Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (19 page)

Writer,
The Daily Show
,
Bob’s Burgers

There’s a hierarchy of television comedy writing jobs, and like most hierarchies (the ones you’ll find within troops of orangutans, say, or pods of
HuffPo
commenters) it’s brutal and a little ridiculous. You see it reinforced in the attitudes of your fellow comedy writers: Work for a smart, boundary-pushing late-night show? Good for you, kid. Think of it as a fun stepping stone. Work on a featherweight multi-cam sitcom starring five hot people pretending to be romantically inept? Congratulations! You have arrived.

There are plenty of exceptions. A job writing for, say,
Saturday Night Live
is more glamorous and carries more cachet than your average sitcom job. And status aside, any working comedy writer is just grateful to be employed.

But comedy writers on late-night shows often aspire to be sitcom writers, for the simple reason that the sitcom world offers more room for professional growth and the potential for bigger royalty checks. Some of the smartest, most charismatic and talented writers I’ve known have been late-night comedy lifers. They’d like to get hired on a sitcom that insults their intelligence and stuffs them firmly behind the camera (on some late-night shows writers get the chance to perform on-air), but it’s a difficult leap to make. Sitcom writers guard their territory with the jealousy of people who know there aren’t enough jobs to go around. And there really aren’t enough jobs to go around.

Which is easier, writing for a late-night show or a sitcom? If you had asked me right after I started my sitcom job after five years at a late-night show, I would have said sitcoms are easier. The average workday at a late-night show is fast-paced and stressful. You are, after all, turning around material for a program that airs that night. Days at a sitcom can sometimes be just as demanding. But other days—often the ones spent breaking stories—can feel downright leisurely. To an outside observer they look a bit like closing time at an opium den. Writers lounge on couches, staring at a bulletin board with index cards tacked to it and tossing out half-baked ideas. One or two people fall asleep. Snacks are available.

But appearances in this case are deceiving. When I made the jump from late-night to scripted I was what you’d call inexperienced at writing sitcoms—or, if you were being less charitable, awful at it. I was cocky because I had assumed that years of watching half-hour comedies would make writing for one an intuitive exercise. I’d given a bit of thought to writing interesting characters but hadn’t troubled myself with the intricacies of story structure beyond getting high once and talking to a friend about Joseph Campbell.

What I now realize is that those slow-paced story days, as numbing as they can be, are really when all the mental heavy lifting happens. Joke-writing days are fast-paced, but they’re a much more mechanical exercise. On a good day, jokes are easy. You can churn ’em out. A satisfying story that serves the characters while building the world of the show and hitting all the network-mandated precommercial emotional crescendos—that’s something that takes painstaking work.

So . . . which is the better gig for the comedy writer, sitcoms or late-night? My cop-out answer is that both are challenging and desirable in their own way. And while one tends to pay more than the other, both pay roughly a zillion times more than substitute teaching, which is what I was doing before I got my first comedy job. So let’s just say the system works and leave it at that.

During his five-decade (and counting) writing career, Bruce Friedman has published eight novels, four story collections, numerous plays, and such screenplays as
Stir Crazy
(1980) and
Splash
(1984), for which he was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

Though he never became a household name, Friedman has many famous admirers and friends.
The
Godfather
author Mario Puzo once described Friedman’s stories as being “like a
Twilight Zone
with Charlie Chaplin.” Neil Simon adapted Friedman’s short story “A Change of Plan” (originally published in
Esquire
magazine) into a 1972 movie blockbuster,
The Heartbreak Kid
, directed by Elaine May and starring Charles Grodin and May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin. Steve Martin, who turned Friedman’s semiautobiographical book
The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life
(1978) into a feature film in 1984, provided a back-cover blurb for Friedman’s story collection,
Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos
(2000), that perfectly, if sarcastically, summarizes the sentiments of so many of his contemporaries and would-be imitators: “I am not jealous.”

In 1962, while working full-time as an editor of various men’s magazines, Friedman published his first novel,
Stern
, which is widely considered to be his masterpiece. The book, which Friedman wrote in a mere six months, when he was in his early thirties, tells the story of a man who leaves the city for the suburbs, only to discover his new home is far from the tranquil residential development of his imagination. He’s attacked by neighborhood dogs. He develops an ulcer. His family is harassed by an anti-Semite, who, during one altercation, pushes Stern’s wife to the ground. The reader never learns Stern’s first name.

Born in the Bronx in 1930, Friedman’s initial ambition was to become a doctor—at first. Switching gears, he ultimately decided to earn a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. But his true literary education came while serving as a first lieutenant in the United States Air Force, from 1951 to 1953. According to Friedman, his commanding officer suggested he read three novels: Thomas Wolfe’s
Of Time and the River
, James Jones’s
From Here to Eternity
, and J. D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
. After consuming these novels in a single weekend, Friedman realized that he wanted to attempt to write fiction for a living.

Along with Kurt Vonnegut, Friedman is often credited as being one of the pioneers of “dark comedy.” In 2011, Dwight Garner, a book critic for
The New York Times
, wrote that Friedman’s
The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life
“makes low-level depression and ineptitude seem stylish and ironic, almost a supreme way of being in the world.” From plays like
Steambath
(1970), in which it’s revealed that a Puerto Rican steam-room attendant is God, to short stories such as 1963’s “When You’re Excused, You’re Excused,” in which the main character tries to convince his wife to let him skip Yom Kippur to work out at the gym, Friedman’s take on humanity is bleak, but always amusingly realistic.

In his foreword to
Black Humor
, an anthology he edited in 1965, Friedman argued that the thirteen writers presented in the collection weren’t just “brooding and sulking sorts” determined to find levity in the world’s misery. Rather, they were “discover[ing] new land” by “sailing into darker waters somewhere out beyond satire.” Not surprisingly, the very same sentiment could be used to describe Bruce Jay Friedman.

I’ve read that you don’t like to be known as a humorist.

I don’t, especially. James Thurber, Robert Benchley, S. J. Perelman—they are the great humorists. They set out to make you laugh. That’s never my intention, although it’s often the result. As a writer, I couldn’t possibly be more serious. Sometimes the work is expressed comedically. The hope is that it’s unforced and doesn’t seem worked on, which, of course, it is.

So you agree with Joseph Heller that humor isn’t the goal, per se, but the means to the goal?

I’m not comfortable with the idea of “using” humor to achieve a purpose. I can’t imagine Evelyn Waugh, while writing [the 1928 satiric novel]
Decline and Fall
, saying, “I think I’ll use a little humor
here
.” But there’s a theory that a writer can’t make a claim to greatness unless there’s a streak of comedy in his work. There may be some truth to that.

I’m not much good at jokes, can’t remember them. However, once upon a time, I volunteered to be the master of ceremonies at a sorority event at the University of Missouri, which I attended in the late forties and early fifties. The mic went dead after about six jokes, all of which were borrowed from a Borscht Belt comedian. One was, “I don’t have to be doing this for a living, folks. I could be selling bagels to midgets for toilet seats.” The room was filled with gorgeous women who began to talk among themselves and to cross and uncross their legs.

I became rattled and shouted out, “Will you please quiet down? Don’t you see I’m trying to be
funny
here?” I then fainted. Someone named Roth helped revive me. “What did you have to faint for?” he asked. “You were terrific.”

In 1965, you put together
Black Humor
, a collection of short stories featuring such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Terry Southern, John Barth, and Vladimir Nabokov. In the foreword, you coined and popularized the term “black humor.” You’ve since said that you feel somewhat stuck with that term.

I do. I hear it all the time, and it makes me wince. Essentially, it was a chance for me to pick up some money—not that much, actually—and to read some writers whose work was new to me.

In retrospect, a more accurate term would have been
tense comedy
—there’s much to laugh at on the surface, but with streaks of agony running beneath. I had no idea the term
black humor
would catch fire to the extent that it did—and last this many years. The academics, starving for a new category, wolfed it down.

What similarities did you notice among these “black humorist” writers’ works?

Each one had a different signature, but the tone generally was much darker than what was found in most popular fiction at the time. There was a thin line between reality and the fantastical. Their works featured ill-fated heroes. It also confronted—perhaps not consciously—social issues that hadn’t been touched on. Pressed to the wall, I’ll use a term that’s sickeningly in vogue today: It was
edgy
.

Why do you think the term “black humor” became so popular, so quickly?

It’s catchy, and that’s appealing to publishers, critics, academics. Some of it may have had to do with the political and social climate of the mid-sixties. The drugs, the Pill, the music, the war—comedy had to find some new terrain with which to deal with all of this. I imagine each generation feels the same.

After the book was published in 1965, my publisher threw a huge “Black Humor” party—I still have the invitation—and the whole world showed up. I recall Mike Nichols and Elaine May having a high old time. The “black humor” label started to get reprinted and quoted after that party, and it never stopped. Ridiculous.

When did you begin writing your first novel,
Stern
?

In 1960; it took about six months. I had been trying to write another book for three or four years, but it never came together. Certain notions aren’t born to be novels. I figured that out—at great expense. I wrote
Stern
on the subway and train to and from work. I wrote it in a heat, like I was being chased down an alley.

Stern
seems like a break from the type of books that came before it. It seems more ethnic; more psychoanalytic. The main character is an anxiety-ridden Jewish nebbish who feels taken advantage of by his Gentile suburban neighbor. The book was very influential for a lot of writers, including Joseph Heller, Nora Ephron, Philip Roth, and, later, John Kennedy Toole, the author of
A Confederacy of Dunces
, who called it his favorite modern novel. When you were working on it, did you feel as if you were working on something new?

I was simply trying to write a good book—and an honest one—after struggling with a book that kept falling apart. I was living in the suburbs and feeling isolated, cut off from the city. I constructed a small and painful event, and I wrote a novel around it—a man’s wife falls to the ground, without any underwear, and is seen by an anti-Semitic neighbor. I hoped the book would be published and that afterward I wouldn’t be run out of the country. I’m quite serious. I thought I’d hide in Paris until it all blew over. Such ego. It’s not as if I had a dozen book ideas to choose from.
Stern
was the one I had—the story felt compelling—and that’s the one I wrote.

This main character was not your typical macho, male literary hero; he was fearful about many things, including sex.

I certainly had that side at the time. All writing is autobiographical, in my view, including scientific papers.

Stern
was a book that was in direct contrast to the short stories I had written up to that time. I’m told that it was a departure from much of the era’s fiction.
The New Yorker
literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman called it “the first true Freudian novel.” It only sold six thousand copies. The editor, Robert Gottlieb, who edited
Catch-22
, which was published just before
Stern
, told me that they were the “right copies.” I remember wondering what it would have been like if it sold a hundred thousand
wrong
copies.

The only book that had a distant echo was Richard Yates’s
Revolutionary Road
. And, of course, John Cheever’s stories, which touched on suburban alienation in New England.

Do you think that
Stern
influenced
Revolutionary Road
, which was written around the same time?

I doubt it, but I do know that Yates was aware of it. I knew Yates when I was working as an editor in the fifties and sixties, at the Magazine Management Co., which published men’s adventure magazines. He just showed up without explanation for a few weeks, this man with a handsome and ruined, disheveled look, and attached himself to our little group—and then he disappeared. From time to time he’d call me from the Midwest to ask if I could get him a job. It annoyed me that he thought of me as a publisher or producer. Never once did he acknowledge that I was a writer. But I later learned that
Stern
was one of the few novels that he taught in his writing classes.

Yates had a difficult life. He was a major alcoholic, and he always struggled for money. In other words, your basic serious novelist.

It’s a shame that Yates’s life was so difficult. He was a brilliant writer, and a very funny one.

I agree. He was a gifted man—his writing was pitch-perfect—but he probably had a demon or two more than the rest of us. He’d complain that if
Catch-22
hadn’t been such a big hit,
Revolutionary Road
would have been a bestseller.

There was an incident in which a few writers and editors, including myself, went out for a drink in the early seventies, and Yates joined us. He drank so much that he collapsed and fell forward, hitting his head on the table. My secretary at the time, who hadn’t paid much attention to him, pulled him to his feet, and off they went together. I never saw either of them again. They ended up living together.

Tell me about your experience editing adventure magazines in the 1950s and 1960s for the Magazine Management Co. What were some of the publications under the company’s umbrella?

There were more than a hundred, in every category—movies, adventure, confession, paperback books, Stan Lee’s comic books. Stan worked there for years and years. The office was located on Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. I was responsible for about five magazines. One was called
Focus
. It was a smaller version of
People
, before that magazine was even published.

I also worked as editor of
Swank
. Every now and then the publisher, Martin Goodman, would appear at my office door and say, “I am throwing you another magazine.” Some others that were “thrown” at me included
Male, Men, Man’s World
, and
True Action
.