by Mike Sacks
It didn’t take long to meet, and then work with, Del Close.
How did that come about?
I got into Del’s improv class and then started an improv group with a few other players. We had a pretty unique style to our group, so other players were attracted to it. It just kept getting more and more interesting. Del began to pay attention to our group, and he sort of adopted us. We invented all these improv forms, including something called “deconstruction.”
With deconstruction we would take long scenes and then just break each of these scenes apart: thematically, narratively, symbolically, psychologically. We’d shatter the scenes and then put the pieces back together in different forms. We could revisit the beginning, jump to the end, reimagine each of the characters—anything, really.
We’d also do other types of improv, like “improvised movies.” We’d improvise an entire movie in a three-act show. We’d do something called “The Dream.” An audience member would tell us what happened to them that day, and we would show them the dream they were going to have that night. In its rawest form, it was a montage of their day. But when done well, we could bend the images and combine them and make it dreamlike. But it was also showing the audience the process: “Look, here are all the cards. We’re not putting any of them up our sleeves. Here they are.” And then we’d start working off what was given to us.
Is it true that in the mid-nineties, while you were in the Chicago improv scene, you publicly improvised your own suicide?
Yes, that happened. I had an actor’s photo, a horrible eight-by-ten glossy, that I inserted into a poster. And the poster read: “On such-and-such-a-date, Adam McKay, 26, will kill himself. This is not a joke.” I put up the poster everywhere, and on the assigned location and date, there was a huge turnout. I went to the roof of a five-story building and yelled down to the crowd. We had a CPR dummy dressed exactly as I was dressed, and we threw it off the roof. Someone else was playing the character of the Grim Reaper, and he collected the dummy and hauled it away. Meanwhile, I ran downstairs and “came to life,” and we all ended up back in the theater where we finished the show.
Good luck not getting arrested in New York with that stunt.
It was the type of thing you could only get away with in Chicago. [Laughs] Anywhere else, I’d have immediately been hauled away. But it was also the perfect time. Nowadays with the Internet, people would just go, “Oh, it’s performance art” or “It’s a flash mob” or whatever. But it wasn’t commonplace back then. There weren’t as many hidden-camera shows. Nowadays, this stuff is so common, you can’t truly surprise people.
There was just this freedom. There was just a freedom to try to get away with whatever you felt you could get away with. Del Close encouraged that.
So Del would actually encourage improv that took place on the streets, in front of unsuspecting people?
Oh, my God, he loved it! You know, when I faked my own suicide, Del was on the street literally screaming, “Jump! Jump!” He had always thought our improv group was pretty good, but once we started doing these kind of stunts—we once even staged a fake street revolution, with audience members hitting the streets with lit torches and fake guns—an extra fondness came in. That’s when Del really started knowing our names and caring about what we were doing.
Do you think you ever went too far with these stunts?
I might have done things differently if I could do them over again. There was one time when Scott Adsit [the actor who later played Pete Hornberger on 30 Rock] and I and the rest of our group were performing in front of an audience. This was when Bill Clinton was president. Scott came out and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have some terrible news. President Clinton has just been assassinated.” Scott’s a really good actor and he played it very real. The whole crowd completely believed it. We then wheeled out a television to watch the most up-to-date news coverage. We turned it on and the audience saw NFL bloopers—we had already inserted a VHS tape. One of us yelled, “Wait, don’t change it!” The whole cast came out and hunkered down and just started laughing at these football bloopers. The people in the audience slowly began to file out, dazed. That was the end of our show.
And you know, that’s the kind of thing you do when you’re twenty-five or twenty-six. Now that I’m a forty-four-year-old, I think, You can’t do that. What happens if someone starts sobbing? What happens if. . . . There are too many what ifs. But at twenty-six, you’re not quite that compassionate. I’ll now bump into members of the improv group and say, “Can you believe we did that?” But that was part of the process. We were pushing things as far as they could go. And the only reason I accept it now is that there was real satire there: entertainment and silly pop culture trumping real information. But we probably should have popped it. There probably should have been some reveal at the end. Something to clue the audience in to the fact that what they had just seen was staged.
What did you take away from Del’s improv teaching that you later applied to writing and directing?
He had two key tenants: one was to always go to your third thought. Sounds really simple, but when you’re onstage, your first thought is knee-jerk. Your second thought is usually okay, but not great. Del would make you stay in a scene until you found your third thought, which was a little above and beyond what most other teachers would suggest. Basically, he wanted your third thought for your character choice, your third thought for your premise or your scene, your third thought for your heightened move.
Also, Del would make you do slow improv, and it was actually torturous. I don’t know if you know the book Thinking, Fast and Slow [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011]. It relates a lot to comedy, and just the creative process. The author, Daniel Kahneman, is a psychologist who won the [2002] Nobel Prize [in Economics]. His specialty is the psychology of decision making. The book is all about how we think: fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is what we do every day. It’s intuitive; it’s quick. Slow thinking is when you stop, shut out everything, really look into the foundations of the decisions you’re making, and then make changes. It’s extremely painful and uncomfortable. Kahneman performed all of these tests on slow thinking and found that the heart rate goes up; people begin to sweat. Especially in our fast-moving society, people hate it. But it’s the key to everything. The people who are more comfortable in slow thinking are more successful, have higher IQs, earn more money. They’re the innovators.
It was exactly what Del Close was doing. He was basically forcing us into slow thinking. Because of that, a lot of students were dropping out of Del’s classes. There were many people who didn’t enjoy working with him. There would be these other improv teachers who would create a sense of, “Everything’s cool, everything’s free and fun.” People would go to those classes, and those people never got any better. The ones who hung with Del, you could see tangible changes. He was not there to make you feel comfortable or put a big smile on your face or stroke your esteem. He wanted you to change the way you were thinking, and he wanted to help you achieve that change.
Another lesson was to always play to the top of your intelligence. If you treat the audience like poets and geniuses, that’s what they will become. Del never—ever—believed in playing down to the audience, in making cheap jokes. His feeling was, If you’re going to make a stupid joke, make it brilliantly stupid. Our group started doing it, and we were like, “Holy shit, this actually works!” Audiences are way smarter than people give them credit for. Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t do silly stuff. But when you play a kid, don’t play a dumb kid. When you play someone drunk, don’t play them overtly drunk. If you’re drunk, play the character as if he’s not acting overtly drunk.
Just very, very honest comedy. Improv is all about taking chances. You’re going to fail at first, maybe even fail the first few times. But you don’t have to be Oscar Wilde on every take. You can also be Frank Stallone on certain takes.
Let’s talk about
the films you’ve made. The characters you and Will have created for your movies—from Ron Burgundy in Anchorman to Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights to Brennan Huff in Step Brothers—are filled with a tremendous self-confidence and bravado, most of it unearned. It’s a type of bravado that seems different from the type seen in comedies from the seventies and eighties, in movies like Slap Shot, Risky Business, Stripes, and Ghostbusters, in which the characters actually accomplished something.
Well, I think America has changed so radically from the mid-seventies. I mean, to me, the mid-seventies was a kind of peak in America. It seemed that everything was working well. We withdrew from Vietnam, poverty was at an all-time low, people were properly suspicious of power in the right ways—as opposed to in manipulative ways. Now Americans think their country is number one despite all the numbers that prove to the contrary, and this fascinates me. I just think we let go of the reins in the last twenty, twenty-five years. It’s a ridiculous, foolish confidence that America seems to have, for the most part.
Whereas back in the seventies and eighties, you saw this sort of mocking confidence, like in Stripes. You saw characters who had their asses kicked by higher, corrupt powers. You saw a lot of cynicism toward power and old establishment. You had Caddyshack making fun of country clubs and how ridiculous all that status was. You had Animal House mocking old blue-blood college institutions.
Nowadays, I think it’s just a totally different game. There are different forces at work. The character of Ricky Bobby and the characters from Step Brothers are all idiots, and yet they have total confidence as they rule their domain. They have no skills, none whatsoever, yet they’re completely entitled. Will and I are endlessly fascinated by this cockiness; it’s all just completely unearned. It’s not connected to any reality whatsoever. It’s free-floating. They’re not getting anywhere. They’re stuck and impotent. I find this to be one of the most fascinating things about America right now.
So the characters in Step Brothers are cocky and entitled, but, at the same time, they don’t have the least amount of power, beyond what takes place in their basement?
Exactly. That’s what I mean. Two guys who have no life skills, no actual power, but who walk around completely entitled as if they have all the power. And that’s so much of the American character right now. I remember once having an argument with a guy who was telling me that America has the best health-care system in the world. I said, “Well, based on what metric? Why are you saying that?” And he said, “Because we do.” So I threw numbers out at him: life expectancy, infant mortality, time allowed in the hospital. America is ranked twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh in all those categories. And he said, “Yeah, but that doesn’t matter because America’s special, so we don’t apply to those numbers.” And I asked, “But how can you say we’re number one?” And he said, “Are you saying I’m stupid?” That kind of conversation just says everything to me. “We’re number one, and I don’t care what anyone else says, or what reality says. We’re number one!” And that’s America in the last thirty years, really.
Does that tie into the Refusal-to-Grow-Up syndrome that a lot of your characters suffer from? Their insistence on remaining stunted? To continue to perform bong hits in their parents’ house long past the age of thirty?
Totally. You never leave the bubble of your assumptions. You never think, Oh, shit, it’s a much bigger world than I thought. Oh, I’m wrong! And, Wow, that’s a whole new perspective! You just stay in the bubble of your own creation—or advertising’s creation, or the media’s creation. You just never leave it, and the more you’re in it, the more you become invested in defending it, and the more cocky you become about it all, and the more you roll your eyes over anything that’s to the contrary. That to me is the spiritual force that is behind the American decline. That’s exactly what’s been happening in the last thirty years. When you stop looking at reality, and you just start walking around like you’re the best, you don’t evolve. You’re stuck in amber. You don’t find roads for improvement. It’s death, basically.
But it seems that one of the major reasons why your characters are so beloved is because they’re stuck and are still doing bong hits in their parents’ basements. Are the audience members picking up on the satire, many of whom might still be watching and doing bong hits in their parents’ basements?
It’s an interesting question. Maybe there is an artful way to be more overt while also keeping the comedy alive. I don’t know. It’s a tricky next step. Rather than just presenting the problem and laughing at it, we could somehow share how to go about fixing it. I don’t know.
I think if you create the characters who confront the CEOs, you’re writing [the 2007 George Clooney film] Michael Clayton. There’s something a little old-fashioned about that, a character going after the big corporations. It feels like those movies from the seventies, like [1974’s] The Parallax View and [1975’s] Three Days of the Condor and [1976’s] All the President’s Men. It no longer feels realistic. It’s not where America is right now. To me, it’s more . . . I don’t know. Everyone attacks this from a different angle. To Will and me, it becomes very, very funny when characters deny that the ship’s sinking, even as the water’s rising past their knees. Other people can write about characters confronting CEOs. We did do that a little bit in The Other Guys. That was in there. That was the first time we ever did anything like that. We did have the characters go into the belly of the corporate world in a way. But what we found was that our comedy swamped the story line a little bit. We thought it was really obvious, but when people saw that movie, they didn’t really pick up on what we were doing.
What do you think they missed?
I remember people were blindsided by what we were saying. I was like, “Did you see the movie? The villain is from The Center for American Capitalism. The whole movie is about how chasing small-time drug crimes is meaningless. The real crimes, like the Bernie Madoff situation, are always taking place behind the scenes.” That was the whole premise for the movie. And I was amazed when no one picked up on it. To me it was glaring.
Will Ferrell’s character in The Other Guys is interesting. As opposed to the rest of the characters in the film, he did, in fact, have the guts to take on those in power. He was a bit strange, a bit of a nerd, and yet he was in no way meek.
When I was a freshman in college, my mom and her husband got this dog, a pure-breed Border collie. He was really inbred, so specific, so smart—but he was a little crazy. He would chase little movements around on the lawn, digging bizarre little holes. His hearing was incredible. He’d hear things that no other dogs, or people, could hear. The Ferrell character in The Other Guys is like that. He almost had an Asperger’s quality to him. I remember learning about this financial analyst [Harry Markopolos] who uncovered, years before anyone else—way back in 2000—the Bernie Madoff crimes. He knew what Madoff was doing was a Ponzi scheme. He went to the SEC and even The Wall Street Journal. Neither did a thing. Meanwhile, Madoff was making comments about this guy, really dismissive comments: “This guy is a joke. Everyone on Wall Street laughs at that guy.” Well, guess what? The guy was right, and he had the guts to stand before everyone and say as much.
When you put that type of heroism on the right rail, it’s unstoppable. When it’s on the wrong rail, it doesn’t make sense. I thought, at the time, maybe we should start listening to these guys who aren’t the best dressed in the room, who aren’t the most charismatic. Maybe we should start focusing on the right answers as opposed to those people who have the best haircuts. And that’s how Will’s character in The Other Guys came about.
The actor John C. Reilly, who was in Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, has said in interviews that the most subversive people he knows in Hollywood are solely focused on creating comedy. Do you agree with that?
I do. To me one of the most heroic acts of the last fifteen years was Stephen Colbert doing his character right in front of George W. Bush at the 2006 White Hous
e Correspondents’ Dinner. I mean, it was really amazing. I think in ten years you’re going to see a movie about that. That was incredible. At a time when our press just had their tails between their legs, this guy stood up and called out the inanity and insanity, the criminality of what was going on. It was amazing.
There are so many great, bold comedies. Look at the [2006, Mike Judge–directed] movie Idiocracy. It’s about a future where everyone is an idiot. If we were living in slightly hipper times that would have been our Dr. Strangelove. Brilliant movie. Just a buck knife down the middle of the tree. Mike Judge went after specific targets, like Starbucks. But it was kind of overlooked, which happens. In the future, according to the movie, Starbucks will be giving out hand jobs. So brave. Maybe audiences just didn’t get the satire, but it is brilliant.
Do you think comedy is more effective for change than drama?
I think what’s great about comedy is that it’s like pornography and horror. In the sense that if you’re not feeling the tingle that’s promised by the genre you know it’s bullshit. There’s no greater truth detector than comedy. You can tell when someone is full of shit immediately. Also, comedy tends to travel. If someone laughs at something, they’ll laugh at it in South Carolina and they’ll laugh about it on the Upper East Side of New York. So I think what’s great about horror and comedy is that both travel. If someone’s funny, anyone can see it. I’ve found that just as many Republicans love Anchorman as left wingers. In fact, maybe even slightly more.
I remember [former United States Army] General McChrystal saying Talladega Nights was his favorite movie. It’s bizarre. Huge right wingers just love that movie even though the film was inspired by George W. Bush. It just travels really well. That’s what’s exciting about it, actually. In these crazy times when the truth is sort of hazed out, a movie like that always tends to work really well.