Poking a Dead Frog

by Mike Sacks

  How did you see them?

  I saw them as being part of the long tradition of orphans getting into dire trouble. I also saw it as creating a worldview that was just as much about hilarity as it was about heartbreak. Funny and ghastly at the same time. The tragedy becomes exaggerated, and then the exaggeration becomes funny. The emotions travel on a circular path. The reader feels terrible, terrible, terrible, and then suddenly it becomes very funny. That’s reality.

  Do you enjoy being around children? It seems that many children’s authors, including Roald Dahl, weren’t too fond of their own audience.

  The truth of the matter is that I’m always disturbed by someone who says they like or dislike children. To me, that’s like saying you either like or dislike adults. There are so many different types.

  Yes, but some adults feel that all children are exactly the same.

  True. It seems that children are one of the last minorities about whom you can make huge sweeping generalizations and no one will care.

  I see this everywhere. I recently read an interview with a woman who was writing about pre-teen culture, and she said that girls love to be pretty and want to grow up to be princesses and want to be rescued by boys, and so on. And I thought, If you were to substitute any other minority for “girls,” you’d never work in publishing again.

  I suppose kids don’t have the representation that other minorities might have.

  Also, a lot of adults don’t seem to have the thinking skills that are critical to understanding kids. I hate these broad generalizations that adults come up with only because they believe this is how kids should think or act. How do you know?

  Does part of all this have to do with adults forgetting what it was like to be a child?

  I think so. It’s one thing to forget about your childhood, but don’t transfer your incorrect memories onto kids who are now living through that time. Or, at the very least, don’t write about it!

  When it comes to writing humor for kids, I always think back to when I was a kid myself and teachers would talk to me like I was an idiot. The teachers I really liked were the ones who spoke to me the same way they would to other adults. It was respect.

  Do you have any interest in writing humor for adults?

  For better or worse, there’s just more appreciation of the humor genre within children’s literature. Beyond the fact they’re very difficult to write, comic novels are also difficult to sell to adults. There are a few authors who get away with it, but, overall, publishers are not excited by humor unless it’s a children’s book, where there’s more room for that type of book in a commercial sense.

  Any last words of advice for the aspiring children’s writer?

  I don’t know whether this is true or not, but there’s a story about John Coltrane and Miles Davis—they were playing together in the mid-fifties. Coltrane was into playing very, very long sax solos, some lasting for more than an hour. Miles Davis asked him to rein it in a bit.

  Coltrane said, “I don’t know how.”

  And Davis said, “Take the horn out of your mouth.”

  I always think of that story when I’m looking at a beautiful chapter I wrote, and I just can’t imagine cutting one word of it. I then think, Actually, yes, you can. It’s not that hard.

  All of my books are a lot longer in their first drafts than they need to be. I always cut them down drastically. I’m a huge rewriter; it’s extremely important. I find this capacity missing with a lot of writers.

  I’d also recommend stealing paper from work. And not only paper but printer cartridges. Seriously, I did this for years before I could afford to write full-time. I wrote the beginning of Snicket when I worked for a dying man. I was working as an administrative assistant at the City College of San Francisco. My job was to answer my boss’s office phone and to inform people, if they asked to speak to him, that he was dying. He managed to live for over a year, so people eventually stopped calling.

  I recently met this underground writer—or so she calls herself—who was complaining about the price of self-publishing. I thought, If you don’t know how to steal enough paper to print out your own stories for free and to advance and improve yourself as a writer, you’re not an underground writer. More than that, you don’t deserve to be a writer.

  That’s my advice. Why this isn’t taught in the creative-writing programs is a crime.

  Finally: I’d avoid reading interviews with writers. None of us know what we’re doing. You can learn more from reading a good book than all the floppy advice from the people who make them.

  PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE

  ANTHONY JESELNIK

  Actor; Comedian; Writer, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, The Jeselnik Offensive

  I wanted to be a writer pretty much my whole life. I wanted to write books. As I got older, I realized what being a novelist meant, and what kind of life that would mean. I decided that that wasn’t the life for me. I was in my early twenties, and I didn’t want to just lock myself in a room and bang away for the next ten or fifteen years on a novel that might not be any good. So I thought maybe screenplays would be the way to go, but I hated writing screenplays—they’re dry and boring, and I found that it was really hard, without connections, to get anyone to read anything you’d written. Even if you wrote a screenplay, to get someone to read that screenplay was a huge pain in the ass. So I abandoned that idea, and I thought, What would be my dream job? Even though I didn’t expect to become a comedian, I thought writing jokes seemed like a lot of fun. Being around funny people was the bigger thing. I think a lot of people want a writing job but they don’t know what that means. They want to just hang out; they want to be around funny people.

  I only had one connection in Los Angeles. My dad had gone to college with a guy named Jimmy Brogan, who was the head writer at the time for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Jimmy had been a comedian for a lot of years. I went to the Hollywood Improv and watched him do a set—which was the first live set I had ever seen. After, I said to him, “I want to be a joke writer; I want to do what you do.” I thought he was going to say, “Okay, show up to the studio on Friday, and bring your ID, and we’ll get you in there.” But he just said, “If you want to do that, do stand-up.” I tell people this all the time, that stand-up, even if you don’t want to be a comedian, makes you write, and it forces you to make the material good, because by doing stand-up you’re defending your own jokes. You can’t just write them down. And I found that that was attractive to me because it made you work.

  Stand-up is kind of like getting your bachelor’s degree. Or getting a law degree. You can do a lot with it. You don’t have to be a lawyer. With a law degree, you can be a teacher. You can have all kinds of different jobs with that degree. If you get into stand-up and you become a producer, or you become an actor, or you become a writer, it’s not like you’ve failed as a comic. It’s just that being a comic gives you the skills to move on to the next job. And a lot of times, it might seem to be your dream job, but it might end up being a job job. There are a lot of bad comedy writing jobs out there—which I would’ve taken at the time—but I’m glad I didn’t get them. I’m glad I didn’t end up on some bad show just churning out crappy stuff. I’m glad I stuck to my guns and just did onstage what I wanted to do.

  As my stand-up career kind of heated up, I got hired on Fallon. It’s hard to get into a place like that, because when shows are hiring writers, they have one spot open, they’ve been on the air for years, and they usually hire someone’s friend. A writer will say, “Okay, I’ve been here for ten years, you know me, I vouch for this guy, bring him in.” And that’s how you usually get hired. But when producers have to staff a whole new show like they did with Fallon, they have to think outside the box, and this was my opportunity. I kind of talked my way in there and said, “Listen, this is gonna be great. I’ll write your monologue jokes,” and I was the first monologue writer hired. I recently read some
thing Tina Fey said: “If you hire a writer, it’d better be someone that you’re happy to see in the hallway at 3:00 a.m.” That’s a big thing, just to be nice, just to be pleasant to be around. I had a total blast, and I was fun to be around, so they liked me, and I thought, Oh, I could do this.

  When I was on Fallon, they would have these things called “informationals,” where young writer wannabes would come into the office. They’d ask, “I want to be a writer like you. How can I do this?” And it was me and Jeremy Bronson, another writer at the time, and we would sit down with this person and they’d be like, “How’d you guys do it?” And they had their résumé—as if I would ever give a shit about that—and I would tell them, “Well, I did stand-up for six years to get to this point, to get this job,” and Jeremy would say, “Well, I worked in news, I worked for Hardball for a few years and then submitted for this show,” and he had submitted to SNL and didn’t get it, but they passed his packet along to Fallon and he got the job that way. People didn’t want to hear that. There are all kinds of different paths to get to places, but you have to work your butt off. You have to work for a long time to do it. There’s no real shortcut. No one cares how you dress in the interview. It’s like a comedian who hands you their business card. If you’re a comedian, be a comedian. I tell a lot of people to start a blog. Start a blog and write monologue jokes every day. And people don’t want to hear that either. To them, it seems like you’re just throwing stuff in the air. But I know Josh Comers got hired on Conan that way. He just had a blog where he’d write monologue jokes every day, and they hired him off of that. So if you have something to show people, they’re gonna be excited by it.

  At Fallon, we had a fax program for a little while, and people would send in jokes. And they would send in five jokes a day, but a lot of times they would be bad. Or the person didn’t really work on them; they would just be sending in jokes for the sake of sending in jokes. That’s a terrible idea. Because when a job finally came up and we were looking through those packets, we’d be like, “Oh, should we hire Jenny? Jenny has some terrible jokes.” So we’d be like, “No, let’s not hire her.” Jenny would’ve been better off not submitting anything, and then getting it together. If you’re going to submit something, make sure the jokes are really good. Really work on them. If you’ve got twelve hours to do a submission, it might be a better idea not to submit to that job if you don’t have the time to make the packet good. Your name is on top of it, and it’s gonna hurt you down the line.

  I feel like a lot of people in comedy get frustrated because it’s not like school, where you show up and those in charge say, “Here are your classes. Go to this and then you’ll take a test at this point.” There’s no structure to this world. But I just very much wanted to get on the tracks. At the very least, you have to get on the tracks. Think of yourself as the train. And keep throwing coal in there and keep moving down the right path.

  ADAM RESNICK

  Who’s the real Adam Resnick? According to actor Chris Elliott, his longtime friend and writing partner, Resnick is (or was) an enormous Russian who doesn’t speak very good English. “The rumor at school was that Adam had grown up in a small town in the Kaluga region of the Soviet Union,” Elliott wrote in his 2012 pseudo-memoir, The Guy Under the Sheets, “and when the nuclear power plant there had its big meltdown, the radiation gave him gigantism—which was why by age fifteen he stood over seven feet tall, and was by all accounts still growing.” According to the book, Resnick and Elliott went on to become comedy co-conspirators—a partnership that, Elliott wrote, soon grew “into a tree of fame, fortune . . . debauchery and a few murders.”

  Elliott and Resnick have a résumé that’d make any comedy writer worth his or her salt envious; their credits together include working as staff writers on Late Night with David Letterman during its golden age (Chris from 1982–90; Adam from 1985–90), the too-hip-for-its-time Fox sitcom Get a Life (1990–92), and the initially maligned but now celebrated 1994 feature Cabin Boy. Resnick has also written for Saturday Night Live and HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show. But despite the prominence of their work, both men remain somewhat obscure figures, which only enhances their status as cult icons.

  “I truly believe my career would have come to a screeching halt a long time ago, as opposed to the slow deceleration I’m currently experiencing, if not for Adam Resnick,” Elliott says now. “Anything funny that has ever come out of my mouth, supposedly spontaneously, more than likely came out of Adam’s brain first.”

  Born and raised in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Resnick spent a less-than-successful three semesters at New York University’s film school before dropping out to intern and then write for Late Night, a show still in its infancy. “It was the defining moment of my life—the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Resnick says. “And probably the first time I felt like I belonged somewhere.” Meeting Elliott would prove to be a large part of it. As Elliott says now of his burgeoning relationship with Resnick, “We come from different walks of life, and yet from the moment we met we both realized that we shared the same sensibilities, laughed at the same things, and were tortured by the same neuroses. We’re two halves of the same coin—like Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner.”

  It’s not difficult to understand why their various collaborations didn’t connect with mainstream audiences. It’s remarkable that Cabin Boy—a movie about a “fancy lad” named Nathanial Mayweather, a flying cupcake that spits tobacco juice, a boat christened the Filthy Whore, and David Letterman selling monkeys to sailors (among many other oddities)—ever got made, much less distributed. It was a failure both critically and financially, but nearly twenty years later Cabin Boy enjoys sold-out special screenings at which Resnick and Elliott occasionally do postshow Q&As. Most of the time, they are greeted with standing ovations. They, and their comedy, were ahead of its time.

  This argument could be made with almost all of Resnick’s projects. More often than not, he was two or three steps ahead of the curve. Much of his work, such as the short-lived 1996 HBO series The High Life or the 2002 Danny DeVito–directed feature Death to Smoochy, had surreal and darkly subversive worldviews and a giddy lack of morality, not to mention characters who were unapologetically unlikable. Sound familiar? Just look to modern comedy classics such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Arrested Development, and Eastbound & Down. While remaining somewhat in the shadows, Resnick was paving the way for some of the best comedy of the twenty-first century.

  As Elliott attests, “There are only a few people who think originally in comedy anymore. Adam has never compromised his comedic point of view, so besides loving the guy, I deeply respect him.”

  In 2014, Blue Rider Press published Resnick’s hilarious, horrifying memoir Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation.

  What comedy did you enjoy growing up?

  Growing up, I was always attracted to old movies—W. C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy and things like that. Screwball comedies from the thirties. I always loved the look of that period, from as early as I can remember. And the music—there’s something about those Depression-era “cheer-up” songs that always appealed to me. So simple and bouncy, yet dark and wise on some level. And ultimately unrealistic. [Laughs] There’s a 1930 song I love by Sam Lanin and His Orchestra called “It’s a Great Life (If You Don’t Weaken).” Good luck with that!

  As I got older, and began to watch a lot of movies, I found I laughed the most at things that tend to feel real, rather than joke driven. Dramas like The Last Detail. Jesus, I’m pontificating about comedy already. Everything I was afraid of. And from the Cabin Boy guy, no less.

  We’ll get to Cabin Boy soon, don’t worry.

  Lovely.

  You just mentioned the 1973 movie The Last Detail. What in particular did you like so much about it?

  It’s just one of those small movies that says so much about life. The directing, by Hal Ashby, is fantastic. And the performances a
re so good, especially Jack Nicholson’s. Clearly, his character is funny, but he’s not playing it for laughs. The dialogue is not about jokes. He’s like someone you might meet in real life. I’ve known a lot of people who are funny characters, but they’re not trying to entertain you. My father’s a good example. People like that are usually a little tragic on some level. The Last Detail is ultimately a tragedy. Same with movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Goodfellas, and a lot of Robert Altman’s films, including Nashville and Short Cuts. Those two aren’t exactly tragedies, but you know what I’m talking about.

  How about contemporary comedies?

  [Laughs] Well, it depends on how contemporary. Does a movie like Election [from 1999] count? What about [1995’s] To Die For? As far as studio comedies, I’m not so much into ones that are specifically aimed at a younger audience. Even when I was a teenager, I didn’t love movies like Animal House. There’s a lot of comedy I enjoy; I just hate rattling off titles. Anyway, most comedies today are pretty much for college kids. I’m out of the loop.

  Do you think you’ve changed? Or has the comedy changed?

  Well, comedy has just become such a gigantic thing now. There’s just so much comedy. Too much comedy. And it all has to be “relatable” or deeply rooted in current pop culture. The audience tends to want to laugh at things they’ve experienced—weddings, break-ups, hanging out with your buddies, that kind of stuff. For me, the smartest comedy seems to be on TV these days. Shows like The Office, Parks and Rec, and Enlightened—that show blew me away. Not sure I’d call it a comedy, per se.

  With movies, a lot of recent comedies are all about this male bonding thing, featuring guys who don’t want to grow up. It’s all about seeing some version of you and your pals on-screen, hanging out and goofing around: “Hey, remember the time Keith puked all over the waitress at Dave & Busters? It was just like in the movie!” I can’t get into that. Hanging out with a bunch of guys and cracking jokes—that would be my worst nightmare. You realize what I’m criticizing, don’t you? Happy, socialized people having a good time. So, to clarify—maybe the problem is with me, not the movies.