by Mike Sacks
There’s something particularly detestable about people who are stupid and completely wrong but still have attitude. It’s funny to hear these characters spout off when you know what’s in store for them. I wrote columns by a recurring op-ed character named Amber Richardson, with headlines like “I Hope My Baby Doesn’t Come Out All Fucked-Up and Shit” and “My Baby Don’t Want No Medicine.” She was a teen mom who was always railing against her “bitch social worker.” This sixteen-year-old single mother is probably at a high point in her life, complaining about her poor social worker and ragging on her friends.
I earned a teaching degree in college. I did my student teaching at a high school in Madison for pregnant teens. It was pretty sad. A couple of the girls were smoking specifically because they had heard it would make the baby smaller—they thought it would make the labor less painful if the baby was small. One girl “stole” another girl’s baby name, Rae Rae, after giving birth first. There was a lot of material that you never would have ever thought up if you were trying to write for a teen mom. You just had to hear it.
Do you see a difference now between your sensibility and the sensibility of the current, younger writers for The Onion?
I think writers for The Onion are still mostly weirdos. And The Onion’s use of freelance writers contributes to that, too. There are people who can live in Michigan and submit jokes every week out of their parents’ basement.
I think there is a new thing that I’ve noticed where more younger people have begun to see comedy as a viable career and approach it that way. It’s not that they’re not funny and talented; they are, but they also go about it with a goal in mind. They know they have to work up their résumé and get their foot in the door at various places. This is so foreign to the way I started and how the older comedy writers I know started. They were doing comedy because they felt like they didn’t fit into the jobs they were supposed to pursue. So they did this other thing as an outlet. And then when they started to make money, it was almost surprising.
In 2013, you were hired as a writer on the TV show Community. What’s the difference between writing for Community and for The Onion?
Writing for Community is, of course, very different than writing for The Onion. The show is [comedy writer and producer] Dan Harmon’s show—he created and runs it. When you’re writing for it, you’re writing for him. At The Onion, our goal was to maintain the consistency of the “Onion voice.” Because it was this collective thing, and there was no single creator, we could argue endlessly about what was in the Onion voice and what wasn’t. The whole process was very democratic—in both good and bad ways.
The Onion voice at its best is rather cold and stiff and clinical, which I suppose is why the hive-mind system works so well. Community, on the other hand, is a very warm show, and that’s because of Dan Harmon and his love for his characters. People who don’t watch it sometimes have the misconception that Community is all genre parody and pop culture references—I myself made that mistake before I actually saw it. But the genius of Community is that even within those genre-joke episodes it never sells out its characters or abandons the emotionality of the story.
Dan Harmon, who began his career as an improv performer in Milwaukee and then began writing for TV in 1999, is notorious for breaking down the plots and storylines in a very analytical way.
Dan has a method for breaking stories, a modified version of the hero’s journey. The character leaves his zone of comfort, has a road of trials, and returns home having changed. It’s physically represented with a circle divided into four parts. We use these circles each time we’re working on a specific story. We spend all day drawing them on the dry-erase boards, marking them up, erasing them, drawing new ones. I literally see these circles in my sleep. Last night, I was dreaming about a vacation I’m about to take, and in my dream I was using Dan Harmon’s circle to figure out what I should do on the trip. This system is a great way to make sure that your stories aren’t too plotty and linear. It helps you wrestle endless options into an emotionally meaningful story. I will definitely use it whenever I write something from now on. I’m learning a lot from Dan.1
As someone who’s achieved her dream of becoming a successful professional comedy writer, do you now consider yourself a happy person?
For me, writing comedy is about being unhappy. It’s about being unhappy with the way things are, and wanting to write something that is critical of those things, but in a way that isn’t so self-serious. Or it’s about being on the outside of something a bit, feeling left out, and needing to create your own fun. Or wanting to create something that excludes other people—the people who don’t get it—in order to circle the wagons a bit around people who are like you. I think if you are happy and fit in, you have little reason to develop a sense of humor. There are always exceptions, but swimsuit models and Wall Street dudes aren’t funny. They have no reason to question the world. It’s working for them. Life is sweet, bro!
I’m not actually an unhappy person. I’m not one of those angry or depressed comedy writers. I just think I am distrustful of the world and of accepting things at face value, and I guess that’s a result of my childhood.
I think things have to be better for kids these days simply because of the Internet. I’m just talking about weird, shy kids wearing the wrong jeans, not kids who are molested by their gym teachers or have degenerative bone disorders or who are getting shot at. They’re just fucked. But these days, slightly different kids can find other people with their interests. It must help them feel like they’re not total freaks.
Then again, maybe it’s a bad thing. I think young writers feel more entitled to be published now than ever before: “I can publish on my blog. Why won’t The New Yorker publish me?”
At the very least, I think comedy can help misfits cope. It’s not for everyone, so it becomes a place for someone to fit in, either as a consumer or as a maker of comedy. Any area of interest can help someone achieve that sense of community, whether it’s astronomy or a particular style of comedy. But comedy is better because it makes you laugh and it physically works those underdeveloped nerd stomach muscles.
What advice would you have for those high school or college students wanting to develop those underdeveloped nerd muscles?
As far as specific advice for those wanting to get into comedy writing, do a bunch of stuff for free. Even if you live in some godforsaken hellhole. There are so many blogs out there and humor websites, as well as people who act or produce and need scripts. Writing for free will make you write a lot, which is the only way to become a better writer. Everyone knows that reading a book about how to write comedy is a big joke. You just have to do it.
College kids used to show me their versions of The Onion—often called something like The Scallion or The Bunion—and they’d want me to be impressed. But it was hard; I was already doing The Onion. What could I say? I mean, now The Onion is a format, but years ago, The Onion was created and developed by a bunch of college kids. The Bunion staff would be better off doing something new. So take a two-prong approach—learn how to write for other people but also, in a separate project, find an original voice.
Another thing: If you want to write comedy, I think that you shouldn’t watch too much comedy. I think you start to rely too much on other people to tell you what’s funny and ridiculous. You become needy for comment. Or else you start to feel that everything has already been done and you inadvertently close yourself off to having an honest and funny reaction to things. This might be bullshit because I do know a lot of comedy writers who are big fans of comedy and who watch a ton of it. But I also know a lot of comedy writers who tell funny stories as opposed to retelling jokes. It just gets annoying when there are five public figures everyone is making jokes about, and the jokes start to take on the same cadence.
So keep writing for free and then almost free, and then after a while, if you are good, you will rise to the top. Good writers a
re actually in demand. If you are not good, well, you will hopefully start to enjoy your day job as a web designer at an Internet company that sells moderately priced, fashion-forward men’s pants. It’s a win-win.
ULTRASPECIFIC COMEDIC KNOWLEDGE
WILL TRACY
Editor in Chief, The Onion
Choosing Headlines at The Onion
Each week, the staff of The Onion reads an average of fifteen hundred headlines that arrive on Monday morning from both regular contributors and freelancers. Now, that’s a lot of goddamn jokes. It’s really more jokes than the human brain is able to reasonably and intelligently process within the span of five days. Only a handful of jokes are truly funny and exceptional enough to break through the benumbed haze of our writers’ room and see the light of day. The rest, meanwhile, are immediately thrown onto the corpse pile and, like my high school years, never spoken of again.
I have chosen nine rejected jokes from a recent Monday headline list and specified the reason why each joke, ultimately, was not picked. The individual reasons why these jokes were not picked tend to come up over and over again. We are constantly repeating the same death sentences about how a joke is “too this” or “too that.” This is how you develop consistency as a joke writer, but this is also how—slowly but surely—you begin to lose your mind.
I have also included five jokes and why they were picked.
REJECTED HEADLINE: Next Quentin Tarantino Movie to Offer Slick, Stylish Take on Rwandan Genocide
I could see how this would be written out, and we could probably come up with some funny casting choices and an amusing description of the film’s story, as well as a realistic-looking poster. But it just feels like the obvious joke to make about Tarantino at this point. Even though it might be a popular story for us to do, it would be popular because it’s telling people, essentially, a joke they’ve already heard before.
REJECTED HEADLINE: Nation’s Environmental Experts Quietly Moving Families Inland
Here’s something that happens to us, depressingly, quite often . . . we’ve already done this joke. “Nation’s Economists Quietly Evacuating Their Families” [August 12, 2012]. Hence, we killed this immediately. We have over twenty years’ worth of these headlines, so the chances of doing a joke we haven’t done before grows a little slimmer with each passing day.
REJECTED HEADLINE: Non–Time Traveler Warns Humanity of Dystopian Present
Here is a similar, yet different problem for us: Someone else has already done this joke. It was on McSweeney’s [“It’s Difficult Convincing Time Travelers That the Present Day Is Not a Dystopia,” by David Henne, January 3, 2011]. We generally kill any joke that is similar to another comedy outlet’s joke. The most common joke-killer, by far, is The Simpsons, because they’ve already made every joke ever. Mr. Show comes up, too, and, occasionally, The Colbert Report.
REJECTED HEADLINE: Study: Majority of Americans Covered in Layer of Crumbs
This is a halfway-decent joke, and not one we’ve made before, exactly, but it’s part of a genre of jokes that we’ve just made too many of recently. Sometimes we hit a certain genre too often and need to take a break. We’ve opted to take a break from writing about overeating Americans for a bit, although, I’m sure, not for too long.
REJECTED HEADLINE: Parents Who Spend Every Waking Moment in Anguish Proud Son Is Serving His Country
This appears to be an interesting juxtaposition and comment, but ultimately, it’s not enough of an escalation of reality. It just reads as too real. Also, feeling anguish over your son serving in the armed forces overseas is not necessarily a mutually exclusive feeling from being proud that your son is serving his country. I’m sure many military parents openly hold both opinions at the same time, and feel no conflict in doing so. It feels like a toothless piece of satire.
REJECTED HEADLINE: Instagram Photo Very Unique, Sources Agree
This would be a popular story, but, like the Tarantino joke, it’s the joke that everyone is making. We look pretty stupid when we make the same basic joke that everyone else is making, because we have a reputation for doing the opposite. The Onion has a long history of snidely pointing out how everyone is making the same point. We’re jerks in that sense.
REJECTED HEADLINE: Area Man Stocking Up on Computers for Impending Cyber-War
Something about this still amuses me—I like the idea of someone physically stockpiling computers like they’re rifles or something. But it’s just too odd, and the logic doesn’t actually hold. It’s the kind of joke we talk about for a few minutes in the room until the question of “How would you actually write this?” is posed, and then we drop it and move on.
REJECTED HEADLINE: Chuck E. Cheese’s Costume Only Halfway Off Before Screaming at Eight-Year-Old Daughter
I’m not a fan of this joke. It’s just too easy, and too constructed. You can see the thought process of the writer, thinking, I’m going to take an upsetting situation (a man yelling at his daughter) and then juxtapose it with an easy, go-to example of something silly and harmless (the Chuck E. Cheese’s costume). But it has no basis in reality. It’s a situation that exists only in Comedy Writer Land.
REJECTED HEADLINE: Only Way to Prevent Gorilla Attacks Is Bigger Gorillas Everywhere, Says NRA Head
This one was not technically a reject, per se, as it led to a reworded headline using the same concept. The gun control joke was, I felt, too convoluted and too jokey. It seemed to parallel the real-life headlines I was seeing. The writers’ and editors’ room batted around a few rewordings and came up with “Gorilla Sales Skyrocket after Latest Gorilla Attack” [January 10, 2013], which just reads cleaner and sharper. A lot of headlines are submitted to a similar brand of torture.
And now for five jokes and why they were chosen as headlines:
Ten-Year-Old Wishes Unemployed Father Couldn’t Make It to Just One of His Little League Games
It’s a switch I haven’t seen before. There is something really elegant and satisfying about a headline that looks almost exactly like its real-world antecedent, the only difference being the addition or subtraction of a few key letters here and there, and suddenly the meaning becomes completely different. And yet, there is still a logic in place that completely holds. We all know the cliché of the busy, careerist father who can’t make it to his son’s Little League game, but anyone who has ever played Little League is just as familiar with the somewhat pathetic, embarrassing father who is way, way too into the game because he may not have much else in his life at that point. To me, that’s a perfectly clean switch.
Film Character Moves into Beautiful Brooklyn Brownstone after Getting Dream Publishing Job
This is sort of a mini-genre within The Onion, wherein we report on a movie or television reality in our dry editorial voice as though it were actual reality. The subtext generally being that the reality presented in movies and television is just utter, lying horseshit. Most of our writers are thoroughly—perhaps unhealthily—pop culture literate, so it is generally fairly easy for us to get into this world, inhabit it, and, in so doing, expose exactly what is manipulative and false about these narratives we are fed over and over again. Also, there is always a slight warmth to these pieces, because I think a lot of our writers have an inherent nerdish fondness for bad, junky movies.
Report: Chinese Third Graders Falling Behind U.S. High School Students in Science, Math
I was unsure about this one at first because, while it’s a cleverly worded joke, I wasn’t sure the story itself would have legs. I also worried the joke might be more “clever” than funny. Ultimately, though, I think it’s good for an issue of The Onion, or a week’s worth of content, to have a certain ratio of smart to silly, and this is just a solid satirical joke. It is all couched in this very official “report” language, as though this were an alarming, surprising trend. It looks just like a news headline, which helps, and it calls up so much unspoken subtext for the reader to think about: the s
tate of the U.S. education system, the rise of China, the economic realities that await both countries. And yet you don’t have to come out and say any of that; it’s all perfectly implied by the perspective of the joke.
Torrent of Soap Issues from Wildly Unexpected Part of Dispenser
This is another entry in the cherished Onion subgenre of Small Made Big, in which we take the must prosaic, insignificant, ordinary event that could ever occur and report on it as though it were huge, breaking, front-page news. “Rubber Band Needed” is another entry in this genre. I like this one in particular because the language in the headline is so heightened, so dramatic. And I immediately smile when I see a headline like this—something so incredibly minor—and then see that there are fucking eight hundred words of text beneath it. Overkill like that makes me laugh.
Robert Mapplethorpe Children’s Museum Celebrates Grand Opening
Sometimes just the thought of what the finished Photoshopped graphic will look like is enough to sell me.
PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE
GABE DELAHAYE
Writer, This American Life, Funny or Die, McSweeney’s, Gawker, Huffington Post, ESPN, CNN; Founding Editor, Videogum
When it comes to advice about humor writing, or really any type of writing, two things seem to stick out. The first is that you should really be looking for better advice. Humor writing? Give me a break! How about advice that might actually lead to the earning of actual money? Or even advice on which specific advice classes to take? That might prove more fruitful. The second thing that sticks out is something I was once told, which I am paraphrasing here: “You aren’t good at writing, but if you can get over that, then one day maybe you will be okay at writing.” I think that’s really solid advice. If you’re reading this right now, you might not be a great writer—in fact, you probably aren’t. No offense! But if you accept that, then maybe you can start working your way toward the holy grail of writing: not being a terrible writer. But this takes time! You know who starts out great? High school football captains. And you know what they do now? They sell insulated hot tub liners to pay for their alimony. So relax.