Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (7 page)

Another influence is David Foster Wallace. I owe a great debt to Wallace—
Infinite Jest
is very funny, but, more important, Wallace spends a tremendous amount of time in that book, and in his others, dealing with the theme of sincerity and honesty. It’s something that is very tricky for comedy writers, because sincerity is the opposite of “cool” or “hip” or “ironic,” all of which comedy writers wield like swords to fend off feeling gooey or mushy. Nothing terrifies comedy writers more than heartfelt emotion. Wallace ended that for me. His entire body of work was an attempt to reconcile jokes, postmodern games, and “coolness,” which he admittedly loved and reveled in, with what he saw as the most basic job of writing: to make the readers
feel
something. To make them feel like they are not alone in the world. That is very moving to me and certainly changed the way I write.

I wholeheartedly agree with one point Wallace made, which was, and I’m paraphrasing: “If the world is terrible and awful and screwed- up, there isn’t much point to writing something about how the world is terrible and awful and screwed up.” What made more sense to him—and, subsequently, to me—was to write about how people attempt to navigate this awful screwed-up world and to then find a way to be happy within it, and to make things better.

Did you ever meet Wallace?

I met him in 1996, when I was writing for the
Harvard Lampoon
.
Infinite Jest
came out in February, and after I read it I decided unilaterally that he would be receiving our “Novelist of the Millennium Award,” which was a thing I had just made up, so that I could give it to him, just so that I could meet him.

We invited him to the
Lampoon
building through his agent, and one day, as I sat in my dorm working on my senior thesis—which was about
Infinite Jest
—he called me to see what the hell this award was all about. It was very surreal. He was notoriously press-shy and wanted to make sure it wasn’t a dog-and-pony show, but I assured him I had just made the whole thing up, and it was only an invitation to come and hang out in a cool old building.

The point of all this is: He wanted to come, ultimately, because he’d been a fan of the
Lampoon
while he was at Amherst. He knew a lot about it, like that John Updike and [novelist] William Gaddis and others had once been members, and that there was a
Lampoon
-
SNL
-
Simpsons
connection, which meant something to him. It turned out to be an easy sell.

There are passages of
Infinite Jest
that I think are monstrously funny. He’s funny and his writing is complicatedly funny. That might seem reductive, but I think it’s true. He was funny in a way that most people who are funny are not.

What was your thesis on
Infinite Jest
about?

I wrote about Thomas Pynchon’s [1963 debut novel]
V.
and
Infinite Jest
, positing that they served as bookends for a type of postmodern fiction that dealt with irony and identity cohesion. I got really into it and worked very, very hard, and I think if I read it today I would have absolutely no idea what it meant, or indeed whether it held water at all or was completely full of shit. I strongly suspect that it was full of shit.

Wallace had a complicated relationship with television. He was raised on it and said it was his “artistic snorkel to the universe.” But he also felt that television changed our perception of reality. Did you ever talk to him about TV, sitcoms, and comedy?

A little. We corresponded for a while after we met, and I kept him up-to-date on my budding career in TV. He was very interested in that. I invited him to come to a live
SNL
show, because it was a TV touchstone for him, but it never came to be. I think a Wallace essay about
SNL
would’ve been amazing.

And it wasn’t just TV—obviously TV loomed large for him, and he wrote about it frequently, but I think he had a complicated relationship with all of pop culture. He told me a great story about when he was teaching at Illinois State and he was given an audio tape of a band that he fell in love with, and he came into his graduate seminar and said, “I might be crazy, but I think this band is great and you all need to hear this right now.” He then played for his students
Nevermind
by Nirvana. It was about seven years after the album had been released.

You wrote for
SNL
for six years, and you’ve mentioned in the past that the show was a big influence for you. But were there any other TV shows that influenced you?

Late Night with David Letterman.
I would tape Letterman every night, watch it in the morning before school, and then steal all his jokes and stories and tell them to my friends. It was the perfect crime, because I knew that no one else my age could stay up that late.

Mary Tyler Moore
was huge for me, and when I stayed home sick from school I would watch
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. The character of Laura Petrie was my first ever TV crush. I remember my young brain being surprised that something shot in black and white could be so funny. Later, I loved Mary’s relationship with Lou Grant—the relationship between Leslie and Ron Swanson on
Parks
definitely has shades of that platonic friendship.

I also remember loving individual characters within shows. I think Alex P. Keaton from
Family Ties
is one of the greatest sitcom inventions in history, but I also loved Michael Gross, who played the father. I became fascinated by actors who had great timing, and Gross’s timing was impeccable. Same with Kelsey Grammer, Woody Harrelson, Ted Danson, Shelley Long—pretty much everyone on
Cheers
gets an A+ for pure comedic timing.

Cheers
avoided a lot of current, topical jokes. In many ways, this allowed the show to age better than other sitcoms. Was this a philosophy you tried to adopt with
Parks and Rec
?

Well, we had more rules on
The Office
. Producer Greg [Daniels] really didn’t want that show to seem pegged to any particular era, so he always resisted showing dates on office memos, or mentioning a specific Beyoncé song that came out that month, or saying “the 2006 company picnic,” or whatever. The idea was, with a show called
The Office
, we were trying to be maximally relatable to all persons who had ever been in an office, not just people who were in offices from 2005 to 2013. We took that idea to
Parks and Rec
, but loosened it up fairly quickly. It became increasingly clear that many of our stories were going to mimic specific things in the political and social Zeitgeist, and some stories were direct parallels to—or commentary on—national political stories of the time. Plus, Aziz Ansari [who plays
Parks and Rec
staff official Tom Haverford] improvised so many great jokes about hip-hop and the
Fast & Furious
movies that it seemed silly to throw them away.

Cheers
is a classic sitcom known to have taken awhile to catch on with an audience.
Parks and Rec
also took a little while to catch on with viewers.

In my opinion, really good pilots don’t often later make great shows. Great pilots are like movies—they have big exciting concepts or hooks that grab people and draw them in, and cut through the white noise of the two hundred new shows that crop up every year. But the problem is, those hooks and concepts elbow out room that should be given to the characters—explaining who they are, what they want in life, and so on—and TV comedies only work long-term if the characters are three-dimensional and great. That’s why
Cheers
is the best TV comedy ever—it’s just great characters sitting in a bar talking to each other. And in that
Cheers
pilot [that aired September 30, 1982], you learn everything you need to know about the characters.

But that
Cheers
pilot tested terribly—there was nothing for the audience to grab on to, and at the end they probably felt like they hadn’t been treated to a big, entertaining half hour. It takes awhile to learn about the characters and enjoy their funny traits. In the
Cheers
pilot, for example, Cliff is basically an extra. It wasn’t until a few episodes later that they moved him to the other end of the bar and sat him next to Norm, forming the most famous 275-episode tableau in TV history.

It frustrates me sometimes, because shows get picked up based on their pilots, which is directly analogous to judging a book by its first ten pages. And then critics weigh in on pilots when they air, which contributes in some way to shows’ being successful or not successful in the long term. In the perfect world, no one would discuss a new TV show until it had aired eight episodes, and the creative team had already worked out all the kinks. Sadly, the world—and you might not know this—is imperfect.

You’ve been quoted in interviews as saying that, as the showrunner for
Parks and Rec
, you care more about story than individual jokes. Why is that?

This is just personal preference, but I find the world so tumultuous and hardscrabble and generally terrifying that I will never tire of stories about people caring for each other, and doing nice things for each other, and in a very basic way trying to make each other feel less alone on Earth. All stories need conflict, but conflict can come from anywhere.

It seems counterintuitive, but when you have well-drawn, three-dimensional characters, and a dozen funny writers in a room thinking about them, chances are that one of the writers can always pitch a good joke at any given point in a script. But those jokes are pointless and empty if the story doesn’t hold together. Good stories beat good jokes every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

It’s also very obviously the case that jokes are fleeting, but good characters and emotional stories are forever. TV is about presenting an inviting world in which audiences want to invest their time, regularly, over many years. Jokes help because, you know, they make people happy. But what makes people
love
a show, and get attached to it, is great characters having great adventures.

I just like that kind of show better—where the characters are generally positive and the comedy comes from goofiness and satire instead of cattiness and negativity. It’s explicitly the theme of
Parks and Rec
—that people need each other to be happy, that communities are important, that nobody achieves anything alone. A show with that theme needs its characters to support each other. So ours do, generally speaking.

Can you remember an instance when a joke was cut because it sacrificed character or overall story?

It happens every single episode. Usually because the joke in question is slightly “off-story,” meaning that it doesn’t line up with the character’s specific attitude in that given scene, and it slipped through the writing-vetting process all through the script stage because it made everyone laugh. Our cast includes some of the world’s greatest improvisers, and we always carve out time for them to goof around. Quite often they will add amazing material to the script. But sometimes, we have to chop off that amazing material, because what they improvised unintentionally changes their characters’ story or attitude, so its inclusion would just muddy the waters.

This seems like the exact opposite of the philosophy behind an
SNL
sketch. Or is it? Can a joke in a sketch sacrifice a character and still work?

Character isn’t important in sketches, where everything is two-dimensional by design. You can’t really “sell out” a character in three minutes. It’s a much, much bigger deal when you’re talking about a show for which you want to do more than one hundred episodes.

What do you look for in character growth? What do you want to achieve at the end of each season?

Someone said that the best ending for a story is at once inevitable and surprising. That it was the only way it could’ve happened, and yet the audience didn’t see it coming. I’d like every episode and every season to end that way. It’s a reason I loved the ending of
The Sopranos
, which, as I’ve been told by many people, who are usually shouting at me, is not a universal feeling. The entirety of that show, and that character, led to that ambiguous cut to black. To me, it made absolutely total complete sense to end the show that way. Even the debate about what had happened—which I don’t imagine [the show’s creator] David Chase anticipated, in its extant form—felt inevitable, because it was a coda to the way we’d all been debating the show for years.

Great endings come from giving a character big hurdles, great successes, tough failures—testing a character’s resolve and defining that character by word and action—and then putting the character into a situation where he or she stands precariously at a fork in a road. I say this as if it’s all super easy.

But here’s the real problem in all of this. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently: Television used to be a
quantity
business. They created around thirty
I Love Lucy
s a year, and Milton Berle just walked onstage in a dress every week and everyone fell over laughing because their minds were so completely blown by what was happening. The production values were entirely secondary. “Did you see the flimsy set shake back and forth when Ricky slammed the door?” “Who cares?
I’m watching this show inside my house!
”

Stories were new, characters were fresh, stereotypes not yet created. Everything was new and juicy and fifty million people were watching.

Television is not about quantity anymore; it’s very much about
quality
—and specificity. It’s a giant beautiful smorgasbord of fiction, nonfiction, comedy, and drama—about every conceivable subject—delivered to the consumer at low cost and with nearly maximal convenience. It is also dissected, analyzed, and reported on with alarming speed by professional and amateur critics alike, who have at their disposal an online database of every single thing that has ever happened in the history of screen-based entertainment for comparison. Maximal speed, maximal scrutiny, maximal convenience, and maximal skepticism in the viewing audience that it’s going to be worth their time investment.