Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (51 page)

Well, at least this particular compulsion is productive.

Sure. But, then again, I don’t know how productive it is when I’m writing tweets at 3:00 a.m. after fourteen hours at
Community
. Apparently, writing on a critically acclaimed network comedy isn’t enough. Apparently, I still need to be told by a complete stranger that I’m funny at 3:00 a.m.
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Has this compulsion to write jokes, at all times of the day or night, gotten more extreme over the years?

Actually, it used to be worse. When I met my wife, Mary, I was twenty-two years old, and I was living like an insane person. There was writing all over the walls in my bedroom. They were covered with joke ideas. God bless her heart. I remember when I went down to visit
The Onion
offices in person for the first time in 2000, Mary carefully transcribed every single scribble onto a piece of paper and then painted my walls white. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me.

She’s my life. I love her so much, and for a million different reasons. I was a disaster before Mary came along. Still to this day, if she goes away for the weekend, I instantly regress. Three hours after she’s out the door, there’s suddenly food all over the bedroom floor and I’m naked for some reason. It’s terrifying.

Do you ever wonder where comedy will be one hundred years from now? I often wonder if it will be totally indecipherable to us.

I’m not even sure where it’s going to be ten years from now. It changes so fast. But in the end—it doesn’t really matter. Comedy for me is about expressing something inside myself. And the human condition will always be around.

I’ll always keep writing, in some way or another, because it’s the healthiest thing I know how to do. Emotionally, I’m a mess. There are a lot of things that I don’t like to deal with, personal stuff—the kind of stuff we all face—and comedy lets me confront that stuff as best I can and hopefully get some relief from it.

In the end, do you think you’ll ever find anything resembling consistent happiness?

I mean, it’s a chemical thing. So I’ll never be the kind of person who does cartwheels or stands around parks holding balloons. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love the life I have. Sometimes I don’t remember to enjoy it enough, but I’m extremely happy that I get to do what I’m passionate about.

And I think it’s getting better. In recent years, I’ve worked with comedy writers who are really balanced people, who approach writing in a shockingly healthy way, and they
still
produce funny work. And that’s been really good for me to see, because it’s proof that you don’t have to be this writhing, screaming husk of pain to be a comedy writer. People who aren’t tortured can also create satisfying comedy. It’s just a myth I was brought up with, even at
The Onion
. This feeling of, “You shouldn’t care if your life is a disaster. Go with it because it’s only going to produce something worthwhile.” I’m now realizing that that’s just not true.

At the very least, I don’t need to conflate so much of my self-worth with my success as a writer. It’s tough. I’ve spent half my life writing comedy. It’s more than an identity—it’s all I’ve accomplished in life. I dropped out of school, there have been disappointing family issues. The one thing, the
only
thing, I’ve always excelled at has been my writing. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

You’ve worked as a script doctor on quite a few major Hollywood scripts over the years. Do you know how much money those films ended up earning, collectively?

They’ve grossed more than $100 million. One grossed under half a million, but that was mostly from matinee business. Senior discounts knock down your average.

Can you tell me the names of any of these movies?

No.

So, as a script doctor, you’re not allowed to talk about the specific movies you’ve worked on?

No, not in my case, because there are some confidentiality clauses. Many times, before walking into a punch-up session featuring a roundtable of comedy writers and comedians, we’ve been required to sign a form agreeing not to talk about the project or our contributions. If you don’t sign, you’re not allowed into the room. It makes you feel like you’re in
Mission: Impossible
. There are some movies where people see my name at the end credits, and it will read, “Special thanks to,” and they ask, “What’s that about?” That’s when I’ve worked on a project as a script doctor. Or maybe just brought a deli platter to the set.

Also, you know what? It’s not fair to talk about these things, because it’s not my work, ultimately. I didn’t incept it. I don’t have authorship on that. They’re not even stepchildren or adopted—more like I’m babysitting. Unless the idea was generated by me, and unless there was a large amount that I wrote, then no, I don’t believe my name should be on the credits as a writer. I tend to only want my name on things that totally reflect my sensibilities. Sometimes the original work from the writer who’s been thrown to the lions is really good; it just needs some objectivity to remind everyone why they were drawn to the material in the first place.

My name is on a “Very Special Episode” of
The Facts of Life
[that aired in 1983], and the only things that remained from my original draft were the punctuations. The episode was called “What Price Glory?” and it was a heavy-handed treatise on illiteracy. A football star dating one of the girls [Tootie] was illiterate. Andy Kaufman, who was a friend, watched it and wondered why it wasn’t funny. I told him because it was a “Very Special Episode.” He asked, “It’s very special because it isn’t very funny?” I couldn’t argue. Anyway, there’s just so much inveterate credit grabbing going on most of the time that it should warrant DNA testing.

It seems like the best comedy writers in Hollywood—the most creative, the ones with the most singular voices—oftentimes prefer to work as script doctors rather than going through the difficult process of selling their own screenplays. Why is that?

You know what happens? It’s the rejection of this business, of writing scripts you care about, either not having them made or having them not made well, and that starts to affect you. You want to win. You want your original script to be bought. But if you’re emotionally invested in your work at all, then you’re in for a really rough time.

Maybe you’re invested early on, but not after a lot of failures or unproduced works. And you turn into a short-order cook. You take a little pad and pen and go, “Okay, what do you want?” You start taking orders. And you do it to the best of your ability. If your work is—even to the slightest degree—personal, you’ll always take it personally. There’s a dearth of personal work out there. It’s now a machine with easily replaceable parts. That’s why there isn’t as much hesitancy about replacing creative figureheads on their own shows. If Rod Serling butted heads with a network today, they’d fire him and call it
John Stamos’s Twilight Zone
instead. Actually, I would watch that.

So what happens is that when you rewrite other writers’ work, you’re now detached. You don’t know the baggage and the history and the in-fighting, all the personalities clashing. You just look at the work and say, “Well, here’s what you need to do,” and you get it going. If you disagree with a note or an idea, you don’t resist. This is not
your
car being painted. You make it the best it can be, and they thank you. And you move on. You turn into almost a utility player, and you do the job. You get well compensated for it, but you don’t have any emotional baggage attached. And you also don’t have the same commitment of time; you’re not going to spend years on a project. It’s an easier life, and for me it just makes sense.

With the script doctor thing, no matter what you do, it’s an improvement. You’re brought in to fix something, and there’s a sigh of relief. So you’re Mighty Mouse: “Here I am to save the day.” If it’s better, then you know you did your job. And usually, invariably, the script’s going to be better or more in line with what they want. And your career and reputation is not necessarily fully at risk, and you move on.

Who are you writing for when you take on a script-doctoring job? The studio executives? The director? The audience? Yourself?

All of them. You bring your own opinions to it. It’s similar to the medical profession. You come in, you look at the patient, and you identify what’s wrong. Then you describe what you can do to remedy the situation. You’re a diagnostician.

In the end, the audience is a major factor. They’re the final vote. You have a test score that you need to achieve. You have to bring this number up for the studio to be able to release the product. When you deal with the insecurity and the alchemy of comedy, you need an audience. They’re the missing ingredient, so there’s always going to be a degree of tension or misunderstanding without an audience to validate you. You ultimately need the vindication. There’s a long-standing tradition of nervous executives in a room decreeing what is funny and what isn’t—and then an audience enters the equation and casts the deciding vote. It’s best to throw yourself on the mercy of that jury rather than argue your case. If people don’t laugh, you’ve been found guilty.

What do you most often notice missing in the scripts that you doctor?

I’ve noticed that it’s very important to have a wonderful third act—a powerhouse ending. Everybody walks out satisfied from that. It can’t be a downer these days. It can’t be like the ending to
Midnight Cowboy
. I mean, there’s a reason you don’t see endings in movies anymore like the one that’s in
Midnight Cowboy
. Made today, Ratso and Joe Buck would be battling a multitentacled CGI monster attacking their bus.

But if a movie scores a very high rating with an audience, even with a sad ending, would the executives keep it?

Sure. The executives don’t care about sad endings if they work. You can’t take
Titanic
and reshoot the finale in order for the ship to miss the iceberg or just lightly graze it. But if the audience complains about it—if they’re unsatisfied—that’s a problem. And executives get greedy, too. A lot of times they’ll want the film to score higher—higher, higher,
higher
. There used to be a rule of thumb that if a movie didn’t test well it could still find its audience; that they weren’t made with a cookie cutter and could still be big hits. Nowadays, if a movie doesn’t test well, and even in some instances when it
does
test well, it won’t be pushed by the studios.

Who is the typical audience for these screenings?

They tend to be mainly tourists in Hollywood. Everything’s formulized, everything is distilled for them. They’re told that the movie will be like
Parenthood
meets
Independence Day
. Or
Schindler’s List
meets
Jurassic Park
, whatever.

I would love to see the test scores for that last product.

Might just be through the roof—after the dinosaurs were made more likable.

It seems that everyone—screenwriters, executives, studios—prefer landing on the side of safety rather than on the side of risk.

Everyone plays it very, very safe. As a writer, you want your material to be made and to be seen. It’s an occupational hazard to confound or to be too outré on the page. For a writer now, security is pre-existing success. It’s very important to have something tangible that was well-received to show executives. I’ve worked on a million shows and movies, and I’ve created two series,
Sledge Hammer!
[ABC, 1986–88] and more recently
Bullet in the Face
[IFC, 2012]. It’s imperative to show something tangible to executives so they’ll trust you and feel secure about whatever project you’re bringing. Trading roles, we’d require the same. Getting notes from an executive with many hits under his belt feels very different than getting them from Ed Wood.

There was a writer—this would be the first time that this has ever been told, this particular story. There was a writer who sold a pilot to a network. He told them that it was the top sitcom in Ireland and he acquired the rights to it. He had the data and charts showing what a big hit it was and why, and how it made all this money and ran for years. He said, “You know, you can’t watch the original show because the accents are so thick, the brogue is heavy. You’ll never understand what’s being said. But I have the scripts, and we’ll retool it for America.”

And this writer sold this show to a network in the midst of buying season, around 2005. It ended up not running, but it proved to all be bogus anyway. The show never existed in Ireland. It was a total con job. His presentation was so well-crafted and dazzling, no one checked.

How was the hoax eventually discovered?

It was not discovered.

So how do you know about it?

He told me.

He
told you? The writer?

Yes.

You don’t have to name names, but is this writer in the industry? Is he well-known?

Uh, he’s in the industry. [Laughs] He’s got an IMDb page. Then again, so does Charles Manson. I’m not joking; check it out.

What does this hoax tell us about Hollywood?

I don’t know. As the old saying goes, nobody ultimately knows anything. Actually, I think marketing people rule the day. They make the decisions. And they like to work with people who have produced something tangible that yields reliable data to analyze. There used to be a time when an executive would call the marketing people in and show them the finished projects. The marketing people would then describe how they would sell the executive’s project that he had shepherded and green-lit. Now the marketing people come in and tell the executive what projects to make.

How content are you with your career? Are you creatively satisfied?

Well, I’m content because I’ve been allowed to do something original over the years. The contentment comes from doing something that’s mine and stands out a bit. And I’d think that would be true for anyone: You have to pursue your own projects that no one else could write. Something with your name on it that represents your point of view and your opinions and your vision of the world—or, at the very least, what you’d
like
to see.

It’s an interesting world we’re in. And it hasn’t changed all too much over the years. There’s a biography about W. C. Fields that came out in 2003 [
W. C. Fields: A Biography
by James Curtis, Knopf]. There are letters that W. C. Fields had written to the studio about jokes, about his scripts, defending certain cuts, that sound like a comedian today battling an executive. No different. I mean, you could change the date and the language and the things that they’re complaining about, but they’re exactly the same. The Marx Brothers once battled the studios over a joke. When the executives saw that the joke wasn’t cut and was still in the movie, they asked Chico Marx, “Why wasn’t that joke cut?” And Chico said, “The god of comedy kept it in.”

So it kind of defines what the relationship is always going to be: a comedian versus the executive. A funny person with one expertise and a business person with another. If either one tells the other how to do their job, tensions surface. So, you have to figure out a way to work together or trust things. You have to have a certain pragmatic and diplomatic personality, because if you fight with somebody, you have to remember, first of all, an executive’s job is on the line. You also have to remember that it’s not your money. If it’s your money, you can do whatever you want. But you have to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and nobody wants a writer coming into their office, or into their world, regarding them as an idiot. That’s not healthy, and some people starting out have an attitude they’re going to war against decades of past battles. There’s always a virtue to listening, and there are intelligent people in Hollywood. You have to be a politician and a diplomat. Also, a human being.

It is a struggle. There’s always a system to buck. But there’s a way to do it. I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen. You have to have an individual voice, even if you’re script doctoring. You have to do it your way and put your stamp on it, so at the end of the day nobody else could have done it the same. The more personal, the better. The more that it’s told from your own personal experience, the better.

Also, the moment you start writing things that don’t personally make you laugh, you’re finished. If you’re just being calculating and hedging your bets, if you don’t have any kind of belief in how funny it is and are just offering safe and easy laughs and nothing that can ever surprise, then you are done, you know? That’s it.