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

by Mike Sacks

  The keys to a good packet are variety, concision, and resonance. This usually consists of a few sketches, a page or so of monologue jokes, a handful of free-floating ideas, plus one “bonus,” which could be a funny article or story.

  If you do manage to score an interview with the producer or head writer, do not attempt to be overly funny. This comes across as desperate. It's more important to act intelligent and nice and normal.

  Robert Smigel

  The first time you watch one of Robert Smigel's short films, it's easy to forget it's merely parody — he perfectly captures the choppy animation and stilted acting of most children's television. It looks instantly familiar, and anybody who grew up watching Saturday-morning cartoons can't help but feel nostalgic. And yet there's a pretty good chance that the similarities between Smigel's comic universe and your childhood memories exist only in appearance. “TV Funhouse” — which aired on Saturday Night Live and later as a series on Comedy Central — has featured a superhero named Wonderman, who “fights a constant crusade to stop crime and get his alias laid”; and the return of Bambi's mother, who has somehow recovered from her “head wound” and is now fighting terrorists.

  Although Smigel has a rotating cast of dozens of characters — everyone from the X Presidents, a crime-fighting team that includes Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, to the Ambiguously Gay Duo, a pair of superheroes with a curiously close relationship — his best-known character is probably Triumph, the cigar-chomping insult comic who speaks with a vaguely Hungarian accent. The canine hand puppet, voiced by Smigel (always lurking just below the camera or behind a podium), was originally conceived as a one-joke bit for Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 1997. But Triumph soon became an audience favorite, thanks mostly to his utter lack of self-censoring and crude sense of humor. Whether he was interviewing big-time celebrities or just fanatics lined up to see a Star Wars premiere, Triumph said things that were so unexpectedly rude and even cruel that he was practically begging to get punched in the face. But when such vile insults came out of a dog's mouth, particularly a puppet dog's mouth, it was impossible for anyone to defend themselves without looking foolish, especially after Triumph half-apologized with his favorite catchphrase, “I keed. I keed.”

  Triumph (and, by association, Smigel) has managed to stir up plenty of firestorms. He was banned from the Westminster Kennel Club dog show (for “humping” a few of the dolled-up canine contestants), was nearly assaulted by Eminem at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards (for approaching the rapper and his entourage unannounced), and was publicly condemned by Canada's parliament (for a taped segment in which he mocked French Canadians for their supposed obesity and for not speaking English). For a writer like Smigel, it was the best of all possible worlds. He could say whatever he wanted, sparking outrage and upsetting almost everybody he came into contact with, all the while maintaining relative anonymity. Smigel gets to have all the fun and a hand puppet takes the blame — the perfect situation for any writer. Or, for that matter, anyone.

  Not surprisingly, Triumph's success begat an entire collection of vulgar animal puppets on Smigel's short-lived Comedy Central show, TV Funhouse (2000). Smigel (with co-creator Dino Stamatopoulos) introduced the world to his Anipals, a ragtag group favoring gambling, booze, and casual sex. If his work on SNL and Late Night was occasionally profane and daring, then Comedy Central's TV Funhouse was a celebration of bad taste, pushed to extremes to shock and offend. The animal puppets had (mis) adventures in a Mexican bordello, a rooster got married to a monkey hooker, and host Doug Dale learned how to achieve weightlessness by taking laxatives. Interspersed amongst all this wildly obscene behavior, Smigel premiered many new cartoons, including two that featured the jaw-dropping titles “The Baby, the Immigrant, and the Guy on Mushrooms: Construction Site,” and “Porn For Kids: Silence of the G.A.M.S.”

  Sometimes Smigel's comic genius has been appreciated, such as when he was hired as the first head writer for Late Night With Conan O'Brien, in 1993, where he created some of the show's most popular bits, like the talking-lips celebrity interviews, “In the Year 2000,” and, of course, Triumph. Sometimes his genius has not been appreciated, such as when he was hired as an executive producer for The Dana Carvey Show in 1996 (which was canceled after seven episodes, although an additional episode was shot), and helped shape some of the show's most universally loathed (or, in some cases, loved) bits — one of which involved President Clinton breast-feeding a gaggle of puppies.

  Don't remember that one from the Saturday-morning cartoons?

  Is it true that you almost became Dr. Robert Smigel?

  [Laughs] Well, I had no idea what else I was going to do with my life. My father is a dentist; he still practices.

  More than thirty years ago, he developed the cosmetic tooth-bonding technique. He's much more important to dentistry than I could ever be to my own profession. You really should be interviewing him. And your book should be about dentistry. It's only right.

  My father's actually very funny. He has his own odd bedside manner. I've seen him ask patients who have cotton in their mouths non-sequitur types of questions, like, “If you were forced to save only one of your grandchildren, which one would you pick?”

  Do the patients appreciate his Sophie's Choice — type questioning?

  That's where the cotton in the mouth comes in. The patient can't answer, so they kind of become a prop in his act. Jon Lovitz goes to him, and he's always telling me how my dad's funnier than me.

  I actually worked in his office for a couple of summers when I was considering dentistry. He has a very thriving practice, and it seemed ridiculous for me not to consider becoming a part of that business. I was funny to my classmates as a kid, but I never assumed I could make strangers laugh. It wasn't really until I was at the end of my rope with pre-dental in college that I just — as a lark more than anything else — entered a stand-up contest that was being held at NYU, where I was attending, in 1981. I wrote a routine for the contest just to see what would happen, and I ended up being one of the winners.

  Do you remember any of the jokes?

  I was a big fan of Andy Kaufman's. So, I was into testing the audience with anti-performance stuff. I would come onstage in full Orthodox Jewish garb. I would wear an overcoat, a tie and a hat, and I fashioned a big beard out of cotton candy. I would also bring out a large religious book called the Pentateuch, which contains the five books of the Torah, and I would then do what the old men in our synagogue used to do when they were trying to find a prayer. They would very slowly and deliberately turn each page one at a time and lick their fingers. I would do the same thing onstage until I got a laugh, and then, when the laughs died down, I'd start to eat my cotton-candy beard. It would become a rhythm. I'd lick my finger, pull a piece of the beard, eat the beard, lick the finger, back to the page, pull the beard, and so on.

  How did your parents react when you made it clear that there wasn't going to be another dentist in the family?

  My father was understanding. He had sort of been led into dentistry — his father was a dentist — and he never enjoyed it until he made it interesting for himself with dental aesthetics. My mother was somewhat horrified, but still supportive.

  I sort of crawled to the finish line at N.Y.U. I even tried to finish pre-dental, but then I flunked organic chemistry.

  A few weeks later, during the summer of 1982, I left for Chicago and joined a Second City offshoot I'd heard about called the Players Workshop of Second City. I also joined an improv group called All You Can Eat. I didn't name it, by the way. We put on a show that we produced ourselves called “All You Can Eat and the Temple of Dooom [sic],” which grew to be very successful. We would split the profits each week, which came to around $300 for each of us. I lived with two friends in this group, in a filthy apartment, and our rent was $450. It was probably the happiest time of my life. Chicago is still a great place to start out in comedy; it's cheaper than most cities, and there's a huge community of people doing improv and s
ketch comedy. It's not hard to find like-minded people.

  What sort of sketches did you perform in the stage show?

  There was a range of silly ones. I don't think it was the most inventive comedy group that was out there at the time, but we tried to do clever material, and we became very popular. It was actually good preparation for Saturday Night Live. We didn't do improv onstage, just sketches. At the time, I thought improv was great as a writing tool, and I loved watching people at Second City develop scenes in improv sets. But I was not a fan of watching improv games.

  In fact, one of our more interesting sketches was a parody of an improv game. So for our sketch, we'd ask the audience for the typical improv suggestion, like, “We need an occupation, and we need a period of time, and we need a location.” Then we'd have a plant in the audience who'd start making weird suggestions. Every time we'd freeze the scene, the plant would highjack it, coming up with stranger and more convoluted suggestions: “Okay, so now you just grew a tree on your arm, because you find out that she had an affair with Hall and Oates's mother, and you're all going to a sing a song about orange puppies.” Most of the audience loved seeing the improv game ruined, although some of them probably felt a little ripped off.

  At what point did this stage show lead to Saturday Night Live?

  Al Franken and Tom Davis, two of the great original writers for SNL, were shooting a movie in the Chicago area called One More Saturday Night [1986]. One of the members in our improv group, Dave Reynolds, just happened to be cast in a major role. Franken and Davis became friendly with Dave, and they came to see our show, and they really liked it. We hung out with them afterward at a goofy German bar. And I thought, Well, that was fun, and that's the end of that.

  About a month or so later, I read in TV Guide that Lorne Michaels had gone back to Saturday Night Live, after a five-year-hiatus, and that he was hiring Al and Tom as producers. It was about the closest that I'd ever come to literally hitting the ceiling. All of a sudden, there was a possibility that I could actually be doing what I most wanted to do, and it felt completely alien. I was never the kind of person inclined to go after things aggressively. I once contacted Late Night with David Letterman before it premiered, to see if they were hiring writers, but I never sent them anything. I was so naïve that I simply called the show and asked if I could submit material. They said no and I said, “Okay,” and I never thought about it again. To give up, that was all the rejection I needed.

  For a job as a writer at SNL, did you have an advantage over those writers who didn't grow up in New York City? You were closer to the showbiz world than others, and might not have found it as mysterious.

  That's true on one hand, but there was an extra layer of awe. Saturday Night Live meant that much more to me because I grew up in New York. As big a phenomenon as it was around the country, it was much, much bigger in New York. To have grown up in the city watching the show, and, having experienced the media craziness that surrounded those early years, I was maybe more intimidated than a writer from the Midwest might have been.

  Having been such a fan of the show growing up, did you find that you had an easy time with the writing once you were hired?

  No. In the beginning, I didn't have an easy time writing for that show at all. I was freaked out just being there. I mean, when I met people on the staff I already knew all their names, from watching the credits every week. “Robert, this is Edie Baskin.” “Yes! Hi! I love your hand-tinted portraits of the cast!” “This is Akira Yoshimura.” “Hi! Yes! You played Sulu on the Michael O'Donoghue Star Trek sketch! Whuh? Oh, okay, see you later.” I was only a nerd, though, not a stalker. I lacked the confidence to be a stalker.

  There were other circumstances beyond my control that created an atmosphere of panic that first year. This was 1985 and the ratings had plummeted and the critics were savaging the show. I think Lorne felt a bit of insecurity coming back to the show five years older, and maybe he wanted to demonstrate he was still in touch with what was funny. So he very consciously hired some very young performers who were all brilliant and funny, but who weren't classic sketch performers.

  Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Michael Hall …

  Right. And Joan Cusack and Randy Quaid. You know, Joan and Randy were probably as funny as anybody I've ever worked with, but as performers they were different than Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks and Dana Carvey. When you have actors like Phil, Jan, and Dana, people who can pretty much play anyone, then all of the other performers around them can shine at what they do best.

  For instance, I think Joan Cusack probably would have had a very long and successful career at the show if she had been teamed with Nora Dunn and Jan Hooks; she wouldn't have been forced to stretch to such a degree and go outside her wheelhouse. But there was an edict for change after that '85–'86 season and she didn't get a fair chance. She had to settle for getting Oscar nominations [for Working Girl and In & Out] when she could have been working on a Morgan Fairchild impression.

  Did that place limitations on you as a writer — to have at your disposal actors who were funny, but who weren't necessarily solid sketch performers?

  I can tell you that when the new cast arrived the next season, in 1986, the change was palpable from the beginning of the first show. All of a sudden, it just became much, much easier for the writers.

  One of the first sketches was a takeoff of a game show, in which a psychic was a contestant and knew all the answers beforehand — a nice, simple premise that would have done okay the previous season. But Dana was the psychic, Jan was the other contestant, and Phil was the host. And the sketch just sailed in a way we weren't used to seeing. Everything changed all at once, and it suddenly felt as if the show was in the hands of total pros who could sell anything.

  It's interesting, because the show was criticized for its writing the previous season, but we really had a very talented staff. Quite a few of those writers were fired that summer, and I barely escaped being fired myself. And some of the fired writers are now legends, like John Swartzwelder, who's probably the greatest Simpsons writer ever. He's written more than fifty Simpsons episodes. He's absolutely brilliant.

  Why was he fired?

  I think the show was under so much pressure to make changes that they fired writers who wouldn't have been fired under normal circumstances. Swartz-welder and I actually shared an office. I don't feel like I did any better than he did, necessarily, but a few of the show's actors were fans of mine — Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, and A. Whitney Brown. They all spoke up for me over the summer, and I think that that's why I made the final cut. Also, I might have displayed a little bit more affinity for writing for performers than Swartzwelder did, being a performer myself.

  At the time, that mattered to Lorne.

  Did you, as a writer, ever purposely set out to create a catchphrase that would stick with audiences?

  Oh, no. Definitely not. I think the best catchphrases happen accidentally, because they're honest and organic. You can't purposely send a catchphrase out into the world with the intent that it's going to be loved and adored and repeated endlessly.

  I wrote the “Da Bears” sketch with Bob Odenkirk [in January 1991], but we never set out to create that catchphrase. It sounds like an aggressive attempt at a catchphrase, but it wasn't. We liked the rhythm and the attitude of saying “Da Bears!” But in the first script, the line actually appeared as “the bears.” The “Da” stuff was started by Chicago D.J.s that played clips of the sketch, as well as Chicago fans writing DA BULLS on banners.

  How about the “Star Trek Convention” sketch you wrote in 1986, when William Shatner tells the Star Trek fans to “get a life”? You had no intention of creating a catchphrase with that line?

  I didn't, no. But I have to say that popularizing that phrase was maybe the most far-reaching thing I've ever done as a writer — for better or worse. I remember pitching that sketch idea to William Shatner, and he really liked that phrase. He kept repeating it — “Get a life.” He had never he
ard it before. And, actually, most people had never heard it before, either. So when I pitched that phrase around, everyone really responded to it. I have no idea where or when I first heard it.

  Now the phrase has been abused to the point where it's become shorthand for mocking anyone who's very passionate or knowledgeable about anything — not just Star Trek trivia. Our culture has become so dumbed down that if you know anything a little specific, you quickly get cut down to size. “Did you know that Gerald Ford was our only non-elected president?” “Sheesh! Get a life!”

  Was William Shatner even aware of his own kitsch factor at that point? His career really seemed to have a resurgence after he appeared in that sketch.

  Yes, I think he was aware of the kitsch factor, to a degree. I mean, you have to remember that it was already fifteen years after Star Trek, and the guy wore a ridiculous toupée, and the Trekkies had been around for a long time. I think he knew what he was doing.

  Bob Odenkirk has told interviewers, including me, that before he joined SNL he didn't know how to properly write a sketch. He said that it was you who taught him how.

  I don't know why Bob would say something like that. I think if anyone taught all of the young writers how to properly write a sketch, it was Jim Downey, who had been with the show, off and on, for more than twenty years — he was the head writer for a number of years.

  What in particular did Downey teach you?

  It was never a Robert McKee [screenwriting lecturer] — type of thing. Downey never actually sat down and taught me that every sketch needed to have a character to root for, and that every sketch needed an arc, and that every sketch also needed to have a payoff. He never imposed his own style on us, and he appreciated different kinds of writing. What he did do was set standards.

  What do you mean by “standards”?

  Downey would let us know how important it was to not necessarily write a sketch with what he called “first-idea premises,” especially if we were writing about something topical. You had to challenge yourself and make sure that the premise of a sketch wasn't something that would be the first or most obvious thing an audience would think of. He would explain that by the time the show aired on Saturday night, all of the TV comics would have already had their shots at the current stories. We would have to tackle these stories by another route; we'd give the audience another take.