that I find very thrilling.

Literary Agent, Waxman Leavell Literary Agency

Can I just be brutally honest here? Agents never want to admit that they don’t do a great job handling the submissions they receive but, well, they don’t—or, at least, I don’t. I was at a party twelve years ago, which would have put me at all of twenty-two years old, and a book editor I respected tremendously, George Gibson, told me something I never forgot. He said, “Go find your clients. Don’t count on them coming to you. You’ll always be remembered by the ones you tracked down.” And I fundamentally believe that. Don’t get me wrong. I do get passed some amazing clients these days. What I don’t do, though, is devote very much of my time going through the “my book is called
Death Comes for Everyone
” submissions.

Which is terrible. But, you know, there’s never anything good in that submission stack. And I’m just not up to it anymore. Can I say that? I am going to get in trouble for this later. But there really isn’t, goddamnit. You know where all the talented people are? They are out there hoeing corn on the Internet. They are putting up great content that people are reading and responding to. And they in turn are learning how to respond to their fans and how to build an audience and how to write what people care about. More than anything, they are learning how to be funny.

No one really gives my client Justin Halpern any credit. In 2009, Justin started a Twitter feed called Shitmydadsays. Shortly after that I signed him and sold the book at auction for a pretty reasonable advance. Then Justin wrote the book and it ended up selling over a million copies in one year. Which is ridiculous. But everyone seemed to focus on how lucky Justin was, and no one seemed to focus at all on the fact that Justin had been out there for years trying to be funny on various sites that were paying him close to nothing. For Justin, that was invaluable. Justin Halpern is now one of the most talented humor writers in the country. Really. He is. Go read one of his books and then come back and say I’m wrong.

So don’t even submit to an agent. You are just going to get rejected anyway. Because these days the idea isn’t enough. Going to publishers with “I’ve got a great idea for a humor book” is about as useful as tweeting your breakfast menu. No one cares. Especially not publishers. All they care about is
platform
. They care if you’ve written something really, really funny and it’s gone viral and five thousand people have commented on it. They care that your product is the perfect thing to turn into a book that works in the market. They care how many readers you can make aware of your book when it is finally published. You have to show agents that you can do all of these things, and then, and only then, do you get to show them how good your book is.

One last point. Most humor books are actually not funny. I’d put the percentage somewhere around 97 percent of books as not having a single laugh. So when you do get your book deal, all you have to do is make sure you are a part of that 3 percent and then watch how many copies your book sells.

Contributor,
The New York Times
,
GQ
,
Salon
,
This American Life
; Author,
Tasteful Nudes . . . And Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation, The Goddamn Dave Hill Show
on WFMU

I think the purpose of writing—and, really, with all comedy—is to fully entertain yourself. I look at my output, whatever it is—be it writing, performance, music, or anything—as more like an excretion, like what a snail leaves behind. It’s just what comes out, and the more you can have it be what comes out naturally, the better it ends up being. The more you can remove any stakes or pressure—just write as fast as you can type—it’s going to come out better. And then, at the very least, you have the raw material, and you can go back and hone it.

I once got asked to submit a writing packet for a comedy show. My thinking was, I’m not the right fit for this job at all. I’m not even in the running, but my friends are going to read this, and while they’re sitting in the office going through this pile, I want to entertain them. So I wrote this packet thinking, There’s no way in hell anyone’s even thinking of hiring me for this. It’s more like I was asked to submit out of politeness or something. [Laughs] Later, they told me, “Your packet was honestly, hands-down the best one we got, and we want to hire you. Nothing was even close.” I’m not saying I’d be capable of doing that again in any context, but I think because I wrote only for wanting to crack up my friends, and I was cracking myself up in the process, it worked. It was the first writing packet I ever wrote that I had any fun doing, and that’s why I was able to make it good. Normally, you put pressure on yourself. And as soon as you think that you
absolutely
have to do a good job on it, you’re in trouble. I tense up when I do that, and then it usually sucks.

When I first started getting into comedy and writing, I thought I needed an agent and a manager. I felt, I have to get my friends to introduce me to people and help me. And my friends would help, which was very nice of them. But I know now that this doesn’t matter at first. I mean, it’s nice to have an introduction. But you know, I was rejected by everyone. And understandably so. When I was first starting, I called someone who’s my current manager, and they weren’t even taking my calls. I couldn’t even make it past the receptionist. I was crushed by that initial rejection. I thought I’d been rejected by the establishment of comedy. So I was like, “It doesn’t matter; I’m on my own. I’m going to do my own thing.” And once I did that, once I was truly at the point where I was not trying to get anyone’s attention, that’s when I got everything I wanted, including a manager. The point is, if you’re like, “Oh, I
gotta
do this,” that energy and that mental state does not help the situation at all.

Another thing that helped was I was fine with failing and being a complete moron. I think a lot of people in comedy have a slight concern about not being willing to be completely foolish. Not everyone, certainly. But it helped me to not care that much.

With my book,
Tasteful Nudes
[St. Martin’s Press, 2012], I knew within three weeks of the proposal going out to publishers whether anyone wanted to publish it. But in that time, I realized probably the real reason that I dragged ass, took several years to put the book proposal together, was because if no one wanted it, it was going to crush me so badly that I would never have written another word. Fortunately, it worked out. And, you know, if no one had wanted the book, I would have been bummed out for a few weeks, but I would have gotten over it. It’s going back to not really giving a shit. Do your best to entertain yourself. Or entertaining the fifteen-year-old in you. Or just creating something that you want to see exist.

Find a way to remove that anxiety and pressure. Just do your best, the same way that you would try to do your best with anything, like making spaghetti. Basically, I think life is way more knuckleheaded than people make it out to be. It’s making spaghetti, and then it’s sitting with someone and having spaghetti. That’s basically all life is.

My mom died a couple years ago. I spent so much of my adult life thinking, Oh, man, I’ve gotta do something to make her proud of me. And it took me right up until the end to realize, Oh, she’s been proud of me this whole time. She doesn’t give a fuck what I do. She doesn’t want me to be a prostitute, really, but otherwise, we’re just sitting around watching TV, talking; it doesn’t matter. We’re just eating Chinese food. I realized the basis of any relationship is way less complicated than it’s made out to be.

I’m probably a bit more scattered than I should be. I sort of wish I could rein it in, but when I try to do that, I realize I’m doing the things I want to be doing. Maybe not always on the scale I want to be doing them, but I’m thrilled that I can make a decent living doing what I want to do—just acting like an idiot. It’s kind of my job.