Poking a Dead Frog

by Mike Sacks

  So to finish a story just means that you can get through the whole thing with the needle up in the Positive—and then, at the very last minute, you are trying to put in something that will make the needle go all the way over. By that time, the theory goes, you will be so deep inside your story that your subconscious will be driving the car, so to speak. But there’s no general principle—each story has its own “epistemology of ending.” It’s maybe like a long car trip with a close friend. You cover so much ground, things get rough, you talk them out, all of that—and then it’s time to say good-bye. How do you say good-bye? Well, there’s no one answer. Depends on that particular friend and trip but, by then, being so deep inside the trip, you’d know how.

  One thing I always do is try to read the story all the way through, remembering that a first-time reader is not reading individual lines but is inside the story. By reading, we enter into this odd mind-state where each sentence is a microadjustment of both our imaginative reality—what’s happening in the story—and what we might call our “sonic reality”—the cumulative effects of all those sentences and the internal dynamics and all of that. It’s so wonderfully complicated, the act of reading. But I understand it as a very visceral thing, just reading along as if for the first time, and what you’re doing is noticing whether you’re still charmed. Is the spell still in effect? If not, where did things go wrong?

  And when you think of it, it’s an incredibly hopeful process—this idea that I, over here, in my place and time and mental state, can actively communicate with someone over there, in some other time, and some other mental state—that I can reach across time and space and circumstance and ring your bell. That argues for a sort of commonality of spirit that I find very thrilling.

  ULTRASPECIFIC COMEDIC KNOWLEDGE

  BYRD LEAVELL

  Literary Agent, Waxman Leavell Literary Agency

  Finding a Literary Agent for Your Humor Book

  Can I just be brutally honest here? Agents never want to admit that they don’t do a great job handling the submissions they receive but, well, they don’t—or, at least, I don’t. I was at a party twelve years ago, which would have put me at all of twenty-two years old, and a book editor I respected tremendously, George Gibson, told me something I never forgot. He said, “Go find your clients. Don’t count on them coming to you. You’ll always be remembered by the ones you tracked down.” And I fundamentally believe that. Don’t get me wrong. I do get passed some amazing clients these days. What I don’t do, though, is devote very much of my time going through the “my book is called Death Comes for Everyone” submissions.

  Which is terrible. But, you know, there’s never anything good in that submission stack. And I’m just not up to it anymore. Can I say that? I am going to get in trouble for this later. But there really isn’t, goddamnit. You know where all the talented people are? They are out there hoeing corn on the Internet. They are putting up great content that people are reading and responding to. And they in turn are learning how to respond to their fans and how to build an audience and how to write what people care about. More than anything, they are learning how to be funny.

  No one really gives my client Justin Halpern any credit. In 2009, Justin started a Twitter feed called Shitmydadsays. Shortly after that I signed him and sold the book at auction for a pretty reasonable advance. Then Justin wrote the book and it ended up selling over a million copies in one year. Which is ridiculous. But everyone seemed to focus on how lucky Justin was, and no one seemed to focus at all on the fact that Justin had been out there for years trying to be funny on various sites that were paying him close to nothing. For Justin, that was invaluable. Justin Halpern is now one of the most talented humor writers in the country. Really. He is. Go read one of his books and then come back and say I’m wrong.

  So don’t even submit to an agent. You are just going to get rejected anyway. Because these days the idea isn’t enough. Going to publishers with “I’ve got a great idea for a humor book” is about as useful as tweeting your breakfast menu. No one cares. Especially not publishers. All they care about is platform. They care if you’ve written something really, really funny and it’s gone viral and five thousand people have commented on it. They care that your product is the perfect thing to turn into a book that works in the market. They care how many readers you can make aware of your book when it is finally published. You have to show agents that you can do all of these things, and then, and only then, do you get to show them how good your book is.

  One last point. Most humor books are actually not funny. I’d put the percentage somewhere around 97 percent of books as not having a single laugh. So when you do get your book deal, all you have to do is make sure you are a part of that 3 percent and then watch how many copies your book sells.

  PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE

  DAVE HILL

  Contributor, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, This American Life; Author, Tasteful Nudes . . . And Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation, The Goddamn Dave Hill Show on WFMU

  I think the purpose of writing—and, really, with all comedy—is to fully entertain yourself. I look at my output, whatever it is—be it writing, performance, music, or anything—as more like an excretion, like what a snail leaves behind. It’s just what comes out, and the more you can have it be what comes out naturally, the better it ends up being. The more you can remove any stakes or pressure—just write as fast as you can type—it’s going to come out better. And then, at the very least, you have the raw material, and you can go back and hone it.

  I once got asked to submit a writing packet for a comedy show. My thinking was, I’m not the right fit for this job at all. I’m not even in the running, but my friends are going to read this, and while they’re sitting in the office going through this pile, I want to entertain them. So I wrote this packet thinking, There’s no way in hell anyone’s even thinking of hiring me for this. It’s more like I was asked to submit out of politeness or something. [Laughs] Later, they told me, “Your packet was honestly, hands-down the best one we got, and we want to hire you. Nothing was even close.” I’m not saying I’d be capable of doing that again in any context, but I think because I wrote only for wanting to crack up my friends, and I was cracking myself up in the process, it worked. It was the first writing packet I ever wrote that I had any fun doing, and that’s why I was able to make it good. Normally, you put pressure on yourself. And as soon as you think that you absolutely have to do a good job on it, you’re in trouble. I tense up when I do that, and then it usually sucks.

  When I first started getting into comedy and writing, I thought I needed an agent and a manager. I felt, I have to get my friends to introduce me to people and help me. And my friends would help, which was very nice of them. But I know now that this doesn’t matter at first. I mean, it’s nice to have an introduction. But you know, I was rejected by everyone. And understandably so. When I was first starting, I called someone who’s my current manager, and they weren’t even taking my calls. I couldn’t even make it past the receptionist. I was crushed by that initial rejection. I thought I’d been rejected by the establishment of comedy. So I was like, “It doesn’t matter; I’m on my own. I’m going to do my own thing.” And once I did that, once I was truly at the point where I was not trying to get anyone’s attention, that’s when I got everything I wanted, including a manager. The point is, if you’re like, “Oh, I gotta do this,” that energy and that mental state does not help the situation at all.

  Another thing that helped was I was fine with failing and being a complete moron. I think a lot of people in comedy have a slight concern about not being willing to be completely foolish. Not everyone, certainly. But it helped me to not care that much.

  With my book, Tasteful Nudes [St. Martin’s Press, 2012], I knew within three weeks of the proposal going out to publishers whether anyone wanted to publish it. But in that time, I realized probably the real reason that I dragged as
s, took several years to put the book proposal together, was because if no one wanted it, it was going to crush me so badly that I would never have written another word. Fortunately, it worked out. And, you know, if no one had wanted the book, I would have been bummed out for a few weeks, but I would have gotten over it. It’s going back to not really giving a shit. Do your best to entertain yourself. Or entertaining the fifteen-year-old in you. Or just creating something that you want to see exist.

  Find a way to remove that anxiety and pressure. Just do your best, the same way that you would try to do your best with anything, like making spaghetti. Basically, I think life is way more knuckleheaded than people make it out to be. It’s making spaghetti, and then it’s sitting with someone and having spaghetti. That’s basically all life is.

  My mom died a couple years ago. I spent so much of my adult life thinking, Oh, man, I’ve gotta do something to make her proud of me. And it took me right up until the end to realize, Oh, she’s been proud of me this whole time. She doesn’t give a fuck what I do. She doesn’t want me to be a prostitute, really, but otherwise, we’re just sitting around watching TV, talking; it doesn’t matter. We’re just eating Chinese food. I realized the basis of any relationship is way less complicated than it’s made out to be.

  I’m probably a bit more scattered than I should be. I sort of wish I could rein it in, but when I try to do that, I realize I’m doing the things I want to be doing. Maybe not always on the scale I want to be doing them, but I’m thrilled that I can make a decent living doing what I want to do—just acting like an idiot. It’s kind of my job.

  TOM SCHARPLING

  “In the seventies, Led Zeppelin and the Who spent the hours on the road listening to their prized bootleg Derek and Clive tapes,” Rob Sheffield wrote for Rolling Stone in 2007, referring to the foul-mouthed, blue-collar characters created by British comedians Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. “These days, Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster are the traveling rock musician’s comedy duo of choice, inspiring a fanatical MP3-trading cult. Like an indie-rock Bob & Ray, they improvise long, absurd dialogues about . . . jerks you know, or maybe the jerk you are.”

  The cult began with a now-legendary 1997 bit (titled “Rock, Rot & Rule”) that Scharpling and Wurster produced and distributed themselves via cassette tapes. The forty-seven-minute phone interview, which first aired live on radio station WFMU near New York City, featured host Scharpling and Ronald Thomas Clontle, a fictional rock critic from Lawrence, Kansas, played with deadpan brilliance by Jon Wurster. Clontle classifies all musical artists into three categories: rock, rot, or rule. Clontle makes maddening statements—“[the eighties British group] Madness invented ska”; Frank Zappa rots because “humor has no place in music”—and it doesn’t take long for the phone lines to light up with callers ready to berate him for his ignorance. But the real comedy gold of “Rock, Rot & Rule” is the comedy interplay between Scharpling and Wurster.

  Growing up in central New Jersey, Scharpling seemed destined more for a career in music than for one in radio comedy. When he met Wurster in 1992, at a My Bloody Valentine concert at the Ritz in New York City, Scharpling was running a New Jersey indie label and fanzine called 18 Wheeler. He and Wurster (in real life, the drummer for Superchunk, Bob Mould, and the Mountain Goats) became friends after discovering their shared love for Chris Elliott and his short-lived Fox sitcom Get a Life.

  Scharpling has gone back and forth between music and comedy writing for his entire career. In the mid-nineties, he was hired by WFMU to host a noncomedic, all-music show. After receiving acclaim from the comedy community for “Rock, Rot & Rule,” which Scharpling intended as a one-time bit, his show ultimately evolved into The Best Show on WFMU, which made its official debut in October of 2000. (The title of the show, Scharpling has said, was always meant to be self-deprecating. “I was such a footnote up at WFMU that I was making fun of my stature there,” he’s claimed.) In 2002, while continuing with the show, he joined the writing staff of the television comedy-mystery series Monk, where he worked as a story editor and eventually rose to executive producer before the show ended in 2009.

  Writing witty dialogue for Monk paid his bills, but Scharpling’s work on Best Show on WFMU was slowly building his reputation as one of the funniest writer/performers in underground comedy. Over the years, not much about the content has changed. Scharpling still plays records and then interviews people, some real and some fictional.

  Scharpling and his longtime co-conspirator Wurster have created hundreds of characters, the majority of whom live in the fictional town of Newbridge, New Jersey. There’s Roland “The Gorch” Gorchnik, who’s absolutely certain that the Fonz (i.e., the Henry Winkler character from Happy Days) was based on him. There’s “Philly Boy Roy,” the former mayor of Newbridge and pencil factory employee who loves everything about Philadelphia, from Tastykakes to the eighties band the Hooters. There’s overweight barbershop singer Zachary Brimstead, and two-inch-tall racist Timmy Von Trimble. And there are also guests who don’t come from Scharpling and Wurster’s imagination—actual comedians who also happen to be Best Show fans, like Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifianakis, and Fred Armisen.

  Among comics and humor writers (as well as musicians), Scharpling is akin to royalty. Listening to the Best Show’s long-form comedy has for years been unofficial homework for Conan O’Brien and his writing staff. When Patton Oswalt guest-edited Spin magazine’s first “Funny” Issue in 2011, Scharpling and Wurster were given a feature profile. “It’s one of those rare things in pop culture,” Jake Fogelnest wrote of Best Show for Spin, “like, say, The Wire—that you actually get angry with your friends for not knowing about.”

  In 2013, a few months after this interview took place, Scharpling—after more than six hundred episodes—left WFMU and took Best Show with him. He plans to direct and spend more time writing. Past and “best of” episodes can be found at wfmu.org/playlists/bs.

  I’ve read that you started working at the age of ten. Is this true? If so, it sounds like something out of a Horatio Alger novel.

  That’s true. When I was around ten, I would run errands for a music store in Summit, New Jersey. It was a store that sold records and other music-related items, like sheet music—just a place I wanted to hang out. I would clean up and run these tasks so I could buy all these records. That was my main goal. I think I made five dollars an hour. Then, when I was twelve, I was a busboy at a New Jersey diner. I worked there for about two years. Eventually, when I was about fifteen, I worked as one of the janitors at my own high school.

  Was this something of your choosing? I can’t imagine any child wanting a janitorial job, especially at their own school.

  Another kid, who was a couple of years older, was working as a janitor, and I liked the guy. We were friends. He said, “So, you do this after school, and you get the keys to the school. You get to push that extra-wide broom down the hall, and you get to spray-clean the floor and you use a mop. Then you get to go into the classrooms. You get the keys to everything.”

  And what was the appeal of that?

  I’d go to the classrooms and look through the grade books to see what my friends were getting.

  Did you ever change any of the grades?

  No, no. It was not WarGames. [Laughs] I wasn’t going to hack into the system. I don’t know why I did that job, truthfully. It was such a bad decision. It was just horrible. It was clear that it was not helping my social standing by doing that.

  I did that for about a year. By this point, I was completely obsessed with music and comedy—equally. Eventually, I was able to afford a color TV for my room. I also bought a Betamax tape machine. I’d rent movies and watch and tape all these comedy shows. I would stay up and watch TV later than most kids. I remember watching that first Letterman late-night show [Late Night with David Letterman, February 1, 1982].

  Actually, even before that late-night show, I remember watching Letterman’s daytime summer s
how [The David Letterman Show, June to October 1980]. It aired in the morning. I remember discovering that show while flipping through the channels. I saw a birthday cake blow up. That was such a ridiculous image. I remember thinking it was funny in a way that really spoke to me. Here was a guy who was younger than most everyone else on television, and he looked different, and he was sarcastic about everything and everyone else. I think I had that streak in me; this was something I could definitely connect with.

  Very funny, very strange. Some bits were almost as scary as they were funny. Like the Chris Elliott characters. Almost frightening.

  Were you also a fan of horror?

  I loved horror as a kid—I’d watch horror movies and read horror comics—but then there came a point when it only repulsed me. When I realized how rough life actually was, I didn’t need to see people getting killed for no reason. I realized that people get killed unfairly all the time anyway. Life is fragile. It was no longer entertainment for me.

  But there is a connection between horror and comedy, not to mention other genres. They’re all math problems ultimately. When I was writing on Monk, I learned pretty quickly that comedy writers were able to write mystery somewhat easily. It was just like writing a joke: the rhythms of the setup, the misdirection, the payoff. That’s what mystery ultimately is. The structure is just 1-2-3. There’s a long arc, but then there are shorter elements sprinkled throughout. And then there’s the big payoff. Just like comedy.