Just the Funny Parts

by Nell Scovell

  A woman is being considered for a job on the writing staff when one of Dave’s assistants—and rumored bed buddies—blocks the hire. Why would she deny another woman an opportunity? Did she feel threatened? And why is an executive assistant determining who sits in the writers’ room?

  Dave takes a shine to a PA fresh out of college. He passes her funny little notes at meetings and asks her opinion on important show matters. She’s barely twenty-two and she’s already making production decisions. One night, her phone rings at home. It’s her boss.

  “I’m in a hotel room, all alone, eating French fries,” Dave says.

  He might just be making conversation . . . or he might be fishing to see if she offers to join him. She changes the subject. The next day, she encounters a chilly reception at work. The funny little notes from the boss stop and she’s no longer asked to offer her opinion.

  “Did I do something wrong?” she wonders.

  Solution: All of them are all three.

  The same week that the Letterman blackmail scandal broke, Nancy Franklin published an article about The Jay Leno Show in The New Yorker. Near the end, Nancy noted, “Leno has no women writers on his show. Neither does David Letterman, and neither does Conan O’Brien. Come on.”

  I stared at that sentence, too. Nancy’s observation shocked me more than Dave’s confession. Zero female writers? I went to IMDb and looked up the last female writer at Late Show. Meredith Scardino had left in 2005. For four years, they’d had an all-male staff. When it came to gender diversity, Late Show literally couldn’t do worse. Even tokenism was dead. And then came insult to injury.

  Rob Burnett, one of Late Show’s many Executive Producers and the head of Dave’s production company Worldwide Pants, Inc., decided to push back against the criticism from NOW. He issued his own statement, which included this claim:

  As an employee of David Letterman’s since 1985, I have personally found the work environment on his shows to be fair, professional and entirely merit-based at all times.

  My soul did a spit take.

  Professional? Dave had just admitted on air that he was sexually involved with staffers. Plus, I’d heard rumors that other high-level male producers enjoyed their own “intern sleepover parties.” Still, what chafed the most was Burnett calling the work environment “fair” and “entirely merit-based.” “Fair” implied women had the same opportunities as men and “entirely merit-based” meant in the past four years, not a single female writer who had applied to the show was funnier than the least-funny male on staff. I personally knew one hilarious female writer who had submitted to the show with recommendations from two hugely respected comedy performers who had worked with her. She never even got a response on her submission.

  By 2009, we’d elected an African American to occupy the Oval Office, but not one person of color had ever broken into the Letterman writers’ room. If the show was “entirely merit-based” then Burnett’s statement implied that since 1985, not a single African American, Asian, East Asian, or Hispanic writer—male or female—merited a spot on that staff. As Nancy Franklin would say, “Come on.”

  A switch inside me flipped that day. Someone needed to call out this ludicrous statement and stand up for funny women and minorities. And I knew the perfect writer to do it: a serious white male journalist named Nick Kristof.

  Nick and I were college classmates and I’d recently heard him give a book talk in LA about Half the Sky, which he cowrote with Sheryl WuDunn. Nick had a huge platform at the New York Times and I trusted him completely. I emailed him and he called me back from an airport. I pitched him the story. He listened, then paused.

  “Okay, my first question is this,” he said. “Why aren’t you writing the article, Nell?”

  “Because you write about women and people will listen to you,” I said.

  What I didn’t say was, “Because I’m scared to death.” I knew speaking up would bring me both attention and criticism. It felt safer to hide behind Nick.

  He wouldn’t let me. “It’s your story,” Nick said. “There’s no one who will tell it better.”

  I didn’t want to. I even emailed a friend who worked on the show to say that I wasn’t going to write anything. It was like announcing to my family that I was no longer going to eat refined sugar.

  That night, I couldn’t put the thought out of my head. When I exited the show, I had kept my mouth shut because I was young and professionally vulnerable. Now I was in a different place. Dave’s admission had triggered a full-blown existential crisis. In the four stages joke, the final “Who is Nell Scovell?” is asked by studio executives who no longer recognize the name. Now I turned the question on myself: Who was I? What did I stand for?

  It’s hard to describe but I felt a compulsion to speak out. I considered the downsides. Dave was a towering figure in television and I might never work for CBS—or any network—again. It helped that I’d just signed a two-year contract at Warehouse 13, which gave me a little job security. I was reminded of a great line attributed to TV writer Tom Palmer: “I don’t have ‘fuck you’ money, but I do have ‘I don’t like your tone of voice’ money.”

  My note to my friend on the show turned out to be as effective as my declarations not to eat refined sugar. The next morning, I grabbed a glazed chocolate donut and started crunching data. The numbers would prove that the gender disparity in 2009 was not a fluke but a pattern. In twenty-seven years, Late Night/Late Show had hired only seven female writers compared to over one hundred male writers. And the men stayed longer. There were individual white male writers who had worked on the show for a decade longer than all the women’s tenures combined. I later learned that female standups were also under-represented on the show. From 2005–2010, The Late Show booked approximately ninety-six standup performances; women only appeared five times.

  Sexual favoritism is an important subject, but my article pivoted to the lack of diversity in the writers’ room. Our country boasted three female Supreme Court Justices while Letterman, Leno, and Conan couldn’t find a single woman good enough for their staffs? Burnett and other male head writers have suggested that women and people of color just don’t apply for these jobs. That’s victim-blaming. The real problem was the hiring process often relied on current (white male) writers recommending their funny (white male) friends to be future (white male) writers. And I knew from personal experience that when women did apply, they were often ignored.

  Nine months before the blackmail scandal broke, I heard Late Night was looking for monologue writers who could work remotely. Recalling Dave’s words that I was “always welcome back,” I submitted four pages of jokes. The submission got sucked into a black hole. Soon after, I sold a pilot to ABC and got busy with that. Still, the show’s silence suggested that they were happier complaining about the lack of female applicants than actually responding to them.

  I finished a draft of my article and ran it by many wise and funny friends, including Susanne Daniels, Amy Hohn, J.J. Jamieson, Kurt Andersen, Anne Kreamer, and Tim Carvell. They all offered helpful advice and encouragement. Finally, I sought approval from one more person.

  The previous summer, our eleven-year-old son had gone to a one-week camp at a local school. After the first day, Dexter came back raving about a funny camper named Jake. I pressed him to get Jake’s last name so we could make a playdate. Dexter came back two days later.

  “Jake’s last name is Brooks and his dad’s a director,” he said. “Alfred Brooks.”

  “Wait—do you mean Albert Brooks?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Oh, we made a playdate. By that October, I felt comfortable enough to share the draft with Albert and his wildly talented writer/artist wife Kimberly. I told them that I was still on the fence about speaking out publicly.

  “Oh, you have to publish this,” Kimberly said after she read the piece.

  Albert looked more pensive.

  “No one can argue with what you’ve written,” he said deliberately. �
�It’s been my experience that a fairer sampling of humanity will always produce better comedy.”

  I felt chills. “Albert, that’s perfect. Can I use that line?”

  “Sure.”

  Albert understood that shows should hire female writers not just because it’s the right or fair thing to do, but because it would make these shows funnier. And he practiced what he preached. Albert wrote Defending Your Life by himself, but other times, he teamed up with Monica Johnson. Together, they cowrote Modern Romance and Lost in America. Both these films have female characters who are flawed and funny. Julie Hagerty gambling away the nest egg is something Monica might have done herself.

  To be clear, I don’t believe only women can write women and only men can write men. The craft for any writer is getting inside a character’s head and understanding their fears, their joys, and their motivations. Emotions are universal but experiences are not. At Warehouse 13, I wrote an episode where Myka, the female lead, becomes magically pregnant. I included a beat in the outline about Myka’s sense of smell becoming acute. On the notes call, an executive questioned the detail.

  “I don’t get the smelling,” he said. “Is that like a thing?”

  “Yes,” I said. Then it struck me that of the seven people on the call, I was the only one who’d ever been pregnant.

  Different backgrounds generate different experiences. A room that shuts out half the population as well as people of color and the LGBTQ community will have less material to work with.

  I added Albert’s line and after a final pass from my invaluable editor Mike Hogan, the piece was scheduled to post. I contacted my soon-to-be boss Jack Kenny and my agent Jill Gillette to let them know that “Letterman and Me” would go live the next day. Jack and Jill were both supportive, which helped tremendously.

  The next morning, I opened my laptop. My inbox was flooded. I closed my laptop. I made breakfast for the kids and walked them to school. As soon as I returned home, the phone rang.

  “Hi. Is this Nell? I’m a producer at The Today Show. We read your article and want you to come on the show tomorrow.”

  “Um,” I said, unprepared for the call.

  “We’ll fly you to New York and you’d appear in studio with Matt Lauer himself.”

  TV morning news loves a sex scandal and even though my article didn’t offer any juicy details, it would serve to keep the story alive.

  “I need to think about that,” I said.

  My next call was to check in with Mike Hogan at Vanity Fair. There were other offers to appear on news and talks shows and we discussed how it could be good to get more exposure. Still, I worried about losing control of the narrative. Mike said I should do what made me comfortable. I called the Today producer back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m gonna pass.”

  I opened my laptop and saw that my article had been picked up by several websites. All my friends had warned me not to read the comments. I ignored them. Some commenters dismissed me as a “fame whore” and “not funny.” (Ah, the classics.) Someone else linked to an article by Rachel Sklar with the promising headline: “Nell Scovell Is My New Hero.”

  “Is Scovell as funny as any guy? Presumably, given her record,” Rachel wrote. “So this isn’t some screed borne of years of pent-up frustration—it’s measured and thoughtful and matter-of-factly assesses the situation.”

  Rachel Sklar was my new hero. Men were angry but women got it. Mostly. An east coast friend emailed that they had just discussed me on The View, and Barbara Walters had accused me of setting women back by quitting. That stung. My phone rang.

  “Nell? Hi. This is Matt Lauer. My producer tells me that you don’t want to come on the show and I was hoping to change your mind.”

  Matt was smooth and charming. He walked me through why I should accept his offer to tell my side of the story.

  “The problem,” I explained, “is that people want to hear about interns in the bedroom and I want to talk about gender in the writers’ room.”

  “We can talk about anything you want,” Matt said.

  “So, you’re okay if I don’t discuss Dave sleeping with interns?”

  “Hey, I couldn’t be held to that high a standard,” Matt said with a chuckle.

  Matt’s “joke” made me queasy. With apologies, I passed a second time.

  The only show I agreed to appear on was The Joy Behar Show since Joy had stuck up for me on The View. Before heading to the LA studio, I called Lawrence O’Donnell, who I knew through Penn Jillette, and asked for some TV interview tips.

  “Figure out the three points you want to make,” Lawrence said. “And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to make one of them.”

  Joy was smart and sympathetic. Before the cameras rolled, she mentioned that she’d been trying to get booked to do standup on Late Show for years without success. The segment sped by so quickly that I can’t remember if I made my one point or not.

  Note sent to me with flowers from Joy Behar.

  Courtesy of the author

  The afternoon that my article came out, the Vanity Fair PR department received an email from legendary New York Daily News gossip columnist George Rush. He was publishing an exclusive item the next day and looking for a comment. Rush’s scoop quoted an anonymous “longtime male Late Show staffer” who said my article had been “greeted with grumbling.” Then the brave anonymous staffer slimed me, claiming that during my tenure, I didn’t get any jokes on the air and that I quit because I was going to be fired.

  I forwarded the quote to Steve O’Donnell, the head writer from my era, and asked if he remembered it that way. He emailed me back, “I know that you got picked up at the end of that first stretch, so you obviously were satisfactory, and as I recall you had only just started that second stretch when you gave notice.”

  It struck me as ironic that after describing how I felt demeaned by the show in 1990, the show’s kneejerk response was to demean me again. In a way, their lies proved my point better than I could. I kept my response to George Rush short: “The Late Show can say anything they want about me; just hire more women.”

  When the Daily News item ran the next day, the Vanity Fair lawyer sent a letter, pointing out the claim that I’d left before I got fired was false and slanderous. That sentence was removed from the online version.

  Late Show female staffers still working in the Ed Sullivan Theater wrote me on the sly to say they hoped the piece would trigger a confidential, external investigation. It didn’t. Worldwide Pants conducted their own internal review and—surprise!—found no wrongdoing. Other employees, former and current, sent me nightmare stories of hostile treatment and I encouraged them to speak out. None felt secure enough to do so.

  “What makes me sad is that so many women in Hollywood don’t want to talk about these issues because they’re afraid of seeming like pains in the ass,” a funny female friend emailed me. “I went to a recent panel discussion for women TV writers, and someone asked the question about whether it was harder to be a woman in this business—and one of the four panelists actually said she thought it was easier. The rest soft-pedaled about whether it made a difference. It felt like Stockholm syndrome to me—an ingrained eagerness to appease/appeal to the system that keeps us down. I know that we don’t want to feel like victims, and it’s important not to dwell on the negative. And perhaps these women’s experiences have been different. But . . . really?”

  I know that instinct to gloss over the bad. A week after the article posted, I ran into a woman at a party who’d worked on the production side in the early days of Jimmy Kimmel Live!. She described at length how she dreaded going into the office.

  “No matter how I dressed, my coworkers commented on my body,” she said. “I felt sexually harassed every single day.”

  The environment stressed her out tremendously and she told me that the second she got another job offer, she took it. Suddenly, she caught herself sounding negative and pivoted hard.

  “But I’m really grat
eful for the opportunity they gave me,” she added quickly.

  Because women are so often excluded from these boys’ clubs, it’s still perceived as a favor when one is allowed in. And no matter how dreadful the conditions are, women are expected to be grateful. I think this explains why several Late Show writers reacted with so much anger toward me. Not a single male writer has disputed the validity of my criticisms. They simply believe that by pointing out the show’s flaws, I didn’t demonstrate the proper gratitude for the exceptional opportunity bestowed on me.

  The buzz over the article died down quickly. I even attended a meeting where an executive brought it up and didn’t know that I’d written it: “Who is Nell Scovell?” in action.

  The Warehouse 13 writers’ room started up in early November and that was a welcome diversion. I was happy—and grateful—to go to work each day. I was the sole woman on the writing staff that season, but what else was new?

  Most of my coworkers had read the article. Some thought it was cool, especially story editor Ian Stokes who told me he’d heard them discussing me on The Howard Stern Show.

  “Artie Lange said he’d ‘do’ you,” Ian told me, excitedly.

  As a longtime Stern listener, I felt honored.

  Other coworkers seemed a bit wary. Once, someone made a sexist comment in the room and another writer cautioned him, “Be careful or Nell will write an exposé about you.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Nineteen years from now, you are gonna be so sorry you said that.”

  There did seem to be a hint of feminism in the air that season. While trying to figure out who the big bad villain might be, David Simkins suggested a time-traveling H. G. Wells. We all oohed at his idea. Then Jack Kenny looked at me with a sparkle in his eye.

  “And what if H. G. Wells was a woman?” Jack said.

  “Yes!” I replied.