Poking a Dead Frog

by Mike Sacks

  He wasn’t hired at Letterman, but we did bring him to SNL for a year [in 1985], and then he went on to do legendary work at The Simpsons. I’m sure that he preferred the freedom of writing for animation over writing for live action. He’s a brilliant guy, although I haven’t seen him in twenty years.

  Have you ever felt constrained within the parameters of the sketch form? Have you ever had the desire to write for the big screen or, perhaps, long-form television?

  No, not really. I kept retooling myself and changing the kinds of things I did. I wrote SNL sketches and then I did Letterman for a few years, which is a totally different thing, and then I returned to SNL and was writing new types of pieces. Then Update was something different all together. More recently, I was just writing political material and it was a change because I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted. Within that, I also had the chance to write filmed pieces or live performance or whatever.

  I really am conscious of the fact that I have been very fortunate. There are certain moments when I felt that better decisions could have been made on the show, but in the big picture I feel I have been treated very well, a couple of firings aside. Because SNL is a variety show and because it’s ninety minutes long, there is always plenty of room to maneuver. I never got bored with doing the same thing or getting stuck in a rut. I could always go back and retool. Like certain bands do when they just emerge with a totally new kind of sound.

  Your attitude seems to be a rarity. It seems that most TV comedy writers constantly yearn to write for the movies. It’s almost as if they have a chip on their shoulder, that television is too small.

  Actually, I’m glad you said that because I honestly feel that TV is a better form for being funny, generally speaking, than movies. I have never really seen what it is that movies give you that makes things funnier. I think that the smallness and the immediacy of TV—where you can do something on Saturday based on an event that happened on Wednesday, and where the important elements aren’t overwhelmed by the scale and production—is great. There are limitations that TV has compared with movies—especially live TV—but I don’t think they’re the important ones in the scheme of things.

  If you look at movies many SNL performers have participated in over the years, you can’t help but wonder why there’s any appeal at all. Is it purely the money?

  I guess it’s just that for their whole lives some people think you do TV in order to get to movies, and that therefore any movie is better than every television show.

  I think it’s fair to say—as a general matter—that most of the people who have been in the cast of SNL did their best work on SNL. Or they do good movies, but it isn’t any better than what they did on the show. For example, I think Will Ferrell is brilliant, and I love him in his movies, but I don’t think he is any funnier than he was on the show. Same with Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids, or Eddie Murphy. And, of course, some people have done much worse than they did on the show.

  I think you’re always going to see more odd, original comedy on TV than you will in a movie. I love the Hangover films, but weird, eccentrically funny stuff is usually going to appear on TV or online. Tim and Eric. Portlandia. Reno 911! [Stephen Merchant’s HBO series] Hello Ladies. Brilliant.

  When have you laughed the hardest over the years at SNL?

  Um, let’s see. . . . Damon Wayan’s audition in the fall of 1985. He was doing two kids on a playground. “Your mother is so fat you have to grease her up to get her through the front door.” And the other kid’s responses keep getting more and more deadly serious: “Yeah, well, your sister had a baby when she was only eleven!” . . . Ben Stiller pitching me a sketch idea in the spring of 1989. I was laughing so hard I fell on the floor. He was improvising a character, a college kid on spring break in Florida—his name was Jordo—being interviewed on MTV, asking his parents for money. . . . Phil Hartman at a table read doing Mace, his psychotic ex-con character with a hair-trigger temper. I couldn’t breathe I was laughing so hard.

  All of those examples took place off the air.

  Funny, I never thought of that. There’s something about being right there, seeing it fresh before makeup and wardrobe. And seeing it for the first time. After that it’s only the audience that gets to see it that way.

  As for moments on the show, I’d say Dan Aykroyd doing Julia Child. Bill Murray doing Nick Rails, the entertainer on the auto train to Orlando, Florida. Eddie Murphy doing James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party. Fred Armisen’s character, Nicholas Fehn, the political comedian with no material. Maya Rudolph doing the national anthem at the World Series with every conceivable grace note and gimmick. And Will Ferrell doing his “Get off the shed!” guy.

  How about beyond Saturday Night Live?

  Probably Team America, the British Office, or The Simpsons. Sarah Silverman. The stand-up of Chris Rock. Any number of Monty Python or Phil Hendrie bits. S. Clay Wilson, a seventies comic artist known for disgusting but hilarious sex and violence. And any phone conversation with Jack Handey or Andy Breckman, who’s written for SNL and Letterman and created Monk.

  You just mentioned Phil Hendrie. Can you talk a bit about who he is?

  Phil Hendrie had a syndicated radio show [based in Los Angeles] which, in its golden age, from 2000 to 2006, was to me the most consistently brilliant and original comedy of the last generation.

  Hendrie did about forty different voice characters so beautifully performed that he could interview himself in character on radio with half the listening audience unaware that only one person was talking. The fake “guests” would be involved in outrageous situations which would get angry listeners phoning in to complain, and a brilliant three-way conversation would ensue with Phil playing the voice of reason and refereeing the fights between the callers and himself in character. The performance, the writing, and the improvised elements together made some of the best comedy I have ever heard.

  Bill Murray is a fan. The Simpsons writers are huge fans—I’m told they would stop their rewrite sessions to listen to the show. Eric Clapton is a gigantic fan. Phil Hendrie is my comedy hero.

  What advice would you give to young writers hoping to make a career out of writing sketch comedy for television?

  Comedy is a hard thing to teach, and the work aspect of it is not fair in many ways. I mean, you can spend hours and hours and focus and hard work and pain, and a piece will still not be good. There’s no equation where the result is in proportion to the effort. But it has to start with a funny take on something, one that’s special, that you’ve never seen before. I’ve known funny people who don’t write particularly well. The non-comedy parts of the writing may not be all that fresh or interesting, the grammar and vocabulary may be shaky, but all that can be handled later. That can be handled later. It’s just mechanics. What you must have is a funny sensibility. You also need confidence to communicate what it is you do that’s different from what everyone else is doing.

  And then it’s a matter of exercising the muscles, hanging out with like-minded people, being out in the world and having experiences. It’s not that you have to stand to the side and observe, but everyone notices things as they go through life and everyone has experiences. All of these will matter at some point in some way.

  I’d also say to writers that when you’re starting out it probably helps to work with other people. Choose a group where you can make a contribution while they get to know you, as opposed to doing it all by yourself and just walking in with the finished product. That’s the entrepreneur’s way. “I’ll own it, it’ll be a hundred percent me.” But because of that it may have flaws that limit its acceptance. As an approach, it’s probably better to be collaborative. Also, it’s good for your confidence, and for others’ confidence in you, because they begin to think, Oh this guy’s good.

  It can all be nerve-racking. There are few things in white-collar life where you’re more vulnerable than when you drop a ten-page script on a table and i
t’s read cold by a room full of people and the piece eats it. It’s terrifying to go through, especially when people are trying to be nice. And you always get that one guy, that one wiseass, who says, “Ooooh! That one rolled foul!” That kind of thing. I don’t want to say it toughens you up, but I respect anyone who goes through it.

  Which is why I think it’s important—and I’m going to sound like an industrial psychologist here—but I think it’s vital for a show to create a zone where writers can try different ideas out without the fear of being made fun of or even giving a shit. And that’s why, when I used to read writing submissions, I would ask a writer to give me three pieces, and make one of them something that only he thought was funny. The other two could be something everybody liked. Just make one piece something that you’ve been unable to convince anyone else is funny but that you believe in. I want writers eventually to produce work that no one has seen before and that is definitely only them.

  A good writing staff is one where you can look around the room and say, “This guy does this thing better than anyone else” and “She does that thing better than anyone else.” It’s not necessary that everyone scores the same amount of points on every outing. But at the end of the year everybody on the show has had some success, something that could not have happened without them—whether they wrote it all by themselves or just contributed. I don’t mind taking chances, and I’m less worried about a bad piece than about missing a great one.

  Writing comedy is like the high jump, where you get three tries at each height and the misses aren’t held against you, or shouldn’t be. So you’re judged by the best you’re capable of. You have to figure out how to clear that height each and every time.

  Most of the time. [Laughs]

  ULTRASPECIFIC COMEDIC KNOWLEDGE

  TERRY JONES

  Writing for Monty Python

  Can you remember the first joke you wrote?

  The first joke I can remember coming up with by myself—not necessarily writing, but creating—was when I was about four or five. My family and I were sitting around a table. My granny asked all of us, “Does anybody want more custard?” I raised my hand, but instead of giving her my plate, I handed over my table mat. She poured the custard all over the mat. Everybody turned to me and said, “You silly boy! What did you do that for?!” It taught me at a very young age that comedy is dangerous business. If you try to make people laugh and they don’t, they can become very, very angry. People do not become angry if you’re writing a tragedy and you don’t do a good job. But people get extremely angry when you create comedy that isn’t funny—or, at the least, with the comedy they don’t find funny.

  Did you always know you wanted to write?

  Yes, since about the age of seven. I was always writing poetry, which tended to be terribly gloomy. I think my family got worried at some point. I was a compulsive writer. I’ve got essays I wrote when I was very young; my granny kept them. I used to write poems and huge, long essays for that age. Just writing, all the time. There was a wonderful teacher at school, Mr. Martin, who would read out my essays to the class. I loved that. That gave me a great base. It gave me confidence. But Mr. Martin left, and it was then that I began to hear different things from teachers. I would be told, “You can’t make a living as a writer. The best you can hope for is to become a teacher.”

  Do you think there’s a connection between poetry and comedy writing?

  I think there is a great connection, actually. The [nineteenth-century poet] Robert Browning, in essence, said that you can take three separate ideas, and from those three, you produce not a fourth idea, but a star. I’ve always found that lovely. It’s a somewhat similar theory with comedy. But the difference is that with comedy you take different ideas and put them together and you produce not a star, but a laugh. There’s a magical element to it.

  Can you give me an example from Python where vastly different ideas were combined to produce a laugh?

  Mike [Palin] wrote a [1970] TV sketch called “The Spanish Inquisition.” I think that’s a very good example of taking separate ideas—twentieth-century locations and Spanish Inquisition priests—and producing a star. How did Mike go from England in 1911 to then having three torturers from the fifteenth century burst into the sitting room and announce, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition”? Where did he make that connection? And how did he make it work? In the end, you get a laugh. But when you reverse-engineer it, it’s quite hard to follow how he came up with the original spark, the original idea. And yet it still works.

  Now that I think about it, there’s another similarity between poetry and comedy: distillation. Both have to be distilled. For both poetry and comedy, the words, the concepts have to be boiled down, and the essence is what you want to say.

  It was tremendously difficult to keep up that level of quality with Python. We made it a point to end sketches when they might have just been beginning on other shows. Writing was very serious business; we took it very seriously. But it did take a lot out of us.

  Michael Palin has said that the six members of Monty Python worked together to produce a harmony that they couldn’t have produced individually. This reminded me of something I once read about the 1960s vocal group the Mamas & the Papas. Individually, they had four distinct voices, but when they sang together they produced a fifth harmony—almost another distinctive voice—which they nicknamed “Harpy.”

  That’s a good image, actually. I think that’s true. The six of us produced a harmony that was somebody else. We’d write together, and we were almost writing for this seventh voice. There was always that image of another voice that was there. It was the Python voice, really. And it couldn’t quite be duplicated with any other combination—or alone. With Python, we had a lot of different minds at work, and we worked very well together.

  I rewatched some of the early Python TV episodes from 1970, and I noticed that the crowd was very quiet for the first few episodes and only seemed to grow more and more animated as the series went on.

  For the very first show, the audience consisted of a lot of old-age pensioners who actually thought they were coming to see a real circus. They were a bit puzzled. By the end of the second and third series, two years later, we actually had to take a lot of clapping and laughter out of the shows. We had to speed up the shows. I think people got used to it by the end of the first season. There was a great doubt whether the BBC would actually commission another series [season]. We were lucky they did, actually. They hated the show—until they were told it was funny and it was good.

  That wouldn’t happen today—executives not being happy with a show, but leaving it completely alone and providing the show time to find its feet.

  With Python, the writers were completely in charge, and this was very unique. We were the only people writing for us, so we had a certain strength. We knew what we could perform. We knew what we couldn’t.

  With the BBC, we didn’t start off with any problems, but we soon faced some difficulty with the censors. We wrote a sketch [for the third series] called “The All-England Summarize Proust Competition.” It was about a beauty pageant where contestants, instead of impressing judges with singing or flute playing, would attempt to summarize the works and philosophy of Proust. And this was one of the first instances, if not the very first time, that the word “masturbation” was ever used on television. Graham [Chapman] was playing a contestant. The host of the pageant, played by me, asked Graham what his hobbies were, and he said, “Well, strangling animals, golf, and masturbation.”

  The BBC edited out “masturbation.” Keep in mind, the BBC was okay with strangling cats. But masturbation was definitely out. [Laughs] If you watch the edited sketch, there’s a lag time after Graham says “golf.” His lips move but you can’t hear him say “masturbation.” And then there’s a huge laugh from the live audience. But this is puzzling to the home viewers. It sounds like the studio audience is laughing at “strangling an
imals.” It becomes even stranger.

  Would Python overwrite? For instance, I’ve heard that the original script for The Holy Grail was much longer, and that only about 10 percent of the first draft appears in the movie.

  Yes, we’d usually write a lot of material, or at least pitch material, and then cut down. The first draft of Holy Grail was much longer. The first half took place in the present day. Arthur and the rest of the knights found that the Holy Grail was being sold at Harrods [department store, in London]. You could find anything there. But we ultimately decided to have the entire film only take place in the Middle Ages.

  For Life of Brian, we had a few scenes that were cut. One of the original ideas was for it to be the story of the thirteenth apostle who missed the last supper because his wife had invited friends over to eat back at their house. That was changed. We spent a lot of time on rewrites. Not so much for Meaning of Life, but certainly for the first two films.

  We were talking earlier about how comedy is often created by bringing disparate ideas together. You wrote a scene for The Meaning of Life that might just be one of the strangest scenes in the history of film—at least for a comedy. I’m thinking of the Mr. Creosote scene, played by you (in what I would assume, and truly hope, was heavy makeup). A gigantic man, dining in a very fancy restaurant, vomits until he explodes.

  [Laughs] Well, for that one, I just sat down and wrote a sketch in the worst possible taste. In fact, at the top of the paper it read: “Sketch in the Worst Possible Taste.” The first time I ever read that in front of the rest of Python, we had just eaten lunch. No one liked it. That was not the time to do it. It was decisively rejected. But then a month later John [Cleese] rang me up and said, “I’m going to change my mind about this.” I think he spotted that the waiter could be very funny. It was John who came up with the “wafer thin” line and to offer the mint to Mr. Creosote just before he explodes. That’s the only sketch I ever co-wrote with John.