Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (37 page)

And then it’s up to you. The responsibility is yours. I give everything I have to make this show work. You can’t do it if you’re not going to do it the right way and if you’re not going to be true to it. Because you know what bad comedy is. You know what garbage entertainment is. And the worst thing for me would be to be responsible for more garbage entertainment. It becomes like a mission to do something good in the face of garbage.

Speaking of garbage, when I entered the WFMU studios this morning in Jersey City, New Jersey, to interview you, I noticed an “Employee Tasks” board in the elevator. And I noticed that your task read: “Garbage.”

We all have to volunteer here at the station. And garbage is actually not the worst task. I go to the garbage can in the studio, I pull the bag out, I tie it, I throw it off the fire escape into the parking lot and I put a new garbage bag in the can. Then, later, when I go to my car, I’ll throw the garbage into the Dumpster. So in the scheme of tasks, it’s not too bad. Everybody at the station has a job to do.

You write and produce your own radio show that entertains more than half a million people every week, including a good percentage of top comedy writers, and yet you still have to hit the Dumpster after each show to take out the station’s garbage?

[Laughs] I’ll do anything for creative freedom.

Radio is such an ephemeral medium. Do you ever wonder how you’ll be remembered?

You have to appreciate the journey. You can’t control where you’re going to end up. You better appreciate the experience; otherwise you’ll never be happy. As soon as I’m dead I don’t care if no one mentions my name once. I can’t get anything from it. It doesn’t matter to me. If I drop dead and am completely forgotten, it bears the same impact on me as if I’ll be remembered for a hundred years. Regardless, I’m done.

But isn’t that the purpose of a creative person’s life? For their work to outlive their own mortality so that future generations can enjoy what they struggled so hard to produce?

But that’s the kind of thing that people have no control over. You just can’t worry about it. It’s funny when you hear names of people who were once so enormous in the culture and they now mean almost nothing. Johnny Carson is currently heading toward that point, and he used to be huge. I guess for me it comes down to wondering why it matters to have your work be valued by anyone after you’re not here. It’s not even that important to me to have it valued by anyone
now
, on some level. If I’m happy with what I’m doing, that’s really all that I can control and it’s all that matters. It’s great when people say nice things about what you do, but that doesn’t help you do the work any better, right? And the concept of “future generations” seems like fool’s gold. There are authors who sold millions of books during their era but they didn’t stand the test of time, and people who didn’t sell ten books who are now revered. I can only focus on what I have a say in, and that’s what I’m working on today. Everything else is out of my hands, and it really doesn’t matter.

If you’re trying to make things that will last forever, I can almost guarantee you that you won’t. The best things are the things that were made because they were powerful in the moment, and they were immediate, and they resonated with people. But if you’re swinging for only immortality, it’s just not going to happen.

All you can really hope for is to connect with people and to hopefully put food on the table—and to then get a chance to do it again the next day.

Writer, Cohost,
Bob & Ray

For more than forty years, you were half of one of the most famous and influential radio comedy teams in history, Bob & Ray. Who were your own comedic influences growing up in the 1920s and 1930s?

Ray [Goulding] and I both grew up with radio. Our whole hopes for the future were that we’d get into radio. That’s what we loved the most. That’s all we thought about. We both loved comedy, and even though we didn’t grow up together, we had the same influences.

One of our favorites was a comedy team named Stoopnagle and Budd. These two were really radio’s first satirists. They were very influential. Very clever. They once did a bit where they had a revolving bowl for fish who were too tired to swim around on their own. They broke up in the late thirties. Really far out. Not as broad as other radio teams, even though they had both been in vaudeville. They would invent different items, like an eleven-foot pole for somebody you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. They were my favorite kind of funny. Lots of characters, bad puns.
Purposely
bad puns.

They also played characters that you could visualize. I think that’s important.

I guess that’s the beauty of radio: You can visualize your own world.

Absolutely. It’s a thing that I miss. I do think that some of the mystery has gone out of comedy. Somebody seems to always now describe exactly what the joke is. We would do bits that we could never have gotten away with on television, like describing a world-champion daredevil trying to break the record for the most times walking around a revolving door. You couldn’t get away with that on TV. It wouldn’t work.

But I guess there was one drawback to radio: Ray and I later did so many characters over and over again that we were afraid to do them in front of people because it would only disappoint. We didn’t want to destroy that thing we’d built up.

What fascinates me about comedy on the radio is how hugely popular it was for decades, but how completely forgotten these shows tend to be now. For instance, one of the most popular radio comedies,
Vic and Sade
, had close to eight million weekly listeners in the early 1940s. Eight million!

Vic and Sade
was another big influence on our show. It was created by a writer named Paul Rhymer, who ended up writing thousands of scripts. The show had great characters who all lived in a small town. It was just homey kind of stuff. You’d hear real people talk. Real people, but a little odd. And you could visualize every one of them.

Radio was huge. It came right into your home, and only books could do that then. It was magic. When I was seven or eight years old, my parents used to go down to New York from Boston for a week at a time and my father would conduct his insurance business. He knew some guy who could get tickets to live broadcasts. We used to go. I just loved it. My parents had no theatrical background at all, but they backed me up and came along. They were very supportive.

Do you consider what you and Ray did as being different from the type of comedy that was on radio before your show launched?

At the time, a lot of people told us we were different, but it was hard for us to see. I guess one difference was that there was no set “straight man.” We were both sort of straight men reacting against the other. We were also the first to use a comic version of a straight interview between two characters. This later became common. Two straight characters talking.

What’s interesting, too, is that a lot of your comedy was surreal, almost bordering on crazy. And yet it was performed in a very understated manner. It’s a very effective combination. And very modern. In particular, I’m thinking of the sketch about two guys who swim across the country, but only after they purchase a semi truck with a pool on it and swim the length of the truck, back and forth, back and forth, as the truck creeps along the highway.

Mostly, I think we were an amalgam of a lot of the shows that we loved. We never thought of ourselves as being different. Each generation is always influenced by the former. Ray and I never discussed “what humor is.” We just did what we felt was funny, and we slowly began to see that people liked it. We started to receive more and more mail. At first it was a small group of listeners, but that group really loved what they heard. They connected with it.

Many current comedians, writers, and actors are huge fans of Bob & Ray, including Paul Rudd, Jack Handey, Bill Hader, and Bob Odenkirk. Also, David Letterman is a huge fan. You once did a bit called “The Bob & Ray Home Surgery Kit.” You announced, “Haven’t you ever thought, ‘Golly, I wish I could take out my own tonsils?’” That’s very Letterman-esque.

David was influenced by us, but we were also influenced by many people. You know, one thing that I can see—not only with David, but also with Bob Newhart—is that the humor is character-based, rather than just purely joke-based. We rarely did jokes. It was mostly characterization. I think that type of comedy always lasts longer. We also didn’t do jokes about current show business. And I don’t think we were ever mean-spirited. We never made fun of these characters.

These characters tended to be very sincere.

[Laughs] Those type of people truly interested us. Ray and I would walk around New York, and we’d look around and find things that would impress us. I remember once walking past a Woolworths in Times Square and seeing somebody playing the character of Mr. Peanut. Out in the sun in a peanut suit, wearing a giant monocle. And a top hat. It struck us as funny. What type of guy would be willing to do that?

You created a lot of characters with horrible jobs.

We once came up with a character who worked at a restaurant and was a shrimp deveiner. It was his job to take that black stuff out of the shrimp. And every day some other guy would come around to collect it. Not a job you’d want, but he was proud of it.

And the porch-swing salesman in New York City. Not an easy gig.

We made fun of a lot of fake products and businesses. It was our take on advertising and how stupid that can be. I remember us talking about a company that only made old-fashioned, homemade paperclips [“The Great Lakes Paperclip Company”]. And we once did a bit about a store [Friedolf & Sons Shoelace Wash]
8
that specialized in cleaning dirty shoelaces. That’s all they did. They steam-pressed the shoelaces for the customers.

In the 1950s, Bob & Ray were performing routines that other comedians and performers were afraid to go anywhere near. In particular, you were taking on Senator McCarthy. This was long before anyone else had the nerve to mock McCarthy and his anticommunist hearings.

Time
magazine later singled us out as having been the only ones who did. One of the long-running bits we did was based on the hearings, but it was about a man in a small town who wanted to build a very large home—sixteen stories high—and had to face Commissioner Carstairs [played by Ray] to get approval. Commissioner Carstairs was based on the blustery McCarthy, and he’d go out of his way to destroy any citizen who didn’t live up to what he saw as exhibiting small-town values.

We’d watch McCarthy every day on TV and then the next day we’d paraphrase everything he’d done. Ray had McCarthy down like McCarthy wouldn’t have known it wasn’t him. What upset us about McCarthy was that he had such a reputation for blacklisting guys that never did a thing wrong in their lives. We were angered by this. It was unbelievable. I don’t know what you’d call it. He was a steamroller when he was going. Nobody could get a word in, on either side.

I guess you could say we were fearless, but nobody complained. Actually, Ray and I and our families all went down to Havana, Cuba, on vacation years later. We were about the only people on this particular flight from Miami to Havana, and the last guy to get on the plane was Roy Cohn [lawyer to McCarthy]. He gave us a good dirty look and sat down. He threw his overcoat over the back of the chair and pulled out a copy of
Confidential
magazine. Which says a lot.
Confidential
was famous for prying into the private lives of celebrities. An awful man.

Over the years, Bob & Ray hired many comedy writers, some of whom later became famous in their own right.

Neil Simon and his brother, Danny, wrote for us. They were nice guys and they were talented, but they didn’t work out. Our show was a very specific sensibility, and it was difficult to get on our exact wavelength. Andy Rooney once wrote for us on some project or other. Another writer named Tom Koch wrote for us for years. He was exactly on our wavelength, and he wrote material for us that we used years before we even met him.

Tom Koch, who contributed frequently to
Mad
magazine from the late 1950s until the mid-nineties, was a fascinating, brilliant writer. And yet, he never seemed to receive the public recognition he deserved. Anyone who has ever read and enjoyed
Mad
magazine would be familiar with his work.

Tom was a news guy who would submit ten to fifteen bits a week to us. He came up with our parody of
Dragnet
[
Squad Car 119
]. He wrote our Lassie parody “Tippy the Wonderdog” and one of our soap opera parodies [
The Gathering Dusk
]. The paperclip bit I was talking about before was written by Tom. We performed that for years. His material never needed any rewriting from us. It was ready to go—nothing needed to be added or taken out. Tom played a big part in a lot of our most successful pieces. He wrote thousands for us.

Tom wrote one of the most famous
Mad
articles of all time, a three-page spread that outlined the incredibly detailed, fantastical rules to a made-up sport called 43-Man Squamish. The 1965 article was so popular that college students around the country formed their own Squamish leagues and played actual games according to Tom’s rules.

I think there are groups that play to this day. Tom had a very ironic kind of wit. He was first-rate. He might be the only humor writer to invent an entirely new sport.

Is it true that Kurt Vonnegut wrote for you when he was young?

He wanted to write for us. I think he had a summer place near Boston, where we were based, and he submitted a couple of scripts, but we didn’t actually meet him until years later, when Ray and I played characters in a TV special [1972’s
Between Time and Timbuktu
] that Kurt had written based on a few of his stories. Then we would see each other often.

In that TV special, you played an ex-astronaut who visited Mars. You described it as looking just like your driveway back in Dallas. You also forgot Neil Armstrong’s famous line when he first set foot on the moon. You remembered it as being, quite wrongly: “One step for man, two steps for mankind.”

[Laughs] That was really a takeoff on the countless hours of live TV devoted to space exploration. Most of the hours were filled with people just trying to fill the hours. A lot of what we made fun of was the silliness of the media.

Vonnegut once said that as a teenager he attended a taping of your radio show and was surprised that you and Ray both looked so melancholy. That it almost appeared as if it was a burden to create and to be funny hour upon hour, day after day.

Others have described the same thing. That we looked angry. But we weren’t. We were just concentrating. And it was a job.

Vonnegut also said that there was a beautiful innocence to your humor. In his foreword to
Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray
, a 1975 collection of your scripts, he wrote that your humor seemed to say that “man is not evil. . . . He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive.”

I agree with that premise, without ever having thought of it that way. That really was what we were. And I think that you can see that way of thinking in the books and stories that Kurt himself wrote.

How would you and Ray write together?

We worked together in the Graybar Building in New York City [near Grand Central Terminal]. We both had our offices, each with a desk and sofa. Each office was ten-by-twelve feet or so. There was a partition in the middle. Our studio was off to the side. Ray would usually come in to where the typewriter was, which was in my office because I could type. And we’d kick around ideas and come up with a line, and then come up with more ideas and come up with another line, and then keep doing that. We would really sit there, improvising but always taking down the best parts.

Did you and Ray use a broadcast delay on any of your shows?

No, no time delay. That hadn’t been invented yet. We were on our own, but we were confident in our characters and in the humor. And, actually, we were the first comedy show to go on the NBC Network without a preapproved script.

You once said you didn’t think that you and Ray could work today. That everything moves so quickly now. And yet, I would think that your bits, your sketches—most of which are very short—were tailor-made for the Internet. There’s no waste. It’s all very tight.

If we ever felt a sketch wasn’t working, we moved on to the next one. We also didn’t depend on a last line being the clincher to a piece. We hoped that all of our sketches were as funny in the beginning and middle as they were in the end.

That’s good for an audience, but we couldn’t sell that now. We couldn’t get a job today with what we did, I don’t think. The vignettes and bits were about three minutes, two and a half. But now the longest they let anybody gab, except on a talk show, is like thirty seconds. But, I don’t know. Maybe we could run late at night. And I’m not talking about audiences, really. I’m only talking about executives. They don’t think that way.

Really? You don’t think that you could now sell your style of humor to today’s executives?

I don’t, no.

At the very least, you’d now have more freedom with language and subject matter.

I know. But if we were on today, I don’t think we would do anything that we wouldn’t have done fifty years ago. We did what we wanted to do and we got away with it. And it was fun.