by Mike Sacks
What percentage of jokes, on average, are written beforehand?
Not much. Maybe 10 percent. It’s really more of a way to calm my nerves and jittery anticipation before I start reporting. And somehow it helps me focus—maybe it’s like an actor reading the whole script before he shoots. Like if you were cast on Law & Order, and your only line was “I didn’t do nothin’, Lenny,” but they gave you the whole script, not just your scene to read, you could then really whale on that one line. You could bring seven thousand pounds of subtext to “I didn’t do nothin’, Lenny.”
You mentioned Spy magazine earlier, which was infamous for combining journalism with humor. Can you see the direct influence of Spy on today’s journalists?
I guess I see the influence most directly when I see charticles—something like New York magazine’s terrific “Approval Matrix” seems like Spy’s offspring. I remember reading an interview with Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter, Spy’s founders, who said that they got the idea for funny charts from Time magazine, which, after notable plane crashes, would always print illustrations of where everyone was sitting on the plane.
Wit is always pretty timeless, so it’s harder to see the specific trickle-down of Spy’s particular acerbity. Acerbicity? Acerbitchy? The one aspect of the Spy legacy that, in the wrong hands, can sometimes be unfortunate is the insiderness of everything: Yes, I thought it was brilliant that Spy devoted a whole column to the Creative Artists Agency, and explained how some Hollywood movies are nothing but “packages,” but isn’t this the same head that wants to know weekend box-office? Not to go all Kahlil Gibran on you, but who gives a shit about ratings and BO, as I like to call it? 30 Rock was one of the most brilliant comedies of our time, but it had crappy, crappy ratings. Do you care? I mean, you care if you’re Tina Fey or you do props for 30 Rock, but otherwise, maybe you should consider taking up golf or Chinese brush painting.
What career advice would you give to those who want to combine journalism with humor?
Don’t cook up some hilarious essay and then go to the newsstand thinking, Who can I submit this article to? Do it the other way around: Obsessively read and reread a particular section of a magazine—maybe Shouts & Murmurs in The New Yorker or maybe the back page of The New York Times Magazine, or maybe your local paper’s op-ed, or maybe those essays in Details where a writer discusses some difficult-to-reach part of his body—and then write something that’s tailored very specifically to that section of that publication. This will save you eight hundred thousand man- or woman-hours.
Additionally: Don’t do round-ups of unusual but actual state laws (“In Rhode Island, it’s illegal to serve crackers to Border collies . . .”), or parodies of year-end holiday newsletters. The world is good on those.
PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE
PATTON OSWALT
Comedian, Feelin’ Kind of Patton; Voice-Actor; Actor, Big Fan, Young Adult; Writer, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Silver Screen Fiend
When you’re writing something, and it makes you laugh, don’t judge that. Even if it doesn’t seem to fit. If it made you laugh out loud, it probably belongs on the page. Let someone else see if they can make it work. In the industry, you’re always told about this imaginary ethereal audience, like, “People wanna see this, people wanna see that.” Actually, let me boil down what I just said even better: Have trust in amusing yourself.
The next step is always the same thing, and it’s actually very simple: Just keep going onstage. This is really helpful even if you just want to write, but especially if you want to perform. You’re not going to figure out what your next step is unless you do get up onstage. Just keep doing it, and the way will show itself. I know that’s frustrating to hear, because it sounds like I’m brushing people off, but it does come down to knowing it when you know it. And the ones that ask, “But what else?” never make it. It’s the ones who just keep going who eventually make it.
The right manager and agent will find you when you’re ready.
I know that it doesn’t sound like I’m being very helpful, but trust me, I’m being extremely helpful right now.
DANIEL CLOWES
The sometimes fictional, sometimes autobiographical comic universes of Daniel Clowes’s books—he detests the term graphic novel—aren’t the idealistic utopias conjured up by so many of his comic peers and predecessors. There are no heroes, super or otherwise; no precocious children. His comics, much like Robert Crumb’s work, are about not-so-lovable losers who aren’t so easy on the eyes. These characters generally live in urban wastelands or mind-numbingly boring suburbs, where nihilism passes for hopefulness, football is understood as “sublimated homosexual rape and Oedipal hostility,” and sometimes dogs are born without orifices. He writes about characters with names like Needledick the Bug-Fucker, Hippypants, Peace Bear, Zubrick, Pogeybait, and Dickie: the Disgusting Old Acne Fetishist.
Born in Chicago in 1961, Clowes was by his own estimation a “shy, loner, bookworm kind of kid.” He first realized he could draw after attempting (unsuccessfully) to reproduce his favorite Batman covers. “I was convinced [the covers] were either done by a machine or they had a special tool that made the lines perfect,” he told the Guardian. “If I could get that tool, I too could create Batman comics.”
Clowes majored in illustration at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and graduated in 1984 with few career prospects. But he soon discovered the Hernandez brothers’ brilliant and influential Love and Rockets comic-book series at a local comics store and decided to submit some of his own drawings to their Seattle-based publisher, Fantagraphics. The editors there recognized his talent and quickly signed Clowes to their stable of artists and writers.
His first series, Lloyd Llewellyn (1986–87), a parody of 1950s gumshoe detective noir, lasted only six issues. But his next attempt, called Eightball, would evolve into a fifteen-year odyssey. Originally subtitled “An Orgy of Spite, Vengeance, Hopelessness, Despair, and Sexual Perversion,” Eightball was introduced in October 1989 and featured an array of bizarre story lines and controversial comedic rants, such as “I Hate You Deeply,” “Ugly Girls,” “Sexual Frustration,” and “The Sensual Santa.” Clowes became popular with the kind of people who had previously never entered a comics store.
His most famous series, first published in Eightball No. 11–18 and then reprinted as its own comic in 1997, was Ghost World. Set within a suburb with no name and no distinctive characteristics beyond the usual detritus produced by chain stores and fast-food restaurants, it followed the lives of two teenage girls and best friends, Enid Coleslaw (an anagram of “Daniel Clowes”) and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, after their graduation from high school as they grapple with the inevitable by-product of the late-teen maturation process: melancholy. Enid feels disconnected from the “obnoxious, extroverted, pseudo-bohemian art-school losers” that surround her, and she ends up befriending a collector of 78-rpm records—a lonely, older male (is there any other type?)—who soon becomes her sole confidant.
When Clowes collaborated with director Terry Zwigoff on the movie adaptation of Ghost World, released in 2001, he approached the task with the same all-encompassing devotion he gave to his comics. It took more than five years and nearly two dozen drafts before they finally got it right. In the end, Clowes was Oscar-nominated, but didn’t win, for Best Adapted Screenplay.
“Dan has an astute, critical eye,” Zwigoff once wrote. “He’s been accused of being pornographic, nihilistic, misanthropic, sacrilegious, overly critical, and hopelessly negative. How would I not love the guy?”
In 2010, Clowes published Wilson, a book featuring seventy one-page gags about an unlikable middle-aged man. The long-time Simpsons writer George Meyer remarked: “Dan is somehow able to dip bucket after shimmering bucket from the roiling depths of his unconscious. Add talent and hard work and courage, and you create blazingly original art like Wilson. The book is heartbreaking, wistful, and joltingly funny. I’ve read it nine times.�
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Is it true that your first professional published work appeared in Cracked magazine?
That’s true. I contributed to Cracked from around 1984 to 1989, though I think I only published one piece under my own name. For the other pieces I was “Herk Abner” and “Stosh Gillespie”—Stosh was the name my father originally wanted for me.
Any particular reason?
He worked in a steel mill when I was born, and several of his Polish co-workers had the name Stosh. Also, I think he was trying to bum out my mom.
As for Gillespie, it’s my middle name.
Were you even a fan of Cracked? And, actually, I should probably point out to readers that this was the first incarnation of Cracked, not at all similar to the current Internet version. This was for print only, and was, more or less, a direct Mad rip-off.
Nobody was ever a fan of Cracked. I was buying it at the time because I wanted work in the satire magazine field, but it was just a terrible publication.
Growing up, my friends and I used to think of Cracked as a stopgap. We would buy Mad every month, but about two weeks later we would get anxious for new material. We would tell ourselves, We are not going to buy Cracked. Never again! And we’d hold out for a while, but then as the month dragged on it just became, Okay, fuck it. I guess I’ll buy Cracked.
It was like comedy methadone.
Right. Then you’d bring it home, and immediately you’d remember, Oh, yeah, I hate Cracked. I don’t understand any of the jokes, and [Cracked mascot] Sylvester P. Smythe is the most unappealing character of all time. He wears janitorial overalls and carries a mop.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Sick magazine—just one of many Mad rip-offs over the years—but they actually had an even uglier mascot: Huckleberry Fink. He was just so ineptly drawn that you didn’t know what the hell he was. I think he was a freckled hillbilly. And instead of “What, me worry?” [Mad’s Alfred E. Neuman’s motto], his was something like: “Why try harder?”10
Were you given free rein at Cracked?
Maybe too much. The very first thing I published was a two-pager called “Aren’t You Nervous When . . .” which was a by-the-book Mad rip-off. One panel had a gag about noticing a fire engine heading toward your house as you drive home, and the only reference picture I could find was from an old children’s book. I remember my roommate looking over my shoulder and saying, “Aren’t you nervous when . . . you’re being followed by a fire engine from the 1930s.”
My friend Mort Todd was the editor in chief for several years, and we created some truly ridiculous material. We did parodies of TV shows that nobody our age, much less the nine-year-olds reading the magazine, had ever seen—programs like Ben Casey [ABC, 1961–66] and The Millionaire [CBS, 1955–60]. I don’t think we ever bothered with a show from our own era [the eighties], or even the seventies.
Did any Cracked readers complain?
Oddly enough, nobody ever wrote in to say, “What in the hell are you doing parodying Dragnet and [1950s sitcom] My Little Margie?”
Cracked was a strange place. They had a consistent, revolving audience of nine- and ten-year-old kids who would innocently pick it up at the grocery store for a year or two before moving on. In the front section of each issue there would be photos of children holding up their issues of Cracked, or posing in front of giant Sylvester P. Smythe birthday cakes with confused, lukewarm smiles on their faces.
I also remember that one of the publishers had a vanity plate that read “Cracked Man.” Sad, but also kind of charming, I suppose.
Cracked did achieve one note of distinction: It managed to somehow convince longtime Mad cartoonist Don Martin to leave Mad and join Cracked in 1988. Mad is still upset about this.
I know. There was some below-radar talk about lawsuits, but I don’t think they had any real claim. They were furious. Don had been there for more than thirty years.
I remember Cracked throwing this big, fancy dinner for Mr. and Mrs. Don Martin in an attempt to woo them over to the other side. Don’s wife was really a character. She acted as his agent and was angry about the way Mad had treated her husband. She thought Mad paid too little. They wouldn’t allow Don to own the rights to his own work. Companies would call Don and ask, “Can we make a calendar with your work?” and he’d have to say no.
Both were very happy to jump ship. Don received a little more money per page—I think a hundred dollars more—and he regained the rights to his own work, which was more important.
How happy was Don Martin at Cracked?
As far as I could tell, he was happy. I don’t think he ever seemed to notice that Mad was respected, whereas Cracked was loathed.
I left Cracked in the early nineties. Once my own comics started to get published by Fantagraphics Books—first with Lloyd Llewellyn and then with Eightball—I started to receive freelance offers from The Village Voice and Entertainment Weekly and other magazines.
You became one of the first comic artists to contribute to Esquire magazine—or, really, to any major, mainstream magazine. What year was this?
Dave Eggers, who was an editor for Esquire then—but who had not yet written his first book [A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Simon & Schuster, 2000] or published the first issue of his literary journal McSweeney’s—wanted me to create a comic for Esquire’s fiction issue in ’98. The story was called “Green Eyeliner,” about a slightly unhinged young woman who was arrested for pulling out a gun in a crowded movie theater.
The fact that Esquire would even publish a comic for “adults” in their fiction issue was really a big deal, it turned out. No one remembers the actual specifics of that comic, only that it was published.
I wonder why it was such a big deal—your comics had been out for years by that point.
It was one of the many “comics aren’t just for kids and fat collector creeps anymore” moments in what has become never-ending fodder for journalists.
Did you ever imagine that you’d one day be producing covers for The New Yorker or have a serial comic strip in The New York Times Magazine?
Back in the early Eightball days? Never in a million years.
Your strip, Mister Wonderful, about a shy middle-aged man on a blind date, ran in The New York Times Magazine in nineteen installments, beginning September 2007 and ending February 2008. How was it received?
I’ve received more response to Christmas cards. The New York Times didn’t have a comments section on their website at the time, but the editors told me that they received some nice letters—although, of course, I never saw any of them.
It’s interesting: I’ll receive a lot more of a reaction when something appears on a small website than I will when something’s published in a major magazine or newspaper. The easier it is for a reader to contact you, the more responses you receive.
Maybe that’s a good thing. I have a feeling that a lot of the responses to Mister Wonderful would have been negative. It’s amazing how sensitive newspaper readers are when it comes to humor. If you look at the syndicated comics, you have to wonder who reads that sort of thing. One would think editors would want to lure readers back to the comics section again, but they’re just so terrified of one negative letter.
Were you given free rein by the Times to write whatever you wanted with Mister Wonderful?
As far as subject matter, they never said a word, but they were very touchy about language—their little “stylebook” is very important to them. Aside from Jesus, for instance, I wasn’t allowed to use the word schmuck. Mad’s been using the word for fifty years! It’s not as if I were using it in the Yiddish sense: “Wow, that guy has a huge cock!” I even found an old William Safire column from The New York Times Magazine about schmuck. He wrote something like, “The original meaning of the word has long ago been forgotten, and it’s commonly accepted for general use.”
I showed this to the editors, but they told me, “No. We can’t run
the word.” I could have acted like an asshole and told them I was going to end the strip halfway through, but this was a really good assignment for cartoonists. I didn’t want to be the guy who killed it for everyone else.
I suppose you have to play the game.
Sometimes that can be a good thing. I was restricted—but this restriction ultimately helped the comic. I wasn’t allowed to use the words Jesus or God, but once I was faced with having to replace them, I got more focused on what the character was actually trying to say—or not say—and I realized how much of a crutch the “Jesuses” had become. The central character was a repressed middle-aged guy who was terrible with women, so any time he was further repressed by not being allowed to fully relieve his frustration it only helped.
When I worked on the movie Ghost World [in 2000], there were restrictions that you wouldn’t believe. For instance, we weren’t allowed to show a painting of comedian Don Knotts—unless we had Don Knotts give us permission. It’s all about rights, clearances, lawyers. We wanted a character to sing “Happy Birthday to You”—but we couldn’t unless we paid something like ten thousand dollars, so we just cut the scene.
In comparison, not being allowed to use certain words in a comic strip became no big deal. You have to work with the situation you’re given.
In 2010, you published Wilson, a graphic novel that centered on a middle-aged man oblivious to social cues. He may be one of the most obnoxious characters in comic history. One panel ends with him saying out loud, on a playground: “Hey! Can you get that brat to shut up for two fucking seconds!?” And yet I read that you came up with this character as you sat next to your dying father. True?