Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (50 page)

What’s the hardest part? That you wake up and have a bad morning, you’re not feeling funny—maybe you’ve had a long night or a fight with your wife—and you then have to head into work and create something funny?

Your job is to be funny whether you feel like it or not—there are people counting on you to deliver. You’re there to provide an endless stream of jokes and pitches and ideas. You’re there to feed the beast. And the beast doesn’t care if you only got four hours of sleep. That said, I don’t know if being in a bad mental space makes it harder to create comedy. Oftentimes, you can channel anger or distress into something really good.

There must be tricks you’ve learned over the years, right? Things that make the relentless demands a little easier to handle?

Sure. When you’re exhausted, or feeling uninspired, you can sometimes lean on mechanics and joke construction. Things like manipulating rhythm to deliver a surprising conclusion, or escalating flawed logic, or changing the point of view of a joke halfway through—they all help to bridge the gap between moments of pure inspiration.

But that’s getting into a whole other crisis: I wish that my writing was more organic. A lot of it comes from the demands of the job, of course. The crazy deadlines, the pressure one has to produce under—but I still worry that I over-intellectualize the way I write comedy. That I’m not
instinctual
enough. It’s a hard thing to explain, but if I were to break it into percentages—and I think it’s telling that I’m breaking it into percentages—my writing would be 70 percent inspiration, 30 percent math.

The danger, when you do it for long enough, is that comedy can become a series of variables in a mathematical equation. I know that if I balance the equation correctly, that if I manipulate
x
and
y
in just the right way, the end result will be laughter. Maybe some of that has to do with me being a left-brain guy, but the whole thing bums me out. You never want to generate material that feels soulless. It’d be nice to be the kind of writer who drew purely from a place of inspiration. I wish my process was more of a mystery. I wish every joke was a surprise to me as I was writing it.

Yes, but if you were to experience a huge, all-encompassing sense of elation or surprise every time you wrote a joke, you’d go insane.

Maybe. Don’t get me wrong—there are still moments of incredible excitement. Especially when I stumble onto something I’ve never done before. Something that feels completely, totally new. Something where I can’t say, “Oh,
this
joke has
this
type of idea from
that
joke, and
that
idea from that
other
joke I wrote.” That’s when it’s really exhilarating.

How did the job at
Colbert
work? What was a typical day like for you?

Every morning there would be a pitch meeting where we’d talk about the latest news and our take on it for Stephen the character. Then Stephen would choose the pitches he liked the most, the writers would be paired off in teams of two, and then everyone would get sent upstairs to write up the chosen pitches into scripts for the day’s show. Each team usually had a little over an hour to produce a finished script—which is not a lot of time. Working on the show was a huge adrenaline rush. You’d get back to your office with your partner and the two of you would instantly start pitching jokes for the script while the clock ticked away. It’s definitely not a job for the faint of heart.

The show was really good for me. I’m in my head so much of the time. Writing for
Colbert
forced me to be more present. It made me a much better comedy writer.

So you would pitch jokes for the script aloud? How did it go from oral pitches to a written script?

One writer would sit at the keyboard, the other would pace back and forth, and both would start writing the script aloud. Whatever you agreed was funny would get typed up.

And you had only around an hour to do this?

[Laughs] It was crazy.

Was there an advantage to pairing up with another writer?

Writing with a partner was totally new to me. Basically, the show’s process borrows a lot from Stephen’s improv background. There’s this philosophy when you do improv to never say no; to always be open to going down a comedic avenue that’s been pitched to you. It’s amazing how often we’d stumble onto something that was funny just by seeing where a certain train of thought would lead us.

Also, the nice thing about working aloud, where you’re basically talking out every line of a script, is that it kept the show from sounding overly written. When you write alone, and have all the time in the world, you end up rewording sentences, editing and re-editing clauses, playing around with syntax—and your jokes tend to stiffen up as a result. They sound labored over. Your writing is more prone to feeling unnatural. The oral process at
Colbert
was great at preventing that.

At first it was scary. But after I had a couple months to adjust, I calmed down and really loved it. At
The Onion
, I was handed my assignment and then had anywhere from half a day to a day and a half to produce an article. The writers would just go back to their offices and shut everyone and everything off. They wrote slowly; when they were stuck, they left the building and took a walk. It was a process that fed on seclusion and solitude. But at
Colbert
, because we had to produce twenty-two new minutes of comedy every day, there was no time for that kind of luxury. There was no staring at a computer screen for twenty minutes in search of the perfect next sentence; you had to find that perfect next sentence in seconds.

That was the other nice thing about working in pairs. It was this amazingly collaborative and selfless process that allowed for polished material to be created quickly. You’d pitch an idea for a joke, your partner would refine it, you would refine his take on it, and in forty-five seconds you’d suddenly have a great bit.

And the only reason that this sort of back-and-forth works is because Stephen has created an incredibly supportive environment where everyone feels totally comfortable blurting out the first thing that comes to mind. We’d all say things we regretted multiple times a day, but we’d also end up saying something that would crack open a tricky idea or would save a script, and it was all because we weren’t overly self-conscious. More so than the brilliance of the writing, it’s the communal atmosphere inside those offices that makes that show one of a kind.

When I was interviewed for the job, I remember feeling like they were really happy with my submission packet, and that they had only brought me in to get a sense of what kind of a person I was. They know they’ve built this comedic Shangri-la, and they don’t want to bring in anyone who’s going to dismantle it. You get the sense that someone could be an outright genius, but they’d still pass on him or her if they were a fucking asshole.

How involved is Stephen in the daily writing process?

Everything goes through Stephen. Every word goes through Stephen. Depending on the day, he’d rewrite anywhere from a few paragraphs to entire scripts. What that guy is capable of is jaw-dropping. He made us look good all the time. You’d write what you thought was a great joke and then he’d read it and he’d laugh and then he’d instantly pitch a tag for your joke that was twice as funny as the joke itself. To be honest, I’ve never seen anything like it before. Comedy just poured out of him, and it all came out completely polished and perfect and unexpected and hilarious. And he did it at will.

How much of the interview segments on
Colbert
is written versus improvised by Stephen?

I’d say about 75 percent of his interviews are completely improvised. [Laughs] It’s mind-blowing.

Stephen is not just riffing—he’s riffing in the voice of a character that is simultaneously a conservative archetype and a comedic deconstruction of that archetype. And he’s doing it while arguing with an economics professor, or a presidential biographer, or a botanist specializing in Amazonian plant life. The man is impossible.

What was the difference in writing jokes for
The Colbert Report
versus jokes at
The Onion
?

At
The Onion
, the goal was to never have something sound like a joke. Comedy was delivered as fact. Because of that, I was used to a really dry and understated approach. And you write jokes differently that way. You try to hide the mechanics of them a bit more. Nothing’s ever written in set-up/punch line order. You’re squeezing jokes into introductory clauses. You’re mixing setups and punch lines together. So when I went to
Colbert
, I had to learn how to write a hard joke again.

What does that mean, a
hard joke
?

I just mean a joke that’s going to get a big laugh. The advantage of print is that you don’t care if your audience laughs or not. You care, but the medium gives you some distance. You’re not standing right there when the punch line is delivered. So you’re less concerned with whether it’s met with a chuckle or a laugh or just a nod of appreciation.

But when you’re writing for TV—in front of a live audience—you want laughs. I mean, it’s pretty key. At
The Onion
, you can argue, the point was to make them
not
laugh. You were trying to phrase comedy in a way where at first glance someone would mistake it for a genuine newspaper article.

Writing for TV is a different skill set. It forces you to become a performer in a way. The timing is different when something is performed versus when it’s read silently on a page. You become more sensitive to some things. Economy of language is really important. You can’t weigh a joke down with extra words, or you’ll lose that joke on TV.

And how about the difference between writing jokes on
Community
versus
The Colbert Report
?

A lot of what I did at
Colbert
translates to
Community
, but because
Community
is a single-camera show, without a live audience, I can also write the way I used to at
The Onion
. I can sneak in jokes that don’t pay off right away or that a viewer might miss the first time. I love comedy that’s a slow burn, where it takes a couple of seconds to connect all the different bits of information in a joke before it lands. There’s this delayed reaction that is wonderful. Thinking. Thinking. Huge laugh. You can’t do that for a show with a live audience—that’s death. You can do it every now and then, but you don’t want two seconds of complete silence after the end of a joke before you get a laugh. It’s awkward. It feels like something has gone wrong.

The great thing about Dan Harmon, and the reason I wanted to work for him, is that he always puts the work first. He’s there, day in and day out, trying to write the best possible twenty-two minutes he can. He’s not concerned with reviews, or with how the show will do in the ratings, or how hard he has to push himself to achieve the results he wants. The only thing he cares about is quality. And I think that translates on-screen.

Community
is also nice because I get to mix emotions. I like comedy that has moments of heart in it, or sadness, or fear. I like comedy that makes people feel different things while they’re laughing.
The Onion
and
The Colbert Report
were the same way. It’s what I’m naturally drawn to.

You just mentioned the word
fear
and have used it a few times since we began the interview. Are you a fearful person?

[Laughs] I was scared a lot as a kid, especially of animals. I was attacked over and over again by animals.

When I was fourteen months old, living in Brazil, my parents accidentally set me on top of an anthill. I got bit hundreds of times and had to be rushed to the hospital. I have no memory of that, though.

Then when I was around four, a monkey at a zoo threw a hardened piece of feces at my head. Again, no memory of it, but a traumatic event nonetheless.

The one incident I do remember was when I was eleven. My family and I went to the San Diego Zoo, where they had a Birds of Prey exhibit. We sat in this little outdoor amphitheater, and these falcons and eagles flew all around us catching food. At the end of the show, they had a place where you could pose next to the trainer and this bald eagle and get a photograph taken. Everyone lined up for the photo, except for me—I was terrified. So I stood maybe fifteen feet to the side. I remember picking up my head and making eye contact with the bald eagle, and two seconds later that damn thing was on top of me, clawing at my back and pecking at my head. I had to be rushed to the medical tent. I always thought the incident was telling. All that eagle had to do was make momentary eye contact with me, and thousands of years of raw instinct kicked back in—one glance and that eagle identified me as easy prey. That sums me up pretty well as a person. [Laughs] I cast the shadow of a trembling field mouse.

Do you think that comedy writers are more prone to fear and depression? Or is it just that comedy writers tend to talk a lot more about depression than those in other occupations?

It’s hard to say if comedy writers are more depressed. It’s definitely an image that’s been popularized and, to a certain extent, romanticized.

For me, having someone laugh at something I’ve written is all about getting approval. Sometimes I wonder if I write compulsively because it’s the most direct way I have of regulating my brain chemistry. It’s all about overcoming a deficiency. Medication helps, but that hit of approval from an awesome joke or script can’t be beat.

And it goes way back. When I first started getting noticed for being funny, back in high school, I would keep track in a notebook of exactly how many times per period I would make the class laugh. “Seven times, first period, Monday.” And then I would try to beat that number the next day. There was never a honeymoon period with comedy. I took it way too seriously, way too early.

Talent, intelligence, hard work—they all help, but nothing sharpens your writing faster than the desperate desire for validation. Having your self-worth inextricably linked to your work may be unhealthy, but it’s also responsible for most of my success.