Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (6 page)

Screenwriter/Director,
Juno, Young Adult, Time and a Half, Sweet Valley High

I couldn’t have grown up less connected to Hollywood. I lived in a very conservative Polish-Catholic community in the south suburbs of Chicago. I went to Mass and received communion six mornings a week. The idea of a “professional writer” was a fantasy. My parents told me that I couldn’t write for a living, that it was just a hobby some people had outside of their real jobs. I love my folks, but they’re the two most practical, risk-averse people I’ve ever met. As a result, I truly appreciate Hollywood. It’s full of grandiose, insane dreamers with entitlement complexes. Some people find that obnoxious, but to me, it’s fun. I never knew characters like that growing up. I never knew anyone who said, “I deserve to be famous.” In Hollywood, that’s every other person you meet! God bless these douchebags.

I’m really lazy, and I’m not proud of that. I’m usually just thinking about what I’m going to have for dinner. People say, “There’s no way you’re lazy; you have such a steady output of work.” But writing isn’t work for me. I enjoy it. If it felt like work, I wouldn’t get past page two. That’s why I have difficulty relating to a lot of comedy writers. They might seem rebellious on the surface, but a lot of them went to Ivy League schools and are ambitious people-pleasers at their core. I’ve always been straight-up lazy and defiant. I wouldn’t last a week at Harvard, or at
SNL
for that matter. It would be like, “What can I write that Lorne will really hate?”

When I first decided to try screenwriting, I was seeking inspiration from small, offbeat films. I think this is a good way to start. I knew if I read the script for say,
Armageddon
, it wasn’t going to connect. I was a nerdy, chubby chick on the fringes, so of course [the 2001 comedy film]
Ghost World
appealed to me. As I started experimenting with my own voice, I found myself interested in suburban misfits like Enid Coleslaw [from
Ghost World
] and like those characters in
Napoleon Dynamite
and Lester Burnham [the Kevin Spacey character] from
American Beauty
. They didn’t have to save the planet to be interesting. Their stories were accessible to me. And
Ghost World
was funny, but also melancholy in a way that resonated with me. I think that tone has informed a lot of the stuff I’ve tried to write.

Always be working on your own material.
Write specs
[non-commissioned, unsolicited screenplays]! Though I’ve been hired to write studio projects, everything I’ve ever gotten produced has been an original spec script that I just wanted to write on my own. I wasn’t being paid for them. Other people’s ideas are never as important as yours. I wrote
Young Adult
while I was supposed to be working on a shitty studio movie, and I’m so glad I prioritized my own idea. Make everything as personal and specific as you can. Sometimes people bitch about, for example, certain screenwriters who make their writing too specific to their own lives, not realizing that that’s why it works! The specificity is what makes it brilliant.

We’re lucky enough to live in an era where you can write, produce, publish, and distribute your own writing through the magic of the Internet, so there’s no excuse not to be creating. Just keep writing. If you really love it, you’ll keep doing it even if you’re not successful. If you don’t love it, you don’t belong here.

If you want to understand the creative nuts and bolts of Michael Schur—a writer for such NBC comedy institutions as
Saturday Night Live
,
The Office
, and
Parks and Recreation
—you should probably read novelist David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel,
Infinite Jest
. At least the first thousand or so pages of it.

Schur didn’t just enjoy
Infinite Jest
. It’s in his bloodstream. While a student at Harvard University, he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the novel and somehow persuaded Wallace to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to receive an award from the
Harvard Lampoon
. (More on that later.) In 2011, Schur directed a video for the Decemberists’ “Calamity Song,” which featured teens playing the fictional game Eschaton, a reference to
Infinite Jest
. And an episode from
Parks and Recreation
written by Schur—“Partridge,” which aired April 4, 2013—was brimming with
Infinite Jest
references. Schur also owns the
Infinite Jest
film rights. So you can rest assured that if there’s ever a movie adaptation of the least filmable book ever written, Schur will be at least somehow involved.

Schur has a popularity that extends beyond those who read the closing credits of sitcoms and enjoy excessive footnotes. Most people would recognize him first as Mose Schrute, the quiet, bearded cousin of Dwight on NBC’s
The Office
. Mose co-owns a beet farm with Dwight, thinks it’s fun to throw manure, loves
Jurassic Park
(he has a pair of
Jurassic Park
pajamas to prove it), and has suffered from recurring nightmares ever since “the storm.” Mose is Schur’s creation—he named the character after Mose Gingerich, one of the stars of the 2004 reality series
Amish in the City
—and one that, for better or worse, has become his most visible mainstream identity.

But there’s another, entirely different audience for Schur. Mindy Kaling, a writer and actress who collaborated with Schur for many years on
The Office
, knows a very different man than most of the world has seen. “The greatest gift you can give Mike Schur is a Swedish dictionary,” she said. “Because he just loves nonsense words, which [is] like a toddler sensibility for a guy who is an Emmy-nominated writer and one of the most well-read, serious guys.” Schur enjoys broad comedy, Kaling said; as proof, she pointed to one of her favorite Schur-penned
Office
episodes—“Dunder Mifflin Infinity,” October 4, 2007—in which Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell, blindly follows his GPS and maneuvers his rental car straight into Lake Scranton.

Schur was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1975, and raised in West Hartford, Connecticut. While at Harvard University, he became a member of the
Harvard Lampoon
, which may or may not have prepared him for a future in comedy writing. (As he said once in an interview, writing for the
Lampoon
didn’t prepare him “for anything, really . . . [except] perhaps if I had a career as a guy who lounged around drunk in poorly maintained Flemish castles.”) Almost immediately upon graduating in 1997, he was hired to write for
Saturday Night Live
, where he worked for seven seasons (1997–2004), three as producer for Weekend Update during Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon’s reign on the segment. Schur found his way to
The Office
, and co-created
Parks and Recreation
, a mockumentary-style, single-camera sitcom about the parks department of Pawnee, a fictional town in Indiana, starring former
Saturday Night Live
colleague Amy Poehler. In 2013, he co-created Fox’s
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
, starring Andy Samberg and Chelsea Peretti.

As a television writer—someone who works behind the scenes—is there a frustration that your name may not be attached to a specific idea or joke? That if you were to write for
The New Yorker
or publish books, you’d receive a byline and full credit?

Not really. TV writing is collaborative—if I want solo credit for everything I write, I’d write a novel. Actually, that sounds really hard. Forget the novel.

But credit can be a very prickly issue for some writers—most TV scripts are constantly rewritten and punched up. It gets very hard to track who did what and whose joke was which and when and where and how. When I got my first half-hour writing job, at
The Office
[in 2005], there were times when I felt slighted because something I had contributed didn’t get “properly” attributed. And since I equated “proper attribution” with succeeding at my job, it would upset me. But then I realized that Greg [Daniels, the showrunner] couldn’t have cared less about who pitched what. He saw the process of writing and rewriting as a collective effort, and as long as everyone was working hard and the collective effort was producing good scripts, the specifics didn’t matter. It was a very enlightened point of view, I thought.

TV comedy writing is a team sport. That’s just the deal. In most cases, I could not begin to tell you who wrote what in a given script. And I have very often had the benefit of other great writers’ contributions in scripts that bore my name, so it would be crazy for me to complain about not getting credit on other writers’ scripts.

Writing for sitcoms, and especially being the showrunner, or head writer, is a notoriously brutal and exhausting job. What exactly does it take to maintain a level of excellence over the course of an eight-month season—twenty-two episodes? How intense is the schedule?

It just takes tons and tons of hard work. In network TV, from the moment you start shooting, you’re basically behind. Something David Mamet once said sums it up perfectly: “Doing a movie or a play is like running a marathon. Doing a television show is like running until you die.”

How is this particular day at
Parks and Rec
shaping up?

I just got back from the sound mix for Episode 515 of
Parks
[“Bailout”], which is now complete. We’re shooting the season five finale, featuring a giant parade in Pasadena, and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, and if it does we’re completely screwed. Tomorrow morning, I have a network-notes call at 9:15 to discuss the first cut of episode 517 [“Partridge”], which I have to lock by Thursday. One new episode of the show has to be edited, noted, and locked every week for the next six weeks. Tomorrow afternoon I have a show-and-tell for the sets, costumes, and shooting style of the pilot I’m doing for Fox [
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
], which has a network table read Monday. By the end of the day today, my partner on the pilot and I have to finish the draft of the script to send to the studio and network to get their notes so we can turn it around by Friday. This happens to be a very busy week, because of the pilot, but this is not atypical for network TV. It’s a Looney Tunes schedule.

Who’s the audience for television these days? Do you write for the home audience or the audience later seeing it on Hulu and downloading short scenes?

We just went through a very specific situation on
Parks
, wherein, due to a scheduling quirk, we had to air two episodes back-to-back. The first was scheduled to be the biggest episode we’d ever done—the wedding of Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt, years in the making, very emotional, and obviously a benchmark episode for the show. The second one—scheduled originally to air a week later—was a regular episode about Leslie attending a luncheon with members of the local media. So, obviously, this was upsetting. There was going to be this huge, massive, life-changing event in the lives of the two main characters, and then, literally, one second later: “Today, I’m attending a luncheon . . .”

We had a lot of discussions about what to do—shuffle the order somehow? Extend the wedding to an hour? But ultimately we let it be. And our reasoning was that this will matter exactly once—on the night it airs this way. The number of people watching TV on their own schedule, through Hulu or iTunes or whichever platform they prefer, is rising exponentially. And it’s never going back the other way.

I’d think that this would put more pressure on you as a writer. You aren’t merely writing jokes to be seen once and then forgotten. You’re writing for multiple viewings, to last years.

Audience expectations are sky-high, and they get bored very easily because they’ve seen it all. Add to that the multitude of choices the consumer has—if you slip up even once, people have dozens of other shows dangling in front of them. And they can watch them
on their phones
. When I was a kid, I watched every single episode of
Empty Nest
, a show about a sixty-year-old doctor living in Florida. I was a twelve-year-old kid in suburban Connecticut. Why did I watch it? It was on. Today, if you’re a twelve-year-old in suburban Connecticut, or a forty-eight-year-old lesbian taxidermist in Tennessee, or an eighty-one-year-old diabetic glass-blower in Yakima, Washington, there are somewhere between one and three hundred better choices for you than
Empty Nest
—shows that someone somewhere made with you and your friends in mind.

Beyond
Empty Nest
, what were your major comedic influences?

I was a crazy, voracious reader of comedy. I read Woody Allen’s books,
Without Feathers
,
Getting Even
, and
Side Effects
, when I was around twelve, and it was like I was seeing in color for the first time. Reading
Without Feathers
is probably the most important “holy crap” moment of my life. I read all these books over and over. I then tried to write Woody Allen comedy pieces, but they were just terrible. I recently found this giant document that I had been keeping that I thought was my great masterwork—it was basically a Woody Allen book rip-off I worked on all through middle school and high school. And it’s just so horrifying.

I have never laughed harder than when I saw [1973’s]
Sleeper
for the first time. I get my love of goofiness directly from Woody Allen and Monty Python. But in some way the most important movie to me is
Midnight Run
[a comedy released in 1988, co-starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin and written by George Gallo]. Maybe the tightest screenplay ever written—not one wasted word—and a dozen indelible characters with strong personalities, each with specific goals and realistic motivations. You can learn everything you need to know about building strong characters by watching
Midnight Run
.

It sounds like you took comedy seriously from a young age.

Every year for Christmas or my birthday, I would receive books of comedy pieces. I remember someone telling me that Mark Twain was really funny, and I started reading Mark Twain short stories. If you’re an NFL quarterback, you watch a lot of games on film, and if you’re a comedy writer you have to watch a lot of game film—you have to watch comedy, read comedy, write about comedy. You have to treat it as seriously as if you’re a law student studying for the bar exam.

When I was a kid, I constantly wrote. I kept notebooks and journals where I jotted down ideas for movies and sketches or whatever. I wrote submissions to shows I wasn’t even planning to submit to. I would write sample scripts of TV shows that I liked, just to practice. I wrote a
Cheers
script around 1998, long after the show had been off the air. I didn’t really know whether something was good until I had written it down and I could look at it. I would see if I could write in the style of shows that I liked. That’s not a job-getting tool, that’s a way to practice your craft. When it comes to writing, there’s no real secret except to keep doing it. In my experience, the only way to get better at writing is to write.

Do you have any influences that one might consider nontraditional for a comedy writer?

The Mayor of Casterbridge
[1886] by Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s novels are insane, many of them, because they have a theme of random chance and unpredictability—sort of the nineteenth-century equivalent of the chaos theory seen in
Jurassic Park
. Someone will be delivering an important message, and then, out of nowhere, a bull will escape from a pen, gore a guy to death, and the message will never get delivered. That book in particular struck me when I read it because it’s about a man who made one awful, miserable, terrible mistake [auctioning off his wife and daughter] when he was young, drunk, and stupid, and he spends the rest of his life trying to make up for it. What a lovely, simple character detail—and a funny one when you then have a brilliant actor such as Adam Scott inhabit a similar character, and a team of excellent comedy writers writing jokes about it, like we do on
Parks
.
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