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

by Mike Sacks

  The way you depicted your parents in both of your books is refreshing. Most memoir writers are so negative when portraying their parents, but you seem to have a real affection for yours.

  I think that holds true not just for memoir writers but for almost everyone in comedy. It's clear that most comedians and humor writers hate their parents. I loved my parents, and we got along great. But that's really just how I approach humor. I prefer the humor of optimism. I naturally go into a situation thinking everything is going to be okay and everything will be really good.

  Is that a Midwestern sensibility?

  I think so, but it's hard to say. Maybe there is that sensibility from the Midwest — where you just hope and want for everything to turn out fine in the end.

  What I do know is that people in the Midwest seem to be a little more emotionally honest — maybe their bullshit meter is higher. And I think that the Midwestern sense of humor is about honesty and realism.

  When I first arrived in Hollywood and started writing comedy in the late eighties and early nineties, I found that executives would always react more positively to over-the-top characters. They preferred the nerds with the big glasses, who snorted and laughed really loud. And I hated that. It was fake and wrong.

  Such as Revenge of the Nerds?

  Yes, exactly. Those were the types of characters the executives were looking for. People always ask me, “Don't you just love that movie?” I always think, Actually, no, I sort of hate that movie. It feels ridiculous.

  The kind of comedy I don't like is when the performers and writers are winking and basically saying, “I know this is stupid and you know this is stupid. I'm not really this dumb, but I'm playing as if I am.” And that's fine, I suppose, but it's dishonest and it's kind of mean to the characters.

  With that said, I don't mind a broad comedy when I believe what's going on and when the characters are authentic. That's what we tried so hard to accomplish with Freaks and Geeks.

  How did Freaks and Geeks come about?

  I wrote the spec script in 1998 and showed it to Judd Apatow, who loved it. Judd had a deal with DreamWorks, which bought the script, and the executives loved it. DreamWorks sent it over to NBC, and they also loved it, to the point where they said, “Don't change anything.” This is all unheard of, really. I was very lucky.

  This happens very infrequently. At that point, when we had the go-ahead, we started thinking about the cast.

  We wanted to avoid the typical beautiful actors you find in most high-school TV shows. We didn't want models. We didn't want characters who were going to take off their glasses and let their hair down and then, all of a sudden, they're gorgeous.

  Also, there was another element of casting that was very important to Judd and I: when you cast actors and actresses, especially in comedies, you often look for what you've envisioned in your head. So, when an actor comes in who's just so weird and different and not at all what you envisioned, there might be a tendency to say, “No, I'm sorry. You aren't what we had in mind.” But I think that's wrong. More exciting things can happen when you take chances.

  There were a few instances when we hired actors who were different from our original vision, and it just lent so much more substance to the show. We actually ended up including the actors' personalities in their characters' personalities.

  Which characters in particular?

  The actor who played Harris Trinsky [Stephen Lea Sheppard] is a good example. This was somebody we discovered in Canada, and we knew we had to add him to the cast. Seth Rogen, who played Ken Miller, we found in an open call in Vancouver. His character was barely in the pilot. Also, Jason Segel, who played Nick Andopolis — originally, his character was this little weaselly stoner. When Jason came in to audition, he was this big, strapping guy who was a basketball hero in real life. We later funneled that into the show.

  The Sam Weir character was originally based on me. He was supposed to be a tall, gangly kid who was attacked by bullies smaller than him. That happened to me when I was in school. All of my bullies were two feet shorter than I was — it was just ridiculous. But when John Francis Daley, who played Sam, came in, he was just so real and so funny and so heartbreaking that it was not a problem to jettison that initial idea and change the bully aspect.

  Once we started hanging out with the actors, the show started to write itself. We put a lot of real elements in, even specific moments. If two actors were mad at each other on the set, something similar would end up in the script. There was a moment during the shooting of the “Looks and Books” episode when Linda Cardellini, who played Lindsay, and James Franco, who played Daniel Desario, weren't getting along. So we worked that into the scene where Lindsay screams at Daniel after she wrecks her parents' car. It's funny, and it's real, and that's what makes these characters seem like your friends.

  To me, that's really the difference between television and movies. I feel that movies are mostly about spectacle and huge stories. There are exceptions, but I find that that's usually the case. On the other hand, TV is about assembling a group of friends that you visit and hang out with every week.

  One of my favorite characters in TV history is Jim from Taxi. He's a completely outrageous character, but you buy it because, as nuts as Jim is, there's a humanity about him. He's not winking and nodding. There's this sense of, I'm a weird guy, but this is just who I am.

  Freaks and Geeks is one of the most honest depictions of childhood and the teen years that I've ever seen — on television, anyway.

  One of my pet peeves is when comedy writers write for kids and there's this attitude of, “If I knew then what I know now.” That's why you get all these portrayals of wisecracking kids who put down the bully and the bully goes running off. That's all bullshit. That never happens — except in fiction.

  It's almost as if comedy writers, who were most likely geeks in high school, now want to spin or sugarcoat their experiences as teens. They didn't get laid in high school, but they make sure their characters do.

  That's just it. I've never been ashamed of my childhood. But I think a lot of comedy writers are ashamed of their younger selves. And I think that's why a lot of these people go into humor in the first place: the only thing you have to hide behind is comedy.

  There's a lot of anger there, too. I did stand-up for a few years, and a good number of comics I met were extremely angry people. They were not pleasant. That's actually one of the things that drove me out of stand-up. I didn't like going on the road, because you never knew if you were going to get stuck with a head-case or not. And I noticed one thing: comics love to be laughed with, but if people laugh at them, they fucking lose their shit.

  I've seen more comics storm off the stage and yell at people, slam their mics down, and do weirder things than you could ever imagine. There's a real insecurity that comes with being funny. You're on a razor's edge. Comedy is an attempt to control things, and it just so happens that you're trying to control people through laughter. But laughter can go off the rails at any given point.

  It all goes back to childhood. You can make the cheerleaders laugh, but if you say the wrong thing they're going to laugh at you and not with you. This can happen very quickly. Horribly quickly. So all this weird anger and resentment builds up.

  Another realistic element of Freaks and Geeks is that the kids actually sound like real kids.

  That's another thing that drives me crazy. I hate it when kids talk like adults; it drives me insane. I find that kids who actually talk like real kids are much funnier. The idea of even trying to jam adult thoughts and jokes into their mouths is just ridiculous.

  This especially holds true with jokes. How many 15-year-olds are capable of coming up with jokes as sharp and as funny as those of a professional comedy writer?

  Absolutely. There aren't too many kids who can come up with a hilarious joke. The characters in Freaks and Geeks often make unfunny jokes that could have been easily fixed by the writers. But that, to me, is much more amusing. The Sa
m character is very much based on who I was as a kid and as a comedy fan. I did so many unsuccessful comedy routines for friends when I was young. I used to dress like Groucho, and all that.

  When you're a kid, your only refuge is through the comedy of successful people. All you do is quote lines from funny Hollywood movies.

  What did Hollywood represent for you as a kid growing up outside Detroit?

  It was like a magical fairyland for me. I thought every actor I saw on TV lived in a mansion and drove a Rolls-Royce. They were all rich and wore tuxedos all the time. When I first saw the reality of it, it just depressed the hell out of me. I first came out here in the early eighties. I drove onto Hollywood Boulevard, and the first thing that happened was that two hookers jumped onto the hood of my car. And I've never forgotten the shock that I felt with that.

  Are you still friends with them?

  I am, actually. They're coming over for dinner tonight.

  What were some of the jobs you worked when you first arrived in Hollywood?

  I worked as a tour guide at Universal Studios. Many of us guides were these deluded actor wannabes who thought that we were going to be discovered. It was ridiculous. I almost died because of that job. I was giving a tour, and a woman was dangling one of her clogs over the side of the tram, and the clog fell out just as we were passing the mechanized shark from Jaws. When I went to retrieve her shoe, I fell into the water and almost got sucked into the shark gears. I thought, I am going to die in front of this tour group — killed by a fake shark.

  Probably not the most ideal way to leave this earth.

  No, not at all. But it would have made for a hell of a story back in Detroit. Anyway, after that job, I went to USC film school, and when I graduated, I worked as a script reader for the producer Michael Phillips. He had produced The Sting and Taxi Driver. I was in charge of reading the scripts that were submitted to his office and passing along the ones I thought were good.

  Actually, that experience was much more valuable than film school.

  How so?

  Film school was so theoretical, and there were so many rules that really fucked me up. There was one rule in particular they were always teaching, and it was right out of good old Syd Field's book Screenplay. And it had to do with “theme.” The theme of the movie is always this leads to that. “Jealousy” leads to “downfall.” One thing leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to the end. Everything is set up in a logical, well-thought-out manner.

  But I couldn't do that; I was just unable to break down a movie that way. It messed me up for years. I couldn't even get out of the gate, because I couldn't make anything work. I would get hung up on semantics and minutiae. And because I'm such a rule-follower, when I first started out this killed me, because it was so theoretical.

  Another thing I learned as a script reader was that 99.9 percent of the scripts that are written are basically terrible. This just blew my mind. It actually gave me a lot of confidence. I was reading scripts supposedly written by the best writers in the business, people who made a career of screenwriting, and I thought, If these are the best writers in the business, and they're producing this shit, then I can do just as well — and hopefully better. It gave me the confidence to say, okay, this is not a mysterious kind of skill.

  My whole life, I've always looked at things and thought they were more complicated than they really were. I would see writers portrayed on TV or in the movies, and they would sit down and they would type out a manuscript and it would turn out brilliant. That, for me, was how writing was supposed to be.

  You thought that a writer had to produce a flawless piece of work quickly and easily?

  Yes. A piece of writing had to come out perfectly or you were not a writer. Well, the process became a lot less mysterious to me after I read those scripts. It freed me up to write what I wanted.

  Freaks and Geeks was only on the air for one season, 1999–2000, before it was canceled. In retrospect, would you have done anything differently that might have improved your chances of staying on the air longer?

  When I created that show, I honestly thought, Who wouldn't relate to something like this? Who wouldn't want to see true stories from their past shown in a funny, realistic way? And maybe I didn't bank on the fact that there were a lot of people who didn't want to re-experience those years. But I found out pretty quickly.

  Here's a good example: I was talking with a TV critic when the show was on the air. We were discussing the episode “I'm With the Band” — this is when the Nick character auditions as a group's drummer. Nick is terrible and embarrasses himself in front of Lindsay, the girl he wants to impress. And the critic said to me, “When Nick walked into that audition, I had to leave the room. I knew everything was going to go wrong, and I couldn't deal with it.”

  I remember when the movie Independence Day was coming out. I was sitting in a theater, and the preview for that movie came on. And it showed a huge spaceship blowing up the White House. I remember thinking, Well, this is going to be the biggest movie ever. It hit the pleasure center of the audience's brains. The problem with Freaks and Geeks was that it didn't hit that pleasure center. It played in the pain center.

  How about the pleasurable-pain center? Can't a comedy play in that part of the brain?

  How many people enjoy that part of their brain?

  A lot, I would think. The show eventually found a huge audience after it went off the air, particularly because of DVD.

  There's a large DVD audience, true. But in the grand scheme of things, that show was a blip on the radar. Hollywood is a numbers game. And that's not to say that Hollywood doesn't care about quality, but that they only want the quality when it's going to bring in money. Nobody in Hollywood wants to do something that they're proud of but that nobody is going to see.

  For so many weeks, we were one of the lowest-rated shows on NBC, and we were not a cheap show. We were on Saturday night at eight. We got knocked off the air constantly. We were pre-empted for baseball playoffs. We were off the air for two months at one point. In the end, only twelve out of the eighteen episodes were ever shown during that first run. Later, all of the episodes were shown on the Fox Family cable network. And they're now on the DVDs, of course.

  Do you think the show could have found its audience if it had stayed on the air longer?

  It never got to that point. The president of NBC at the time, Garth Ancier, hated the show. Absolutely hated it. Judd [Apatow] met with him once, and Garth was complaining about the “Girlfriends and Boyfriends” episode, in which Sam finally gets a date with Cindy Sanders and all she does is talk about this jock she has a crush on. And Garth dressed down Judd. He was like, okay, you have the hero. And he's finally going on a date with the girl he loves. And she tells him that she's in love with somebody else?

  This just blew his mind — that it was taken to that level and then, worse, there would be no payoff. He wanted a victory at the end of each episode. My feeling was that there are no victories when you're a geek. Actually, I take that back. There is a victory: you still have your friends, and you've gotten through the experience alive. That's the biggest victory you can have in high school.

  You really got away with some edgy material, especially for a show that aired prime time. I'm thinking in particular of “The Little Things” episode, in which the Ken Miller character learns that his girlfriend is a hermaphrodite.

  For a show like Freaks and Geeks, you come up with a million ideas and every one of those ideas will fit somewhere in some episode. But you need the show to be grounded. When it's grounded — when the characters are living, breathing, real people — then you, as a writer, can do practically anything with them. But you have to treat the characters and the ideas with respect. We're not saying that this young woman is a Martian. We're not saying that she's half-donkey. There are hermaphrodites and transgender people out there in the world. So, what if one of these people — this living, breathing person — walked into our lives? What would ha
ppen? And if you face it that way, the only challenge is keeping it real.

  Your natural instincts with an idea like that is to make fun of the situation. But I always prefer to defend the underdogs. I have great empathy for people like that — and that's really why I have the hardest time writing about characters who are kind of cool and on top of their games.

  But weren't the “freak” characters, such as Daniel and Kim, at the top of their games and considered cool?

  They were, but they were still outsiders. That was really my whole motivation for making Freaks and Geeks. In high school, I was afraid of the freaks. But I ended up befriending a few of them, and I found that they were on the periphery — just like I was as a geek. I realized, Oh, these people are just like me. They're just going about it in a different way. The geeks used comedy and Dungeons & Dragons to hide, whereas the freaks used drugs and sex to hide. There were other differences, of course, but there was overlap, and both groups could talk the same language.

  In other words, one high-school clique can bleed into the next, as opposed to The Breakfast Club — style cliques, which are so delineated?

  Right, those are sort of caricatures. Real life doesn't work like that.

  The anchor of Freaks and Geeks, Lindsay, was very well-written, very well-defined. This is another aspect that one doesn't find too often in television shows about high school — a very strong, exceedingly intelligent female character.

  I feel closest to Lindsay. I wanted to create a character who saw the world of high school for what it was. So, what's the best way to do that? It's with a girl who is more mature and smarter than everyone else at the school. But I didn't want this character to be wisecracking. I wanted a real character who was stranded. She's sort of our tour guide, because we've all been stuck and stranded in high school.

  We've all been in the jail that Lindsay now finds herself in. Some people liked that situation; some people didn't. Some had varying degrees of resignation to it. Lindsay sees it for what it is, and that, for me, becomes the best type of character.