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

by Mike Sacks

  But it was a really long and slow process for me to ever think that I could do this sort of thing for a living. I just didn't know anything at all about show business, or how one gets a job in it. It wasn't a legitimate field. There was nothing real about it.

  I take it that you or your family didn't know many people in the showbiz world?

  No one. This was Naperville, Illinois. My parents didn't even watch movies. My mom's probably seen fewer than one hundred movies in her entire life. Show business was just not a thing that was talked about in my house.

  It's actually a shame, because my father was a really funny guy, and he could have been a happier person earning a living as a comedy writer. He could have done it, I think. Instead, he made business forms for major corporations and hospitals and other companies, which you can now make on your computer in a second, but back in those days you had to hire somebody to design them for you. I think he was very unhappy — which, of course, is one of the reasons I am in comedy.

  Who were your comedy influences?

  My strongest influence was Monty Python. After that comes the Credibility Gap and Bob & Ray. Also, SCTV and Steve Martin's first album, Let's Get Small [1977].

  What was it about the radio personalities Bob & Ray that you liked? Were they even on the air when you were growing up? They were very popular in the late forties, fifties, and sixties.

  They were doing a lot of commercials, and I think I only heard them on records. My friend had a copy he'd somehow found. I loved their little individual sketches. Like the one about the guy who swam across the country by buying a semi truck with a pool on it and swimming the length of the truck, back and forth, back and forth, as the truck creeps along the highway. Brilliant, loopy stuff.

  What in particular did you like so much about Monty Python?

  I loved Python. People always tell me that they can see Mr. Show being similar to Python. In particular, with the way the sketches flowed into each other. But to me the primary attribute of Python was that it had something on its mind and, at the same time, was laugh-out-loud funny. Python actually made you laugh. It wasn't just intellectually funny or clever.

  You also had different actors, with very different sensibilities, that blended very well. Once you got to know the show, you could tell who did what, like a John Cleese — Graham Chapman sketch versus a Terry Jones — Michael Palin sketch. You could even see how each of the sketches was different. But that's only after you got to know the show really well.

  Mr. Show was similar. We had different actors, but it came together well. We had a shared sensibility. We worked really hard to make every sketch as good as it could possibly be. I think that's what happened with Python too. Everything had to be approved by the whole group. The quality was very, very high.

  How difficult was it to create the Python-esque segues for Mr. Show, in which each sketch would be seamlessly linked to the next?

  A lot of people comment on Mr. Show sketches interlinking, but I think that's one aspect of the show that's overrated. I'm glad we did it that way. It made all of the shows hang together. Sometimes it was a very clever trick. But sometimes those segues were not very clever. Our rule was that transitions had to work on their own merit, but they also had to somehow comment on the next sketch. That was very hard to do, and we just couldn't do it all the time. When we were really stuck for a transition, we would do something simple, like pan to a poster with a few words that summarized the next sketch — and then we just panned back.

  One of the things we experimented with in the second season was abandoning this idea of thematically tying together the show.

  Why would you abandon that idea? Wasn't that one of the aspects that made Mr. Show unique?

  It became too difficult to pull off. We thought that it would be a neat thing to do, and it turned out to be a drag. And besides, we soon learned that the best Mr. Show episodes were the ones that contained scenes that were vastly different in subject matter and comic sensibility. One scene might be physically comic, and the next more verbal. It was really fun to jump between things that were as different as they could be in presentation and also in subject matter. In the end, you didn't really need to have those strict segues between sketches.

  What would you look for in a sketch idea? Did a sketch have to meet certain criteria with the writers?

  We would ask ourselves about every sketch, “Is it funny? Really, truly funny? Or do we just think it's funny because we really want it to be funny?” That doesn't sound very scientific, but I think there's an important truth there. We took this very seriously. It was very, very important to us.

  Second: What is this sketch about? That was a little challenging sometimes, because we'd have an idea that seemed funny, but the sketch didn't really have anything to say.

  Does every sketch need to say something?

  No, but it's nice to know the underlying meaning. If you have a sketch that's a bunch of taglines that are stupid and funny, that can just be a list of funny jokes.

  But if you can think of a unifying point of view for them — something you are clearly commenting on while you're listing a bunch of funny taglines — that's even better.

  You've said that quite a few of the sketches from Mr. Show sprang from real-life experiences, including the sketch in which you parodied the Mr. Ed television show. In that particular sketch, you played a talking junkie who “spoke” just like Mr. Ed.

  Yes, the “Talking Junkie” sketch. I had a meeting about writing a movie script for Francis the Talking Mule, which was a really dumb idea. I thought, What did the executives see in my past work that made them think I'm the perfect guy to write this? It then made me think about talking mules and what's at the core of that type of comedy. People are just fascinated by something that talks that shouldn't be talking. The notion occurred to me that junkies are just so weird; almost like a different species. So that's how that sketch came about.

  Here's another sketch that came from reality: the “Great Hemingway” sketch, from Season Four. It was about an explorer who tells his friends about his amazing adventures to Africa, but he only uses descriptions in relation to his scrotum and ass. I've always loved Hemingway, and I remember reading an issue of a magazine that had an excerpt from a lost Hemingway fictional memoir [True at First Light, 1999]. And one of the first sentences in the excerpt was, “You cannot describe a wild lion's roar…. you first feel it in your scrotum ….” And I thought, Now that's bad writing.

  Not Hemingway's best line.

  Just bad writing. Now, in Hemingway's defense, who knows if he would have kept that sentence in the book had he lived, but that's just trying way too hard to be cute in a really strange way. And so the sketch came from that.

  Another instance of a sketch coming from real life was our “Fartin' Gary” sketch. The character Fartin' Gary was a professional farter, or a “fartist.” That was his act: he would fart. We based him on a real performer named Mr. Methane who was at the Montreal Comedy Festival when David [Cross] and I performed there in 1997.

  It's a living, I guess. Or maybe it isn't.

  You have a reputation for being a perfectionist. Are there any Mr. Show sketches you're still not happy with?

  I can think of two sketches that were among our worst, but I wish to hell they were our best. One was called “Clumsy Waiter.” It was from Season Four, and it was about a waiter, played by me, who spills food on a patron's suit. The maître d', played by David, insists on paying for the restaurant's mistake, but only for half the cost of the cleaning. It almost devolved into vaudeville, which is what it felt like when we were rehearsing it. It didn't work, but it could have been a good one.

  What do you think that sketch needed?

  It needed exactly what I pitched and what no one would do. No one would do it! Dino Stamatopoulos, one of the writers, told me, not long ago, “We should have done what you wanted, and I wish I would have backed you on it.” What the sketch needed was a little stopwatch in the lower-right-
hand corner of the screen with “Time till end of sketch” and a countdown.

  Wouldn't that have called attention to the fact that the premise for the sketch was weak, and that even you, as the writers, knew it was weak?

  Yes, it would have implied that we thought the sketch sucked. But it doesn't matter. It would have made the whole thing funny. I believed that, and I fought like hell. But that's something I didn't win.

  Why did the other writers not want to do it?

  They said things like, “Come on! Some people might like the sketch. Don't do that to them. Don't steal their joy if they are going to enjoy it.” But — goddamn — that would have been funny, wouldn't it?

  I think it would have been. I've never seen anything like that on a sketch show.

  It would have worked on so many levels. It would have said that the sketch wasn't working and because of that, we're now giving you exactly what is needed to improve it. Which is a countdown to the end of the sketch.

  What was the other sketch you're not happy with?

  The “Philouza” sketch.

  For those readers who haven't seen it, the sketch was a takeoff on the relationship between Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus. Two 19th-century composers of marching-band music — one a genius, the other an idiot — compete for the attention of a beautiful woman.

  To me, that sketch just never worked as well as it did on the page. I think maybe it was miscast. We were trying to be clever by having me play the sillier character and David play the angry guy — not that we were some kind of traditional comedy team who had the prescribed roles, but I would often play the person who got angry about the craziness going on around him. And with that particular sketch, it just didn't work with us in those roles.

  Dino and I wrote that sketch, and, from the first draft, everyone who read it said, “Wow, that's perfect. Just do that.” Troy Miller directed it and did a great job. It's very well executed in every way, but it just isn't that funny. Maybe the concept is a little too rich or something. Just a little too pleased with itself.

  You're so honest with your assessments of your work. There's no sugarcoating.

  To me, honesty is everything; it's an honesty about life and people and the way we all act and the way in which we are pompous or hypocritical or ridiculous. And that translates into being honest about the work, too.

  I think I've tried to become more forgiving about things in the last few years. I don't know if that really helps your work, though. But I'm always trying to stretch myself and grow. I think another thing that I've been really trying to do in the last few years is to be a little less ironic and do some things that are more honest and straightforward. That's always hard for anyone who starts in comedy.

  How did the writers' room work at Mr. Show?

  Very few ideas were not accepted by all the writers by the time a sketch got on the air. You would have to prove it to the group, and certainly to David and me. We both had to like everything. Neither of us wrote things off. Neither of us said, “Well, you like it, but I hate it, so just go ahead.” We just didn't work like that. If I didn't like something, I would say to David, “I just don't like it yet.” And he was the same way.

  Also, I'd come from Saturday Night Live, and a lot of what I did at Mr. Show was a direct response to things I thought were done poorly at SNL.

  Like what?

  Like very little interaction and very little guidance for the first two days of the week before the show — and then all of the material is suddenly brought to a rewrite meeting in the last fourteen hours. By that time, everyone's wiped out. Another thing I was reacting to was the way in which ideas were abandoned after one reading at SNL. If the ideas didn't go over well at the first pitch meeting — for whatever reason — they were thrown away, even if they were good ideas. You couldn't pitch them again, because they had already been done once and they didn't have the surprise element to them. They weren't new to the people in the pitch room the next time they read them.

  How often did that happen to you at SNL? When you felt that you had a good, solid idea, but once it was rejected it was never used again?

  There were quite a few times where that happened. There were jokes and ideas I used at The Ben Stiller Show that I'd written for SNL, like “Three Men and an Old Man,” which was a takeoff on the movie Three Men and a Baby. In the sketch, three men cared for an old man as if he were a baby. I pitched that idea at SNL and it didn't get anywhere. We later used that idea on The Ben Stiller Show, and it was that episode that actually won the show an Emmy in '93.

  I saw that happen often at SNL, but probably more so with other people's ideas that I thought were really good. There would be a reading of a sketch in front of everyone, and it didn't go over well, and then that was the end of that.

  And I thought, Well, why get rid of it so quickly? If you had done a rewrite, you could have ended up with a good sketch.

  Another thing that used to happen at SNL was that if you were a new writer and a little tentative, you may not have pitched things well. I remember pitching ideas when I was new. And I would get my ass kicked. I would wonder, What am I doing here? You liked my writing samples. And now you won't listen to me. I'm not that good at pitching. I'm new to this. Give me a chance — help me pitch it.

  So I was really averse to quickly rejecting ideas on Mr. Show, and I guess I even took it to a torturous extreme. When writers would pitch ideas at meetings, and I think the other writers can attest to this — with very few exceptions — I would talk at length about every idea. Because when you shit on a writer's idea quickly, they either clam up or they pitch ideas just for the sake of pitching them and just to sort of waste time. They know everything is going to get shit on, and they're more apt to pitch something that even they don't believe in. So you get this list of shitty pitches that are being bandied about.

  I tried to avoid that at Mr. Show, and some of the best sketches came out of that process.

  Like what?

  The “Titannica” sketch.

  A speed-metal band named Titannica meets one of its fans in the hospital after the fan hears a song called “Try Suicide” and does exactly that. Not an idea one would think of as being funny, but it worked.

  That sketch is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. One of the writers, Brian Posehn, pitched it in the writers' room — and it got no response at all. At first, it was about a kid who jumped into a vat of acid and was burned from the neck down. The sketch didn't have a comic core to it. It was just kind of mean-spirited. After we finished reading it, we set it aside and I said, “So what's funny about this idea?” The rest of the writers looked at me sort of like, “You asshole! Nothing is funny about that! Don't even say that it's funny!” Brian then put aside the script and said, “Oh well, it didn't work. So what?”

  In the writers' room at SNL, no one would have heard that idea ever again. But my feeling was, “Brian, you are a funny guy. You wrote this because you saw something funny here. What is it? What was funny to you? Because if we can all understand why you thought it was funny, then maybe we can make it great, or maybe we can all agree that it is not very good. But you didn't intentionally just write a piece of shit.”

  After discussing this Titannica idea for a while, I thought of having the kid's body just be a puppet, shriveled and looking like a wrinkled hot dog. I also wanted to make the kid very upbeat. And that changed everything about it. Then everybody grasped the attitude of the sketch: that this kid has a really good attitude. He's done a horrible thing to himself, but he's still really happy to meet his heroes, these incredibly stupid heavy-metal musicians.

  So those two aspects of the sketch came together and it worked great. It just took time to make it work.

  A lot of Mr. Show characters were losers or physically disabled.

  Yes, but by and large they were happy and upbeat. And that's actually a lesson I needed to relearn in the course of making movies, I think.

  How so?

  When you featur
e a physically or mentally disabled person just to feature them, it becomes mean-spirited. More importantly, if it's not funny enough, there's nothing to save it. There is no reason to like what you're seeing.

  That's very important: to have a good feeling, an upbeat feeling. There are very few comedies that I can name that don't have “dog” jokes in them, or “dog” scenes — meaning just awful jokes and terrible scenes. But in the good comedies, you excuse those bad scenes and bad jokes because you just don't care; it doesn't matter. They blow by you — they're not weighed down, and the good things are still worth waiting for.

  Was this one of the problems with Run Ronnie Run!, the 2002 feature-length movie that involved Ronnie Dobbs, a Mr. Show character? You've talked in the past about your unhappiness with that film.

  To its credit, the movie has a few scenes that are really funny. It has as many funny scenes as can be found in numerous hit comedies. But the problem with it is that the unfunny scenes are such tonal shift s that they drag the rest of the movie down. They really weigh on the rest of the movie. The trick is to have a consistent tone throughout. If you can accomplish that, then the scenes that don't work can just be excused. You say, “Well, whatever. That didn't work.”

  In Run Ronnie Run!, there is a really funny scene with Jack Black. He does this takeoff from Mary Poppins, in which he plays a chimney sweep and sings a song in a terrible Cockney accent on a roof. Now, if we had put that scene in Mr. Show, it would have been a huge hit. It would have killed, and it would have fit. But in Run Ronnie Run!, it doesn't fit with the rest of the movie.

  Does that theory hold true for Mr. Show — that even if one sketch didn't work, the rest of the show would still work, as long as the tone remained consistent?

  Yeah, I think so. Just take a look at The Ben Stiller Show. The show was really a great experience for me, and it's something I was really happy to be a part of. And yet the tonal shift s in that show are very noticeable. The scenes don't complement one another and the show doesn't have what Python had and what Mr. Show hopefully had, which was that shared sensibility. Even though a lot of the individual pieces were very good, I think the show dragged and didn't work as well as it could have — in particular, the segments between the sketches, when Ben would walk around the sets and talk with the guests.