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

by Mike Sacks

  Look, man, I'm a college dropout. What the fuck do I know? I'm just saying you don't have to be a genius to figure out that humor is connected to pain.

  Famous Last Words (of Advice)

  I actually have a very hard time giving out advice — for two reasons. First, it makes me feel like a fraud. Second, the business is so ephemeral. It's not like training for a marathon, where you can print out a schedule of how many days a week to run and how many miles to run and then — boom! — four months later you are running a marathon and kind of hating it but also saying to yourself, Holy shit, I'm running a marathon!

  The best advice I ever received was from my first boss at The Onion. He believed you needed three things to be successful in comedy, but I think it applies to almost everything. First, you need natural talent. Second, you need skill development. Third, you need ambition. Everyone's ratio is different, but the most successful people have all of them. It helps to have a fourth thing, too, but I don't know what that is.

  — Ben Karlin, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report

  Marshall Brickman

  Fans of writer-director-actor Woody Allen like to refer to the mid-to-late seventies as his career's high point, his cinematic heyday. It's when Allen stopped making movies that were merely funny and starting making films with substance. But three of his most critically lauded films during that period — Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan — were co-written by another Jewish kid from New York, the lesser-known, but multi-talented Marshall Brickman.

  Brickman may have looked like an overnight success in 1978 when he walked onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept the Academy Award for best original screenplay for Annie Hall (which he shared with Allen), but he was far from a novice to the comedy- writing game. He was already an accomplished television scribe, a former head writer for The Tonight Show (a job he received at the relatively young age of twenty-seven), and a staff writer for Candid Camera and The Dick Cavett Show.

  Brickman was also one of the key writers of a little-seen pilot in 1975 called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence. It was a risky venture to combine Sesame Street — type Muppets with adult content, but Marshall somehow managed to make it work, with irreverent yet oddly innocent gags, such as the “Seven Deadly Sins Pageant” (appropriately, the character of Sloth arrived just as the end credits began to roll and asked, “Am I late?”). Brickman didn't stick around when The Muppet Show was picked up for its first season, but he did leave a lasting influence. Without him, the world might never have enjoyed a bushy-eyebrowed Swedish Chef howling, “Bort! Bort! Bort!”

  After helping Woody Allen win his first Oscar, Brickman went on to write and direct many of his own projects, including Simon (1980), Lovesick (1983), and The Manhattan Project (1986). He co-wrote Manhattan Murder Mystery with Allen in 1993, directed a TV adaptation of playwright Christopher Durang's Catholic satire Sister Mary Explains It All (2001), and even co-wrote the Broadway hit Jersey Boys (2005), a musical about the popular early-rock and roll quartet the Four Seasons.

  It's not a coincidence that Brickman would write about a singing group. During the early to mid-sixties, shortly before making a living as a writer, he was a member of the folk trio the Tarriers, then later the New Journeymen, which included a pair of musical visionaries named John Phillips and Michelle Phillips, who would soon go on to form the Mamas and the Papas.

  Perhaps Brickman's biggest hidden talent is his bluegrass roots. He played guitar and banjo (along with banjo virtuoso and Juilliard graduate Eric Weissberg) on the 1963 album New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass, which would find a huge mainstream audience nearly ten years later as the soundtrack to a wildly successful John Boorman — directed movie called Deliverance.

  It's almost impossible to ignore the inherent irony that the banjo picking of Deliverance, which so many people associate with the stereotypical Hollywood-created Southern rednecks and “mountain folk,” was at least partly created by a future New Yorker comedy writer Woody Allen cohort. It's just another example of how Brickman can be so wonderfully and unexpectedly subversive.

  What was it about bluegrass that appealed to you growing up?

  I first heard it when I was about eleven. My friend Eric Weissberg had been playing the banjo for a few years, and he was kind of a genius at it. It was a thrilling sound — it just knocked me out.

  But I've never been able to satisfactorily answer why this particular music appealed to guys like us, from Brooklyn, urban Jews. Especially back when the idea of doing this type of Southern local music was so associated with things that we had a lot of suspicion about — politically, socially, culturally. It was so alien, in a way. Maybe that was part of its appeal. Or maybe it was the type of percussive, masculine sound that pre-adolescents enjoy so much.

  The Deliverance soundtrack has an interesting history.

  Eric and I made a record called New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass in 1963 and it sold about five thousand copies. It was a kind of experimental album — we were developing a style of playing that was a combination of traditional Earl Scruggs — style picking and something more fluid and melodic. Other guys like Bill Keith, and later, Béla Fleck, did much more impressive developing of that kind of playing, but we were among the first.

  Anyhow, now it's 1971 or so and John Boorman, the director of Deliverance, had this idea for the sequence in Deliverance — or maybe it was James Dickey, the author of the book and the screenplay — when one of the characters plays a duet with a little kid. So Eric and Steve Mandell then recorded the “Dueling Banjos” track. I really had nothing to do with it — I was already working on The Tonight Show as a writer. Warner released it as a single and, for some crazy reason, it became a big hit in Detroit. But Warner needed a whole album, so they re-mastered our old New Dimensions album. They released the record as the “soundtrack from Deliverance,” which it certainly is not, but it took off and it's been a steady seller for thirty years now.

  How did you get involved with your first folk group, the Tarriers? Was this after college?

  I graduated from the University of Wisconsin with degrees in music and science. Eric had already been with the Tarriers, but he felt they needed something else. They were a trio at that point. And he asked me, “Why don't you join the group? We'll become a quartet.”

  What did you bring to the group?

  I played a bunch of instruments — bass and country fiddle, and guitar and banjo. Since I could tune up pretty fast and had a little background in comedy, it defaulted to me to do the between-song patter — de rigueur for folk groups of that era. I was the guy who stood up in front of the group and told jokes.

  Do you remember any of the specific patter?

  Thankfully, no. I would guess that the material, while appropriate for a coffee-house audience of 1966, might suffer and die from exposure to print — even if I could remember any of it.

  Who else was in the group besides you and Eric Weissberg?

  Bob Carey and Clarence Cooper. Two black guys and two Jews.

  An integrated group — that must have been a rarity.

  We couldn't play south of Washington, D.C. We couldn't get booking for the same hotels.

  What year was this?

  1964 or so.

  This was around the time of the British Invasion.

  Yes, but as folk purists, we never felt we were in the same world as the Brits — or the Roger & Roger groups that were vying with the Brits for space on Billboard's Top 10.

  How did you end up joining forces with John Phillips?

  “Join forces” — that's an interesting way of putting it. It was more like John ingested me whole, like a python. John had a group called the Journeymen. In the early sixties he met a spectacular-looking young woman named Michelle Gilliam, and promptly fell in love. We all became friends, and we formed the New Journeymen. A clever name, no? John, Michelle, and me.

  Were you ever in the running to become a member of The Mamas and the Papas?

  On the
contrary. Leaving the group — which I did after an eight-month wild ride — was, for me, the equivalent of escaping from a burning building. John was into drugs of all kinds; experimental, over- and under-the-counter. John was wonderfully talented and charming, but I was this kid from Brooklyn and really couldn't tolerate that lifestyle. It was madness. We'd come into some town to perform, and I'd keep saying, “We have to rehearse! We have to do a sound check!” And John would say, “Chill out.” And he and Michelle would take off and do interesting things like buy two motorcycles and ride around town. Whereas I would stay back at the hotel and write bass charts. [Laughs]

  Did you keep in touch with John after you left the music scene?

  We did remain friends. Later, I quit the music business and went to write for Candid Camera and later for The Tonight Show. By this time, John and Michelle had hit it really big, and they were living in Bel Air in [thirties and forties film actress] Jeanette MacDonald's old house, a spectacular chalet with a giant pool and peacocks strutting around the grounds — like a drugged-out Versailles. It was quite a scene. I used to work all day at NBC in Burbank, and then, at the end of the day, I'd switch gears and call John and ask, “Okay, what have you got for me tonight? What's going on?”

  One Friday in 1969, I called John to see what the plan was, and he said, “We have a choice. There's a party over in Malibu. Or we could go over to Benedict Canyon.”

  You have to understand that as head writer for a daily show like The Tonight Show, one is always looking for material. I used to read every magazine and newspaper I could get my hands on, in a never-ending, desperate attempt to find material for the show. I had read earlier that day, in the science section of the Los Angeles Times, that there was a colony of phosphorescent plankton that had drift ed into Malibu from the Pacific, and that every time a wave crashed, it looked like a big neon tube lighting up the entire beach. So I opted to go see the plankton. That's the kind of fun guy I was. I told John: “Let's go to Malibu.”

  We show up at this party — hosted by this Brit director Michael Sarne, who had gotten a little heat from a 1968 film called Joanna, and who later directed a train wreck called Myra Breckenridge [1970]. Anyhow, we showed up, and it was like Caligula's Rome. There was a big pile of white powder on a table, which turned out to be mescaline. People would casually stroll by, lick a finger, dip it into the power, and lick it off. Who was I not to do this also? Out on the beach was a huge bonfire, and everyone was singing and playing and doing other things not suitable to mention in a family publication, and at one point my hand started to strobe in front of my face. Understand that up to that time I was, pharmaceutically speaking, pretty much a virgin. Maybe a little grass in the dressing room. So, as a Jewish control freak now out of control, I started to panic. I said to John, “My hand is strobing.” He looked at me for a full twenty seconds, his pupils teeny little black dots, and finally said, “What?” And I yelled, “My hand is strobing in front of my face!” And he said, “God gave you a gift, man. Why don't you enjoy it?” So I immediately called a friend of mine and told her, “Get me the fuck out of here!”

  My friend picked me up and deposited me back at the hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where The Tonight Show put up their staff, and I put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and went to sleep. When I awoke, there were about six dozen messages waiting for me. You're probably ahead of me, but that was the night of the Manson murders. The horrible events took place at the other party I could have gone to — the one in Benedict Canyon. The first person they had discovered was a young man about my age who was shot numerous times. All my friends thought it was me.

  My god, it could have easily been you.

  Absolutely. Then again, maybe if I had been there, the murders wouldn't have taken place. But, most likely, I would be dead. And we wouldn't be having this conversation.

  What can we learn from this? Perhaps: Stay out of Los Angeles.

  The music scene was just never for me. There used to be a mirror on 57th Street in New York, a little distorted, like a fun-house mirror. One day, as I was carrying my banjo and my guitar, I looked at this strangely shaped person in the reflection, and I thought, “Is this why my father escaped from Poland? So I could become an itinerant musician with a squished head and spindly legs?”

  So I gave up the music scene entirely and eventually got a job as a writer for Candid Camera. This was before writing for The Tonight Show.

  How did you get the job for Candid Camera?

  I auditioned for Allen Funt, the creator of Candid Camera, by writing a couple of pages with ideas for those hostile, hateful little stunts he used to do. I guess you could say that Candid Camera was one of the first reality shows.

  Compared with what goes on today, those stunts were very sweet.

  I know. Nobody had to eat tarantulas.

  What was Allen Funt like to work for?

  Kind of eccentric, and when he walked into the room there was an aura of tension around him. I was fired after about seven months, which was par for the course. Pretty much every writer was fired from that show at one point or another.

  What sort of ideas did you come up with for the show?

  One of the ideas — I think it was mine, but it's been a long time — concerned a dry-cleaning establishment. A guy would drop off his suit to be dry-cleaned — this took a little planning, of course — and we would manufacture an identical suit, but in a tiny size, like for a chimpanzee. When the guy returned for his suit, the clerk would bring out the tiny version and explain that it had shrunk, and he was really sorry, but the customer should have read the warning on the back of the ticket. And some people accepted it and some people became very angry, and so on.

  I recall one customer didn't respond very well. It turns out this guy was caught once before by Candid Camera. He was in a city he wasn't supposed to be in, with someone he wasn't supposed to be with. So after he was caught for the second time, and after he was told “Smile, you're on Candid Camera!,” instead of smiling, he went berserk. He spotted the hidden camera and picked up a glass ashtray weighing about six pounds and hurled it at the camera operator and broke the two-way mirror the camera was hidden behind. Then he decked the clerk, who was, of course, an actor working for the show. Lots of good, wholesome fun. Needless to say, he didn't sign the release. But the footage was a big hit at the show's Christmas party.

  Did this happen often?

  Not as violently, but the ratio of filmed segments to segments that actually aired was something like twenty to one.

  It must have been tough to pull off those stunts. The cameras were huge compared with the ones today, and I assume you needed a tremendous amount of lighting.

  You're absolutely right. One of the crises on the show was the phasing-out of anything that was in black-and-white. They had to start using color film, which needed about five times the amount of light as black-and-white film. So they had to put these two-thousand-watt bulbs in the lamps in the fake offices or other places we used. Most of our “locations” were more like movie sets than, say, offices. The walls didn't even go up to the ceiling. And there would be some poor person earning $4.10 an hour, hired as a temp, sitting at a desk. The “manager” would tell this temp, “Look, I'm going out for twenty minutes, so just answer the phone and take messages.” And then a man in a gorilla suit would run through. And then the “manager” would return and say, “I'm back from lunch. Did anything happen?”

  And the temp would often say, “No, nothing.”

  People don't notice what they don't want to notice — either that or they don't trust their own senses. More likely, they were afraid that if they were the only one to have seen the gorilla, they might be locked up. It was like that famous experiment conceived by the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, detailed in Obedience to Authority [Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963; HarperCollins, 1974]. If a person in a white lab coat tells someone it's okay to hurt someone else, then it becomes accepted. Someone in a position of authorit
y can remove all rationality from a person's responses.

  That's especially true when you're a temp.

  You don't want to rock the boat.

  How did you get the job writing for The Tonight Show?

  My friend Dick Cavett, who was a writer on the show at this time, the early sixties, was leaving to try his hand at stand-up. And I was bouncing around after Candid Camera. So I said to Dick, “Let me see what your stuff looks like when you hand it in to Johnny.” I had this idea that if Carson saw material submitted to him in the form that he was used to, he would think I had already worked for him. Or deserved to work for him. Anyhow, he hired me.

  That's the key to life, isn't it? Acting as if you belong where you want to end up.

  “Assume a virtue if you have it not,” as Shakespeare wrote.

  How did you become the head writer for the show?

  I didn't have an office when I started, just a rolling typewriter stand with an old Royal on it. And I would push my stand to an empty part of the office and write my jokes. Walter Kempley, who later wrote for Happy Days, was then the head writer. He had a disagreement with the producer over a raise, and he left. He called me into his office and said, “Congratulations, kid. You're the head writer.” He gave me half a box of cigars and his joke file. I got his office — a nice office with a window — and a backlog of four or five years of jokes.

  How long had you been on the show?

  A month or two.

  You skipped over all the other writers to become head writer?

  The other writers didn't want the job. They were smart. The monologue writers, like David Lloyd, who later wrote for The Mary Tyler Moore show and Cheers and Frasier, merely had to deliver a monologue to Carson every day by three o'clock. I shouldn't say “merely,” because writing a daily monologue can be a terrifying task. But the head writer, in addition to running the writing department, had to write all the sketches, the little interview pieces, the comedy spots.