by Mike Sacks
I hadn't even seen the show when Lorne asked me to come on and host. A little later, I went to a party in downtown L.A., and a lot of people were there, but everything came to a dead stop when it came on. I watched the show and thought, Geez, it's really interesting, whatever it is. There were parts that reminded me of the TV show That Was the Week That Was, which I had written for in the mid-sixties and which had similar elements. Both shows were live, and I love the live aspect of television. When it's live, you can actually make mistakes but you still have to keep going. It's theater, and it's real.
What was your opinion of the younger writers on SNL, such as Michael O'Donoghue and Anne Beatts, both of whom came from that slash-and-burn sensibility of National Lampoon?
I liked O'Donoghue immediately. It took me a couple shows to figure out who was writing what, but on my first show, Lorne told me that O'Donoghue had written a sketch about Citizen Kane. Lorne said, “Do you think you'd be interested in being in it?” I said, “God yes. Where else could you ever do something like that? Let's do it.”
What was the sketch about?
It was a little odd. It wasn't filled with laughs in the old-fashioned sense, but it was so original and I was so amused by the shaggy-dog punch line that I just had to do it. The joke was that Kane wasn't looking for Rosebud after all; he was simply trying to get a roast-beef sandwich.
At the next show, Lorne said to me, “I want you to see something O'Donoghue does, and I want to see if it interests you.” O'Donoghue came into the office, and he did this routine about being an impressionist. He did an imitation, which was no imitation whatsoever, of talk-show host Mike Douglas shoving six-inch steel spikes into his eyes and screaming in pain. It was pure Dada. I laughed so hard I fell on the floor.
But, you know, I don't think that joke ever quite lived up to how funny it was that first time in Lorne's office.
In the early years of SNL, there seemed to be a lot of jokes done strictly for the writers' amusement — if the audience didn't understand them, it didn't seem to matter.
Listen, I have some friends who could never figure out O'Donoghue's stuff. In fact, I have a literal-minded friend who is a well-known name in the business, and extremely talented and intelligent, but he could never understand the concept of O'Donoghue playing this impressionist. He would say, “He doesn't sound anything like the guy! He's not doing Mike Douglas. Why would Mike Douglas put his eyes out?”
You were responsible for one element of SNL which is either lauded or criticized: the repeating of characters week after week.
I did suggest repeating certain characters, which didn't seem to me exactly revolutionary, since every comedy I've ever been involved with, including movies, depends on repetition of a kind. I know Lorne has given me credit for saying that he should do certain characters over and over, but if I hadn't, then someone else would have — it was so obvious. Why not do the samurai character in different situations over and over again? The repetition is funny in and of itself.
John Belushi's samurai character had been done before I got there; I think it was “Samurai Hotel.” When I came on the show, I said, “Let's do Samurai Delicatessen or something like that.” And then came “Samurai Tailor” and “Samurai Stockbroker” and “Samurai Optometrist,” and on and on.
What was it like to work so closely with John Belushi? There's been a lot written about his “genius.” Do you think he was a genius?
I thought of him as being very, very funny, but he was not the only one there that I thought this about. They were all highly original minds. All of them had a wealth of characters they could do, and they were wonderful to work with. In particular, Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase were two of the funniest humans I have ever known.
I don't know what it was about John that made him so good. I think partly it was because he was such a shambles to look at, but he was also so disciplined with physical comedy. It was a great contrast and enjoyable to watch.
What do you think made Gilda Radner so good? You not only worked with her on SNL, but also directed her in the 1980 movie First Family.
No matter what Gilda did, she never lost any adorability; there were no hard edges to her work. But it wasn't as if she was working off sentiment. There's a difference between sentiment and affection. She had affection for all of those characters she played, and it showed. But she also had a sadness to her. I would find her crying from time to time — during shows and after shows. I'm not sure why, really. When she was happy she was wildly happy, but she had her down times.
It's amazing to look back at those early shows and see how young the cast was. The comedy was so smart, even when it was broad, and yet the cast was mostly in their late twenties or early thirties.
When you've been in improvisational theater, you get used to capturing the characteristics of people who are really out there in the world. And if you're up onstage every night for a year, or two years, or three years, with the audience yelling suggestions at you like “Do Chekhov, but do it with Chinese characters,” you get used to an immediate commitment to lunatic ideas. You gain a confidence. Most of the SNL cast members came from that background.
You played one of the more bizarre and lecherous characters on the show, Uncle Roy, the middle-aged pedophile babysitter. I wonder how many guest hosts today would ever play such a role.
He wasn't the only creepy character I played. I played Charles Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic and jerking off to a pornographic magazine. I welcomed the weirdness of that sketch and others.
I don't think you could do a sketch like “Uncle Roy” these days. I think one of the reasons why it worked was because the two little-girl characters, played by Gilda and Laraine Newman, love their Uncle Roy in the nicest possible way. The games they play are great fun to them. Also, the sketch was written by two women, Anne Beatts and Rosie Shuster, which helped get it on the air. Anne and Rosie were better at convincing the show's censor than two male writers would have been.
We only did a few of those Uncle Roy sketches. In one of them, the parents came back home and said something like, “Oh, Uncle Roy, you're like nobody else. You're so great!” I looked at the camera and said, “Oh, that's not true. I bet there's an Uncle Roy in every family.” I thought, This is going to be interesting. I wonder if kids across America will turn to their parents and say, “You know, Dad, your brother Jack is just like Uncle Roy.”
Watching those early shows, it seems there was a real sense of camaraderie between you and the cast.
Oh, absolutely. I've talked about this before, but in one of the samurai sketches, John hit me in the forehead with a samurai sword. He put a real gash in it, and I needed a bandage. And by the end of the show, when the cast members were saying good-bye, all of them had bandages on their heads. I mean, to have the freedom and imagination to do that, it was just great. Obviously, the show has to be live and spontaneous and funny, and all of those elements were incorporated into that event.
Why were you only on SNL the first five seasons?
Because on the last show of the fifth season, I said good-bye for myself and goodbye for the cast. We turned off the lights and left. The next year a new cast was brought onto the show, and I never returned.
You've said that luck plays a big part in any creative career. Do you think it played a part in your career?
Oh, sure. Timing is everything.
In what sense?
Timing is when a movie comes out. Timing is what the country's political disposition is when a movie is released. It's what people are thinking about — what they want to see.
You really can't control that as a writer. But if you're talented, it'll all work out in the end. I mean, not all the talented writers will make it, of course. In spite of what's said, there is a great writer out there whose work no one has discovered, and there is a great painter out there whose work nobody has seen or will see. But, for the most part, if you're talented, I think somebody will find you.
Any last words?
In this life
? “These were my last words.” In this interview? “No.”
Famous Last Words (of Advice)
Do not write down to your audience. Learn how to use the English language. I think the most important courses you can take are courses in English and journalism. Get the basics down. I was lucky enough to have once worked on a newspaper. God! That helped a lot. Deadlines. Deadlines. Create deadlines for yourself. Just get it done, but do it with craft. Care about each scene or care about each paragraph, but do not be self-indulgent.
— Frank Jacobs, Mad
Stephen Merchant
It's not often a writer is praised for the words he didn't write. But Stephen Merchant has proven that silence — usually anathema to humor — can be a comedy art form in itself. Nowhere was this more apparent than in The Office, the BBC sitcom that Merchant co-created with longtime writing partner Ricky Gervais.
A mock documentary about the employees of a London-area paper-supply merchant called Wernham Hogg, the world of this office was as naturalistic as it was realistic: no punch lines, no laugh track, no contrived plots neatly wrapped up within thirty minutes. Merchant and Gervais didn't want conventional funny — they wanted funny that seemed as if it were ripped from the real world. And the real world, as we all know, is most often uncomfortable, awkward, mortifying.
The show's funniest moments — which, not coincidentally, were also the most painful — were usually marked by their wordlessness. One could fill novels with what was left unspoken. Tim Canterbury (Martin Freeman), the sales rep with a crush on the engaged receptionist, Dawn Tinsley (Lucy Davis), relayed comic sonnets with only a furrowed brow or a mournful stare at the woman he loved but could never have. Wernham Hogg's general manager, David Brent, was a man-child whose ambitions were grossly larger than his talents. Invariably, he would utter something foolish — or unfunny. After a pregnant pause, one could see the flash of panic in Brent's eyes, the nervous twitch of his nose as he sought to put a positive spin on his own stupidity. Every silence was an emotional gulf that the most carefully chosen words could not begin to bridge.
Two seasons of six episodes each (as is the British standard), a two-part Christmas special, and countless awards and critical raves later, Merchant and Gervais ended The Office. But a few years later (July 2005 in the U.K. and September 2005 in the U.S.), they returned with their next show, Extras, which focused on a semi-talented, little-employed actor named Andy Millman (Gervais), striving for his big break in the movie industry.
As with The Office, Extras continued to explore some of Merchant and Gervais's favorite themes: failed ambition, meritless self-regard, the unrelenting desperation of everyday life. This time, Merchant stepped in front of the camera with a major recurring role, but not as the hero. Rather, he became Darren Lamb, an incompetent talent agent who is not nearly as successful as he wishes to be; a man with huge dreams who is forced to earn extra cash as an employee at the Carphone Warehouse.
Another lost soul, yearning to become someone — anyone.
Tell me how The Office began.
I first met Ricky in 1997 at this radio station where we both worked in London called Xfm. Ricky would perform his obnoxious office character as a sort of party piece — really only for me, because it didn't have a name yet. I don't think he did it for anyone else. It was just something he did to amuse the two of us in the office as we worked. It was kind of an observation of the types of people we had both worked with in the past.
Then I left Xfm and joined the BBC. While there, I was asked to make a training film. I said to Ricky, “Listen, we should film that character of yours.” We shot a short film in documentary style, because that was the quickest way to do it. We didn't have to worry about lighting and all those technical matters. It was just necessity; we only had one day to shoot it. We shot it fast with only one cameraman.
When we edited the tape, I was just knocked out by Ricky's performance, especially for someone who had never acted before and who had no intention of doing anything like that. His performance seemed amazingly rare and rich.
So that tape started getting passed around the BBC and the other TV channels, and buzz started to build. We shot an official pilot for BBC in 2001, but it never actually aired.
How did that pilot differ from the final version that we're all familiar with?
It all just felt a bit too prompted, and it didn't seem like it had a documentary feel. In a documentary, there's no real narrative. Usually in a documentary, a narrative is just created unofficially. That's what we wanted to get back to. We wanted audiences to completely accept this world as being a real office and a real environment.
We kind of panicked. We thought, We've blown this, and now we're done. But luckily, the pilot was never broadcast. So we went back to the drawing board and tried to eliminate those transparent elements of storytelling.
I can't imagine The Office being done in any other format but documentary.
In retrospect, no. The show just wasn't funny if we were approaching it as a sitcom. It's only amusing if you think of it as a real place being filmed by a documentary crew. The documentary seemed so vital at that point, because it seemed like all the jokes were dependent on the way that the character David Brent wanted to portray himself versus the way he was being portrayed by the documentary crew.
Another thing we did was to remove the voice-over track with documentary-style narration. This helped, because in the end it meant there wasn't an explicit editorial voice. This allowed David Brent to just dig his own grave.
It sounds as if you had the luxury of not being bothered by executives. You could spend the necessary time discovering what did or did not work for the show's best interests.
It's sort of a constant source of amazement that we didn't get interference from executives. It felt at the time that we were battling for everything, but I think that was because we were new to the whole thing and we had no experience with the horror stories that other people would tell us later.
In retrospect, it was a fairly easy ride. I think the BBC felt that we were acting sensibly, we weren't being silly and we weren't being egomaniacs. We reassured them in that respect — that there was very little that could go wrong. We were very low-budget. They didn't have to pay big star fees.
They had nothing to lose.
Exactly. The show went on the air in the middle of the summer, which is not a big TV time. Really, it kind of snuck out, and there was not a huge kind of fanfare, and not many people really got with it.
Weirdly, the day after the first episode aired, I heard two women talking on the train. One of them said, “Hey, did you see that documentary last night about an office? It was hilarious. There's this crazy boss who runs the place, and he's hysterical.” The other woman said, “That wasn't a documentary. That was a sitcom.” And then the first woman said, “Oh. Then it wasn't very funny.”
I thought, That's strange — you just said you laughed. I think it took people a while to acclimate to it. And eventually they did. People tuned into it, and off it went.
I wonder if it's easier to pull off a new show like The Office in Britain, as opposed to America. It seems that British TV comedy writers are allowed to take more chances than your typical American sitcom writer.
Rob Long, an American writer who wrote for Cheers and who wrote the book Conversations With My Agent [Dutton Adult, 1997], once said that America is kind of like a factory machine — your product goes in one end, and if it comes out as you intended it's only by sheer good fortune and luck.
I have to say that it is a little bit different in England. I think generally, particularly on channels like BBC Two, which is slightly more fringy and more akin to the cable networks in America, you are given enough freedom to do what you want as a writer. At the very least, they give you enough rope to hang yourself.
What kind of audience were you hoping for at first? Were you ever going for the masses?
There's nothing wrong with a huge audience. But in reaching for that h
uge audience, you could possibly compromise your material or maybe try to second-guess what an audience wants. We genuinely thought that The Office was funny and that it was truthful, and maybe there would be a million and a half like-minded people who thought it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. And if that happened, then we'd think, Oh, well, we had fun and that was good. And that would be that.
So when the success started to snowball, it just seemed very bizarre. It became like Godzilla, and it rampaged off through the world.
When you consider some of the great comedians, such as Charlie Chaplin or Woody Allen or the Marx Brothers, they all went through a lengthy process in developing their comic personas, either onstage or elsewhere. Even the animated Homer Simpson character took some time to fully develop. But the David Brent character seemed to emerge fully formed from the beginning — an amazing feat.
In a weird way, Ricky's lack of formal training and his lack of ambition are why that character is so strong. He doesn't have any of the pretensions or the tricks that a lot of actors have. Ricky just approaches acting from what seems the most real. What would this character say? How would he act? It's almost as though Ricky had been storing all this up for years — just taking in observations by osmosis while he was working in offices, and it just seeped into him. He seemed to know exactly how this character would think about everything, and that was remarkable.
But actually, the David Brent character did evolve slightly from when he was first created. The original was a little bit more vindictive and spiteful than the one he would ultimately become. In the pilot, the character is a little bit malicious. In one scene, he turned on Dawn, the receptionist. She made a comment about his drinking, and he launches into her. That was something we eventually toned down. We wanted people to fall in love with David Brent in a strange way and to realize he's not such a terrible person. He's just mixed-up, and he's trying too hard.
Hollywood always talks about “likability.” But the David Brent character is not likable in the traditional Hollywood sense.