Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (46 page)

How, specifically?

My five older brothers, who were big potheads, had a lot of underground comics when I was growing up, so I saw
Zap Comix
when I was really young. Probably the first pornographic images I’d ever seen. So there was all this acid-induced imagery of animals and weird characters fucking each other and doing strange things and it reminded me of the old cartoons I loved from the thirties and forties, but with bizarre, graphic sex. As I got older, I just really started connecting with Crumb. Not with his very specific sexual fetishes—God bless him—but for his honesty, what he says about life, work, art, the past, and the decline of American culture. How jazz died after 1932. [Laughs] I’ve been collecting that same kind of music since I was about thirteen. I’ve always felt a strong personal connection there that I can’t completely articulate. Crumb kind of helped me escape into my own mind.

What were you trying to escape from?

I felt very isolated at home. I grew up in a very dysfunctional family. I always wished that I had had a sister, because I just relate better to women. In general, I think women are superior to men in every way. They’re just smarter, more thoughtful, more compassionate. I always thought that if I had a sister, she would’ve been the one I could’ve talked to and relied on. It was an insane house. A hell house. Every one of us had padlocks on our doors because no one could be trusted. I can remember hiding the money I saved working for a landscaper, but no matter where I hid it—even in the gap behind the heat register that was literally underneath the floor—it would get stolen. I grew up with such paranoia. If you used the phone, someone would always be listening in. And whatever information was collected would be used against you somehow. Things like that were constant. No sense of privacy. Believe me, I’m not doing this justice. This is the soft overview. [Laughs] I don’t have the stomach or the nervous system to go too far down memory lane with all the specifics.

Your situation sounds as if it was a step beyond the typical dysfunctional household.

I’m sure everyone has their stories. Most families are fucked up in one way or another. All I know is, I grew up locked in my room with my books and my old records, and I hardly ever came out. I tried to avoid all interaction with my brothers, and I didn’t want too many friends. Sort of a self-imposed isolation based on my circumstances, but I actually enjoyed it. Maybe I would have been like that no matter what. I’m
still
like that.

How did you get the writing job for Letterman in 1985?

Well, Dave’s probably the most important person in my life. He gave me my career—which I later set fire to—and basically gave me a reason to live. I was attending NYU film school and came on to
Late Night
a couple of years after the show started. I just cold-called and asked if they had any internships available, and my timing was lucky. I was able to work for Steve O’Donnell, who was the head writer at the time. He’s a great guy and was hugely supportive. He bought me a lot of meals in those intern days. It really felt like a family back then. And Chris Elliott, who was already writing and performing on
Late Night
, became my best friend. Chris suggested I start showing my material to Dave. So I began to give monologue jokes to Dave’s assistant—those were the days before he was surrounded by the goons with earpieces—and he really liked it.

What was your particular style of joke?

My jokes were barely jokes. I wasn’t good at writing topical material, and it really didn’t interest me. My material was more about Dave talking about his white-trash relatives or telling the audience that he spent the weekend sitting on his front porch waving at trucks. A lot of it was just glimpses of things I knew from growing up in rural Pennsylvania, which probably intersected with Dave’s Indiana experiences.

Eventually, I was hired as a writer and I dropped out of college. I still look back at
Late Night
as the happiest period of my life, with all due respect to my wife and daughter.

You make your TV days sound so easy, almost like a dream world.

No, it was a lot of work, but so much fun. And the luck of timing! I walked in there at the exact right moment and I happened to be the right guy. I went from an intern to a researcher in the writers’ department, which was a paid position, and then I was promoted to writer. But I kept putting those opening remarks on Dave’s assistant’s desk. And I’ll never forget the day Dave called me in and told me how much he liked them. It was a big turning point. Today, it would be hard for an intern to replicate that experience.
Late Night
, and I guess the world in general, was a small shop back then.

Also,
Late Night
was a completely different culture than a place like
SNL
, where you heard a lot of stories about drugs and things like that. Our staff was a direct reflection of Dave, a guy from the Midwest who wasn’t impressed with show business and didn’t act like a big star. We were all pretty grounded people. The most decadent it got in the office was too many cigars and too much talk about baseball.

What in particular did you find so appealing about Letterman’s sensibility?

At the heart of it was his aversion to bullshit, specifically when it came to celebrities and Hollywood. You didn’t really see that attitude before Dave. And it was coming from a real place. It wasn’t an act or “shtick,” to use a beloved Yiddishism. Dave loved doing the show, but anything beyond that was of no interest to him. He never cared about being part of the club or making friends with other celebrities—all the shit that a lot of people relish in the business. They fantasize about that experience. So my thing for Dave, even before I met him, was all about a sense of genuineness. Beyond that, he’s still the smartest and funniest guy out there. Since
Late Night
became a big deal in the eighties, so many performers have borrowed the Letterman “aloof, cynical, wiseass” thing, but for most of them, it’s not coming from as real a place. It’s just a persona. And incidentally, I think Dave’s honesty and decency is what cost him
The Tonight Show
. He would never in a million years make a play for Johnny’s job as long as Johnny was still doing it. Whereas Jay was sneaking around and going to the affiliates and kissing their asses and all that shit. Dave’s a respectful guy. He had too much admiration for Johnny. It’s not in him to behave that way. He worked hard all those years and turned 12:30 into a lucrative time slot, and he absolutely deserved
The Tonight Show
. That whole thing was fucked.

How did you come to bond with Chris Elliott, who eventually became your writing partner on the show?

Chris was a writer and performer on
Late Night
, and he was there from day one; he started as a production assistant. He was already performing The Guy Under the Seats sketches when I got there. I was a huge fan, like anyone else who was watching
Late Night
at the time. Before I met him, I assumed he was probably a prick, based on his persona on the show. I could never quite tell if it was a put-on or not. He seemed a little Michael O’Donoghue–esque, the
National Lampoon
writer, who I heard was a real piece of work. Brilliant, but, you know . . . keep your distance. But he wasn’t like that at all, and we bonded almost instantly. It was a strangely deep connection. We came from completely different backgrounds, but we had so much in common—how we thought, our sense of humor, the movies we were obsessed with, neither of us could spell. [Laughs] We were the furthest thing from Harvard boys.

You helped Chris create characters for the show. I watched some videos of these characters recently, and I have to say, I still find them just as funny as I did in the eighties—but I also find them just as bizarre and, in some cases, just as frightening.

I don’t think Chris or myself—or anyone else who wrote with him—ever consciously tried to make something weird. I think a performer who’s got a really original voice, like Chris, doesn’t overthink what they’re doing. The character he created for the show—and in all his roles he was basically the same character—had been a part of him since he was a kid. He told me that that’s how he acted in school with teachers. But what really made it work on the show was Dave sitting there to his left. They were a comedy team in the great vaudeville tradition. Chris was the arrogant idiot who wasn’t impressed with Dave, and Dave’s reaction to that was just calm amusement. The audience, by nature, was always on Dave’s side, so that’s a funny dynamic. And quite frankly, it was pretty brave of Chris to always play into that. I think that’s where the undercurrent of awkwardness or strangeness came in. You were never quite sure if you were watching a genuine uncomfortable moment or not.

I really think Chris was the first guy to do the modern-day Arrogant Idiot, which is now a staple with a lot of comedic actors. For me, though, no one’s done it better or braver than he has. He came at it in such an original way—look at those early characters like The Panicky Guy and The Guy Under the Seats. How often do you see something that’s not derivative of a million other things? Chris’s work never felt like that.

The studio audiences during Chris’s
Late Night
performances appeared to be almost bewildered. Oftentimes, there was literally no laughter.

That’s the risk you take when you’re writing something that’s more a cockeyed performance piece and less joke driven, although there were plenty of times we thought we had some real jokes in there and they died, too.

But there was never a victory lap for baffling the audience. We
wanted
people to like the piece. And, most of all, we wanted Dave to be happy with it. Another thing: It wasn’t that easy to get a laugh in 6A back then [the Rockefeller Center Studio where
Late Night
was shot]. I don’t know why. You really had to earn it. It was a smallish studio, and I think audiences were different. Whenever I see a late-night talk show now, the audience seems so ramped up. They’ve been conditioned to behave differently. Or in Leno’s case, instructed to run up and shake his hand. Like he was Neil Armstrong or something. First day back from the moon.

Were you involved with the Marlon Brando character that Chris performed on the show?

I was. That came out of Chris and me hanging out and talking about Brando and how nuts he was and how terrible his later movies were, like [1980’s]
The Formula
. Chris used to imitate Brando up in the office, but in a way that had hardly anything to do with the actor—it wasn’t a classic imitation. It wasn’t Brando the actor, it was Brando the mental patient. Brando the cartoon. I don’t think we were that far off from what he was really like at the time.

I guess that would explain the dance that the Brando character would perform every time he appeared—a spastic shimmy around a pile of bananas.

The Banana Dance, oddly enough, came from
The Godfather
, but it had nothing to do with Brando. There’s a guy in the
Godfather
wedding scene, and you only see him for a second, and he’s holding a drink, doing this little dance—he’s shaking his hand in a funny way, and both Chris and I remembered the guy doing this little hand movement. The Banana Dance was based on that.

To Chris’s credit as a performer, he didn’t really seem to care whether he got the laughs or not.

I remember Carrie Fisher was standing backstage once, waiting to go on the show. I doubt she’d ever seen Chris do Brando before, and he walked over to her—in character, in full Brando makeup, holding his little Styrofoam cup of coffee—and said something like, “Miss, if there’s anything you need, please don’t hesitate to ask. And I wish you the greatest success on your appearance tonight.” She looked horrified. Another time there was an astronaut on the show—I forget who—and Chris, as Brando, just drove the guy nuts in the greenroom, asking him a million questions and referring to him the whole time as “Mr. President.”

Chris was always pretty fearless. But when a piece died on air it wasn’t like, “Yeah! We got ’em!” He wasn’t like Andy Kaufman that way. The goal was to do something different
and
get a laugh. And when it didn’t get a laugh, you just told yourself the audience was too dumb to get it. [Laughs] Classic writer denial.

Chris once came out as himself—which he began to do more and more as the show went on—and he was telling Dave how he was earning extra money by working as a costumed performer on
Sesame Street
. He said, “I landed a new gig as Big Bird’s left leg with another guy. There are two other guys who man the right leg, and another five guys up top.” And Dave said something like, “Wow, who knew it was that labor intensive?” And Chris said, “Yeah, it gets pretty hot in there . . . so we work without our shirts.” To me, that was really funny—the idea of it taking a sweatshop to operate Big Bird. There was also this touch of homoeroticism thrown in to boot—always a cheap, reliable go-to for Chris’s character. Anyway, that got nothing from the audience.

Except in the homes of future comedy writers. Did you have any idea, at the time, the mark you were making on pop culture?

Not long after I arrived, we did a show that took place entirely on an airplane going from New York to Miami. When we landed, there was a big crowd of fans waiting for Dave at the airport. I remember then thinking that something was really clicking with people, maybe even more than we realized. But the show was popular almost from the start, before I got there. As far as being an influence on anyone, I don’t think you’re aware of that when it’s happening. It’s always looking back, many years later. But, yeah, I think Dave and a lot of the things we did on the show turned out to be hugely influential in the comedy world. I can see Dave’s influence in commercials, on YouTube, on all sorts of things.

The writing staff for Letterman in the mid-eighties was one of the greatest TV-writing rooms of all time.

A lot of really talented people. But the trick was being able to write for Dave, and I think the people who were in that room at the time were just about the only ones who could do it. It’s a specific thing—Dave’s voice, his sense of humor, his worldview, you had to share some of that to be able to write it. Merrill Markoe was really the one who came up with the template. She and Dave were the creators of
Late Night
, which started back with [1980’s]
The Morning Show
. But there were a lot of great writers there in the early days who helped shape it: George Meyer, Jim Downey, Steve O’Donnell, Gerry Mulligan, and some others.