by Mike Sacks
Anyway, in the People review, the critic was talking about the [October 1984] “Synchronized Swimming” bit with Chris Guest, Harry Shearer, and Marty Short. It was about two guys training for the Olympics as male synchronized swimmers. And Chris did this brilliant turn as a not-very-funny, inarticulate gay choreographer: “I’ve been directing regional theater . . . and if I ever do that again, I’m just going to kill myself with a Veg-O-Matic.” So the People review says, “How bad is the new SNL? They do Veg-O-Matic jokes.” Which, of course, misses the entire point of the reference. The lame Veg-O-Matic reference was a character joke, you fucking moron.
It seems that the sensibility of many TV critics rarely matches those found in professional humor writers. There seems to be a disconnect.
Well, I think most of them have terrible senses of humor. Tom Feran, a guy I knew in college, was the critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and had a great sense of humor. He always championed smart, funny stuff and always tried to get it noticed. He wasn’t mean, but he wasn’t the kind of easy mark for fake “genius” that gets pushed on you all the time. Most critics, though, have no sense of humor. And all of the mean ones have crates filled with humor pieces rejected by The New Yorker.
There also sometimes seems to be a disconnect between the censors for SNL and the writers. Over the years, have there been many instances in which you’ve written sketches that you’ve loved but were ultimately not allowed to air?
I can think of two: One was a commercial parody written by me, Jack Handey, Al Franken, Robert Smigel, and probably some others. It was one of the few times all of us have worked on the same piece, one that was gang-written. It was for a car called the DWI, the only car built expressly for driving drunk. We wanted to get James Earl Jones to do the voice-over: “It. Is. A. Drunk. Driving. Machine.” One of the jokes was that the car keys would be gigantic. I don’t remember the rest. But I do remember the network saying “Absolutely not!” And I honestly did not understand. There was nothing dirty in this piece. This was not making light of drunk driving. It was making fun of people who drive drunk. It was holding them up to ridicule; it was fighting the good fight as far as that goes. But their attitude was, Nope, we don’t want any letters along the lines of “I wish I could laugh, but, you see, I lost my fifteen-year-old daughter to a drunk driver.” So it’s that defensive thing.
The other piece [in 1990] was called “Pussywhipped.” Jan Hooks was playing the host of a talk show and there were a few male guests, one of whom was Tom Hanks, and they had to keep excusing themselves to go call their girlfriends. The piece did run, but the censors absolutely would not let us use the title “Pussywhipped.” And I kept saying, “C’mon, it doesn’t mean vagina. It means female-dominated.” But that’s where the NBC standards lady says, “Well, as a woman . . .” Which was her way of reminding me that her sense of humor had been removed at birth.
And so I lost that one, and we called it “P-Whipped” or something. I always hate it when you have to do a lame euphemism that no normal person would ever use.
Overall, though, I never really chafed under the restrictions, even when sometimes they got really crazy. One of the points I pride myself on is that I avoid anything I feel is a cheap laugh based on shock or just being dirty. You can always get a laugh, but you don’t want it to come at the price of your dignity.
You wrote a sketch for an October 1990 SNL episode that’s often listed as an all-time favorite from fans: a very fit Patrick Swayze and a very unfit Chris Farley compete with each other for the last spot on the Chippendales male exotic dance team. But as much as fans love it, there have been some comedy writers who have taken offense to the sketch, thinking that it was demeaning to Farley’s true character.
Well, I don’t think they understood what I thought was funny about it, and what the audience liked about it. I think they read it as just making fun of the fat guy dancing. But, to me, what was crucial was that Farley wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. To me, it was all about the reactions from the judges. The whole point was that not only did they make Chris audition in the first place, but then the judges took the time to patiently explain, at great length, why they were going to choose Swayze over him.
Does it upset you when other comedy writers are critical of your pieces?
No, not really. We disagree sometimes. I know there was another piece I wrote with Jack Handey that a few writers hated; it was the one [that aired in October 1989] about Dracula, played by James Woods. It was the one piece we ever did on the show that dealt, however indirectly, with AIDS. Dracula would engage his female victims in conversation, subtly sounding them out about their sexual histories before he sucked their blood. If I remember the specific objection, it was the kind of instance when writers don’t like an idea because they can imagine a hack version of that idea. I suppose you can conjure up a vision of a bad comic out there doing “Hey, how about Dracula! What with AIDS, he’s probably asking to get a blood test! Am I right?!” But that’s not what this piece was. You can turn any idea into a hack version of itself, but sometimes comedy writers just go crazy with overthinking these things.
Sometimes the audience just wants to laugh.
They do, that’s right. But sometimes writers overlook this. Not performers, though. If the audience is laughing, they’re happy.
Do writers and performers on SNL tend to write different styles of sketches?
I think so. Writers tend to write ordinary people in weird situations. Performers tend to write weird people in ordinary situations. That’s a broad generalization, but it’s fairly true.
With a performer-written sketch, often the criticism that will come from a writer is that the situation is something the audience has seen a million times. And it often bothers the pure writer that audiences don’t seem to mind. As writers, we get so frustrated: “Why don’t those people—that is, the audience—object?” Writers are much more interested, and maybe even obsessed, with originality. We sometimes treat comedy as a science, where advances are made, and we must always move forward, never backward. So that once something has been done, it should perhaps be built upon, but never, ever repeated. For performers, the fact that something has been done before is, I think, neither here nor there. For writers, it’s a real problem, and sometimes we can tie ourselves up in knots worrying, “Is this too similar to that other thing?”
As for me, I wish originality were prized more highly by audiences than it is, but I have to say it doesn’t seem to be that important to them. I think we need to be ahead of our audiences, but not so much that we lose them. Figuring out the right balance is everything.
I suppose it can always be taken too far in the other extreme: the repetition of characters to the point of overkill.
Writers tend to be very resistant to repeating characters. We always feel that it’s somehow unethical, that it’s cheating. “I did that piece already. What? I’m going to do the second version of the same piece?” Generally speaking, you do the best jokes the first time around. Now, it’s true that over the course of the following three months, you’ll think of jokes that if you’d thought of them at the time you would have put in the first version—but there’s usually only one or two of those. From a writer’s standpoint, not enough of a reason to do it again.
I haven’t written a lot of those recurring pieces in my career. Most of what I do is topical one-off things. I have written tons of presidential addresses, but they never involved the same comedy premise—at least, I hope some of them didn’t.
One idea I did write a few times was The Chris Farley Show. That was basically putting Chris Farley, the real Chris Farley, on stage in a structured way. I did it the first time when Jeff Daniels was guest host [in 1991], and Lorne kept asking for another one. But it seemed to me such a one-off thing. Lorne finally said, “Well, if you won’t do it, I’ll ask someone else.” And I said, “No, I want to at least control it.” So we did it two more times, once with Marti
n Scorsese and again with Paul McCartney, in 1993.
I must say, none of this seems to bother performers at all. They’ll tend to go and go and go with essentially the same sketch until someone makes them stop. We’ve all seen repeat pieces on the show that are basically the same sketch spray painted a different color, but with the same dynamic, same jokes.
As a writer, I would love to say it’s all about the writing. But like the way good pitching beats good hitting, good performing can lift a mediocre premise, and bad performing can sink the best-written piece.
Lorne Michaels has called you the best political humorist alive. In 2000, you coined the George W. Bush–ism “strategery,” which many people mistakenly came to believe was actually uttered by the president himself. But there’s been some criticism over the years that you lean more right than left. I think it goes without saying, of course, that this criticism tends to come from those on the left.
In the political sketches I write, I think I just go where the comedy takes me. I honestly never want a political agenda to be the leading edge of the piece. I want the piece to be funny, but only because it’s based on an observation that I think is fair to make and that no one else is making. I don’t think anyone could ever accuse me of going for clapter. And what’s sometimes even better than the laughter is making audiences laugh when they don’t particularly want to, or when they’re not sure that they should.
Can you give me a specific example?
Well, in 2007, I did a couple of debate pieces with Hillary Clinton and Obama that were generally perceived as being pro-Hillary. Our audience, meanwhile, was probably 95 percent pro-Obama.
One fellow SNL writer, who shall go unnamed, criticized you for that particular sketch. He thought that you were promoting Hillary over Obama.
To me, what was funny about that situation was that, for years, Hillary had been very much the official candidate of the media, even right up to the announcement of her candidacy. She was like the wife who put them through dental school, and suddenly they dumped her for the hot, young hygienist, Obama, the trophy wife. And the change in the media was so quick and so extreme. To me, what was funny was Hillary thinking, “What the fuck? Two months ago everyone loved me!” It was like the media was doing to Obama what Monica Lewinsky had done to Bill Clinton. And now Hillary was in the same spot all over again. When I write these sketches, I want them to be fresh in comedy terms but also something that resonates: “That’s true, that’s true.” As opposed to something I know damn well reflects the viewpoint of 90 percent of the audience but what would feel to me like cheating or ass kissing: “Well, about time someone took on Big Oil!”
I like to think that unless you’re making an observation, and that observation is true—and I hope fresh—it’s not worth writing a piece. I’m not saying that I always have a particularly original observation to make, which is why if I had my druthers, I’d write fewer political pieces. For me, this is more about the characters in politics than politics itself. It’s about the human aspect of these people we don’t usually get to see; the way a person would react in these situations if they were in any field but politics.
Can you give me some examples of sketches, political or otherwise, you’ve written over the years that you thought would kill with an audience but ended up bombing?
There was one [1985] piece I wrote with Jack [Handey] that absolutely destroyed at the table and then just played to exquisite silence from the audience. It was called “The Life of Vlad the Impaler.” And it was [fifteenth-century ruler] Vlad the Impaler’s wife, Madonna, gently trying to explain to Vlad why he was so unpopular with his subjects. This came as a terrible shock to him, and he was really stunned and hurt. He couldn’t understand why. And her theory was, “I really think it’s the impalings.” “What?!” “Yeah, they really hate them.” “Are you sure?” “You know, Vlad, they try to tell you. You don’t listen.”
God, it bombed. Absolute silence. We figured, Well, maybe they don’t know the story of Vlad the Impaler. [Laughs] Maybe they don’t know what impaling means. Anyway, Larry David called to say how much he liked the piece, which was enough for me.
Here’s another one: It was when Bob Newhart hosted in May 1980 and he loved the piece, which was also enough for me. The sketch began with one of those Civil War scenes you’ve seen a million times. I saw it as recently as Black Hawk Down. Officers are walking through the wounded tent, and there’s a boy soldier dying. “You’re going to be okay, son. You’ll be back with your regiment in no time.” “You don’t have to lie to me, Major. I’m gut shot. I know I’m a goner. But I want to ask you one thing. Will you write my mother and tell her that I did my duty, that I was a good soldier?”
Everyone’s tearing up. The music is somber, and the officer, played by Newhart, says, “I’ll do that, son. Don’t you worry.” And then the kid dies and you dissolve to a series of Civil War–era photographs and music, with the graphic “Three Weeks Later.” When we come back, we’re in Newhart’s tent, which he shares with Bill Murray, a fellow officer. And Murray asks, “Hey, did you ever write that kid’s mother?” And Newhart sheepishly says, “Not yet, but I’m going to.” “Geez, it’s been like a month!” “I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it!” And the rest of the piece was more dissolves to “Three Weeks Later,” “Six Weeks Later,” and so on, and Newhart still hadn’t written the letter. By now, Bob is suffering from writer’s block. “See the problem is, I’ve waited so long that now I can’t just write ‘Your son was a great soldier. He died a hero.’ It’s got to be better than that.” He was trying to come up with good ideas. It was like someone putting off a term paper.
I think the opening of the sketch with someone dying, particularly a young person, chilled the audience from the start.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that when SNL airs sketches with graphics—particularly graphics that express the passage of time, such as “Three Weeks Later,” “One Day Later,” whatever it may be—these sketches tend to confuse the audience. At least, the audience in the studio.
It does take the audience out of the sketch. The only way the studio audience for the Civil War piece could know about the passage of time would be to see the graphics on the monitors. But there was nothing about that piece that suggested to the audience they had to watch the monitors and not the stage. There were no special effects, so most watched the live action.
Do you think the home audience responded differently to that sketch?
I think the home audience would have liked that piece a lot more. But I still think the biggest factor was that the audience felt, Ooooh, a sixteen-year-old kid died.
Is it true that you discovered the legendary and reclusive comedy writer John Swartzwelder, who later wrote more episodes of The Simpsons—fifty-nine—than anyone else? He’s the Thomas Pynchon of the comedy world. I think there are only a few known photographs of him.
I was head writer for Letterman at the time [1983], and we would read unsolicited joke submissions. [Producer] Merrill Markoe showed me this small postcard and it was from Swartzwelder. It had just a single joke on it. It went something like: “Mike Flynn’s much-publicized attempt to break every record in the Guinness Book of Records got off to a rocky start this week when his recording of ‘White Christmas’ sold only five copies.”
I just loved the shape of that joke. I became obsessed with it. John had signed the card but had left no address. Nothing, just his name and a Chicago postmark. So I began a desperate attempt to track him down. He wasn’t in the Chicago directory, and this was way before the Internet. So I went to the New York Public Library and looked up big-city phone books for Swartzwelders, figuring that there couldn’t be that many. I found his mother’s number in Seattle. She said, “Yes, that’s my son, John. He’s at an ad agency in Chicago.”
I got in touch with John and set up a meeting with him and Letterman, and it was one of the most spectacularly awful interviews in history.
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What happened?
Swartzwelder shows up just as we finished taping for the day. Chris Elliott says to me, “Hey, this guy is here to see you.” I went to say hi to John—I had never seen him before—and he’s a really imposing figure, about six foot eight, standing there in a navy peacoat, like Randy Quaid in The Last Detail. At the time he looked like a combination mountain man/biker/Edmund Kemper [1960s and ’70s necrophiliac serial killer]. He had a droopy mustache and long, greasy hair, and he was just a real presence. He was carrying a little 1930s-style hip flask. And he asks, “Is there a kitchen here?” “Yeah, down the hall. I gotta run and do something, but I’ll be right back.” I took longer than I thought, and when I come back Swartzwelder is gone. Chris tells me, “I think he’s in with Dave.” “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No, I needed to talk to him first!” Dave is a wonderful guy, but he’s a very private person, and it’s important that people be warned not to come on too strong when meeting him.
So I ask Chris, “How long has he been in there?” “I don’t know, about five minutes.” I run back to Dave’s office and Swartzwelder is sitting there, making himself completely at home. I want to say he had his feet up on Dave’s desk, but I’m not sure. I am sure, however, that he was both smoking and drinking, a move not recommended in the Dress for Success guidebooks. Meanwhile, Dave is sitting there stiffly, like an orderly at a mental institution trapped alone with a patient. Swartzwelder is holding forth, as I recall, about his views on television, which amounted to everything on television was shit—including, I think, much of what we had done on our show. Dave looks over at me and his eyes tell me “no way.”