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

by Mike Sacks

  Mitch Hurwitz

  It's not easy being Mitch Hurwitz, especially when so many people regard you as the comedy equivalent of Thomas Edison.

  In August 2004, when his Fox sitcom, Arrested Development had just finished its first season, The New York Times ran a story about Hurwitz with the daunting headline: Can This Man Save the Sitcom? Apparently it wasn't enough that his Little Show That Could had won several major awards and narrowly avoided cancellation. He was now marked as someone attempting to “re-invent the rules of the half-hour” sitcom by creating a “new kind of comedy.” It was never explicitly stated, but the unspoken implication by the media was that Arrested Development's failure (and, by association, Hurwitz's) would mean the fall of sitcom's last great hope.

  Of course, we already know how that story ends. Despite numerous Emmy Awards, a cult audience, and having been named by Time magazine as one of the “100 Best TV Shows of All-Time,” Arrested Development was canceled, effective February 2006, after just three seasons. History may very well judge this cancellation as one of the biggest injustices in television, but while the media and the show's legion of fans and bloggers never recovered — “I cry myself to sleep at night when I think about [what] could have happened,” wrote one anonymous Internet griever — Hurwitz seemed to accept it all with a shrug. Even when the show was offered a second life on Showtime, Hurwitz took a pass. “I'd be happy to [act as a consultant], but I've gone as far as I can go [as a writer and producer],” he told Variety.

  Born and raised in Orange County, California, Hurwitz attended Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. After graduating in 1985, he moved to Boston and tried his luck as a writer, penning short stories and screenplays. “I failed,” he confessed to a group of Georgetown University students in 2004. “I couldn't write in a room alone. I fell into television to be with funny people and be forced to write whether I wanted to or not.”

  Although Hurwitz began his career as a writer in the mid-eighties for The Golden Girls (1985–1992), The John Larroquette Show (1993–1996), and Ellen (2001–2002), he didn't truly hit his stride until Arrested Development, in 2003.

  Arrested was a perfect forum for his comedic sensibilities and for his desire to tinker with the standard sitcom form. On the surface, it may have seemed like a generic, even stereotypical TV plotline: Son takes over family business, is forced to deal with crazy family. But Arrested Development was anything but ordinary, and not just because of its gleefully subversive humor — jokes about incest, alcoholism, an attic dweller, physical (and mental) disabilities, and sexually ambiguous thespians don't usually make it onto prime time — but because it was a show that rewarded patience. Hurwitz filled the series with recurring gags that unfolded over several episodes, looping through major plot points and subplots laid out like an elaborate jigsaw puzzle.

  Unfortunately, such creative complexity does not often translate into mainstream success. Critics may have loved it, but the majority of TV viewers — who, for better or worse, ultimately control the fate of all TV shows — didn't get it and didn't like it. Hurwitz could have lashed out against the banal state of modern television. He could have insisted that audiences were lemmings jumping off the cliff of mediocrity, or fought harder with the network for his vision. Instead, he reacted with a humility that's uncharacteristic in Hollywood — especially among successful writers.

  During his 2004 Emmy acceptance speech, for writing the pilot episode of Arrested Development, Hurwitz smiled sheepishly at the crowd and said, “This is such a huge, huge honor, and, I fear, a giant mistake.”

  Is it true that you were a theology major at Georgetown University when you attended in the early to mid-eighties?

  Yes, I earned a theology degree as well as an English degree. I put the English degree to better work. I never pursued theology after college, but I did learn quite a few answers to some major questions.

  I wish I could share them with you — I just can't.

  Maybe for the next edition.

  I know whether God exists or not. That's all I can say.

  Do you know what He or She looks like?

  That would give away whether God exists or not, so I can't answer that. Sorry.

  I was hoping you were going to say Bea Arthur.

  No such luck.

  Here's a funny thing about Georgetown: At the end of each year the college would create this mathematical formula to figure out the average salary each major would eventually earn. English majors earned, on average, about $30,000 a year. But majors in the fine arts earned more than $1,000,000 a year. And that was because there were only six of them, and one had been [Knicks basketball-team center] Patrick Ewing. So fine arts seemed really good to me. [Laughs] I thought about it, but, in the end, I never went through with it.

  Georgetown is not exactly a hotbed of comedy. When I first started, I was thinking about becoming a lawyer. Halfway along I realized, “Um, perhaps I should go the comedy route.” I had written a few original plays in high school, in Orange County [California], and I was just always interested in comedy.

  Do you remember your high-school plays?

  One was called Wet Paint, and it was about a kid — believe it or not, exactly my age — who wanted to write sketches. The audience would then see the sketches this character wrote. Most are too embarrassing to even think about now; they were just so hackneyed and amateurish. One was about a disaster movie that took place on an escalator. The escalator stopped suddenly, and all of the riders had to find their way to safety. That was my biting take on automation.

  I returned to my high school recently to see the students perform a play they wrote called Waiting for Hurwitz, which was about the 25th anniversary of my original show. I spoke to some of the performers afterward, and I gave them what I thought was good advice about Hollywood and other such matters. Later, I couldn't help but think that it was very wrong of me to encourage anyone to go into entertainment — let alone these kids.

  Why?

  It can make a lot of people very, very unhappy. I think exploring creativity, and being a creative person, can be a wonderful joy. But if you do choose a creative career, I think you can do a much better job of making it work than I did. I always took it extremely seriously — even in the early years of my career. I was always very nervous and I never really enjoyed the process. To a certain extent, I'm still nervous. I've always been very hard on myself, and that's taken some of the joy out of all of it.

  Don't you need to be a little hard on yourself to become successful?

  I don't know. As I've gotten older, I try to figure out how much is necessary to my process and how much is just an old model that I'm still foolishly following. One of my goals as a grown-up is to trust myself a little more — trust my abilities and not second-guess and worry about every little thing.

  When I watch Arrested Development now, I can really see how hard I was working. Some of the details didn't have to be worked over so much. I see other shows, and they are just fine without being so complex. Everything was so dense and detailed with Arrested.

  If you were creating the show today, would you do anything differently?

  I don't know that I would do anything differently. You only get so many words per script; let each of them really matter. I always wanted Arrested to be complex. I like complexity in TV shows. I like shows that challenge me as a viewer — where if I put a little more thought into it, I then get more out of it. This is the way I like to think, even though I don't feel it's necessarily the most audience-pleasing. The presumption going into Arrested Development was that there might be an audience who was interested in these details. In retrospect, I was trying to do too many new things, which might have overwhelmed the viewer.

  Do you know what a callback is? It's when a writer revisits a past event and then uses it to make a joke. A callback usually gets a laugh because the audience is part of the joke; they've experienced an event along with the characters. But in Arrested, I put in “call forwards,” whi
ch were new for me. I inserted hints of events that hadn't yet happened. And, of course, there's no way you can get laughs out of that.

  In a larger sense, Arrested paid off with the portion of the audience who wanted to pay close attention. I wanted there to be hidden clues and auguries of things to come. Those viewers who paid attention would be more rewarded than those who didn't.

  You just mentioned “complexity.” That's not necessarily a word one often hears associated with sitcoms.

  Or “auguries,” for that matter.

  Actually, though, complexity really can be a big part of TV comedy. The Simpsons was, and is, incredibly complex. I even remember being disappointed with some early episodes when the writers didn't bother to make a store sign in the background funny, or when a joke wouldn't pay off. That's what I enjoyed as a viewer, those details.

  In retrospect, perhaps a majority of the audience for Arrested Development didn't want to see such a detailed show and didn't want complexity with their humor. And that's understandable. Arrested was always a show I wanted people to watch and re-watch over and over again. I wanted to pack the most into those twenty-one minutes per episode.

  I thought the length of a sitcom was around twenty-three minutes.

  Not for us — and that made a huge difference. Arrested was a little over twenty-one minutes, which was a giant obstacle. It made the reality of attempting to do eight story lines that all tied together that much more the folly of a masochist.

  The time difference might not sound like much — what is it, less than two minutes? But we're talking close to 10 percent of the show. It became crazy. I would literally edit out single frames between individual words. I would edit out the second ring of a telephone. I would delete the third step toward the door. I shortened that show literally frame by frame.

  And then, of course, the audience who did watch the show started searching for complexity the way I did watching The Simpsons — which was great in some ways. The audience was expecting a twist each week, and we felt we had to give them one — maybe even two or three.

  When Julia Louis-Dreyfus did the two-parter in the first season [“Altar Egos” and “Justice is Blind”], we made her character blind. But then it turns out that the character really wasn't blind. When she appeared in another episode [“Out on a Limb,” Season Two, Episode 11], she was pregnant. And then she was not pregnant. Then she was pregnant again. Then she was not pregnant again.

  How difficult was it for you as a writer to not only have to create jokes but also to keep track of all the twists and turns for each character?

  It was like playing a game of multi-level chess. I had to keep track of a lot of information. Maybe that sounds overly impressive: multi-level tic-tac-toe might be more accurate. What happened in the past? What's going to happen? What does the audience think will happen? What does the audience think has already happened?

  As a writer, I've always found it hard to deal with anything head-on — what's that phrase? “My appetite is greater than my ability”? “My desire is larger than my ability”? “My eyes are bigger than my penis”?

  Yes, the last one.

  I work really hard to live up to my own ambition with these shows. But television isn't exactly the ideal medium for that kind of appetite. Television is really about repetition. That's what audiences truly want in a show. They don't necessarily want surprises.

  I would think that a lot of what you did with Arrested Development is the exact opposite of what screenwriting classes might teach.

  [Laughs] Oh, we did a ton of things with Arrested that would never be taught in a screenwriting class! Just the fact that we had a narrator who explained the nuances of the story goes against all recommendations. It's always considered “too easy,” almost like a crutch. But sometimes you need a crutch. If you twist your ankle, if you try to do a show with eight characters … these are excellent reasons to use a crutch. Also, the nonlinear structure of the show is something that's not exactly on the curriculum at most first-rate TV schools.

  Larry Gelbart once said something very interesting: “Your style is formed by what you can't do.” I've always loved that quote.

  It's one of my favorites, too.

  Since I began, I've felt that I've had to attack writing sideways — almost from an unconventional route — mostly because when I began, I felt I couldn't compete against the brilliant and successful writers of the medium. I couldn't compete with their ability to make any line funny in any situation. So, I started tying things together, trying to make the story the joke — figuring out the last laugh first and then making it the answer to the first joke. I could write half the number of jokes that way and still, hopefully, get the same number of laughs.

  Along the way, I did learn the craft of joke writing a little bit — and learned that you could always write a better joke than the one on the page. All of the readings and run-throughs of the show were noted by the executives and re-written. And then the audience would come in and tell you if it was funny or not, and you had to re-write it again. Many of the writers for Arrested Development — not just me — came from a very solid, traditional sitcom background. So we'd all been through that gauntlet. And we'd learned.

  The first television show I ever wrote for was The Golden Girls. The producers, Paul Witt and Tony Thomas, were brilliant teachers with creative minds that pushed us all to not only learn the fundamentals of comedy writing but to become better writers. They were the executive producers of Soap, and Paul was a producer on The Partridge Family. So, a writer for The Golden Girls learned all of the sitcom basics. I learned a tremendous amount, which helped me later, when I wanted to create a non-traditional show.

  It's like knowing how to play traditional jazz before you learn how to play bop. Or painting: there are a lot of painters who break the rules, but they have to know how to paint figuratively before they learn the abstract approach.

  We did it the hard way. For years, we all wrote on very conventional shows — which is not to say that it wasn't a good experience. It was a great experience, but many of us got tired of that particular structure. It just became somewhat predictable. It was like driving a slow car when the only thing we wanted was speed.

  That may not hold true for every sitcom writer. I'm sure there are many great comic voices who really don't quite understand what they're doing — who are just true originals. But the rest of us tend to understand what already exists and then try to go further with it.

  I saw a television show recently where a cocky male character was about to face off against a young girl, who just so happened to have had a black-belt in karate. I thought, There is just no way these writers will go for the joke where the little girl beats him up. But they went for the joke where the little girl beats the crap out of the big guy.

  How would you have written that scene?

  A few years ago I would have written it the same way — presuming I would have thought of it, of course. But now that the twist is a little more expected, I would feel compelled to challenge that and do the opposite: have him beat her up.

  Yes, but you're a professional humor writer. How do you think a viewer at home, not overly familiar with sitcom tropes, would want that scene to play out?

  I think that's an excellent point. The twist is certainly nothing particular to me; I think all of us in comedy try to twist whatever is expected. But different audiences expect different things. A sitcom audience would expect one thing, whereas the audience for Arrested expected something else. And perhaps that's why Arrested Development didn't have a bigger audience. Maybe the writers for Arrested were trying too hard to make ourselves laugh. We were all trying to be as funny as we could be, and perhaps we were working on a level that was too removed from what viewers wanted.

  How would that karate scene have appeared on Arrested Development?

  To be different, we'd twist the twist. We might have had the character of Gob [Will Arnett] talk to the family about this little girl who thinks she can beat
him up. Michael [Jason Bateman] might have said, “We should get a parking space at the hospital now, just to save time.” Everyone would have expected this adorable little girl to beat the shit out of this grown up.

  Or, in the next scene, Gob would enter the house and say something like, “I feel awful. I'm so embarrassed.”

  “She beat you up?,” Michael would ask.

  “No, I put her in the hospital. I thought she was gonna flip me. Don't people with black belts always flip you in James Bond movies?”

  Whatever I would have done, I would have tried to find a way to point out that the situation was a cliché — and I would then try to get a surprise out of it.

  I wonder what sitcom situations will seem cliché to the writers who have grown up with Arrested Development.

  I think the writers who are coming up now will far exceed what we did. In any creative endeavor, there needs to be progression. If there is no progression — no innovation — you're finished.

  But for anyone who wants to try something like this, let me tell you now: It's going to be very exhausting. Perhaps you should use fewer characters? Or try to get more than twenty-one minutes per episode? That could ease a lot of the burden right there.

  Exhausting specifically for the writers?

  For everyone. Arrested Development just depleted everybody on the staff — writers, actors, directors, people who worked on the sets. We would finish one show, and we'd wonder how we were ever going to be able to do another episode. We'd then have this sick feeling in our stomachs: Oh, god! Now we've gotta do it again! We put everything we had into each episode. To do something like that show takes a lot more work than it would for another show.

  That's not to say that deep down, Arrested wasn't a traditional show. It was. I really followed the rules that I first learned at The Golden Girls. There was never an episode where the characters didn't learn at least one thing. And, as much as the critics praised us for being different, we had a hug in almost every episode.