Failure Is an Option

by H. Jon Benjamin

  The next night, we met my friend’s brother again for dinner, and this time he brought his other brother. Afterward, we were out front and he handed me a joint. Despite my better instincts, I took a small puff. It wouldn’t be like that again. I only smoked a tiny amount. Seven seconds passed, and I went right back to losing my shit, then a desperate retreat to the Windsor Arms, where I decided to pace around the outside perimeter of the hotel over and over. I told Amy to stay in the entranceway so I knew she would be there. I walked around possibly thirty times, maybe more. Finally, close to dawn, I went up to the room to sleep it off. That’s how you show a girl a good time in Canada.

  Failed Weed-Strain Reviews

  Singapore Math

  A hybrid strain, Singapore Math boasts a small, tightly wound bud that packs a huge punch—a real high-ya! Singapore Math produces an ultra-disciplined effect with strong cerebral overtones. It’s a real left-side-of-the-brain experience, bringing on waves upon waves of logical rushes that cascade like a consistent system of equations. With hints of cherry and citrus, this high-performing buzz does carry with it some hard-core self-doubt and bouts of overpoliteness. Also, some have described stiffness in movement and manner, along with perma-smile. I highly recommend this strain if you like an intelligent, respectful stone with huge interior baggage and an abiding impulse to overwork. But I would avoid driving after smoking Singapore Math. It will aggravate other drivers.

  Kentucky Coal

  This S1 cultivar has royal origins—many believe it’s the result of a cross between two of the same family of seeds, which gives Kentucky Coal its unusual appearance and powerfully dense attributes. Kentucky Coal is a workhorse that delivers a very introverted experience—some would say too introverted, as in cut off from normal society and its highfalutin’ moral compass. Woodsy and dark, Kentucky Coal is long-lasting and stridently opinionated, bringing its smoker a creamy sanctimony followed by a radical sense of insularity. This is a great toke for just hanging out alone with your loved ones—or cousins or sister or uncle—and getting down and dirty.

  Fratricide

  There’s nothing commonplace about this florid, richly green sativa-indica blend. It’s all brawn and not much brain. Creative types need not apply, as this muscly buzz does not take no for an answer. On smoking Fratricide, a blanket sensation of entitlement washes over you, making this an ideal bud to share with buds who are also of the mind-set that no consequence is too damaging. It’s a real team-effort high. One downside to this musky blend is the aftermath, which can be a bit prickly. But don’t worry—your parents and/or a white judge will probably bail you out.

  Daddy Issues

  Sharp and unforgiving, this bitter bud is the hard pillow on the bed, the one you try to avoid but somehow end up sleeping on. This is hard smoke to swallow, and it leaves a deep feeling of regret and existential dread with a lingering premonition that things will just get worse. The high then morphs into a growing parental anxiety about future unfulfilled burdens. Finally, Daddy Issues snowballs into a revolving sense of the cycles of eternity, of knowing that your life is connected to all life before it and all life that follows and that you’ve only contributed to that and that alone—which ends up being a devastating truth. (By the way: Don’t smoke this Pandora’s box too late at night; you’ve got to take your kid to school in the morning.)

  Tween Green

  Middle school can be a high-pressure environment. You’ve got to dutifully perform at school, stay connected socially, feel vulnerable all the time, and then go home and get shit for all that. These trying years can have lasting effects, and this strain is the perfect antidote for them. So I’m not advocating tween smoking, but I am advocating Tween Green for those people stuck in their memories of the many horrible experiences middle school can bring. This is a nice, smoothed-out ride with intermittent flashes of the distant memory of a kid calling you “fat fuck,” or another kid dumping out a saltshaker on your head in the cafeteria because you like disco (callback), or you having your period all over your beige pants in the middle of social studies.

  Kosher Kush

  Next year in Jah-rusalem! Sometimes, the rigors of the modern high are too much to take. Sometimes we crave a simpler high, one that forgoes the imposing freedoms of the infinite permutations a typical high can bring. Sometimes we just want a radically narrow high, what some would call a purposeful high. The double K offers this with a vengeance. But don’t sell your donkey before you build your cart; the double K comes with a lot of baggage. Maybe it’s better explained sermonically. There’s an old story, oft told, about a farmer who lived in a small hut with his wife and his baby. For months and months, no rain came and the farmer was hard-pressed to grow the crops necessary to sustain him and his family. Every day he would sit in his field and pray to God for rain to nourish the soil to grow the crops. Then one day the wife came with her baby to the man who sat in his arid field and she showed him the baby’s penis, which was red and irritated on the tip. She was worried that the baby was carrying disease. Suddenly, as from nowhere, a torrential rain came. The farmer was overjoyed. And it rained and rained. For weeks, the rains came and the farmer sat in his hut waiting for it to stop, but it never did. What he assumed was a gift became a curse, for his fields flooded and he could still not grow any crops. He then knew that the baby’s red penis was a very convoluted test from God to make things that appear good actually bad. Now, to this day, the Jewish people cut the tips off their babies’ penises and do very little farming. Kosher Kush can be a bit like this test, so best be careful not to apply too much significance to what you smoke, or you may get stuck in your ways—and that ends up hurting babies.

  CHAPTER 13

  How I Failed to Sell a Pilot

  I spent my twenties pretty much getting fired from a bunch of waitering jobs but did finally land a steady gig stacking books at the Cambridge Public Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a pretty good job, if you enjoyed public masturbation and cleaning up after public masturbation. It was also good if you like to get paid less than thirteen thousand a year. I spent a lot of my nights then trying to do comedy at places like Catch a Rising Star and Stitches Comedy Club with various sketch troupes. Years went by, and I still can’t honestly say that I had any real ambition to do comedy as a profession. The comedians around me, who performed night in and night out, their aim was pretty apparent—become successful at comedy. At first, I thought of comedy as a way to avoid a profession, but via all these people I was around, very driven comedy minds, I learned to mimic their drive to pursue comedy as an actual career. But that doesn’t go without error.

  Having been a part of many sketch shows and appearing in a couple of animated shows, I started to slowly develop a comedy-writing career. Pitching and writing shows is a precarious endeavor. I have written a good number of sitcom scripts with the hopes that they’ll get developed into series. But writing television pilots can become a tedious task, because often, you have a good idea for a show, it gets sold, and then you spend time and energy writing it and then the network takes months to get back to you and their notes come in and they want to make changes and the process becomes entangled and unclear. By this time, you are so far away from the moment of conception that the idea itself starts to seem terrible and fruitless, so you end up rooting for its demise. It’s like any relationship really.

  My first script for a network was called Squash Club. It was 1996, and I had just moved to New York and was, for some reason, playing a lot of squash at a club downtown. I didn’t really have a day job, so it was a good time to score open court. The script, appropriately, was about a young man who played squash with old men in New York City and they became his only friends. It was really about not wanting to be young—something I strongly felt in real life. Being young means you have so much left to do, but being old means just settling in quietly for the remaining days. You know, just tucking yourself in with a bowl of popcorn or some soup and welcoming the
final breath (that’s how I imagine my death—being poisoned by soup).

  Anyway, the pilot script was declined, and I moved on to the next idea, which was subsequently rejected, and so on, for many, many years. Also, there’s this sword of Damocles–type feeling about starting the process, and it’s twofold, because one, once you start, you’re almost certain it will reap no reward and die on the vine; and two, if the show does get picked up, but the idea was concocted more out of necessity than inspiration, it’s less than ideal knowing you have to helm a show you just came up with as an exercise in coming up with something for the sake of coming up with something.

  Oh, and for money. It turns out writing pilots is a pretty low-paying affair considering the amount of time invested, most of which is waiting for a response. Basically, writing pilots for television has a very low rate of return emotionally and financially. That’s some uplifting advice for all you young writers getting into television.

  I am the king of gloomy feedback. Around the same time as the writing of Squash Club, I remember going once to a high school as a volunteer to an enrichment program for kids, where I met with several classes to talk about animation and scriptwriting. After the classes ended, there was a final ceremony in the school’s auditorium, where the volunteers sat on stage and went down the line giving their final thoughts to the students. All successful artists and actors and musicians, all so incredibly positive. Like “Never stop striving and working toward your dreams,” and “Don’t let anything stand in the way of going for it.”

  An actor, I think it was Matthew Lillard, spoke right before me, and he was fired up. He gave this rousing speech about achieving goals by pushing to be who you want to be. It hit all the major notes, and undeniably was a bit of hokum, but it was well-delivered and incredibly well-received hokum. Kids like positive reinforcement.

  I resented his success and his positive reinforcement, and then it was my turn. I went for some irony and told the kids, as a counterpoint, not to push so hard, because “going for it” is annoying. So many blank stares. Even my fellow volunteers on stage, none of whom I knew, looked at me sideways. It was a poorly timed joke.

  You never know when a joke is going to fall completely flat. I have had many jokes in this vein produce rotten results. One that springs to mind was when, during the era of answering machines, I recorded my and my girlfriend Amy’s outgoing message so it said, “Hi, you’ve reached Jon and Amy, we’re not here right now, but if you need to reach us, please call [the number of the White House].” Not a great joke, but when Amy’s grandmother tried to reach her, she called the White House and started leaving messages for someone there who actually shared Amy’s name. In the end, I made an old woman very confused and disappointed that her granddaughter was not working for President Clinton.

  Back in the late nineties, my friend and I sold a pilot to NBC. The show’s premise was pretty simple. It was about two twentysomething guys who were going nowhere financially, so they decide to just “retire” and move into one of their grandparents’ gated community in Florida to save money and scam old people. I can’t remember the title, but I imagine it was something like, Early Retirement or Gated or Buddies or Moving In or Hi, Grandma, I’m Home or And Bubbie Makes Three or It Takes a Retirement Village.

  When we started writing, I suggested that we might take a bit of the money we were going to make and go to Florida, where my brother-in-law’s parents lived, and spend a night at their Jewish retirement village to do some embedded research for the script. They lived in Boca Raton, the Babylon of Jewish retirement: an endless stream of golf course condominium communities separated by strip malls. Now, I’m not exactly very close with my brother-in-law’s father and mother, but they were gracious enough to agree to show us around their community. When we arrived, we told them we just wanted to tag along with them as they did what they would normally do so we could get a sense of the lifestyle.

  It was pretty much what you would imagine. A trip to the clubhouse and the pool for lunch, then a trip to a nearby strip mall, to some weird gambling facility that kinda looked illegal—all the windows were blacked out, but inside there were just slot machines. After that, the requisite 5:00 p.m. discount buffet dinner at an all-you-can-eat Chinese food place. At the dinner, crammed into a booth, the father told us how he was his community’s head writer for his theater group that put on in-house plays and performances, and went into a detailed description of his body of work, which consisted mainly of Jewish parody versions of postwar musicals. So, for example, the Jewish West Side Story (West Side Schnorrer), or the Jewish Cats (Katz), or the Jewish My Fair Lady (My Fair Knaidel). A simple refillable model for quick-impact entertainment for old Jews. Basically any Yiddish pun would suffice. That’s a special talent, writing stuff like that.

  I pulled my cowriter aside and hit him with what I thought was an interesting proposal. We could take a decent but minority-share percentage out of our paycheck for the script and have my brother-in-law’s father write the whole thing and then turn that in to the studio just to see what happens. Again, in my spirited tradition, a way for me to make less money than I could, but in this case, the same for my cowriter, who was not as thrilled with the idea. I convinced him next to the heaping glossy load of chicken and broccoli under a sneeze guard, and we went back to our table to offer our new writer the opportunity. He was thrilled.

  So, now, to summarize, we were paying something around $4,000 out of what I think was about $20,000 total to a retired shoe salesman we only knew peripherally to write a whole sitcom script for us to turn in in lieu of something written by us . . . as a joke . . . or not? And let’s be clear, money was an issue for us, and giving away 20 percent off the top also factors in to the normal deductions one takes in this line of work, where we also have to pay off our agent, our manager, and our taxes. So, this joke would cost us 20 percent more than the 50 percent taken out of our payment. We would end up with around $2,500 for the script each, minus the money we were paying to go to Boca for research, which was also my idea.

  So most would say this was a lark. But maybe his script would be good and he’d become the next septuagenarian head writer of a network sitcom. I’m saying, in these kinds of experiments, there is no set conclusion, though one would guess it would not work out well for any of us. But like I’ve been trying to tell you, this is my unique talent: to successfully muck up any plan. It stems from a complex that manifests as my taking pleasure in hurting myself and others simultaneously, a real Freudian one-man band.

  Back in New York, around three weeks later, we received a script about forty pages long with little to no connection to our story and with an extremely disproportionate amount of Viagra jokes. It wasn’t at all what the network would want but exactly what we wanted for the network. At least, for the reaction.

  Also, I will point out, this was in no way a failure on the part of the father-in-law. He wrote a whole sitcom script in three weeks with no real television experience—despite, I gather, a heavy reliance on Jewish joke books, which could be construed as plagiarism, but I am not here to judge his methods. I’m here to make people uncomfortable. Also, if no action had been taken in that Chinese buffet that night in Boca Raton, I would not have this to share with you. Here is a snippet from the pilot script written by my brother-in-law’s father, Mal.

  Man 1: Ernie’s wife asked him if he remembered if they ever had a mutual orgasm. He answered, “No, we always had State Farm.” (All laugh.)

  Man 2: Hey, what do you get when you mix Viagra with your baked beans for supper?

  All: What d’ya get?

  Man 2: A stiff wind. (Everyone laughs.)

  Man 1: There was a truckload of Viagra hijacked last night. The police were told to be on the lookout for a gang of hardened criminals.

  Man 2: How about the old guy in the nursing home. They gave him Viagra every night to keep him from falling out of bed.

  Man 1: Did yo
u hear the one about the old geezer who said to his doctor, “I think I’m going deaf in my right ear”? The doctor said, “No wonder you can’t hear, you have a suppository stuck in there.” The old geezer said, “Now I know what happened to my hearing aid!”

  Now, I like a good Viagra joke (actually, not really), but three hundred in a row gets to be a little much. And the script was magnificently outdated, but to be fair, perfectly outdated. George Eliot and Raymond Chandler didn’t write until later in their lives, and think how much better Middlemarch would have been with more (any) Jewish jokes. Or erectile dysfunction jokes. But this was definitively not a modern American sitcom. It was more like Soviet psyops.

  So, the plan unfolded. We sent his script as ours and waited. About three weeks later, we got on the phone with the executives from NBC to discuss the draft and had a gloriously uncomfortable notes call. They tried as best they could to politely explain that the script seemed to be “trying too hard to capture the characters of a Florida old-age community.” They were expecting something more from the perspective of the young characters and felt there were way too many old-timey Jewish jokes. But they did break it down and give suggestions on how to retool it in great depth. At the end of the call, we revealed what we did, and there was a pregnant pause. Like more of a baffled “Why would you do this?” than a “That’s an amusing gag.” We did make them read and pull together a half hour of notes on a script we didn’t write.