Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (38 page)

Not a bad life.

Not at all.

Actress/Writer,
Parks and Recreation
,
SNL

Read your stuff out loud. Sometimes the way it reads in your head sounds different when someone says it.

Be open to changing all the material you think is really brilliant. Even the most talented people don’t fight every day for every one of their jokes. There’s always some better way to do things when you’re working with good people. I find the most talented people tend to be the best collaborators.

Being flexible can mean people want to work with you. A lot of people say fight for what you believe in and don’t let them change it, but I want to say, fight less, and be open to the fact that other people might have a better idea.

I’m paraphrasing that great quote from [
This American Life
host] Ira Glass—basically the sentiment of, “Keep doing it, even though all your stuff is going to be pretty bad. But don’t be discouraged by its imperfections; embrace it if it’s half good. Fake it till you make it. Put things up. If they’re sloppy, keep trying.” I love his thought that nobody carves out this perfect jewel. Everybody struggles and does all these half attempts, and it’s really more about time than it is about perfection.

Just put in the time, and don’t be too precious about things. Work with your friends. And maybe, eventually, you’ll get paid. [Laughs] If you’re doing it for the money, then just forget it. When you sit at your computer and think, I’m going to write something really political and interesting, it’s like, Okay, good luck with that!

People quit because it’s really hard. It’s hard to not have a house, hard not to have money, hard not to have insurance, hard not to be married, hard to have your parents ask you every day what you’re going to do with your life. It’s hard to wait tables while you’re doing improv shows. It’s hard to get up onstage and bomb. It’s hard to lug your props around everywhere. It’s hard to submit things that get rejected.

It’s not easy! Good people make it look easy, and a lot of people want to do it because they think it looks easy. If you stick around, if you’re a good collaborator, if you’re open to new ideas and you keep trying, then you’ll find there’s a lot of different ways you can work as a writer. You can generate original material, or you can be a staff writer, or you can write about the comedy scene—all different things you might find you’re good at if you stick around long enough.

During an interview with Roz Chast at the 2006
New Yorker
Festival, comedian Steve Martin read aloud from one of her cartoons from February 1993. It was a fictional help-wanted classified, touting the opportunity of a lifetime. The job? “To reorganize 760,000 files from top to bottom, fire four people nobody else will, and take care of children aged three and one.” In addition, applicants would be expected to have an “up-to-date trucking license” and “knowledge of quantum physics.” “There is so much literature involved,” Martin remarked about this cartoon, and others. “So much
writing
.”

Cartoons are mostly a visual medium; too many words add unnecessary clutter. But Chast, like the early
New Yorker
cartoonists, is a master at finding the perfect balance between the literary and the visual. Her cartoons do not depend on funny pictures, needless explanation, or rambling punch lines to sell the joke. She’s a rarity among her creative brood—a cartoonist whose humor can be appreciated
without
the drawings.

Take this
New Yorker
cartoon from October 2002, which features the following catalog description beneath a simple drawing of a cardigan sweater:

Item #3715—Cozy Cardigan: Snuggle up in this oh-so-cozy cardigan. Once you slip it on, you’ll never want to take it off. We’ve improved the fit and the texture—it’s a hug made of wool, a hug that never lets go before you’re ready to be let go. Whether you’re just sitting at home with your family, who must think you’re some kind of automaton and take you for granted day in and day out, who can’t be bothered to clean up after themselves, it’s a wonder you’re not a complete alcoholic, or whether you’re going to work at the widget office where all day long, you have the privilege of watching your boss making goo-goo eyes at that thing in the black leather miniskirt that a normal person with her legs would never wear, and finally it’s five o’clock and you can go home to your empty apartment overlooking two gas stations and a restaurant that is probably a Mafia money-laundering operation because it has all this expensive but ugly junk in it and about seven waiters per customer because no one ever eats there, and you wonder: Is this all there is?, this is the sweater you’ll reach for over and over again. We guarantee it!

As with all great humor writers, Chast has a fascination with the tiny, seemingly insignificant details that are usually and all too easily ignored. Her cartoons—which have appeared in
The New Yorker
since 1978—have featured an array of characters, some of whom bear an uncanny resemblance to her own family members.

But many of Chast’s most famous creations are insentient. Chast has devoted entire comics to wallpaper, lamps, boxes, electrical cords. She specializes in finding the “inner voice” of these objects—or, as her mother once referred to it, the “conspiracy of the inanimate.” In one late-seventies cartoon, she gave a toaster a bow tie and a vase a string of pearls, and dressed a grandfather clock in a skirt and straw hat. (“You can dress them up,” she wrote in the accompanying caption, “but you can’t take them out.”)

Born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in the mid-fifties and sixties, Chast began drawing at age five—her first original comic strip, featuring two anthropomorphic birds, was named
Jacky and Blacky
—but it never crossed her mind that she might make a living in cartoons. However, within only a few months after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied with the future members of Talking Heads, Chast was already publishing her work in
Christopher Street
magazine and
The Village Voice
. A few years later, still in her twenties, she was invited to join the approximately forty cartoonists under contract with
The New Yorker
.

Today, Chast lives with her husband, humor writer Bill Franzen, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where she continues to write and illustrate her cartoons. Her books include
The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z!
, co-written with Steve Martin;
Theories of Everything
, a career-spanning, four-hundred-page retrospective, featuring an introduction by
New Yorker
editor David Remnick; and
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
, a memoir about the deaths of her parents.

How much did
The New Yorker
mean to you growing up in Brooklyn in the fifties and sixties?

Not much, truthfully.
The New Yorker
wasn’t something that I focused on when I was a little kid, even though my parents subscribed. I read
Highlights for Children
. It wasn’t until I was about eight or nine that I discovered the old
New Yorker
cartoonists like Charles Addams.

My parents were both involved with education. My mother was an assistant principal at a Brooklyn elementary school, and my father taught high school. Each summer, we would drive from Brooklyn to Ithaca, New York, to Cornell University, and we’d rent graduate-student housing, because it was cheap. When my parents attended lectures, they’d stick me in the browsing library in the student center. There was one section that contained only cartoon books. I would look through these books and just die.

I especially loved Charles Addams. It was the funniest stuff I had ever seen—just amazing. I still remember the books:
Monster Rally, Addams and Evil, Black Maria, Drawn and Quartered
.

What was it about Addams’s cartoons that appealed to a nine-year-old?

For one thing, I “got” them. I couldn’t relate to some of the other
New Yorker
cartoons, like the ones in which grown-ups said witty things to each other at a cocktail party. That just didn’t make any sense to me; I had no idea what a cocktail party was, really.

But with Addams, I understood the jokes. It was sick humor—very black. They were funny to me. Plus, there were kids in them! A few of his cartoons I’ve never forgotten. One had an entire family pouring boiling oil onto a group of holiday carolers. In another one, the Uncle Fester character is signaling to the car behind him to pass, even though he knows an oncoming truck is approaching. Or the cartoon where Uncle Fester is grinning as he watches a movie, while everyone else sobs. So many great ones! Kids building guillotines in their rooms. Very transgressive.

Wolcott Gibbs, the
New Yorker
writer, once wrote that Addams’s work was a denial of all of the spiritual and physical evolution in the human race. Maybe I related to that.

Even when you were nine?

Oh, when I was a kid I was obsessed with all sorts of weird, creepy, dark things. I was fascinated with medical oddities and bizarre diseases. My mother’s sister was a nurse, so we always had [the medical reference book]
The Merck Manual
lying around. I didn’t understand much of it, but I did understand the symptoms. Just the faint possibility that I might have leprosy or lockjaw or gangrene . . . tantalizing and terrifying.

I’m still fascinated with that sort of thing. Last night I watched this incredible medical show on television and [laughs] . . . I shouldn’t laugh, because it’s not funny at all, but the show featured a woman who turned silver.

She turned what?

Her skin turned silver, but I can’t remember why.

I suppose it doesn’t matter, really.

It doesn’t matter—it’s true.

Oh, actually, I
do
know why! When she was a kid, a doctor prescribed nasal drops that had silver in it.

And you’re not confusing this person with a superhero?

No, she was definitely just a normal woman who turned silver. The condition is called
argyria
.

To me, that’s the ideal type of disease show. If I watch a show that features, say, a man with an extra arm growing out of his shoulder, I know that I don’t have that condition and I never will. Same with parasitic twins. Horrifying, but not contagious.

Have you ever seen
Dear Dead Days
? It’s a book by Charles Addams [Putnam, 1959], and it’s a compendium of all of these odd images—weird photos of patients suffering from rare diseases, criminals, revolting or frightening architecture, wheelchairs. I loved that book.

Many writers and cartoonists are fascinated by people who live on the outskirts of society—criminals, the mentally ill, those suffering from deformities.

Those people are more interesting than the everyday humdrum. To quote [photographer] Diane Arbus, “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

I suppose it’s also helpful for a creative person to look where others might not be looking.

Maybe. If I could, I
would
look where everyone else is looking. But my attention is always drawn elsewhere. When I was in school, trying to listen to the teacher talk about the French and Indian War, I would be distracted by irrelevant things like the ugly shoes she was wearing.

You once drew a
New Yorker
cartoon about that.

I did. It was called “Newly Discovered Learning Disabilities” [December 3, 2001], and one of the entries was “Doodler’s Syndrome.” The child in the cartoon insisted on drawing and didn’t hear a thing the teacher was saying—very similar to my own experience.

You’d be labeled ADD today.

Oh, absolutely! It’s still very hard for me to pay strict attention to something that I have to listen to. I once drew a cartoon called “Adult Attention Deficit Disorders” [
The New Yorker
, June 7, 2004]. It included “Financial Information Disorder,” “Driving Directions Deafness,” and “Technical Manual Fatigue Syndrome.” I suffer from all of them—and more.

I’d love to be able to pay attention to a lecture about saving money on my taxes, but I’m always fascinated by the silver person sitting in front of me.

How often does that actually happen?

Not often enough.

Were you a fearful child?

I remember I was afraid of kites, but I have no idea why. Actually, I can sort of guess: I had an uncle who told me that if I were to hold on to a kite long enough I would be lifted into the sky.

Kids believe
anything
you tell them. I did, anyway. I could easily convince myself that something bad was about to happen, or that I was about to come down with a terrible, incurable disease.

My parents were older than all of my friends’ parents. They came from a world where people actually did get diphtheria. I remember my mother describing having had diphtheria as a child; she said it was like having “a web across [her] throat.” My grandmother supposedly stuck her finger down my mother’s throat and pulled out the web. This was very real to me. I heard that diphtheria story many times.

My parents were both forty-two when they had me in 1954. They were a link to another time and place, and that affected me greatly. A lot of my friends had parents who had experienced the excitement and the prosperity of the fifties, whether they were “red-diaper babies” or “Eisenhower babies.” My parents didn’t seem to know anything of that; I might as well have been raised during the Depression. My parents grew up poor in households that spoke mostly Yiddish. They were from the Old World.

How did your parents feel when you achieved success? Did they understand your cartoons?

Sort of, but they were more excited that I had insurance. [Laughs]

Did your parents allow you to own comic books?

My parents were very serious; they did not like pop culture
at all
. Comics were considered “crap.” They did buy me
Classic Comics
, however. Have you ever seen them? They’re illustrated versions of
Moby-Dick
,
Robin Hood
, and other works of literature.

They were like pieces of candy that looked great but tasted terrible. The sad part was that an illustrator actually drew them. So much work went into them, and they were really horrible.

I hated
Andy Capp
. A lot of daily strips were so depressing. They have that awful “joke” rhythm. Here’s the set-up . . . and now . . . here comes the punch line! Ha, ha, ha! Everyone’s laughing at the hilarity that ensued, except you! I could never imagine doing a weekly strip with the same rhythm and the same format week after week after week. You just want to kill yourself. I’m able to work on any subject in any format, and it’s freeing.