Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (17 page)

When you put that type of heroism on the right rail, it’s unstoppable. When it’s on the wrong rail, it doesn’t make sense. I thought, at the time, maybe we should start listening to these guys who aren’t the best dressed in the room, who aren’t the most charismatic. Maybe we should start focusing on the right answers as opposed to those people who have the best haircuts. And that’s how Will’s character in
The Other Guys
came about.

The actor John C. Reilly, who was in
Talladega Nights
and
Step Brothers
, has said in interviews that the most subversive people he knows in Hollywood are solely focused on creating comedy. Do you agree with that?

I do. To me one of the most heroic acts of the last fifteen years was Stephen Colbert doing his character right in front of George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I mean, it was really amazing. I think in ten years you’re going to see a movie about that. That was incredible. At a time when our press just had their tails between their legs, this guy stood up and called out the inanity and insanity, the criminality of what was going on. It was amazing.

There are so many great, bold comedies. Look at the [2006, Mike Judge–directed] movie
Idiocracy
. It’s about a future where everyone is an idiot. If we were living in slightly hipper times that would have been our
Dr. Strangelove
. Brilliant movie. Just a buck knife down the middle of the tree. Mike Judge went after specific targets, like Starbucks. But it was kind of overlooked, which happens. In the future, according to the movie, Starbucks will be giving out hand jobs. So brave. Maybe audiences just didn’t get the satire, but it is brilliant.

Do you think comedy is more effective for change than drama?

I think what’s great about comedy is that it’s like pornography and horror. In the sense that if you’re not feeling the tingle that’s promised by the genre you know it’s bullshit. There’s no greater truth detector than comedy. You can tell when someone is full of shit immediately. Also, comedy tends to travel. If someone laughs at something, they’ll laugh at it in South Carolina and they’ll laugh about it on the Upper East Side of New York. So I think what’s great about horror and comedy is that both travel. If someone’s funny, anyone can see it. I’ve found that just as many Republicans love
Anchorman
as left wingers. In fact, maybe even slightly more.

I remember [former United States Army] General McChrystal saying
Talladega Nights
was his favorite movie. It’s bizarre. Huge right wingers just love that movie even though the film was inspired by George W. Bush. It just travels really well. That’s what’s exciting about it, actually. In these crazy times when the truth is sort of hazed out, a movie like that always tends to work really well.

There was a study from a few years ago where it was discovered that Stephen Colbert has a lot of Republican viewers who don’t quite understand that he’s joking. It’s amazing. I’ve heard people say, “I kind of like him.” I’ll ask, “You do know he’s completely making fun of such and such, right?” And they’re like, “Oh, no. He’s just a cheeky kind of guy, but he’s basically a Republican.” I’d think, Oh, my God, I know Stephen. He’s not! He’s most definitely not a Republican!

In some ways, this happens with our movies, too, which is okay by me. Our movies are fun, hopefully. They’re fun, bright movies, so there’s a lot to enjoy on different levels.

Since you began making comedy films more than a decade ago, it seems that the genre has only exploded in popularity.

I saw a guy the other day at a wedding, and I told him my theory on why we’ve seen this explosion in comedies in the past fifteen years. Number one, America is tacking hard to the right. That sort of extremism always kind of kicks up the need to create comedy. But the second thing is Avid.

What’s Avid?

It’s a digital movie-editing program that directors use, and it’s incredibly helpful. I think Avid is hugely responsible for this boom in comedy. In the past, one would have to shoot the film and edit it, which was a big deal. Now, filmmakers can record the laughs from a test audience at a screening, and we can then cut to the rhythm of those laughs, the rhythm of the audience. We synchronize the laughs with the film. We can really get our timing down to a hundredth of a second. You can decide where you want your story to kick in, where you want a little bit of mood, where you want a hard laugh line. All of this can really be calibrated to these test screenings that we do. It doesn’t mean that it becomes mathematical. It still ultimately means that you have to make creative choices, but you can just really get a lot out of it. Sort of like surgery with a laser compared with a regular scalpel.

We’re able to download a movie onto the computer and literally do all our edits in minutes. The precision is incredible. You play back the audio of the test screening and get everything timed just right. Like, “
This
laugh is losing this next line; let’s split the difference
here
.” You’re able to achieve this rolling energy. You can try experimental edits, and do multiple test screenings, and it’s all because you can move so fast with this program. Comedy is the one genre that I think has just really benefited from this more than any other.

This process sounds a lot more useful for comedy writers and directors than reading the suggestion cards from audience members left at test screenings.

Test cards are almost useless to me. I can never get any use out of focus groups or test cards. What works best for me is sitting with an audience, which is the greatest thing. There’s nothing better than feeling the energy in the room. That’s the best, but the audio we use with Avid is incredibly helpful. I think Jay Roach [the director of
Austin Powers
,
Meet the Parents
,
The Campaign
] was the one who started doing it, although the Marx Brothers, eighty years ago, used to take their scripts out on the road to perform them live. They’d then rewrite the scripts based on the audiences’ reactions. We wanted to do this with the script for
Anchorman 2
, but for whatever reason never got around to it.

What’s the worst audience note you ever received for any of your movies?

There’s no greater comedy killer than receiving a note that says a character’s not likable enough. The second you see someone write that, you know they don’t know a thing about comedy. The entire game is to make your character as awful and irresponsible as possible, while still keeping a toe in the pool of his still being a human being. I mean, that’s the game. That’s the game you’re playing. The more despicable your guy can get away with behaving while still remaining on the side of the audience, the funnier it’ll be.
Seinfeld
is the greatest example of that ever.

According to showbiz legend, an audience member left the following note during the previews for 1988’s
Rain Man
: “I was hoping the little guy would snap out of it.”

Come on! Oh, that’s great! That’s fantastic. Kind of typical, unfortunately, although I actually do find some negative notes very encouraging. Or negative reviews. There were some bad reviews I received where I thought, Good. This means the movie’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Roger Ebert said that
Step Brothers
was symbolic of the end of Western culture.
9
I thought, That’s
exactly
the response he should be having. For me, that’s just a sound. It’s like when a boxer gets punched, they make a certain kind of noise that clues the other boxer as to how much damage is being done. So reading that from Roger Ebert felt like we had accomplished what we had set out to do.

For three seasons, you were the head writer at
Saturday Night Live
, a show that’s sometimes been criticized for still adhering to a writing schedule more conducive to the coked-out seventies than today. Do you feel that
SNL
’s schedule—including all-night writing sessions on Tuesday nights—is helpful or harmful to the comedy-writing process?

I always found it pretty great, actually. Monday you would get your ideas together. On Tuesday, you’d really start in earnest at around one o’clock in the afternoon. You’d then write for fourteen hours straight. Often, you’d end up writing even longer, until nine or ten in the morning. Some of the best material came out of staying up all night when you were half asleep.

But, yeah, the time we spent at
Saturday Night Live
was a very different time from the seventies, with all of that craziness. We would go out and drink, but it was all pretty laid-back. You’d be bopping around to different people’s offices. You’d dig in with one group of writers, you’d finish writing the sketch, you’d go visit another group of writers. And I remember just writing crazy amounts. That sense of a deadline is so helpful. It forces pages out of you. So some of the highest volume of writing I’ve ever done in my life was for that show.

Do you remember any specific sketches or jokes that were created solely because you had been up all night?

What usually came from staying up all night were “ten to one” sketches. Meaning, the last sketch of the show that aired at ten to one in the morning. I remember it was once five in the morning, and Ferrell and I found out that Robert Duvall was going to make a guest appearance. We tried to figure out something to write for him. I said, “I’d like for you to give him a sponge bath,” and Ferrell said, “Well, I’d like to sing to him.” And I said, “Well, I’d like for you to give him a sponge bath while you sing ‘Lay Lady Lay.’” And that was it. We wrote a sketch where Will was a weird hospital orderly who ended up giving Robert Duvall a sponge bath while singing Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay.” Four days later it was on the air.

Is the last half hour at
SNL
viewed with contempt by the writers? Or is it seen as an opportunity to air more interesting material?

I think for a lot of the writers it’s the best. That was the place you wanted to be because you had a chance to get away with a crazy sketch. At the same time, some of these stranger sketches would play well enough that it would then go higher in the show. Which was great, because it just meant more people saw it. But no, no writer ever looked down on the last half hour. The only time you ever saw someone upset would be a cast member who might have written a sketch that was supposed to contain a big, fat hit character and it didn’t quite play. Lorne would sometimes drop something like that to the very end of the show.

What percentage of
SNL
sketches, on average, would kill at read-throughs with staff members on Wednesday afternoons but never make it to the air on Saturday nights?

Maybe 40 percent to 50 percent. I remember I once wrote a sketch with Ferrell playing a doctor telling a patient that they were going to die. While the doctor was talking to the patient, he was also eating a giant tuna sub. Real messy. The tuna was dripping onto his clothes, dropping to the floor. It just killed in the read-though. But then in the big studio, the audience didn’t get into it at all. It was just dead silence the entire time. Actually, that was a pretty common experience.

Were there certain types of sketches that would hit with audiences more than others?

There were many factors at play. A lot of it had to do with the sketch that came before yours. If you were sort of trying to do something small and funny, and the sketch before yours was the Cheerleaders [starring Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri], you’d just get swamped. The audience was looking in one direction with cheerleaders and then suddenly your little sketch would come along and it would just get swallowed whole. That big studio floor could make subtle ideas feel very small, and they could get lost. There were a lot of factors at play.

And, quite often, a sketch would kill in dress rehearsal and would
still
get cut. I wouldn’t understand why.

Even as the head writer you didn’t understand why?

Even as the head writer I wouldn’t understand why. Will and I once wrote a sequel to our Neil Diamond storyteller sketch. Will played Neil Diamond as if he were on the show
VH1 Storytellers
. Before each song, “Neil” would explain the songs’ origins. “Cracklin’ Rosie” was about a hit-and-run. “Cherry, Cherry” was about the time Neil killed a drifter. These were really fun, poppy songs, but they each had these horrific backstories. The first of these Neil Diamond sketches went over really well, so we wrote a sequel with Helen Hunt playing Christina Aguilera singing along with Neil Diamond. It got a ton of laughs the whole way through, and then it got cut. I was really baffled by it. But you know, there’s never going to be consistency, really. After you’re at
SNL
for a couple years, you learn not to look for consistency. You kind of take it as it is and move on and try to remember to be super grateful that you’re working in New York City on a show where you get to write this crazy stuff. My last two years were definitely the most fun I had on that show, because I wasn’t as obsessed with “Why didn’t that sketch get in?” Your first couple years, you think everything should be perfect. Once you let that go, it’s a really fun show to work on.

You came of age pre-Internet, when a site like Funny or Die wasn’t even remotely possible. Do you think your writing and comedy style would have been different if you had grown up connected?

Truthfully, I think it would have been bad for me. I think there’s a chance that I would never have left my hometown. The reason I left Philadelphia to begin with was that there was no sketch, no improv, and that’s what I really wanted to do. If the Internet had been around, I would have found four or five people who also wanted to do it, and we would’ve just started shooting videos. Back then you had to head to Chicago. I’m curious if that’s changed in Chicago. It was like a migration when we were there. There were people from everywhere. In the Upright Citizens Brigade, we had Matt Besser from Arkansas, Ian Roberts from New Jersey, Rachel Dratch from Massachusetts. People were from everywhere.