Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (49 page)

Coat
: Parka, faux–Members Only jacket (maybe), windbreaker with stripe or father’s sporting goods store logo embossed on back (cheap, low-end looking).

Accessories
: Always a belt, sometimes with a large copper novelty belt buckle (like a train or Model T car or a tennis racket).

Bill

Overall look
: Bill’s pretty much a mess. But not a sloppy guy. His family isn’t very well off but his mother tries to dress him nice. The result is a lot of clothes from the irregulars bin. He looks like a guy who leaves the house neat but immediately becomes unkempt. Bill is so unaware of his clothes that you get the feeling he doesn’t care what he wears.

Shirts
: Plaid cowboy shirts, sweater vests (Bill tries to take his fashion cues off of Neal but it’s always off a bit), brightly printed button-up shirts, pullover shirts that no one else would buy (different color swatches sewn together, weird patterns patchworked into solid colors, stuff from the irregular bin).

Pants
: Off brand jeans, rumpled khakis, occasionally vertically-striped pants.

Shoes
: Orthopedic black dress shoes (not jokey looking—just sensible-looking shoes), suede gym shoes (Tom Wolf brand—see Paul Feig for explanation).

Coat
: A beat-up, hand-me-down football/baseball jacket with the name of the school on it.

Lindsay

Overall look
: Lindsay is trying very hard to look like a freak. She pulls it off very effectively but there’s always something a little studied about her look. She dresses down but her clothes are always pretty clean. She tries to be sloppy but can’t help primping and neatening herself. A lot of her clothes come from her father’s sporting goods store, so they’re rather new looking. You’d have to look close to see that she’s not truly a freak, but it shows.

Shirts
: T-shirts (flower-embroidered, band logo iron-ons), thermal underwear shirts, solid color sweaters (occasionally cowl neck), button-up plaid shirts (tucked in).

Pants
: Bell bottom jeans, old painters pants, overalls.

Shoes
: Black suede rubber-soled shoes, clogs, old running shoes.

Coat
: Old plaid hunting jacket, army field jacket, old worn parka, long wool coat.

Accessories
: Worn knapsack for books.

Daniel

Overall look
: Daniel has the original grunge look, before it had a corporate name.

Shirts
: Plaid flannel shirts with T-shirts underneath (usually black T-shirts).

Pants
: Bell bottom jeans.

Shoes
: Work boots, old sneakers, snowmobile boots in the winter.

Coat
: An old army field jacket, an old sweatshirt under his coat if it’s very cold out.

Accessories
: Scarf, snowmobile gloves, never wears a hat (it would mess up his afro), a large afro pick is always in his back pocket (although we never see him use it).

Things in the Background

In all the hallway scenes, there will be things happening in the background that typify high school (however, we won’t have
too
much stuff going on in the hallway—we don’t want it to look like all those period movies that take place in Medieval England where every street in town is filled with people doing activities typical of the era—you know, how every street in
Moll Flanders
and
Shakespeare in Love
looked like a Renaissance Faire was taking place—do we really think that every street in merry olde England had jugglers performing and bear-baiting contests? But I digress). Here’s some of the stuff we’ll see in the background:

—Two guys having a punching contest (punching each other on the arm seeing who’ll get hurt first)

—Band kids selling candy bars

—Drama kids selling suckers

—Drama kids walking around in costume to promote the play they’re currently putting up

—Freak couples making out

—Kids harassing the janitors

—Janitors sweeping the halls with red sawdust

—Kids trying to step on other kids’ new shoes to get them dirty

—Students carrying wooden planters and cutting boards they made in woodshop

—Students trying to navigate the hallway carrying large sheets of poster board

—Student government kids hanging long painted paper signs advertising dances and school activities

—Freaks tearing the signs down

—Other freaks writing on the signs

—Students making fun of the pictures of former graduating classes hanging on the hallway walls

—Band kids carrying tubas and large cumbersome cases down the hall

—Hearing the school band rehearsing with the door open

—Freaks with large radios (but not boom boxes—just big cassette players or large transistor radios—all low quality)

—Hall monitors (usually women in their fifties who are constantly knitting)

—Science students carrying large science fair exhibitions to and from class

—Kids getting clean-outs from other kids (when you run up behind somebody and knock their books and papers out from under their arm and all over the floor)

—Jocks taking up too much of the hallway and kids trying to get by, not daring to ask them to move

—Guys checking out girls

—Girls checking out guys

—Kids getting wedgies (when you grab the waistband of someone’s underwear and pull it up as hard as you can. AKA “snuggies”)

—Tough freak girls harassing younger kids

—Girls laughing at anybody and everybody

—Teachers yelling at students in front of their lockers

—Freaks flipping teachers off behind their backs

—Kids tapping their friends on the opposite shoulder behind their backs to get them to turn around the wrong way

—Students in band uniforms

—Farmer kids tripping smaller kids

—Guys high-fiving each other

—A/V guys pushing projector carts down the hall

—Yearbook kids taking pictures of other students (the students pose by doing kick-lines, putting their arms around each other, standing and smiling stiffly, putting up finger horns behind their friends’ heads, punching each other, or simply looking like they really don’t want their pictures taken)

—Groups of freaks breaking up when a teacher approaches

—Guys delivering love notes to girls for their friends

—Girls coming up to a group of guys and telling one of the guys that some girl likes them

—Students imitating teachers after they’ve passed by

—Students giving other students “flat tires” (when you walk up behind someone and catch the back of their shoe with your foot, making their heel pop out of their shoe)

—Geeks carrying huge piles of books

—Students rushing to the nurse’s office with a cut or a bloody nose

—Students from Commercial Foods class walking around wearing industrial aprons and paper food service hats

—Auto shop students wearing dirty coveralls

—Greasy-haired, dirty “stinky” guys (usually some form of geek—although often a farmer or a freak or just some kid who’s a real outsider)

—Scary crazy kids that no one talks to

—Quiet mousy girls with no friends walking quickly down the hallway, clutching their books

—Drafting students carrying blueprint rolls down the hall

—Fights, fights, fights!

—Students on payphones

—Students who are dressed very nice (disco-style clothes)

—Students who are dressed terrible (ratty T-shirts, knit watch caps, old worn parkas, dirty jeans)

—Jocks wearing their school jerseys (usually on game day)

—Girls wearing rabbit skin jackets (short jackets with a patchwork of different colored squares of rabbit pelts)

—Students eating junk food (Hostess fruit pies, Nutty Buddy prepackaged ice cream cones, Twinkies, cans of soda pop)

—Other students knocking the food out of the other kids’ hands

—Kids burning other kids with the “If your hand is bigger than your face, you’ll die when you’re thirty” gag (the other kid puts his hand up to his face to check and you hit the back of his hand, causing him to get a bloody nose—funny!!!)

[Editor’s note: Original version contains nearly twenty-one thousand additional words.]

Stand-Up Comic; Performer; Co-creator,
The Office
,
Extras
,
Life’s Too Short
,
An Idiot Abroad
,
Hello Ladies

I was always a comedy nerd. I used to spend a lot of time watching and dismantling comedy to see how it worked, what made it tick. It’s about taking pleasure in the process. The fun of it for me is the work. And I don’t really like work; I’m naturally lazy. But when I am being lazy, I feel guilty that I’m not being productive. With stand-up and writing, it’s about trying to be good at it in the way that my heroes, the people I admire, are good at it. Like Woody Allen, who started as a stand-up and hated stand-up comedy, but his managers told him it was an important process in terms of a gig, getting yourself noticed, building your skills as a writer and as a comedian. It’s this philosophy that keeps me doing it. “Oh, I’m just not good enough, I wish I could be better.” You never feel like you’ve cracked it. It’s like a tooth that keeps wiggling.

Woody Allen is quoted as saying, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” You can’t sit around going, “Man, I would be the heavyweight champion of the world, it’s just that I never got in the ring, but I have the physique, people have told me.” At some point, you’ve got to do it.

Sitcom writing is a different skill set than stand-up, because narrative writing has a whole other set of difficulties and complications. There’s a different grammar to it. I think sometimes sitcom writers struggle when they try to just simply take their stand-up material and dole it out among different characters. They just regurgitate their observations on airplane food. And if you look at something like
Seinfeld,
where it could’ve become that, in the end it’s so grounded in those characters of George and Jerry and Elaine, allowing what would’ve been stand-up observations to be played out as real scenarios. The characters are real, not just simply making droll observations about a subject.

Everything’s been done. I really think that. All you’re doing is variations on a theme. There’s an obsession with novelty and freshness, but often that’s just repackaging something that people haven’t seen for awhile. It’s writing something that you think will be funny, that you will enjoy seeing. It
has
to be that to me. What would I want to see? How am I not being catered to? That’s the way to do it, rather than something more cynical: “Let me see if I can find a gap in the market.” That’s just joyless to me.

So much of what we see now is market-tested within an inch of its life. The humor is fine, it makes people laugh, but people sense something missing. It feels mechanical; it feels committee-driven. And the stuff that feels personal and unique—even if the subject matter is very familiar—will become appealing as long as your take on it is specific.

In the end, it comes down to what is satisfying to you. It’s hard because we’re all seduced by popularity and we’re all seduced by money and success, and those things are very alluring, and it’s hard to fight that. But you’ve got to be careful because you might find yourself, five years down the line, working on something you hate—but living in a big house.

I always feel like even with the things I’ve tried that didn’t come off, it was important to go down that alley. Every little avenue is productive, even if you’ve got to back up again and come back out. I always feel like even with the things I’ve tried that didn’t come off it was important to have done it. Otherwise I’d have this niggling frustration that I didn’t try. To me it’s useful. Even the missteps are productive, because you’re getting something out of your system.

Dan Guterman may be the funniest writer you’ve never heard of.

Over the past decade, Guterman has written for some of the most respected comedy outlets in both print and television, including
The Onion
(1999–2010),
The Colbert Report
(2010–13), and
Community
(2013–). Guterman’s also written for
The New Yorker
and coauthored two best-selling books:
Our Dumb World: The Onion’s Atlas of the Planet Earth, 73rd Edition
and
America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t
.

Guterman clearly cares deeply about his craft: “Dan is one of the most serious funny people I know,” says Peter Gwinn, a writer at
The Colbert Report
. “I used to make fun of a scene in the pilot of
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
when someone hands Matthew Perry a script. He reads it, and then with a dead-eyed, unsmiling expression, says, ‘This is funny.’ Because no one is really like that—no matter how jaded a comedian you are, when you read something funny, you at least crack a smile. But Dan comes pretty close. He’s constantly thinking about whether something is funny, which to him is too important a pursuit to waste energy on laughing.”

Carol Kolb, former editor-in-chief of
The Onion
and the person responsible for hiring Guterman, says, “When Dan started writing for
The Onion
, he was only seventeen years old—a baby! He was just some weirdo kid up in Canada who apparently didn’t leave his apartment much, but his ideas were so great and so funny. There was no learning curve with him. He was one of our top writers right out the gate.”

Guterman would go on to become the satirical paper’s head writer, responsible for some of
The Onion
’s most memorable headlines and articles, including “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job,” following Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. From 2004 to 2009, Guterman also penned
The Onion
’s weekly horoscope section. In his words, “They were the perfect vehicle for short-form dark humor.” Guterman would spend one day a week crafting these perfect little jewels, an apex of sophisticated comedic thoughts distilled in as few words as possible. Some of Guterman’s divination from the heavens:

Aries
You’ll spend your remaining years hooked up to a machine, which is sad, as it’s the kind that checks e-mail and sends out texts.

Cancer
Everything will go according to plan, except for the injured hostages, the brief shoot-out with police, and the fact that you were just trying to make toast.

Virgo
You’ve never really thought of yourself as a cat person, but the splicing, trans-binding, and DNA resequencing will soon change all of that.

Gemini
Your tryst with a married woman will come to an end this week when she finally asks you for a divorce.

Capricorn
The stars fucking give up—if you want another slice of blueberry pie, just go ahead and have another slice of blueberry pie.

In his five years as the writer of
the
Onion
’s
horoscopes, Guterman penned more than three thousand.

When did you first become interested in comedy?

I was always making people laugh growing up, but I didn’t know comedy was an actual
thing
until very late. It never occurred to me that comedy was something that I could do professionally.

I was born in Brazil, and my dad brought our family over to Montreal when I was seven. Growing up in Brazil, the only comedy I was exposed to was pretty broad: large men in diapers banging on pots while large costumed apes ran around in a frenzy. That’s all I knew.

Brazilian comedy is lighthearted—it’s not the comedy of sarcasm and subversion. So when I first saw
SNL
and
Kids in the Hall
, it freaked me out. It was so loud and aggressive. And it was played straight. It would genuinely frighten me.

Can you give me a specific example?

I remember being really unnerved by some of Jack Handey’s work. There was one Fuzzy Memory, about a group of kids pretending to “play pirate,” and that meant robbing innocent passersby with these immense machetes.
13
And that scared the crap out of me. I didn’t parse it as a joke. I was ten years old and just horrified.

The Chicken Lady sketches [played by Mark McKinney] on
Kids in the Hall
were also terrifying. McKinney played a half-woman, half-chicken creature. It was strange and unsettling, and it imprinted on me in a very visceral way. It makes sense that I ended up writing comedy that draws from darker themes. It had a big effect on me when I was a kid.

Were you a fan of Steve Martin’s?

I didn’t know who Steve Martin was until I was about twenty. [Laughs] I was totally out of the loop.

The movie
Ghostbusters
?
Animal House
? Any comedy?

No. My parents had nothing like that around the house. No records, no movies, no comedy books. I only found those things much later, on my own. Both of my parents have not-great senses of humor. When I was a kid, I remember my father telling a dirty joke—the kind you’d hear on the playground at school—and I remember him just howling with laughter. I would sit there, dumbfounded, as this fifty-year-old man would be doubled over on the ground. I mean, it’s not like it’s their fault. It was just a cultural difference.

When you finally did discover comedy, what became your first love?

I was sixteen when I found out about the
National Lampoon
. I discovered “satire” for the first time. And it blew me away.

I had no idea that comedy could be more than just jokes. That the whole thing could be in service of exposing some truth. Now there’s nothing wrong with just writing a joke. A great joke is a great joke. But to realize that I could also say something that I believed in, or describe a worldview I shared, or attack a dishonesty that bothered me, through comedy—that changed everything. I was obsessed. I would walk from used bookstore to used bookstore to find old
Lampoon
issues. I’d be in those stores, rummaging through box after box of horrifying secondhand pornography to track them down.

Lampoon
pieces like “The Vietnamese Baby Book” [January 1972] by Michael O’Donoghue were amazing. Just so daring and confident, but still measured and nuanced. Targets were introduced and then savagely cut down in a matter of sentences. Jokes like “Baby’s First Handprint”—which had three fingers missing due to Agent Orange—or “Baby’s First Word: ‘Medic’”—these were more than jokes, they were powerful antiwar statements
phrased
as jokes. To read something like that—something so unexpectedly powerful—was an incredible rush. O’Donoghue was using the rhythms and mechanics of comedy to articulate despair. It was so wonderful.

National Lampoon’s 1964 Yearbook Parody
[published in 1973 as a book], co-written by Doug Kenney, was also incredible. Youthful idealism bludgeoned by the creeping realization of one’s own limitations. Dreams careening headlong into brick walls. It’s all very painful and wonderfully funny.

The
1964 Yearbook Parody
proved what could be done with an intricate and sprawling work of parody. This wasn’t just a short magazine piece, typeset in the style of what was being parodied—this was an actual one-hundred-and-seventy-five-page physical yearbook, complete with awkward photos, meaningless quotes, and desperate cries for attention. Kenney was creating an entire world, with a giant cast of characters, each with their own intensely average lives.

I think this was also the first time that I realized how effective patience can be. Instead of spilling everything at once, Kenney would slowly leak out details, here and there, until his portrait of fading adolescence came into focus.

Some of the
National Lampoon
material hasn’t aged well. A lot of it is shocking and aggressive for the sake of being shocking and aggressive. But the material that was great is still every bit as impressive today.

How about more current comedic influences?

A year or so after finding the
Lampoon
, I stumbled across
The Onion
. I had just gone through a major depressive episode, and reading
The Onion
made me feel so, so good. It was incredible. It was like the
Lampoon
, but, you know, consistent. If you want to read the sharpest satire that’s ever been published, track down every issue of
The Onion
between 1999 and 2002. The fact that I got to write for it when I was seventeen is ridiculous. I had no business sitting next to the geniuses who created it.

I remember when I was asked to take over the horoscopes. At the time, the horoscopes were being written by John Krewson, who basically created the model and is probably the most talented writer I’ve ever worked with. I had admired the horoscopes so much. To me, they represented the pinnacle of comedy writing. So when Krewson said he thought I could handle them, it was overwhelming for me. I just closed the door of my office and started sobbing. [Laughs] In a good way.

What about television comedy? Did anything excite you?

I loved watching
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
. The show would do these high-concept comedy bits on a level I had never seen before. Bizarre sketches that would lead out of the studio and into long pretaped segments. There was a summer episode performed entirely in front of a crowd of six-year-olds. It was silliness on a huge scale and treated with the utmost of seriousness. The perfect blend of highbrow and lowbrow. I couldn’t get enough of it.

That was almost twenty years ago. It’s crazy. I’m starting to feel like an old man in comedy. Soon I’ll be totally out of touch.

Out of touch with what?

With what’s popular with the kids. I’m not sure today’s generation would go for the absurdist, slyly subversive brand of comedy that
Late Night with Conan
O’Brien
did so well. I don’t know. Kids today don’t seem to want any substance in their comedy.

Would this hold true even for
The Colbert Report
or
Community
, two shows you’ve written for?

Colbert
is a wonderful show. It’s filled with great satiric insights on a nightly basis, but I don’t know if the kids are watching it. And
Community
is maybe the rarest of shows—a network comedy that’s constantly challenging itself both structurally and emotionally. Great, challenging comedy is still out there, but not as part of the mainstream.
Colbert
and
Community
are definitely in the minority.

[Laughs] You’re talking like you’re ninety. In fact, ninety-year-old comedy writers don’t feel this way about “the kids” and their comedy.

Yeah, but I’m not a young sprite, either. I’ve been writing, without break, for fifteen straight years.
The Onion
snatched me up when I was super young. I’m pretty much done. I’ve put in my time. I’m very tired.

Tired from having to produce jokes every morning?

Yeah. The stress of constantly having to deliver takes a toll on you. Add deep-seated insecurities on top of that and you end up pushing yourself really hard. I have more than just pride in my work—it’s an unhealthy, all-consuming obsession. I want to write a joke so good that it somehow rights the rest of my life. That’s the nice thing about having demons. It makes you very productive.

Are you unhappy with your chosen career? If you weren’t writing comedy, what else would you be doing?

No. I feel incredibly lucky to get to write comedy for a living. And I’d be miserable doing anything else. But writing comedy isn’t carefree and lighthearted work. People think that being a comedy writer is nothing but laughs. And maybe it is for some writers. But for me, it’s tied up with all sorts of complicated issues.

The interesting thing about comedy writing is that you’re doing this very creative, often very personal thing, but you’re expected to produce in this totally noncreative way. My job is to churn out comedy, which is this intangible and temperamental thing, but at the rate and consistency of an assembly-line worker. It’s tough. Especially if you’re drawing from an emotional place. Synthesizing trauma into entertainment can be great. But having to go to that dark well twelve hours a day is really draining.