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

by Mike Sacks

  Such as Carnac the Magnificent, Aunt Blabby, and “The Tea Time Movie”?

  All that shit. I have piles of it, cubic feet of it, stored somewhere.

  They were very vaudevillian, those sketches.

  Johnny loved to do characters. And the advantage we had was, as a nightly show, the material didn't have to be timeless — or even very funny. But if you had timely references, it usually worked. And Johnny was quite skillful. The audiences loved him.

  TV's a monster. It just eats up material.

  It's impossible to be continuously good. That's why I'm amazed when I see a TV show that's good consistently, night after night, week after week.

  One of the things that I'll go to my grave having to apologize for is having invented the Carnac Saver.

  Which was what?

  Every time Johnny's character Carnac the Magnificent told a joke that bombed, he would have a line that would save him. Like a “heckler-stopper.” And we would give Johnny a page of these jokes: “May the Great Camel of Giza leave you a present in your undershorts.” I can't believe we were paid for this.

  Was there a lot of pressure for you on The Tonight Show?

  I didn't experience it as pressure. It was a good stress. I was young, had a lot of energy. I was what — twenty-six, twenty-seven?

  What are your feelings about Carson? What was he like to work with?

  He was an avuncular figure to me, even though he was probably only forty when I started on the show.

  He had a reputation for being difficult to write for, very aloof.

  Aloof, I guess. He wasn't a touchy-feely type of guy. But appreciative and loyal. And a good boss.

  What were his strengths, from a writer's standpoint?

  He knew how to deliver a joke. He was a good reactor. He was perfect for television. He never gave a whole lot away. But in terms of delivering comic material, he had that glint.

  He knew exactly what would work for him.

  He had a good arena instinct, a solid sense of what the audience would accept from him. Not only in terms of the kind of jokes, but how far he was willing to push it politically. He was a kind of barometer. When he finally did a joke about Johnson or Nixon or whomever, then it became okay to think about those things in a different way. I've always thought that television exists for the audience as a kind of parental entity. If it's on TV, then it's been certified by someone, somewhere. And if Johnny did a joke about Nixon or the mayor or whomever — then it became okay to do jokes about that person.

  We were constantly trying to push Johnny — by we, I mean Jewish, liberal-left-wing writers. We would always try to have him do jokes that were a little stronger than what he wanted to do. But every once in a while he'd sense when the time was right. That was his strength, really. He was like a tuning fork. He would vibrate with what he perceived was the mood of the country.

  So he could sense when the time was right to tell a certain joke?

  Yes. Without losing his constituency.

  I think of Carson as representing this Gentile, Middle America persona. Did you have trouble tailoring your humor to that world, being a Jewish writer from Brooklyn?

  No, it's easy to write for someone who's already established a persona. It's easy to write for a Bob Hope or a Jack Benny or a Groucho Marx. Those characters have already been developed.

  It's the hardest thing to develop a persona. That's why movies and plays about fictional comedians are almost never truly convincing. Because it takes years for the audience to help a comedian shape a comedic persona.

  A case in point: Woody Allen's act was all over the map at first. I remember, early on, he had one of those “what if” premises. For instance: “What if Russia launched a missile and it was going to hit New York? And Khrushchev had to call Mayor Lindsay and warn him about it?” And then Woody would get on the phone like Bob Newhart and be Mayor Lindsay's half of the phone conversation. It was funny, of course — because he can make anything he touches funny. But then he eventually started to explore more personal things — subjects about his psychiatrist or his marriage. Initially, people were kind of shocked that he was willing to be so intimate onstage — it's hard to believe this now, in the current environment of public confessionals — but they didn't know what to think. And a lot of times they didn't laugh. Woody would say his jokes for twenty minutes, and the audience would just stare at him, as if he were an oil painting.

  Because he was so new? Too new for the audience?

  I don't know. I would stand in the back and think, This guy is a genius. It was like discovering a new author, such as Fitzgerald or Faulkner. The material was so great, so imaginative and audacious. Even early on, when he was still finding his voice.

  He found a whole new area of insight: relationships of a certain kind, psychoanalysis, and the creation of the so-called loser — mostly with women. To some extent, the loser-with-women character was someone Bob Hope would play, but in a much more general and mainstream way. Woody's character was more ethnically and culturally specific.

  It takes true genius to develop a comic character like that.

  It does, but it also requires a collaboration with the audience. It's the only way you can do it. You have to get out there and do a variety of material. Over time, certain things, statistically, will continue to work, and other things will drop away, and the audience will tell you what seems correct for you — for what you project onstage as a personality.

  But even with that said, you can work for twenty years and never connect with the audience half as much as Woody Allen.

  That's right. That's the genius. Creating something that somehow resonates with an audience that strongly.

  Why do you think people feel such a strong connection to his work?

  Because it's true. Tom Stoppard has said that laughter is the sound of comprehension. So when an audience laughs, it means they really understand and, by implication, identify with the material. Woody's work will still be around to be read and enjoyed by generations to come.

  When did you first meet Woody?

  He opened for the Tarriers at the Bitter End in the early 1960s, and we were represented by the same manager, Charles Joffe. He thought Woody and I might be able to write together, and as I said, I was the one in the Tarriers who was the front man and told jokes. It turned out Mr. Joffe was right.

  You once said that Woody is very intuitive, while you're much more analytical and logical.

  I would always try to back into something logically. And he would always make an intuitive leap.

  Is that your science background? You mentioned earlier that science was one of your college degrees.

  No, it was just a lack of confidence. Because at that time I was young and new, and was sort of going to school with Woody. I was just feeling my way. But I don't think I'm that way anymore.

  There's a great exchange that I remember. It's always stuck with me. Woody and I were walking down a street around the time we were writing Annie Hall, and this guy was walking toward us — someone both of us knew. And I said, “He looks terrible.” And Woody said, “Yeah, he just went through a very bad divorce.” And I said, “Didn't he used to have a mustache?” And Woody said, “Yeah. His wife sued for the entire face but settled for the mustache.”

  Woody's able to do that. That's the leap. I mean, how many things have to fire in your brain in one-twentieth of a second to come up with that?

  He has a reputation for not being an “on” comedian.

  He's not “on,” but he's always thinking. When you're with him, he's not performing. But in the right environment, the right situation, you can see it working. And I got to see it a lot.

  How would you write together?

  Just like you and I are doing now. A dialogue. Then he'd go off and write a scene and give it to me, and we'd trade it back and forth. Or we would play “What if this?” or: “What if that?” like Woody used to do when he first started in stand-up.

  One of us would say somethin
g and someone would say something else. You know, if you're loose enough, you can make it work. That's the trick. It's hard to do. It's like an actor who's in the part but who's also looking at his own performance at the same time. Then you can come up with the right material. A lot of it is intuitive, and it's hard to get your internal editor out of the way. The editor is always sitting there and editing before you say it.

  You once said in an interview: “Every writer harbors two personalities: the infant who generates the raw material and the editor who evaluates it. Both are crucial to the process and each is inescapably at war with the other.”

  That sounds so pompous. But I think it's true. You generate the material and you also edit it. Sometimes it's simultaneous.

  For a writer who's just starting out — who doesn't have a writing partner — how does he or she find that balance?

  It's hard. When I first started writing by myself, I would actually type out dialogue on a typewriter. I would write as if someone else was in the room. I would literally try to write as two different entities within myself. “What is this about?” “Well, it's about two people in love with the same girl.” “Okay, well what happens now?”

  I really did miss the presence of other writers.

  Collaborations can often be tricky, though. In the end, who ultimately decides what's funny and what's not?

  I don't think there's ever a totally equal collaboration. There has to be one dominant intelligence or creative force that informs the process. You have to have one person who is making those decisions, so that you wind up with something that has a little consistency and integrity.

  Can you give me a specific example of your creative process with Woody?

  Our first movie was Sleeper. We first wanted to do the movie with an intermission. Talk about arrogance! We wanted the beginning of the film to take place in contemporary New York, where a guy who owns a health-food store goes in for an operation. And then there would be an intermission, and you would come back and this character would be defrosted and in the future. We thought there would be no speaking whatsoever in our version of the future. We wanted to do a purely visual comedy. And we tried to figure out why in the future there would be no speaking. We decided that in the future it was a privilege to speak, that only certain classes of society had the right to speak, that everyone else had to be quiet.

  So we wrote a whole scenario in which none of the things that we were good at as writers, like dialogue and jokes, were in the second half of the movie. Fortunately, we soon came to the conclusion that this was a bad idea. It eventually became what it became, the movie that everyone knows, but it had to go through that exploratory process first.

  What are some specific jokes that didn't make the final cut of Sleeper?

  One early joke was that the president of the future exploded and Woody had to reconstruct him. But the only thing left was his penis. That was later changed to a nose.

  When you're loose and intuitive, you're vulnerable to a variety of peripheral influences. We were working on the screenplay during the 1972 Fischer-Spassky chess match, in Reykjavík. We were both chess fans, and we were watching a lot of it on TV. So we wrote a chess sequence in which the pieces were played by actual human beings — knights on horses, the whole deal. Woody filmed the scene out in the desert on a giant chessboard. He was a white pawn, and he was trembling. One of the other players, who was the voice of God, muses, “Hmmm … should I sacrifice that pawn?” Woody starts to argue with God, and then finally breaks all the rules of chess by running off the board, with the other chess pieces chasing after him.

  That scene never made the final cut. It was like what later happened with Annie Hall. A lot of material was taken out because the audience just doesn't care how clever the authors are. They only want a good story. And they're right.

  Are there jokes in Sleeper that you now regret? Any that you feel are too dated?

  I try never to regret anything. But the Albert Shanker joke is one that might need some explanation to current viewers.

  At the time of the movie's release in 1973, Albert Shanker was the very powerful president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York.

  The joke was that Shanker had somehow gotten his hands on a nuclear bomb and destroyed civilization. How do you feel about that joke now?

  I love that type of stuff. I think it really grounds it in its time and place. If people don't get it now, too bad. I think you always have to be as specific as possible; that's the only way you can achieve the universal. But that's the problem with TV — it tries for the universal and gets nothing.

  It's like E. B. White's advice about writing: Don't write about Man, write about a man.

  Exactly.

  You once said that humor came so easily for you that you were suspicious of it. Do you still feel that way?

  Woody used to say that comedy sits at the children's table. But I don't agree, and I don't think Woody really believes that, either. I think humor is a way of getting to an essential truth. If you can get an audience to laugh together, it does a whole lot of great things. It solidifies them; it gives them a mystical experience of being in a crowd. It socializes people.

  Do you think comedy is equal to drama?

  Look, if you're trying to write a dramatic piece that encompasses the deepest aspects of what it is to be a human being, you're probably not going to be able to do it in a comedy. Drama is a more profound medium. But I think comparisons are odious. I mean — so what? Now that we know that, what do we know? We need both of them.

  Charlie Chaplin did both comedy and drama, often in the same movie. When he puts on a mustache and plays with the world as Hitler, is that any less profound that anything else that might have been said at that time?

  Maybe even more profound, because the whole world can understand it.

  Yes. It's so compressed, so quintessential.

  Let's talk about Annie Hall. From what I understand, it started as a book.

  Woody might have started it as a book. I'm not sure. After Sleeper we decided to do something else. We were working on two ideas for movies simultaneously: one was this kind of weird literary piece, which turned out to be Annie Hall. The other was a more conventional period comedy.

  For me, trying to decide which one to finally do was like being in a desert, between two mirages. As you got closer to one idea, it would start to break up, and you'd turn around, and the other idea would look very nice from a distance, and you'd approach that one, but then that one would start to disintegrate. We went back and forth for a while, until, one morning, Woody said, “You know what? The movie that could really be a breakthrough hit is the kind that nobody's tried before. So let's do the crazy one, the literary one.” Which was Annie Hall.

  The French had tried it a little bit, talking to the camera, breaking the frame. Very Brechtian, always reminding the audience that they were watching a movie, with split screens and cartoons. Nobody had really tried anything like that in American cinema, however, and we really couldn't have done it anywhere but at United Artists. They were enthralled with Woody, and they gave him carte blanche.

  What was the first version of Annie Hall like? Was it different from what eventually ended up on-screen?

  It was full of brilliance. It was very long — about two hours and forty minutes — and it really didn't have Annie as a significant character. She was just one of the women in his life, among the others. If I remember correctly, she didn't come from Wisconsin; she came from New York. But that was just in the first draft of the screenplay. By the time the movie was shot, she was from Wisconsin.

  When we saw the initial screening, we thought, There's no story here. In the first scene of the original version, Woody came out and looked at the camera and said something to the effect of, “Well, I just turned forty and I've been examining my life. How did I become who I am?” And it went on from there, in a ruminative and associative fashion.

  After watching it, we thought, “Where's the relat
ionship?” When people come to me with ideas, sometimes they say, “I want to do a story about a war” or “I want to do a story about a hospital.” And I'll always say, “Tell me the story in terms of a relationship.” So, with Annie Hall, we knew what was missing. It didn't focus on a relationship.

  Audiences don't really care how bright you are as writers and how many literary associations you make and how brilliant you come off. When you're showing off, it becomes a little exclusionary to the audience. You're just being precocious.

  That's why the movie was called Annie Hall and not Anhedonia or The Second Lobster Scene, which were two working titles.

  Didn't the movie have a few working titles, such as Roller Coaster Named Desire, Me and My Goy, and Me and My Jew?

  Not to my recollection. Those sound like jokes, not titles.

  What were your thoughts upon first seeing that two-hour-and-forty-minute cut?

  I was very inexperienced. I didn't realize that a rough cut is exactly that — rough. There's a Yiddish phrase: “Never show a fool something half-finished.” Well, I was the fool in that situation. And I don't even know why they bothered to show it to me. I thought, “Uh-oh.” It was like a nightclub act, like a riff.

  Later, after the drastic edit, were you upset that a lot of the brilliant material never made it to the screen?

  Oh, no, no, no. Because when I saw the final cut, I thought, That's it.

  It went through a lot of reshoots, didn't it?

  A few. The ending took a while to get right. But who knows why that film works? I have no idea. It's a film where you can learn nothing as a screenwriter or as a director, because it's so eccentric. It's such an odd, idiosyncratic, personal thing, and that's probably part of its appeal. And, not to take anything away from Woody's performance, which is very skillful, but I think that a lot of the success and charm of the film is due to Diane Keaton, with her endearing eccentricity and the way she appreciates Woody and grows as a character. She was — and is — a delight. She sort of inhabits the whole movie. And I think that's what you leave with, that glow from her performance. But again, who knows, really, why it works? It's a mistake to think that what you're seeing up on the stage or on the screen is what the author intended. It isn't. It's always the result of a hundred compromises and accidents, both good and bad, and if you're lucky, you get lucky.