Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (28 page)

This particular event has become infamous in the comedy community, but I can also imagine that if you were somehow involved—that if the show you were working on was being held up because of such a performance—it might not have been terribly entertaining.

If this happened today, it’d be all over the Internet. Everything Andy did would be. In a way it’s too bad Andy was before his time. He would have reached a lot more people on YouTube than he ever did on
Taxi
. Anyway, I found it surreal. I didn’t find it funny. I find it even less funny in retrospect that we allowed the indulgence. In the seventies, everything was a little wilder. It was, “Hey, let’s be part of this. We’re young. We’re hip. Let’s let it happen.”

We were having a party after the shoot on the
Taxi
stage one evening. Andy invited me and Jimmy Burrows, the director for most episodes, to come up to his dressing room and meet a poet. The poet was a lady—young, slender, and blonde. Andy introduced us as the producer and director and asked us to sit on the sofa. He informed us that the young lady preferred to write and read her poetry in the nude. She declined at first but then started to disrobe. At that point Jimmy, obviously not as big a poetry fan as I was, said we’d best be going. He reminded me that our wives were a matter of feet away at the party and would soon be wondering where we’d gone. Looking back on it, I’m thinking maybe that that’s what Andy wanted—our wives to walk in. Not out of any animosity toward us but just as, what . . . performance art? If all this had happened to somebody else I might have loved it.

It got stranger. Tony Clifton was once kicked off the set, and he returned with a gun. There were about two or three days when we said, “Well, we can put up with this.” But then we concluded that it wasn’t fair to the rest of the cast to allow this type of disruption to go on. We were shooting a television show. We eventually decided this was something we couldn’t tolerate. Call us party poopers, if you must.

From
Taxi
, you went on to create
Cheers
. You mentioned earlier that the setting for
Taxi
was quite bleak. With
Cheers
, however, I’d imagine it was extremely important, in a visual sense, to create not only an inviting bar for the fictional customers but also for the home viewers.

That’s right. Les, Jimmy, and I had sort of settled on Boston as the setting for the series. I had never visited Boston, so my wife and I went to look around. We were staying at a hotel across from a bar called the Bull & Finch. We started our journey of discovery there on a Friday afternoon. All the regulars were already expounding on the state of the world. I loved it. I looked around and told my wife, “We don’t need to go anywhere else. This is it.” She said, “You know, you’re going to spoil this place for their regulars.” I said, “Sure, I guess, if we get really lucky . . .” I hope they’ve forgiven us over time.

The Bull & Finch eventually became the third-biggest tourist attraction in all of Boston.

The regulars later did complain the bar was ruined. It became a huge industry. I feel bad about that. But, look, we had no idea anything like that was going to happen.

On the bright side, the owner of the Bull & Finch reportedly became a millionaire.

He did well, yes.

After
Cheers
ended in 1993, an entertainment company built facsimiles of the
Cheers
bar in airports and hotels around the country. In each, there were two animatronic characters, Bob and Hank, modeled after Norm and Cliff. One was a delivery driver, the other a businessman. They would crack corny vaudevillian-style jokes.

We were asked permission and we said, “Sure.” It was pretty much underway by the time we heard about it. I always found that strange. You entered a bar where no one, including the robots, knew your name.

Cheers
was very much a character-driven show, less gimmicky and quieter than other sitcoms. Is this why it might have taken longer to hit with audiences?

It definitely took awhile to find an audience. The first year it aired, 1982, we were ranked seventy-fourth out of seventy-seven shows. I think we would have been canceled, but NBC didn’t really have any other shows to replace us. Over the summer, our competition showed repeats. It was then that the vast majority of the TV audience on Thursday night had to either talk to each other or tune in to watch us. When we began the second season, we had already made the top twenty. I’m not sure that would happen now. We wouldn’t have been given a second chance.

Another advantage was that we had more time per show. Sitcoms now have almost three minutes less content, around twenty-two minutes—we had about twenty-five minutes. The network now wants more room for advertising. Consequently, everything is condensed, and, especially when you’re first starting, you have to overwhelm people with comedy. As a writer, you don’t have the time to establish a character before they have to earn their first laugh. With
Cheers
, we had the luxury of more time. If you can get a joke right after a character’s introduction, that’s fine. If not, let’s wait.

Is it true that Bill Cosby was once up for the role of Sam Malone?

In the beginning, the network called us about Bill Cosby playing the lead character. We were Cosby fans but we took a vow, a blood oath, before we started the show, that we would never have a “name” in the title of the show, whether it be an actor or a character. Bill Cosby was a star. We wanted to avoid
Bill Cosby in Cheers
. Because if you ever lose that star, the show is over. So that was the main reason we didn’t use Cosby and I’m happy that we didn’t. I’m sure he’s happy, too. Two or three years later he came along with one of the most successful sitcoms in history.

Did the
Cheers
writing staff have any rules regarding jokes? What to avoid?

We had a rule that if writers were pitching jokes and two writers came up with the same punch line at once, it was gone.

Why?

If two writers arrived at the same joke simultaneously, someone in America would, too. Maybe that wasn’t the case, but it was one of our superstitions.

When a show lasts eleven years, such as
Cheers
, how can the writers even remember what jokes have already been used?

Jokes you can remember, particularly if they’re yours. There are entire plot lines I’ve forgotten, but I always remember specific jokes.

If you’re on the air a certain amount of time, say five or six years, there’s no way you can remember all the shows you’ve done. For plot points, we had a show historian. All she did, essentially, was sit in the writers’ room when we were pitching stories and say, “You did that in season three.” By the end of our run, that was happening more and more. If you’re on the air a certain amount of time, there’s no way you can remember the shows you’ve done.

Cheers
had a large writing staff, didn’t it?

It varied. We started with five writers full-time, and then a couple of writers would come in to do punch-up, including Jerry Belson [
The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gomer Pyle–U.S.M.C., The Tracey Ullman Show
] and David Lloyd [
The
Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Wings, Frasier
]. It was small for a week’s show, but that’s how we wanted it. We always considered it a compliment when we were called a writers’ show. To us, the writers were the stars of the show. After we’d been on a few seasons we had established writers actually sending us spec scripts.

Cheers
certainly never talked down to its audience. I remember jokes that concerned Dorothy Parker and seventeenth-century poet John Donne. I don’t recall similar jokes on
Laverne & Shirley
.

We had a publicist at NBC at that time, and we had lunch with him one day. We were talking about the low ratings for
Cheers
, and he sighed and said, “I’m going to be honest with you. I just don’t know how to sell a show that does Arthur Schopenhauer jokes.”

A joke about a nineteenth-century German philosopher. Not exactly a “can’t miss.”

That’s what we liked about it. Diane met an old friend of hers from graduate school and they were going on and on about this and that. Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the subjects mentioned. Diane’s line at the end of the conversation was, “Well, that’s enough ‘Schop’ talk.” To them, it was screamingly funny. It would have been a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual pun that would have confused and annoyed anyone else who had heard it. It was very much a Diane joke. It wouldn’t have worked with Norm.

Cheers
dealt with some very serious issues: homophobia, alcohol, and sex addictions as well as other topics that were regarded as risqué for a network show at the time—and would perhaps even be considered risqué today.

We dealt with homosexuality in the first season in an episode called “Boys in the Bar” [January 27, 1983]. Sam’s former Red Sox teammate writes an autobiography and comes out of the closet. There was discussion among Sam and the rest of the regulars about the fear of
Cheers
turning into a gay bar. The episode really wasn’t about homosexuality, more about paranoia. Everyone started to turn on each other. I once had a guy at a seminar ask if that particular show was about McCarthyism. I said “exactly.” That’s the first time I realized what the show was about.

Is it true that, at one time, there were plans to produce a
Cheers
episode about the AIDS epidemic?

Yes. One of Sam’s girlfriends calls to tell him that she just tested positive for HIV. It was toward the end of the series. AIDS was very much in the news. It was an epidemic. The question for our staff was, “Are we being irresponsible by having a sexually active male the central focus of our series and not dealing with the issue in some way?” The more high-minded among us said, “Of course we should deal with it.” The writing session went on for three or four hours just deciding if we wanted to do it. The big question was, “How do we make this funny?”

Toward the end of this long writing session, Bill Steinkellner, who was one of our producers, said, “Well, what’s wrong with somebody tuning in to watch their favorite comedy at nine o’clock on a Thursday night and, for thirty minutes, to live in a world where things like AIDS don’t exist?” When no one could think of an answer, that’s how we decided to look at it.

Cheers
dealt with some serious issues that were beyond your control, such as the 1985 death of actor Nicholas Colasanto, who played Coach. Was that difficult to deal with as a comedy writer? Not only the death of a character, but also of the actual actor who played him?

We knew that Nick was very sick quite a long time before he passed away. We had him off the show for half a season because he wasn’t feeling well. When he felt better, he came in to pay us a visit and frankly, he didn’t look well. Putting him on the show would have been jarring to the audience. He was so emaciated and obviously terminal. So we knew that that day was coming, and we had time to prepare. We just tried to soften it, not to spend a lot of time on it. We wanted to give him a tribute at the end of an episode [“Birth, Death, Love and Rice,” September 26, 1985] and move on.

The network, in years past, was always giving us notes about adding youth to the show. So this was our chance. We actually named the replacement character Woody even before we found Woody Harrelson. We created a backstory where Woody had been a pen pal of Coach’s, and that worked out well.

It seems that as the show evolved over the years, the humor became broader and more physical, and it became less about dialogue.

It did tend to lean that way. There was one show where Sam and Diane grabbed each other’s noses and didn’t let go [“I’ll Be Seeing You,” May 3 and 10, 1984]. I think the first time we tried that joke it was just experimental. It worked, so we moved forward. I think the point we were trying to make was that you reach a stage in a relationship when you can no longer reason with your romantic partner. You go back down the evolutionary scale, physically—grabbing each other’s noses. Ted and Shelley made it work.

You and Les co-wrote the final episode of
Cheers
, “One for the Road,” which was broadcast on May 20, 1993. I remember the
National Enquirer
actually publishing the entire leaked script a week or so before the show aired. The build-up to the show was tremendous.

That was strange. I’m still not sure how they got the script. But we ended up shooting the last scene without an audience, just to keep it secret. It was a very quiet scene, and we didn’t want anybody to know how it ended. Nobody except for a few people saw the whole show being shot in its entirety.

You once said that all final episodes are very difficult to write. But I would think that final episodes would be easier to write than pilot episodes, in which you’re still imagining who the characters are.

First of all, the whole country gets primed for a final episode. There has to be a spectacular finish. It’s almost inevitable it’s not going to be like the rest of the series because you’re going to have to reach conclusions. I think the best ending ever for a television show was
M*A*S*H
. They had an inevitable conclusion: the end of the war and almost everybody going home.

For the rest of us, we have to manufacture an ending. And one of the problems is that the network always wants to make the last episode longer than it would normally be. In our case, it was ninety minutes, three normal programs in length. Way too long.

The final episode does end on a quiet note. Sam and Norm are alone in the bar, very late at night. After Norm finally leaves, another customer, unseen from the waist up, knocks on the door. Sam says, “Sorry, we’re closed” and walks into the back office.

Was there any hidden meaning to that last scene? Some fans felt that it was a metaphor for death.

I’m flattered that some feel that the last scene was a metaphor for death. Every comedy writer aspires to that level of hilarity in their work. Actually, any interpretation other than our saying good-bye and leaving Sam Malone in his bar just as he was back in the very first scene of the series would be coincidental and unintended.