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

by Mike Sacks

  I remember this one time in particular, I came up with a Harpo bit for Go West. Harpo was in a face-off with another cowboy. It was our High Noon situation, where they both slowly walk toward each other, but at the last second, Harpo pulls out a whisk broom and dusts the dandruff off the cowboy's shoulder. The broom then accidentally fired. It diffused the tension and got a big laugh.

  How was Chico to work with?

  He paid no attention. None. He showed up for shooting when he could remember it, but his mind was really only on gambling and women.

  Groucho was truly the spokesman and the front man for the rest of the brothers. You could even say he was a type of producer, because the actual producers never really had anything to contribute — from a comic standpoint. I would read the producers the script, and they might say, “A little long, trim this part a bit.” On the other hand, Groucho would carefully read each joke, and by the end, when he said, “That's good,” then that was that. That was the version of the script we shot. Once Groucho approved a script, he almost never questioned a line once he was on the set. Groucho respected what was on the paper — at least when I was involved. I don't know how he was with his other screenwriters.

  So the Marx Brothers never improvised scenes or dialogue on the films you worked with them on?

  Never. Groucho always sounded like he was making up a joke on the spot — that was his talent. But his jokes were always very carefully written. Then again, he wasn't against telling me, “This line is a little hard for me to say. Can you rephrase it?” And I would do as much.

  Were the Marx Brothers directed? I imagine they knew exactly what they wanted and weren't necessarily open to suggestions.

  The Marx Brothers were not hooligans. When a director would say, “I think that if you do this a little over here it might be better,” they really did appreciate it. They were not out to kill the director, necessarily. However, they had no respect for Edward Buzzell, the director of At the Circus and Go West. The brothers went through their paces on those two pictures — and nothing more.

  In my opinion, the kind of work that Buzzell did with the Marx Brothers was not the type of work that made them better. Sam Wood, who directed A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, directed them differently — and more effectively. He shot the films dead-on straight, as if they were dramas. He didn't have the actors mincing around acting cute, which is what Buzzell did.

  Can you give me a specific example?

  Take a look at A Night at the Opera. That film was very successful because opera is a damn serious subject. And that only made the comedy funnier, having that anarchy bumping against the serious. It wasn't as easy to pull off with Go West or At the Circus. The circus is funny on its own. And when you throw in more funny, it becomes too much. You need a solid framework.

  How did Hollywood's Production Code, adopted in 1930, affect your writing? Did you feel hamstrung by the limitations it set forth?

  It's strange what the Hays Office [which ran the Production Code] would and would not accept. When it came to a line like, say, a joke that had to do with violence, it was okay. When it had to do with sex, it was often not okay.

  Even with the Production Code, you did manage to sneak some very dark jokes into your Marx Brothers movies. I'm thinking in particular of the scene in Go West in which Groucho asks a stranger in a bar: “Didn't we meet at Monte Carlo the night you blew your brains out? How we laughed!”

  You had to play games with the type of material you could get into a film. It's much easier now — there are far fewer restrictions.

  But you really had to be clever in the way you went about writing certain jokes. There's a sequence in At the Circus where the actress Eve Arden plays a character who walks on the ceiling. She's the girlfriend of the crook who's stolen a wallet with $10,000 in it. Groucho suspects her of being involved with the theft, and he very openly accuses her. He then watches as she puts the wallet down her cleavage.

  I needed a line for this moment, to bridge the action, so I wrote a line where Groucho looks directly at the camera and says: “There must be some way of getting the money back without getting in trouble with the Hays Office.”

  The director was mortified to insert that line — he just wouldn't do it. He was replaced and the joke made the cut. A few weeks later, an audience watched a sneak preview, and the biggest laugh in the movie came with that line. Groucho later said it was the biggest laugh he had ever received in his career. The audience laughed so long and so hard that extra footage was added after that joke. Otherwise, the audience would have drowned out the dialogue that followed. That happened sometimes — when we were lucky.

  So the Marx Brothers films were shown to audiences and then tweaked in the editing room?

  No, not the films. The brothers would travel around the country performing the script live. They did this for all of the films, I think, except for At the Circus, which would have been impossible. But I do know they did this for A Night at the Opera. Four or five of the writers, including George Seaton, a friend of mine, traveled with the production and managed to get some added jokes into the movie. They also cut out some dead wood on the road, which only helped.

  Go West went out on the road, and I would stand in the wings as it played in these vaudeville theaters. The brothers would perform the script, and singers would come out between sketches and perform. An M.C. provided the audience with the plot. This was done four times a day.

  It's incredible the amount of work that went into honing these scripts.

  In most cases, the jokes worked. But if a joke didn't work, I would replace it in time for the next show, and certainly in time for the movie. Chico, of course, couldn't remember a damn thing, so we had a guy in the wings who would read out his lines. If you were sitting in the theater, you could have heard this guy behind the curtain, whispering out the jokes before Chico said them.

  Yes, it was a good way to sharpen the movie. It was a good technique.

  Beyond the language issue, how do you think comedy has changed from when you first started writing?

  Comedy these days takes on subjects that have some sort of importance in the cultural or political life of the country. Now a writer can now talk about abortion, the death penalty, immigration. I don't even know if I would have wanted to deal with the abortion issue and other issues when I was writing, but it would have been nice to know that I could have touched on something real if I had wanted to.

  Here's another major difference: I had to create a lot more material than today's comedy writers. When I wrote for The Life of Riley in the early fifties, I had to write most of the twenty-six episodes — by myself.

  My point is that there are writers in Hollywood now who make a quarter-million for writing five fucking jokes per episode. I'd be a millionaire if I were starting now.

  What's your opinion of the romantic interludes in the Marx Brothers movies?

  Personally, I hated them. Just hated them. The difference between the Marx Brothers movies that I was involved with and the movies that came before was that Irv Thalberg, the producer of those earlier movies, cast very good actors and actresses for the romance portions. What I got was garbage. The two young actors who played the lovers in At the Circus, Kenny Baker and Florence Rice, had as much chemistry as Metamucil.

  The romantic interludes were really an intrusion. However, the audiences at the time did like them.

  Really? I know quite a few fans in the present day, including myself, who can't stand them.

  Like I said, I hated them, but they were in the movie for a reason. It gave the Marx Brothers a reason to do something besides running around and cracking jokes. If you look at the so-called plotting in A Night at the Opera, or in my specific case, At the Circus, the brothers are trying to help a young couple out. In Go West, they're doing it for Diana Lewis, because the bad guys want to take away her land. You see what I mean?

  You don't think the movies would have been as popular without those subplots?
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br />   If you cut out the subplots, why would you be interested in what the Marx Brothers were doing? Who would they be doing it for?

  Themselves?

  No. A selfish gain? They have to act altruistically. You need certain things in film. You need that romance. But also need a villian in movies. Do you remember the scene at the end of Go West when the Marx Brothers are riding a train, and they want to escape the bad guys, but they run out of coal? And they start to burn the wood from the train, itself? If you can believe it, the producers wanted to take out that sequence. I said, “If you take that out, you have no end to the goddamn movie!”

  Why did they want to take it out?

  It was going to cost too much.

  So the long romantic interludes could stay, but not the funniest scene?

  Right. Eventually the producer came around, and told me, “I just don't know how we can cut it.” So it stayed.

  How confident were you, as a writer, that a joke would work on the screen?

  This is certainly immodest, but I was almost positive every time.

  Now, that's not anything I'm bragging about — it just happened to me. It doesn't mean I'm a genius. It only means that somehow I had a way of doing this without any courses or college or teachers. What happened, happened genetically — that's the only way I can explain it. I don't take bows for that, but I am happy about it.

  Can a writer learn such a thing, or is it merely instinct?

  See, that's where I may be wrong, but I don't believe you can teach that. I don't believe you can teach anybody to be a top comedy writer. If anything, you have to teach yourself.

  Why did you stop working with the Marx Brothers in 1940 after Go West?

  I didn't want to keep writing for the Marx Brothers. I just figured that it was enough already. I wanted to work on other movies, do other things.

  One of which is a long-forgotten little film called The Wizard of Oz.

  For that movie, I was brought in to spike up a few lines of dialogue between three of the main characters: the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow. Mervyn LeRoy, the producer, thought the script could use more comedy. For about a week I gave each of the three characters new lines, which LeRoy approved.

  Do you remember the jokes you wrote?

  It was so long ago I don't remember the specific lines, but one had to do with Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion, boxing and saying, “Put 'em up! Put 'em up!”

  Did you have any idea at the time that The Wizard of Oz was going to become such a big hit?

  Not really. I did love the songs. I knew the songwriter Harold Arlen and the lyricist Yip Harburg. I was friendly with Harburg, and I ran into him one day on the studio lot. He said, “We just finished a song, and we like it. Do you want to hear it?”

  I said yes and walked into a room with a piano, and this little girl was standing there. I had no idea who she was, but I later learned that her name was Judy Garland. They played the song, and this girl sang it, and I just knew it was wonderful.

  So you were one of the first people to ever hear Judy Garland sing “Over the Rainbow”?

  I was one of the first, yes. And I just knew the song was special.

  Let's talk about some of the other humor writers who were out in Hollywood at this time. Did you know George S. Kaufman?

  I loved him. I befriended Kaufman when I came out to California. He was already Groucho's friend, and he had already written Broadway musicals, as well as the script for A Night at the Opera. He was a genius.

  When I was with him, I was always happy to be in the presence of someone who was this good. I loved George, but he was a sour man — as most humorists are.

  How about S. J. Perelman?

  I thought that Perelman was a wonderful humorist in his books and in his short pieces for The New Yorker. But, as a person, he was not so nice. He seemed anti-social.

  Dorothy Parker?

  Only a hello. I saw her at the Round Table at the Algonquin when I had lunch there once.

  Who else was at the Algonquin that day?

  Harpo. Alex Wolcott. Edna Ferber [author of the novels Show Boat and Giant]. George S. Kaufman. Harold Ross. I've forgotten who else.

  What was Harold Ross, the founder and first editor of The New Yorker, like?

  He was kind of a crotchety guy, but sharp. I'd only talked to him one time. I said, “Mr. Ross, I'm an avid reader of your magazine, and I'm curious: it seems like your movie reviewers really dislike movies.” In a drawl, he said, “I wouldn't have a reviewer that liked the goddamn movies!”

  He had scorn for the cinema. Now, that didn't mean that there wasn't a staff reviewer who didn't rave about movies, but Ross, the top editor, didn't like them at all.

  Many of the readers of this book weren't born when you started writing humor. In fact, many of the readers' grandparents hadn't yet been born. If anyone in this book is entitled to give young humor writers advice, it's you.

  I would say that if you think you're funny, then do it. As long as people genuinely respond to what you produce, keep at it. If their laughs seem genuine, keep writing. And don't stop. Never stop.

  On the other hand, if nobody likes what you create, well … find another profession. Like interviewing.

  Thank you for your time. I hope to speak to you again one day.

  Don't wait too long.

  Ten months after this interview took place, Irv Brecher passed away at the age of 94 in Los Angeles.

  Bob Odenkirk

  Bob Odenkirk's Three Rules of Writing

  1. Finish all errands and chores before picking up pen and paper!

  2. Put down pen and paper — computers are where it's at nowadays.

  3. Play computer games.

  There's an urban legend about Bob Odenkirk that goes something like this: In the late 1980s, when Odenkirk was a staff writer for Saturday Night Live, Al Franken — also a writer on the show — pitched his Stuart Smalley character to the entire cast. Franken insisted that he was the only person who could possibly play Stuart. Odenkirk listened quietly, and then raised his hand to ask the question everybody at the table was thinking but didn't dare voice.

  “Here's an idea,” Odenkirk suggested. “Why don't we let one of the actors do it?”

  Depending on which version of the story you hear — and there are at least two — Fran-ken either leaped across the table and punched Odenkirk in the face, or he kicked his own chair and injured himself so badly that he couldn't perform at all.

  If either of these stories is true — and even if they aren't — there's a lesson to be learned. Writers write, and the best of them are satisfied solely by tackling the often near-impossible task of putting words down onto the page in a coherent fashion.

  Although Odenkirk hasn't always adhered to this truism — most notably when he performed in his comedy cult classic Mr. Show with Bob and David — he has proved time and again that, at heart, he's a comedy writer, perhaps one of the most brilliant in television.

  In 1990, Odenkirk briefly joined Second City in Chicago, where he appeared in a critically lauded sketch revue called “Flag Smoking Permitted in Lobby Only or Censorama.” While most of the cast were interested in showcasing themselves as performers, Odenkirk was busy coming up with ideas for others. For his friend and castmate Chris Farley, he created the character Matt Foley, a motivational speaker who scared teens with a warning about his own disastrous situation: “Thirty-five years old, thrice divorced, and living in a van down by the river!”

  When Farley was hired by Saturday Night Live that same year, he took Foley with him, who became one of his — and the show's — most recognized and popular recurring characters. He gave Odenkirk full credit, of course, but the glory belonged to Farley.

  Odenkirk's career has been filled with successes and failures, obscurity and slight notoriety. After leaving SNL, he joined the writing staffs of such short-lived shows as Chris Elliott's Fox sitcom Get a Life in 1991, and the critically beloved The Ben Stiller Show for its on
ly season, also on Fox, in 1992. He briefly wrote for Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 1993, but left to join forces with David Cross (another Ben Stiller Show writer) to create, in 1995, Mr. Show for HBO.

  Mr. Show was one of those rare comedy masterpieces, such as Monty Python's Flying Circus, that managed to break the rules while making it all seem easy. With skits about Satanism, cock rings, and mentally challenged parents — all loosely connected by a narrative thematic thread — Mr. Show was consistently more intelligent and irreverent than anything else on television. But despite critical raves, Odenkirk and Cross's style of humor failed to attract a mainstream audience (or what counts for one on Monday mornings at midnight), and, in 1998, HBO axed Mr. Show after four seasons.

  Since then, Odenkirk has remained mostly behind the scenes. He's written for animated sketch shows, such as Tim and Eric's Tom Goes to the Mayor; non-animated shows like Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!; and webcasts like Derek and Simon: The Show. He's also directed films both independent (Melvin Goes to Dinner, 2003) and studio-funded (Let's Go to Prison, 2006).

  How early did your interest in comedy begin?

  Very early. I got into comedy when I was a little kid. I would goof around with my brothers and sisters at the dinner table. My brother Bill and I would imitate the people we met in the course of a day, while the rest of my family ate dinner and laughed. Bill used to write for The Simpsons. Then, in junior high, I would write and perform sketches for school projects. I would do these sketches in various classrooms, and not just in my classes — the school would let me go around and do them in other rooms too.

  So, that's really where it all started, but I never thought about writing and performing comedy for a living until I went to college, at Marquette University and then at Southern Illinois University. I wrote radio shows at both schools for three years — live performances and sketches every week. My friends and I performed them in the studio with no audience.