And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft

by Mike Sacks

  Mickey Rooney's Weenie World?

  It was a chain of restaurants that Mickey once owned that specialized in Weenie Whirls, round hot dogs on a hamburger bun, with mustard in the central hole. I remember seeing one of the last ones on Long Island when I was out researching remotes for Dave's show. I always planned a visit but never got around to it. Mainly, I was attracted to the term “Weenie World,” as any self-respecting person would be. How can you not love a place called Weenie World?

  Awkward segue: Are you insulted when certain critics invoke the adage that women aren't as funny as men?

  It is very annoying. Especially since it is so patently untrue. I don't understand what is wrong with these guys. I assume we are talking about Mr. Christopher Hitchens, whom I rather admire, and Mr. Jerry Lewis, the man who brought us my very favorite horrible movie, the exquisitely painful Hardly Working. It almost seems beneath me to argue this point. It would be kind of like saying, “People should not own slaves.” For the record, there are a lot of funny women around these days. A lot. Many.

  I think a sense of humor is something that certain people take on as a protective adjustment to the difficulties of childhood. And when it seems to be working, it's a hand that they keep playing. I can tell in just a couple of seconds if I am going to find someone funny. It has nothing to do with gender. It's all attitude and the right kind of brain cells.

  It may also be an intimidation factor. If a man can't keep up with a woman who's faster and more quick-witted and who has a higher “humor I.Q.,” he might lash out.

  This is certainly true. Our culture as a whole is very ambivalent about funny women. But, then again, they do let us get driver's licenses and learn to read and wear shorts, so I guess, relatively speaking, we shouldn't really complain. I'm hopeful that the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler surge has turned the opposing army around once and for all.

  What do you not find funny?

  Comedy with a maudlin center is the opposite of funny. Anything that is meant to trigger both a laugh and bring a tear to the eye has departed the comedy arena for me. Like in a catalog I just received that sells a sign that reads: “Who needs Santa when you've got Grandma?!” Same goes for the apron that says, “Pinot Noir Envy.”

  Any other comedy pet peeves?

  Well, I hate puns. I never find them funny. To me, they are all about, “See what a clever boy or girl I am.” I can't even make the edges of my mouth curl up a little when someone puns at me. I wind up glaring at them.

  I also hate jokes that are made up ass-backward. Someone thinks of a clever piece of verbal gymnastics and then takes the long way around to justify it with a complex setup. The example that comes to mind is a joke that ends with a punch line like “carp-to-carp walleting.” Also, for the most part, I would rather not even read forwarded Internet jokes.

  I hate stock improv-group characters that seem to be based not on observations about people but on other famous and beloved stock improv-group characters. Two that come to mind are the theoretical Sean-Penn-in-Fast-Times-at Ridgemont-High surfer dude and the hair-tossing Valley Girl. If a prototype of these people ever existed, the people now perpetrating the offense never met them. There's a certain kind of old-timey reverend character that is also in this category. And a certain kind of seventies lounge singer. How many of these can we pretend we find amusing?

  This gripe includes hating anecdotes about any kind of stereotypes that don't seem specific enough to have ever been real human beings. And my complaint cuts across all racial and gender lines. Real human beings don't behave in big broad strokes. They behave with tiny, exacting, site-specific details. Your stupid McDonald's employee should be different than mine.

  I hate any clichés. Comedy clichés are as big an offense as Hallmark-card clichés, because in both cases they are trying to manipulate you into a response with something prepackaged. If you're going to get a response from me, I want to hear an individual point of view. If you do an impression, I don't want to see another version of the same film clip everyone else is using. I don't want to see the same Jewish mother or black church lady. I want to see the one you know.

  I hate plots that hinge on amazing coincidences or overheated misunderstandings. I don't like to see life remade as too perfect or adorable.

  I hate people who talk in buzzword cues they've heard other people use and now think amount to humor shorthand. The example that comes to mind is: “He gives good phone.”

  I hate anyone who is wise beyond their years. I don't mind precocious children if they come as a side order with W.C. Fields.

  I don't much like parody songs … the Weird Al genre. And I find the category even more offensive when they're supposedly political. Like “Hark! The Harried Republicans Sing.” Hopefully, there is no such song. I don't mind funny songs. Or political songs. But, such as with everything else I've mentioned, I want original thought.

  And as a rule I hate tit jokes. I think every reasonably funny version of the average tit joke was wrapped up and put to bed about 1720. Same with double entendres. I've seen all the melon and hot dog confusion I need for one lifetime.

  How about things that do work for you? Any advice for novice writers — technical tricks you've found helpful?

  Where rewriting is concerned, I always think, The bologna rises to the top. When I am in the midst of writing, I tend to hear my words in a sort of sing-songy verse and chorus that's almost musical. But once I put the work down for a while and then return to it, I have forgotten the melody I was using and I can read what I have written with the ears of a stranger. You need to find a way to get enough distance from yourself to effectively edit and rewrite your own work. And I do a lot of editing and re-writing. A lot.

  Don't be overly attached to every syllable and detail of your work. Your commitment is to making the whole thing work. So you have to allow yourself to throw out sections you may love if they block the flow or seem unnecessary. Tell yourself you can save them and use them elsewhere later. Even if you never do, lie to yourself if it makes it easier.

  On a related topic, take a moment to imagine how you will feel when your work is published. Anything that you think will make you uncomfortable or ill at ease … get rid of it. Lose anything that makes you cringe, anything you think is questionable. If you are writing about someone you know in real life and are worried that you are being too mean or that maybe you will feel bad and regret it, change or get rid of it. But, at the risk of confusing you entirely, I have also found that sometimes the pieces I write which cause me the most pain and embarrassment are the pieces others like best. Sometimes it is by working through areas of personal discomfort that you stumble to where your own growth is taking place.

  You have to allow your first draft to be really bad. Just throw a lot of things out there and get it on paper. The hardest part of the process is just getting a first full draft. The fun part, if any of it can be considered fun, is when you start to improve the piece through the editing and re-writing. That is definitely where the art is; knowing what to save, what to throw out, what to embellish.

  In the end, nothing works except sitting down to write. And then, even sadder, actually writing. Robert Benchley wrote a funny piece called “How to Get Things Done” [Chips Off the Old Benchley, 1949]. In it, he explains his premise: “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” He describes putting up shelves, clipping magazines, sharpening pencils. You don't get any writing done, but you get all this other work done. At the very least, it's not a complete waste of time.

  You have a very strong and distinct comedic voice. How does a young writer of humor find his or her own voice?

  One easy way would be to sit down and write a bunch of material that includes the personal pronoun “I.” Even if you keep a journal, you are hearing your own voice.

  Another way would be to begin to analyze why you like what you like. When you can isolate and put your finger on the mechanism you can try to duplica
te it in an original way and then apply it.

  Count on the fact that, yes, almost everything has been done before, but not necessarily informed with your perspective and details that will make it different.

  You just used the word “mechanism.” What does that mean exactly?

  Everything has an underlying structure, some kind of a formula, and leave it to me to analyze and identify it. I do that with everything I see or hear. I also do it with everything I read. Consequently, I drive very abstract people nuts.

  You see a piece of written work as having structure — like, say, a blueprint or a machine would?

  You don't? I see an underlying structure in everything, everywhere on the planet — including random remarks, bad behavior, and this interview.

  In that case, can you see a good way to end this interview?

  Yes, but we'd have to start from the very beginning.

  Famous Last Words (of Advice)

  I'd suggest you stay away from irony or satire; there's very little money in it. You're likely to wind up with reviews — like some of mine — that say, “I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.” There's no such question in Dickens. Most readers would prefer to know exactly where they stand, where the author stands, and how to respond. Ergo, no irony permitted.

  I also like the writer Grace Paley's single piece of advice: “Keep a low overhead.”

  As for television writers, in comedy or drama, there's a simple rule: Include the line “We have to talk,” even if your characters have done nothing but for half an hour. Producers love that line. Writers are brought in and paid a fortune for their ability — and willingness — to write that line.

  — Bruce Jay Friedman, The Collected Works of Bruce Jay Friedman

  Paul Feig

  Life, especially before the age of twenty-one, is filled with mortifying and embarrassing moments. And while most of us would just as soon forget them, Paul Feig has been writing down his bad memories and welcoming — even encouraging — the world to laugh.

  Feig's body of work, which ranges from TV shows to humor books, has been described by Relevant magazine as its own genre — that of the “masochistic memoir.” It's sometimes painful to read his stories, because Feig never sugarcoats his past or spins even the worst personal humiliation into a tidy lesson. As frequently as you cringe at the unspeakable horrors Feig has endured, and it can happen frequently, you still find yourself laughing. If he has accomplished nothing else, he's proved a universal truth about human nature: Tragedy is when something bad happens to you; comedy is when something bad happens to somebody else. Or, as Mel Brooks so eloquently put it, “Tragedy is when I get a hangnail. Comedy is when someone falls into an open manhole and dies.”

  Feig began writing down his life stories in the eighties, when he was fresh out of USC film school with few prospects in Hollywood. Broke and out of ideas, he signed on as a contestant for Dick Clark's $25,000 Pyramid game show and earned enough ($29,000) to support himself while he launched his stand-up career. After six months on the comedy- club circuit, he had generated so much material — much of it about his awkward high-school years — that he decided to write a memoir, which he tentatively titled School. The project was subsequently shelved.

  Then, in 1999, thanks to a short-lived but critically beloved TV show called Freaks and Geeks, Feig became, if not famous, at least more well-known than he had been during his stand-up days. Although the show — about a group of teenagers (both cool and geeky) living in Michigan — was technically fiction, Feig has admitted that many of the story lines were at least partly autobiographical. There were the obvious similarities: the show was set in small-town Chippewa, Michigan, similar to Feig's hometown of Mount Clemens, a Detroit suburb. But the parallels ran deeper than geography. All of the characters, particularly the “geeks,” were in some fashion composites of Feig's younger self. And the plots were often based on his (and the other writers') actual high-school experiences. When gawky nerd Bill Haverchuck (portrayed by Martin Starr) dressed up as the Bionic Woman for Halloween, it was inspired by Feig's own experience with cross-dressing.

  Freaks and Geeks was canceled after just twelve episodes (six were later seen on the ABC Family cable network and then, later, on DVD), but it continues to have a loyal cult following even today, with fan conventions and viewing parties held across the country. At a cast reunion at San Francisco's Sketchfest in 2008, Linda Cardellini, who played brainy, unsettled, Lindsay Weir, admitted that she initially didn't believe the show was anything but the product of a very active imagination. “Then you would look at Paul,” she told the website buzzsugar.com, “[and] you'd see the earnest look on his face and the sadness in his eyes, and you'd realize that most of this happened to [him].”

  In 2000, a book editor and Freaks and Geeks fan from Random House recognized this same sadness, and Feig was soon a published author, with the 2002 memoir Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence, and then, in 2005, Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year Old Virgin. Readers learned that Feig's youth was, to put it diplomatically, hellish. Whether it was his classmates demonstrating how easily “Feig” turned into “fag,” or his first kiss with a girl who had just puked at a school dance, things never came simply for him. Even masturbation, the only dependable bright spot in even the most miserable teenage existence, was ruined after Feig heard a radio preacher warn that “each time you masturbate, God takes one day off of your life.”

  Feig still occasionally writes for TV, but his main focus, as always, remains writing stories about his past. He's working on another memoir, the third in his “trilogy of shame,” which will include, among others, an essay about his one-time day job as Ronald McDonald.

  One can only assume that things don't end so well for Ronald.

  When I read memoirs, especially those written by humor writers or comedians, I often get the sense that much of it is fictionalized. When faced with a choice between going for the laugh or the truth, those writers usually choose the former. But I didn't get that feeling with your books.

  I'm very much a purist about memoirs and the truth in stories. As far as I'm concerned, a memoir story only gets its power when it's true. At some point during a story, especially if it's a funny one, a reader or viewer should be thinking, I can't believe that happened. I can't believe he or she did that. But if you're ever thinking, No, that's fake, then it just neuters the whole thing.

  I mean, look — I can think of a lot of funnier endings for everything that's ever happened to me in my life, but that's not the point. Most of the experiences I've written about were just awful. They were painful and upsetting and horrible. And yet that's the great thing about humor. You can take those experiences, and if you recount them in a funny way, and if they're truthful and real, they will always become funnier.

  That sounds like the sensibility of Freaks and Geeks.

  Well, exactly. I've never considered myself to be a writer who's great at making up stories and plots. What happens when you make up a story is that you tend to fall into this standard set of A leads to B leads to C. We're all used to a standard trajectory for television and the movies; there's a typical route that a writer can go in a story.

  When we were doing Freaks and Geeks, we always wanted to avoid that typical route. Real-life experiences are rife with bad decision-making. And bad decision- making is, in a lot of ways, the key to comedy.

  I go through such a rigorous process of not making up material in my memoirs that my wife gets mad. She yelled at me when she read my manuscript for the longer version of Superstud — the one that didn't make the final cut. She told me that I didn't have to be so honest, that I didn't have to tell these stories exactly as they happened.

  But if I did that, I might as well have written a novel.

  Considering the stories you put into Superstud, I shudder to think what was left out.

  [Laughs] Well, here's one story I left out: When I was about nineteen or twenty, I went out on a date with this younger girl who was really cute. We
went to this bar, and we were sitting in a booth talking. My date excused herself to go to the bathroom. The booth was close to the bathroom, and I could hear this girl urinating. And it sounded like a fire hose.

  We actually wrote that scene into a Freaks and Geeks episode, but we ended up taking it out. It was one of the times when the Sam character was getting close to dating Cindy. They were on a date, and Cindy had to go to the ladies' room, but it was out of order. So she went into the men's room, with Sam standing guard outside the door. He heard her urinating, and it really upset him.

  Your wife had a problem with that story making its way into Superstud, but not some of the other stories? Such as when you attempted to give yourself a blow job as a twenty-something and nearly broke your neck in the process?

  Oh, that she will not talk about! When I first showed her that chapter, she said, “You absolutely cannot publish that! Just don't!” So I thought, Yeah, maybe she's right. I called my publisher and told her take it out, but the publisher said, “It's too late. Sorry. That's the sample chapter I sent out to all the booksellers.”

  What was the reaction from your family and friends after they read that self-gratification scene?

  I mean, that's the risk you take. It was scary for me. Would readers relate to it? Or would I be the only person in history who's ever done this? That's the strange thing about being a writer. At first it's just you and your computer, or you and your pen and paper. And no one is going to read it. You think, I'm just going to be honest. I'm just going to have this confession with myself. And you put it down. And then off the manuscript goes to the publisher, and there's always that moment when you think, Oh my god! Now it's out there. But if I think too much the other way, I wouldn't put out half the stuff that I do.

  I grew up in a religious family. My parents never talked about sex, even though this was a time when people were very sexually promiscuous — the seventies. In our house, that was obviously not the case. My father abhorred the whole sixties and seventies sexual freeness. It was not a comfortable topic. And to this day I don't like talking about sex. But that's why it's fun to write about.