Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (3 page)

You worked at
SNL
longer than any other writer in the show’s history. And yet as respected as you are, you were actually fired by NBC for a season, beginning in 1998.

Well, that was all due to [then NBC executive] Don Ohlmeyer. Norm Macdonald, the anchor for Weekend Update, and I were writing a lot of jokes about O.J. Simpson, and we had been doing so for more than three years. Don, being good friends with O.J., had just had enough.

Your O.J. jokes were not light taps on the head. These were jokes that would often end with: “Because O.J. murdered two people.”

Yeah, we weren’t holding back. [Laughs] That’s the thing I kind of liked about Don, actually: His friendship with O.J. was so
old school
. It was so un-showbizzy. He ended up firing me, as well as Norm, but I can’t honestly say that a part of me doesn’t respect Don for his loyalty. Most people in show business would sell out anyone in their lives, for any reason at all, including for practice. Don was the opposite. He threw a party for the jurors after the 1995 acquittal. And he stuck with O.J. through it all.

I don’t know that Norm enjoyed the experience of the firing quite as much as I did, but to me it was exciting. It was certainly the best press
I
ever received. We got tremendous support from people I really admire, some of whom are friends and some I didn’t really know that well, but who stepped up and called me. It was a fun time.

You had been on the show for twenty years. Being fired must have stung a little.

To tell you the truth, Norm and I had done Update for three and a half seasons. I felt like we had made our point. What I did like about the way we approached Update was that it was akin to what the punk movement was for music: just real stripped down. We did whatever we wanted, and there was nothing there that we considered to be a form of cheating. We weren’t cuddly, we weren’t adorable, we weren’t warm. We weren’t going to do easy, political jokes that played for clapter and let the audience know we were all on the same side. We were going to be mean and, to an extent, anarchists.

Shouldn’t there be
some
connection with the audience? Can you be a
complete
anarchist when it comes to humor?

Yeah, well, that’s Norm Macdonald. He does things for the experience of doing it, and he doesn’t fear silence at all. Take his performance at the 2008 Bob Saget roast where he did jokes that could have come out of a 1920s toastmaster’s manual: “[Comedian] Greg Giraldo is here. He has the grace of a swan, the wisdom of an owl, and the eye of an eagle. Ladies and gentlemen,
this man is for the birds
! [Actress] Susie Essman is famous for being a vegetarian. Hey! She may be a vegetarian,
but she’s still full of bologna in my book
!”

One summer, when
SNL
was on hiatus, Norm and I read a story about a newspaper published by and for the homeless. We were improvising around that idea, doing the tough newspaper editor handing out assignments to his homeless reporters: “Edwards! I want a thousand words on going to the bathroom in your pants! You! Davis! How about a human-interest feature on urine-stained mattresses! Bernstein! Can you give me a long ‘think piece’ on people whose brains are being monitored by the CIA?!”

I had forgotten all about this conversation, but the first
SNL
episode back that fall, Norm says to me, “Hey, Downey. Remember that homeless idea we had? About the newspaper by and for the homeless? Well, I was out in LA, you know? And I was doing this benefit for the homeless . . . ”

And I’m thinking, Oh no . . .

And he says, “Yeah, I did that bit for the audience . . . at this benefit, you know? And they
hated
it
!”

He’s just the most courageous performer. Norm would sometimes hang on an Update joke because he wanted to make it clear to the audience that yes, the joke was over, but we still thought it was funny. He didn’t make the panic move of quickly jumping to the next joke so he didn’t have to hear the silence. He wanted to give people a chance.

I’m not sure how big a fan Lorne was of our Update. I think it was probably too mean for his sensibility, and he didn’t like the deadpan aspect of it. But he supported us as long as he could, bless his heart. And I stand by it. I’m proud of what we did there. Nearly all of those Update segments have been edited out of repeats, by the way.

Over the years, critics have had a strange relationship with
SNL
. They take very personally what they perceive as the show’s low points, almost as if a good friend has let them down.

I remember
there was the most cretinous review of the show in the fall of ’84. I will never forget this. It was a new cast with Chris Guest and Marty Short, and there was a review in
People
disparaging the show. Now my idea of the lowest rung in hell is to be surrounded and condescended to by idiots. In fact, I tried to write a sketch one time about that. It was Galileo getting teased by other astronomers at the [seventeenth-century] Papal Court. He’d be surrounded by these other scientists, who’d be like: “Oh, geez, Galileo! I’m getting sick to my stomach. It must be all this
spinning
from the earth
rotating
on its axis
!!! Awww, I’m just ribbin’ ya!” Galileo would be getting this constantly and he’d be losing his mind.

Anyway, in the
People
review, the critic was talking about the [October 1984] “Synchronized Swimming” bit with Chris Guest, Harry Shearer, and Marty Short. It was about two guys training for the Olympics as male synchronized swimmers. And Chris did this brilliant turn as a not-very-funny, inarticulate gay choreographer: “I’ve been directing regional theater . . . and if I ever do that again, I’m just going to kill myself with a Veg-O-Matic.” So the
People
review says, “How bad is the new
SNL
? They do
Veg-O-Matic jokes
.” Which, of course, misses the entire point of the reference. The lame Veg-O-Matic reference was a
character
joke, you fucking moron.

It seems that the sensibility of many TV critics rarely matches those found in professional humor writers. There seems to be a disconnect.

Well, I think most of them have terrible senses of humor. Tom Feran, a guy I knew in college, was the critic for the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
and had a great sense of humor. He always championed smart, funny stuff and always tried to get it noticed. He wasn’t mean, but he wasn’t the kind of easy mark for fake “genius” that gets pushed on you all the time. Most critics, though, have no sense of humor. And all of the mean ones have crates filled with humor pieces rejected by
The New Yorker
.

There also sometimes seems to be a disconnect between the censors for
SNL
and the writers. Over the years, have there been many instances in which you’ve written sketches that you’ve loved but were ultimately not allowed to air?

I can think of two: One was a commercial parody written by me, Jack Handey, Al Franken, Robert Smigel, and probably some others. It was one of the few times all of us have worked on the same piece, one that was gang-written. It was for a car called the DWI, the only car built expressly for driving drunk. We wanted to get James Earl Jones to do the voice-over: “It. Is. A. Drunk. Driving.
Machine
.” One of the jokes was that the car keys would be gigantic. I don’t remember the rest. But I do remember the network saying “Absolutely not!” And I honestly did not understand. There was nothing dirty in this piece. This was not making light of drunk driving. It was making fun of people who drive drunk. It was holding them up to ridicule; it was fighting the good fight as far as that goes. But their attitude was, Nope, we don’t want any letters along the lines of “I wish I could laugh, but, you see, I lost my fifteen-year-old daughter to a drunk driver.” So it’s that defensive thing.

The other piece [in 1990] was called “Pussywhipped.” Jan Hooks was playing the host of a talk show and there were a few male guests, one of whom was Tom Hanks, and they had to keep excusing themselves to go call their girlfriends. The piece did run, but the censors absolutely would not let us use the title “Pussywhipped.” And I kept saying, “C’mon, it doesn’t mean vagina. It means female-dominated.” But that’s where the NBC standards lady says, “Well,
as a woman 
. . .” Which was her way of reminding me that her sense of humor had been removed at birth.

And so I lost that one, and we called it “P-Whipped” or something. I always hate it when you have to do a lame euphemism that no normal person would ever use.

Overall, though, I never really chafed under the restrictions, even when sometimes they got really crazy. One of the points I pride myself on is that I avoid anything I feel is a cheap laugh based on shock or just being dirty. You can always get a laugh, but you don’t want it to come at the price of your dignity.

You wrote a sketch for an October 1990
SNL
episode that’s often listed as an all-time favorite from fans: a very fit Patrick Swayze and a very unfit Chris Farley compete with each other for the last spot on the Chippendales male exotic dance team. But as much as fans love it, there have been some comedy writers who have taken offense to the sketch, thinking that it was demeaning to Farley’s true character.

Well, I don’t think they understood what I thought was funny about it, and what the audience liked about it. I think they read it as just making fun of the fat guy dancing. But, to me, what was crucial was that Farley wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. To me, it was all about the reactions from the judges. The whole point was that not only did they make Chris audition in the first place, but then the judges took the time to patiently explain, at great length, why they were going to choose Swayze over him.

Does it upset you when other comedy writers are critical of your pieces?

No, not really. We disagree sometimes. I know there was another piece I wrote with Jack Handey that a few writers hated; it was the one [that aired in October 1989] about Dracula, played by James Woods. It was the one piece we ever did on the show that dealt, however indirectly, with AIDS. Dracula would engage his female victims in conversation, subtly sounding them out about their sexual histories before he sucked their blood. If I remember the specific objection, it was the kind of instance when writers don’t like an idea because they can imagine a hack version of that idea. I suppose you can conjure up a vision of a bad comic out there doing “Hey, how about Dracula! What with AIDS, he’s probably asking to get a blood test! Am I right?!” But that’s not what this piece was. You can turn
any
idea into a hack version of itself, but sometimes comedy writers just go crazy with overthinking these things.

Sometimes the audience just wants to laugh.

They do, that’s right. But sometimes writers overlook this. Not performers, though. If the audience is laughing, they’re happy.

Do writers and performers on
SNL
tend to write different styles of sketches?

I think so. Writers tend to write ordinary people in weird situations. Performers tend to write weird people in ordinary situations. That’s a broad generalization, but it’s fairly true.

With a performer-written sketch, often the criticism that will come from a writer is that the situation is something the audience has seen a million times. And it often bothers the pure writer that audiences don’t seem to mind. As writers, we get so frustrated: “Why don’t those people—that is, the audience—object?” Writers are much more interested, and maybe even obsessed, with originality. We sometimes treat comedy as a science, where advances are made, and we must always move forward, never backward. So that once something has been done, it should perhaps be built upon, but never
,
ever repeated. For performers, the fact that something has been done before is, I think, neither here nor there. For writers, it’s a real problem, and sometimes we can tie ourselves up in knots worrying, “Is this too similar to that other thing?”

As for me, I wish originality were prized more highly by audiences than it is, but I have to say it doesn’t seem to be that important to them. I think we need to be ahead of our audiences, but not so much that we lose them. Figuring out the right balance is everything.

I suppose it can always be taken too far in the other extreme: the repetition of characters to the point of overkill.

Writers tend to be very resistant to repeating characters. We always feel that it’s somehow unethical, that it’s cheating. “I did that piece already. What? I’m going to do the
second version
of the same piece?” Generally speaking, you do the best jokes the first time around. Now, it’s true that over the course of the following three months, you’ll think of jokes that if you’d thought of them at the time you would have put in the first version—but there’s usually only one or two of those. From a writer’s standpoint, not enough of a reason to do it again.

I haven’t written a lot of those recurring pieces in my career. Most of what I do is topical one-off things. I have written tons of presidential addresses, but they never involved the same comedy premise—at least, I hope some of them didn’t.

One idea I did write a few times was The Chris Farley Show. That was basically putting Chris Farley, the real Chris Farley, on stage in a structured way. I did it the first time when Jeff Daniels was guest host [in 1991], and Lorne kept asking for another one. But it seemed to me such a one-off thing. Lorne finally said, “Well, if you won’t do it, I’ll ask someone else.” And I said, “No, I want to at least control it.” So we did it two more times, once with Martin Scorsese and again with Paul McCartney, in 1993.

I must say, none of this seems to bother performers at all. They’ll tend to go and go and go with essentially the same sketch until someone makes them stop. We’ve all seen repeat pieces on the show that are basically the same sketch spray painted a different color, but with the same dynamic, same jokes.

As a writer, I would love to say it’s all about the writing. But like the way good pitching beats good hitting, good performing can lift a mediocre premise, and bad performing can sink the best-written piece.