Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (15 page)

Writer,
Mr. Show with Bob and David, Real Time with Bill Maher, Best Week Ever, Bob’s Burgers

There can sometimes be a division between different artistic expressions. Writers sometimes look down their noses at people who are actors, and actors do the same with writers. And that’s too bad. What you have to remember is that it’s always a team effort. That is how great things get done. You can arrive at a movie like
Citizen Kane
just as easily through team effort as you can with the auteur method. Bear in mind, Orson Welles was an actor, as well as a writer. He understood all those disciplines. That’s what makes a successful auteur. Somebody who understands those disciplines and has respect for all of them. I think respect for people who do the things you don’t do is very important. The writer of the movie is just as important as the director, who’s just as important as the makeup artist, who’s just as important as the key grip and the lighting guy. And the guy who carries the tiniest cable is just as important as the actor who ultimately stands on the red carpet.

Networking is extremely important. I hate the word
networking
because it feels very crass. To me, networking used to be going to parties and insinuating yourself into conversations. Now, the better definition of networking is that you socialize and find like-minded people and either work with them or have conversations with them about creativity. Networking does not have to be, “How can I get someone to give me a job?” It’s, “How do I establish relationships with like-minded people that will eventually lead to work?” It doesn’t have to be about, “Hey, you got a show. Are you going to put me in the show?” If you approach everything from a pure creative angle, the work and employment will take care of itself. People don’t like others who constantly ask them for work. People find that off-putting. That’s not the way to do it. Just be around and engage people in a pure way and you’re going to get more work that way.

People like to talk about selling out. I don’t think most people understand what that really means. To me, selling out is if you’re set for life with money, and yet you still decide to do an M&M’s commercial. That’s selling out. That’s you saying, “I want a bunch of money.” But if you are someone who wants to do good work but you’re not set for life and you can’t pick and choose what you want to do, then you do what you have to do to pay the bills. It’s just that simple. I’m forty-three, so I kind of feel like that’s just life. That’s fucking life. I have a wife. We can’t be precious artists who starve anymore. We’re too old to starve. I base decisions on, “I need to work. I need to do this.” I’m fine with that. Honestly, even with the things I’ve done that were more for money than art, I had fun and I enjoyed the people I worked with. I’m not ashamed of anything. Do whatever is going to pay the bills for you while you are trying to get your foot in the door. There is no shame in that.

When you’re younger, you’re very concerned with appearance. You’re very concerned with how you look to the outside world. Are you cool? Do people think you’re cool? When you get older, you don’t give a shit about that anymore. The more you do it, the longer you do this, the more it becomes about the work itself. I love the stuff I’m doing, and I’m excited by the prospect of how my artistry is going to evolve over the years. To me, it’s exciting. I see the journey in a way that I did not see when I was starting out.

What it really comes down to is that life is short and these things should be fun. That’s why we get into this business and the arts. It’s because it’s fun; it’s like nothing else. The idea is to get paid to participate in this wonderful fun with other fun people.

Will Ferrell doesn’t mince words when describing Adam McKay, his longtime friend and comedy collaborator. “He’s kind of a dangerous individual,” Ferrell says. “He’s extremely funny; there’s no doubt about it. But he’s dangerous. I wouldn’t stay in a room with him, one-on-one, for any longer than I had to. There’s a criminal tendency there. We have a great working relationship because I don’t ask him much about his past. He just frightens me.” Ferrell is joking, obviously. But there was a time, years before McKay found Hollywood success directing and co-writing films such as
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
(2006) and
The Other Guys
(2010), when he might very well have been the most dangerous man in comedy.

In June of 1995, McKay was making history at Chicago’s legendary Second City, in a sketch revue called
Piñata Full of Bees
. It would prove to be one of the most seminal and groundbreaking productions in the theater’s history. Set apart by its aggressive approach to political and social satire,
Piñata
tackled such seemingly unfunny subjects as wealth corruption, racism, and the massacre of Native Americans. McKay is often given sole credit for masterminding its strong political point of view.

McKay hadn’t always aspired to create political satire. The Pennsylvania native grew up idolizing mainstream comics such as Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld. While studying English at Temple University, he performed what he calls “family-friendly” stand-up in local bars and restaurants. But less than a year shy of graduation, he dropped out of school and moved to Chicago to study improvisation, and he soon became one of the most popular (and notorious) performers in the city’s vibrant comedy scene. With such pioneering groups as The Family and The Upright Citizens Brigade, he became infamous for interactive theatrics and elaborately staged pranks. During one show, he led an entire audience back to his apartment, where they witnessed a brutal (and entirely staged) murder from his bedroom window. During another show, he staged his own suicide.

Performing storefront improv for free soon led to a gig at the Second City, and within a few months of
Piñata
’s premiere, McKay was hired as a writer for
Saturday Night Live
. (He was promoted to head writer after just his first year.) He wasted no time trying to infuse
Saturday Night Live
with a sharper satiric bite, but it wasn’t always easy. “We did a commercial parody about a luxury car with an aperture that you could have intercourse with,” says Tina Fey, whom McKay hired to the
SNL
writing staff in 1997. “Adam insisted on calling it the Mercury Mistress. Well, it turned out that Lincoln Mercury had just signed on to advertise at NBC, and obviously they didn’t want someone fucking their car. The commercial only aired once and it will never air again.”

While he was never able to make sweeping changes to
SNL
’s content, McKay eventually found small ways to be subversive. During his fifth year, he began writing and directing short films that were hidden in the show’s final minutes. The films—which starred such diverse talent as Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, and Ben Stiller—were typically dark and disturbing. In
The Pervert
, for instance, a group of sexual deviants are disgusted by a fellow pervert’s attraction to the Cream of Wheat chef.

In 2001, after six seasons at
SNL
, McKay left to pursue a career in filmmaking. But Hollywood didn’t exactly welcome him with open arms. “It’s difficult if you’ve only ever made short comedy films about Doberman attacks and a brutal ‘rape’ involving [Eagles guitarist] Glenn Frey,” McKay admits. “There was at least one studio that was so horrified they asked me never to contact them again.” Despite that studio’s reluctance, the 2004 release of
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
eventually grossed (for the DreamWorks studio) more than $90 million worldwide and became a cult classic on DVD. It was McKay’s feature debut as a director and screenwriter, and his first big-screen project with Will Ferrell.

More movies followed—
Step Brothers
(2008),
The Other Guys
(2010), and
Anchorman: The Legend Continues
(2013). McKay and Ferrell also hit Broadway with the 2009 George W. Bush–skewering one-man show
You’re Welcome America
, as well as infiltrating the Internet with Funny or Die, the wildly popular, user-generated video website they launched, in 2007, with their production company, Gary Sanchez Productions. Today, McKay is a mainstream juggernaut, one of the few dependable comedy writer/directors with a loyal following, whose name alone is enough to sell tickets. But has all the success softened the edges of this once subversive comedy writer?

Filmmaker David O. Russell, who coexecutive produced the first
Anchorman
, doesn’t think so. “Just spending time with Adam McKay sharpens my rebellious spirit,” Russell says. “He’s the pure stuff, as far as I’m concerned. We typically go from having a serious political conversation to an insane improvisational digression and back. It cracks me up that anyone would suggest that he’s become more traditional. Adam McKay is a cultural gem and he’s gonna shine and he’s gonna fuck shit up.”

Was there a particular comedy movie, or TV show, that influenced you as a child more than others?

It was the [1980] movie
Airplane!
Everything up to that point had been fairly predictable. Story structures had always been sort of the same in movies. With the comedies until then, you would see setup, a beat, and then a joke. Most had this kind of a structure, but
Airplane!
changed that.

There’s a specific scene in
Airplane!
that I love. A newspaper spins and it stops with the headline: “Disaster Looms for Airline Passengers.” And then it spins and stops with the next headline: “Chicago Prepares for Crash Landing.” And then it spins again and stops with the final headline: “Boy Trapped in Refrigerator Eats Own Foot.”

That was the first time I ever saw anything like that. That joke was just so out of left field, and yet it still made sense. It was one of the first times I ever saw something where I felt, Oh, my God, you can do whatever you want with this form! Someone’s imagination had taken a leap four steps ahead. It was just the utter surprise of it. It was almost wrong or naughty or crazy. It was just so exciting to me. I’ve talked to other comedy writers who have said the same thing, that they distinctly remember that joke: “Boy trapped in refrigerator eats own foot.” I remember my eyes just going wide.

On one level it’s pure absurdist comedy. The first couple of beats of the spinning headline are parody, then it becomes a bit of a satire about the media blowing stories out of proportion, and then all of a sudden, it becomes pure absurdism. The premise almost ate itself at that moment—or its own foot.

Your movies tend to contain that very same combination: parody, satire, absurdism.

If you just do parody, it can get pretty boring. You’ll just be hitting the old formulas that we’ve all seen before. We always try to make our movies one-third satire, one-third parody, and one-third original storytelling. We’re very conscious of that. We like to use the old tropes to ground the movie in familiarity, and then jump off and go in different directions. At that point—and, really, only at that point—can you then get as sincere as you want. I love getting really sincere off an insane joke or a tail-eating-itself kind of joke, but it has to be grounded first. It’s like grounding a live wire. It’s the only way good comedy works.

When did you first make the leap from loving comedy to actually devoting your life to it?

I dropped out of Temple University [in 1989] during my senior year. I had a buddy go out to Chicago to perform. He came back and told me about this thing going on out there, long-form improv. I couldn’t believe it. At that time, I was only doing stand-up. He said to me, “You go onstage, and whatever you say is what happens. You make up
anything
you want. If you want to be on Mars, you’re on Mars. The only rule is that you can’t say ‘no’ to the other performers. You have to say, ‘Yes, and . . .’ If another performer starts to go off in another direction, you say ‘Yes, and . . .’ and then you follow.”

I was like, “You gotta be kidding me!” My friend also told me about improv teacher Del Close, this old hipster who was the mastermind behind it all. There were other improv groups, led by other teachers, but they didn’t really do long form like Del taught. This is what I was waiting to hear. I called up my parents and said, “I’m leaving college.” I had a semester and a half to go. And they were so fucking pissed at me. My mom had just remarried a guy who was a doctor, so they had a little bit of money. She said, “Look, if you stay, we’ll buy you a car. We’ll pay for you to go to law school.” And I was like, “No, no. I’m going.”

I literally sold my entire comic book collection that I owned growing up. I had the reboot of
Captain America
No. 1. I had
Iron Man
reboot No. 1. I had
Captain Marvel
No. 1. Yeah, I had a bunch of good ones. I had been smart enough to bag all of them. I had some good comics in great condition. I bought a Chrysler New Yorker with shag carpeting, power windows, and an eight-track player—there was already a tape in the player—from an elderly guy who could no longer drive. I then sold my baseball card collection for four hundred dollars, which paid for car insurance. Then my buddy and I put a gag lobster claw over the Chrysler emblem on the front of the car’s hood and drove out to Chicago.

When you purchased the car, what tape was already in the eight-track player?

Jethro Tull’s Greatest Hits.

Now, why would an elderly man in the 1980s be listening to Jethro Tull?

That’s the question that will haunt me for life. My Rosebud question, right there.

When you headed out to Chicago, had you already given up on your stand-up act that you had started in college?

I had given it up. I had been doing stand-up all throughout college, on the weekends, and I just didn’t like where my act was headed. It was more original and interesting when I started than what it eventually became. I had to create this bulletproof act that I could perform on the road, lasting about twenty minutes, that could get me through a rough night. In the end, I was doing airplane jokes and girlfriend jokes. I had a couple of original jokes, but I just wasn’t that into it.

Hearing about this whole other world and this scene in Chicago sounded so intriguing to me. I was just looking for a change. At that point, I was writing short stories and thought maybe I could be a serious writer. I still had those ambitions. And that’s what mostly attracted me to Chicago. It was a great blend of artistic ambitions combined with comedy, with maybe a slight commercial bent. It was a mix of artistic ambitions with straight-up laughs.

It didn’t take long to meet, and then work with, Del Close.

How did that come about?

I got into Del’s improv class and then started an improv group with a few other players. We had a pretty unique style to our group, so other players were attracted to it. It just kept getting more and more interesting. Del began to pay attention to our group, and he sort of adopted us. We invented all these improv forms, including something called “deconstruction.”

With deconstruction we would take long scenes and then just break each of these scenes apart: thematically, narratively, symbolically, psychologically. We’d shatter the scenes and then put the pieces back together in different forms. We could revisit the beginning, jump to the end, reimagine each of the characters—anything, really.

We’d also do other types of improv, like “improvised movies.” We’d improvise an entire movie in a three-act show. We’d do something called “The Dream.” An audience member would tell us what happened to them that day, and we would show them the dream they were going to have that night. In its rawest form, it was a montage of their day. But when done well, we could bend the images and combine them and make it dreamlike. But it was also showing the audience the process: “Look, here are all the cards. We’re not putting any of them up our sleeves.
Here they are.
” And then we’d start working off what was given to us.