Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (32 page)

Your stories have a surreal, dreamlike quality to them. Do you ever dream your story ideas?

I do. I once dreamed that this old girlfriend—someone I had treated kind of shittily at the end of our relationship—came up to me and said: “I just want you to know: I have a baby.”

Was it your baby?

No, it was quite clear that it was not mine. This was her way of saying: “I survived, and even thrived, asshole.” And in the dream I was like: “That is so great. I am so happy for you.” To which she replied: “No. I have a
baby
. And he is just incredibly smart. Watch.” And then the baby started talking, reciting all these facts and equations and so on. But then I looked down and noticed a zipper on the back of the baby’s head. He was wearing some sort of mask, this smart-making mask. And the dream ended on this realization. So that mixed tonality is even present in the dream, I guess. It’s sad, with some sci-fi, but it’s also sort of a funny idea.

And then in writing that story—“I Can Speak” [
The New Yorker
, 1999]—what you do is squirm around until you find the right narrative stance. It’s a very intuitive thing, when you first stumble on to an idea, of figuring out how to start, what voice to use, and all of that.

This whole story-writing thing is like riding a bike. If the bike is leaning left, you need to lean right. If a story starts to feel maudlin, darken it up. Too earnest? Put in some crude thing. It’s essentially your psyche wrestling with your psyche. You have, say, two or three main personality go-to’s and they are always wrestling. But this process is not so different from what we do every day, as we try to be charming or functional or liked. “Eek, I’ve gone too far with Ed. Better say something flattering.” Or: “I am sounding strident. Better counteract that with some humility.” And of course each of us has his or her own way of doing this, his or her own set of issues that tend to throw the bike off balance, and then ways of rebalancing it along whatever axis is ours.

The most popular types of characters in comedy these days seem to be adults unwilling to grow up. This is common in Hollywood, as well as in literature. The eternal teen. But your characters tend to be real adults who are doing their best to live, struggling mightily. There’s no Peter Pan Syndrome at work.

I think I had a little advantage in this, in that I didn’t really get started until I already had a regular life—a job, a wife, two kids—so the idea of eternal youth had flown. And it had flown for good reason, by which I mean: I was totally on board with it having flown. I didn’t feel reduced or compromised by having a job and family. The whole 1970s idea of “selling out” had been rendered anachronistic and even gross by the extent of my love for my wife and kids. Beatniking was not an option anymore. So then I had to learn that the things that were actually bothering me or challenging me during the day were valid subjects for literature. Mostly, at that time, what was bothering me was 1) not having enough money to provide for my family in the way they deserved, and 2) having a job that required me to spend basically my whole day doing things that I didn’t want to do and were simultaneously hard and boring but that were, at that time, the only antidote to (1). So I suppose that’s a fundamentally adult conundrum: no place to run, because the trap you’re in is made of love. Love plus material paucity.

Your characters tend to be bizarrely optimistic. In your short story “Bounty,” one of the characters says, “[My sister] Connie is a prostitute. I’m a thirty-year-old virgin, but all things considered, we could have turned out a lot worse.”

That has something to do with American optimism that is really mostly denial energy. Critical thought becomes negative. Negative thought means you’re a loser. So don’t do it.

Another characteristic I notice about your characters is that even the “bad” ones—the characters who work for big corporations and tend to do evil things—still have a good deal of humanity in them.

I never bought into the whole corporation-as-evil thing after I worked as a geophysical engineer for a company called Radian Corporation, in Rochester, New York. The “big evil corporation” was
us
. All of us. And everyone who was there, including the managers, was there for one reason, and that was to support his or her family, to make a living.

You can see this philosophy in quite a few of your stories. Your 2010
New Yorker
story “Escape from Spiderhead” is about two prisoners forced to participate in laboratory experiments involving new drugs, one of which is a love potion. And yet, the “bad guys”—in this case the scientists—break the rules by going offsite to buy the prisoners delicious snacks.

Sure. The idea is that even the “bad guys” don’t see themselves as such. Have you seen those color photos and videos of the SS guys and gals at Auschwitz cutting up on the weekend, singing and dancing and joking and so on? They thought they were the good guys. Mostly that sort of black-and-white, Cruella de Vil flavor of evil is, I think, a creation of comic books and movies and TV—and one that has, sadly, started to dominate in our epistemology of evil, and is maybe now leeching out into the real world. We’d be better served, I think, to start with the idea that all of our enemies get up in the morning feeling like they’re out to serve good. That’s a more realistic and effective view of evil, I think, even just in terms of how it actually occurs and also how one might start to defend oneself or work against that evil. If you see the 9/11 guys as pure rabid monsters, there’s nothing to do but kill kill kill. But if you can ask: Okay, what was the guy like the day
before
he decided to be a terrorist? What was nascent? What other direction might he have gone? What would the necessary conditions be to get a parallel version of him—or some current version of him—to take that other, more peaceful, path?

In
Persuasion Nation
, there is a terrifying and very effective story called “93990.” The story is written in the form of a dry bureaucratic document about a scientific study—or “a ten-day acute toxicity study”—performed on twenty monkeys. The cold, precise language reflects the horrors of what occurs. I bought a used copy of the book, and I found the following Post-it note on the title page of this story. I have no idea who wrote it, but it’s obvious that this particular story affected him or her very deeply.

Hopefully he or she meant the story line, not the prose quality. Did they leave a phone number, so I can check?

Was the idea for this particular story dreamed?

No. I worked at a pharmaceutical company in Albany, New York, in the late eighties, just after our first daughter was born. That was based on a true story.

This story was based on a real event?!

I worked summarizing tech reports for the company’s FDA submissions. I worked upstairs and the animal labs were downstairs. I have a strong memory of leaving work at five o’clock, liberated, so happy to be going to see my wife and our baby, and taking a shortcut through the lab, and seeing about fifteen beagles in slings—that’s right, beagles in slings. They slung them up like that, supposedly, to stabilize their heart rates for the next day’s study. Seems like that might have had the opposite effect, if it were me being slung. They also tested rats and rabbits and monkeys.

My job was to summarize all of the animal tests that had been done for a particular proposed drug. This would be maybe five thousand pages. And we had to get the whole thing down, in summary form, to less than a hundred pages to submit to the FDA. So I had to read—or, more honestly, scan—these larger documents and summarize them.

A memo very much like what’s in the story one day came across my desk: this miracle monkey who could survive every dosage level. And then they killed it at the end, per the protocol. So I photocopied the summary and took it home and held on to it for a few years. And, as I recall, I was flying home from out west and thought of that, and wrote a quick draft—I can’t remember, but I might have had the memo with me. Maybe I’d planned to write it on the trip. It’s all kind of hazy. But I was pretty good at that kind of language by then, and also had really internalized the way these studies were done and so forth. So I just turned the volume up a little, to make the movements within the real memo more evident to a reader who hadn’t had the benefit of reading the hundreds of nonmoving memos that I’d had.

I wonder if it helps a writer to have worked difficult jobs, such as yourself.

Not necessarily. I mean, look at Flannery O’Connor, Tolstoy, or Proust. It helped me, I think, but it also could have completely messed me up. There was this narrow window of a few years where, if I hadn’t gotten something going, it would have been too late, given my fiscal situation—my energy for writing would have been gone and my life would have become too busy to write a first book.

The weird thing about writing is, whatever the question, there’s no “one size fits all” answer. Because writing is hard, and subjective. We like to think, you know: “The key must be X!” And the X equals “work weird jobs,” or “cut the story down in half,” or “show, don’t tell,” whatever. But it is totally person-centric. Nobody’s truth applies to anyone else, at least not completely. So you go into it alone.

But in my case, I do think that the difficult-job period was good. It helped me to get a first read on capitalism and its hardships. It sort of gave me my material. I had a couple early close brushes with real poverty that scared the shit out of me. We had a dog once who almost got hit by a falling icicle when she was a pup and always flinched when she had to go by that side of the house. I am—when it comes to poverty—like that dog.

How easy could it have been for you to have remained in the working world? Not necessarily in a slaughterhouse or as a doorman, but as an engineer in an austere office? Someone who was a little different from the rest of the co-workers, the one not participating in the trust games at the company picnic?

I think it would have been easy enough. There were real pleasures in that life. And people are pretty adaptable. I mean, all kinds of people do it. I think we do what we need to do and our real spiritual and emotional growth occurs around that, no matter what.

The thing that made it easier at the time was that I was far from the only one who felt weird. I’d go so far as to say that most of us felt that way—that we were not supposed to be there, or were too cool for the setting, or that this was a temporary glitch in the greater glory that would be our life. There was definitely an ironic thing in the air. This was especially true of those of us who were below a certain line—basically, those of us who were not in management felt that way.

It was a great chance to get into a more or less “typical” life and just stay there. It was beautiful, actually. And it was a great inoculation against simplistic thinking when it came to “the corporation” or “big business” or “the suburbs” and all of that. I don’t like the lazy way of telegraphing those things you sometimes see in fiction or on TV, something that indicates that a concept like “suburb” automatically means: “shallow craphole.” That’s not interesting, to see things only as simple blocks of meaning.

In previous interviews, you’ve talked about the presence or absence of magic in writing. How does a young writer create a sense of magic in their work without overthinking it?

Yes, that’s the million-dollar question. Or, since we’re talking about fiction writing, the five-thousand-dollar question.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but my feeling is that you have to first and foremost keep your eye on the fact that your prose has to kick ass. It has to compel and entertain, and your job is to make that happen, per your taste. And my experience has been that this process isn’t so much intellectual or cerebral as we sometimes, when younger, think it is. We think of writing as an intellectual act, which of course it is, but it’s also an act of entertainment and engagement and arguably has to address those needs before it can do any sort of intellectual work.

So my first job as a writer is to make the prose undeniable. And for me this is mostly a gut-level or “ear” thing. Maybe it’s like music—people can talk and think and write endlessly about Miles Davis, but I doubt, in the moment of playing, that Miles Davis was doing much thinking, per se. What he was doing—well, who knows what he was doing. But whatever it was, it was the result of years of prep. Writers also prep themselves with years of reading and thinking and talking and so on. But in the moment of doing, I think we have to admit that something magical and inexpressible and irreducible is going on. And that this moment is what distinguishes an interesting writer from a dull one. And what distinguishes this interesting writer from this other one over here. And what I find exhilarating is that we don’t have to worry too much about what exactly that magical thing is—we don’t have to reduce it or own it or be able to explain it. We just have to be able to do it. Our job isn’t to describe that state, but to learn to get there, and occupy it, using whatever tricks we’ve learned to get us there.

Does an internal melody come into play when you write? Or a musical rhythm?