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

by Mike Sacks

  Downey once summed up SNL sketches this way: actors love to act in sketches about a crazy person in a normal situation, and writers love to write sketches about normal people in a crazy situation. And, of course, the ideal is to have a balance. He also made a point of not beating the audience over the head with a political opinion. He felt it was lazy, since most humor writers tend to be liberal anyway. But he also thought the audience resented the heavy-handed stuff. Downey left the show in 1998 and returned in 2000. In the time he was gone, SNL swung much more obviously to the liberal side.

  Downey's standards had a huge effect on the quality of the writing. And he's a brilliant writer himself, so all of the writers wanted to make him happy. To be honest with you, I don't think the bar has ever been as high as when he was running the place.

  Many writers have complained over the years that the environment at SNL does not foster an atmosphere conducive to creativity — that it's not a place where the best comedic writing can be accomplished.

  I think the difference between me and Bob Odenkirk, for example, who has been a critic of the show and who describes his time at SNL as being unhappy, is that Bob really didn't have a lot of reverence for the show. Bob was his own entity who would create characters for himself; he was someone who could do stand-up and perform in a one-man show, which is something he did when he wasn't at SNL. On the other hand, I truly revered SNL. It just meant everything to me. And I did my best to fit into the show's parameters, while also trying to come up with smart and interesting material.

  SNL is its own entity, and Lorne Michaels tries to make the show a comedy gumbo. There are a lot of different tastes going on, and the audience isn't going to necessarily be of one mind. There's a lack of a safety net for a show like that. It's a different beast than Mr. Show, where the audience is all of one mind and where everybody wants and expects one kind of comedy — and they're going to get it. Mr. Show was outstanding, and I loved it. But there's a reason why certain sketches that will kill in a closed format like Mr. Show might eat it on Saturday Night Live.

  I have a lot of respect for alternative comedy, but it's a different challenge to survive and get laughs on mainstream TV while still being hip and smart. It's a lot more difficult to be a rebel in a sweater.

  Meaning what exactly — that it's more difficult to sneak subversive ideas into a mainstream show such as SNL?

  Yes. It's incredibly satisfying to slip something strange into the mainstream and have it work.

  All of my comedy heroes when I was growing up were performers like David Letterman and Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman, and later, Larry David. These guys were every bit as smart and extreme and inventive as any performer or writer who cultivated a reputation as being too cool for the masses. But they were just so brilliant and smart that they figured out a way to do what they wanted to do on network TV. I have a lot of respect for that.

  Do you think you've gotten away with more subversive material on SNL because much of your work is animated?

  For sure. There are certain images that are just easier to swallow in cartoon form.

  As an example, I wrote a commercial parody in '92 called “Cluckin' Chicken.” It was about an extremely happy cartoon chicken who explains in great detail how he will soon be butchered and then eaten and then digested in a customer's gastrointestinal tract. If he wasn't animated with googly eyes — if it was just a guy in a suit — it probably would have been much more disturbing.

  I'd agree with you on that.

  There were certain jokes in the “X Presidents” cartoons — about former presidents now acting as superheroes — that only worked because of this. When George H. W. Bush was called away to be a superhero, he was always having wild sex with his wife, Barbara, either in bed, or in the shower, or on a swing. And there's no way on earth that I could have gotten away with that with actors. I'm still a little shocked that I got away with it at all, quite frankly.

  Similarly, I suppose you wouldn't have been able to get away with the “Ambiguously Gay Duo” shorts if they were live-action and not animated.

  Actually, I think I could have. Maybe not every visual joke, but a lot of the jokes were just this short of being overt. “Ambiguously Gay Duo” is one of my favorites because of its slyness — because it's all about what's not being said as much as anything else. The villains are always sharing suspicious glances with each other in the presence of Ace and Gary. We're all perversely obsessed with everyone's sexuality.

  Especially those of superheroes.

  Even more so, yes. We love taking down celebrities. Imagine what we'd do to superheroes.

  You've talked about your love of cartoons when you were a child. What were your favorite characters?

  I loved Bugs Bunny. Very little entertainment matches up to the best Bugs Bunny cartoons. They've got great sight gags and plenty of cynicism — and not the pop-culture-self-referential kind that's gotten so overdone. Bugs Bunny villains are all hilarious embodiments of unfettered greed, vanity, envy, rage. They were all very broad characters, but they have great internal moments that are played with subtlety. By today's standards, it's very sophisticated material for kids.

  On the other hand, I despised Mickey Mouse. Just hated him. For one thing, he was never funny. It always felt corporate to me. I was a cynical kid who didn't like to be addressed like a baby. Those cartoons felt like they were selling brain death — the “Hey, kids! Everything is great!” approach. They made you feel like a Stepford Kid, even though The Stepford Wives hadn't been written yet.

  But what affected me the most was “Peanuts.” My father gave me a Charlie Brown book when I was 7-years-old — one of those tiny paperbacks that had the collected strips in them. It was summer, and I started reading the book, and I was up until three in the morning. I had never done that before in my life; I'd never stayed up that late for anything. I was just alone in my room reading and giggling and being completely taken over by this other world.

  What was it about Charles Schulz's work that affected you so deeply?

  I guess I connected with the melancholy. As much as I loved Bugs Bunny, I didn't necessarily identify with him as much as I did with Charlie Brown and the others. There were no winners in those “Peanuts” strips. The kids always had problems, sometimes adult problems. I learned a lot of words reading “Peanuts,” most notably “anxiety.”

  Charles Schulz is famous for saying, “Happiness is not funny.”

  … so Mickey Mouse sucks. That should have been the whole quote. Actually, it's a very realistic take on childhood. Every age has its share of misery and anxiety. But, you know, there were a lot of surreal elements with that comic that I loved just as much as the sad stuff — pioneering visual jokes that no one ever talks about. I remember one specific panel [originally from June 28, 1956] that made me laugh harder than I ever laughed. It was from my first “Peanuts” book. Linus is about to shoot an arrow that he wants Snoopy to retrieve. Linus seems to be excited about this, but as he pulls back the bow and releases it, Snoopy just leans forward and chomps down on the arrow in mid-air. The look of disappointment on Linus's face is beautiful. So it was a great combination of darkness and goofiness. A lot of cartoons have been influenced by “Peanuts,” you know, with semi-cynical ensembles of kids and so on. But they don't go the distance. They're all morality plays. Everyone always has to learn something, and I think that's kind of sad.

  You've used the “Peanuts” characters in at least two of your “TV Funhouse” cartoons, including one that was a takeoff on the 1965 Charlie Brown Christmas special.

  A Charlie Brown Christmas was a very brave move for television. Every other Christmas special at that time was all about peace on earth, and good tidings to your neighbor, and every other cliché imaginable. But Charles Schulz saw the Christmas special as an opportunity to say something new, and he made a very adult social commentary about commercialism that kids could understand.

  If that weren't enough, he also had the courage to take it a ste
p further and actually inject real religion into a Christmas special. It sounds like a joke, but no one had done it before. The CBS executives in 1965 weren't going to allow the Charlie Brown special to be shown at all. They weren't happy that Jesus was even mentioned. But a drunk animator stood up at the screening and said, “If you don't show this special, you're crazy! It's going to become a classic!” And he was right.

  When Linus speaks up on that stage, the sight of an innocent child reading a passage from the Bible is so simple and powerful that it kind of knocks you off your feet. You're moved, and yet you don't feel like you're being taught a lesson or a moral. I'm Jewish, but this is a message that goes far beyond the specifics of religion and into a plea for simple humility.

  In my own Christmas “TV Funhouse” cartoon — this was in 1997 — Jesus returned and was horrified by the hypocrisy of people using his name for their benefit. The only thing that did not annoy Jesus was seeing Linus's speech in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. As he was watching it, Jesus began to tear up, and then dance like the “Peanuts” kids. I expected his tear to get a big laugh with the studio audience, but just the opposite happened: the audience was touched, just as they are when they watch the real special.

  It seems that you have a rarified position at Saturday Night Live. You've had the freedom over the years to write whatever you wanted, in any format, whether it was animated shorts, commercial parodies, or political sketches, such as The McLaughlin Hour parodies.

  The McLaughlin sketch was definitely a high point. The first of those sketches may be one of the funniest things I ever got on Saturday Night Live, and it was exhilarating to write something that was that silly, and to have it kill as hard as it did. It was definitely one of those milestones where it added to my confidence and made me want to go for more of that type of thing. A few months later, we did the Sinatra Group sketch. Instead of the usual McLaughlin Group panel members, there was Frank Sinatra as the host, with his guests, Billy Idol, Sinead O'Connor, Luther Campbell, and Steve and Eydie Gorme. And that sketch became more famous than the original — but I don't like it as much.

  Why?

  Well, it was a funny idea to have Frank Sinatra say a million rude things in an incredibly rapid fire setting. He would shout out lines to Billy Idol like “I've got chunks of guys like you in my stool!” For the audience it was a bigger hit because it had some topicality on top of the goofy structure. But for me it wasn't as interesting. It was a comedy game that wasn't as sophisticated; Frank's insults were funny but not as crazy as the non sequiturs we wrote for McLaughlin.

  Is that what you wanted to achieve with your sketches? Sophistication?

  No, not always. Sophistication is fine, but more importantly, a sketch has to be funny. If you can have both sophistication and humor, then that's even better. That's why a chimp in a smoking jacket is the apex.

  With all of the freedom that you were afforded on Saturday Night Live, why did you decide to leave the show as a full-time staff writer in 1991?

  I left for a little while, but not for long. I would have left for good if a sitcom pilot called Lookwell had been picked up by the networks in the summer of 1991. I co-wrote it with Conan O'Brien. It starred [TV's Batman] Adam West as an incompetent detective. Only the pilot was broadcast.

  Lookwell is one of those mythological “lost” comedy projects that has a real underground following among humor fans — especially now that the pilot is available on YouTube. How do you think the show would have played out in the long run if it had been picked up by the network?

  It seems really cocky to say this, but that show was probably a few years too early. It was a single-camera comedy, which was almost a nonexistent form at the time, and it was kind of commenting on reality in a coy way, which started happening later with The Larry Sanders Show. I've sort of come around to Lookwell, because for a long time I was like, Is this really any good? Do people like it only because my name and Conan's name are on it?

  I watched it recently, and I have to say that I think it's funny and I'm glad we did it. But, you know, while we were working on Lookwell, I wondered if we could really sustain a show like that, week after week. There are so many strange elements to the show. And, of course, the protagonist is practically insane. Would viewers want to see that every week? I'm not so sure they would have.

  There were a few neat ideas that might have helped. If you remember, Look-well taught an acting class where he showed old clips of his 70's crime show. If Lookwell had stayed on the air, I was hoping to have a marginal celebrity each week playing themselves taking the class, in hopes of stretching out their fifteen minutes of fame. For the pilot we asked Donna Rice, the woman who had an affair with the '88 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, to do it. She actually came very close to saying yes. Marla Maples — Donald Trump's former wife — said yes, but after we'd already cast the part with another actress.

  Do you think that Adam West was in on the joke? It doesn't look like he was cognizant at certain points during the pilot.

  Definitely. He knew he was being made fun of, and he had been self-deprecating in the past about his role as Batman. At the same time, there was a little part of Adam West that was still innocent and naïve enough to be incredibly sweet-natured about the whole thing. I remember one day he ran into our office, and he was wearing shorts and a straw hat — but not as a gag. It was just the way he dressed. And he announced, “I've got it!” He was dancing on air. He told us that he had been walking on the beach and he'd thought about everything and he finally understood the part. He had cracked the code, kind of like Batman would. He knew exactly what we wanted to do and he was exuberant. He was like a kid.

  When the show wasn't picked up, he was very disappointed, and there have been times over the years when he's called to ask if we could reconsider bringing it back to television. But I wouldn't want to do it without Conan. The basic idea and story elements were mine, but Conan had an amazing ear for the main character, and he lift ed it to the next level with some of the best lines.

  So, it was only after Lookwell wasn't picked up that you then decided to leave SNL for Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 1993?

  I was offered the head writing position on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and I decided to do that for a while. But I never really left SNL — at least not for good. To this day, I still have an amazing setup, and one that is unique in television. I think I'm the only person who gets to be an important contributor on some level to two major late-night shows. Also, I don't have to go to either show each day. I can work from home, alone.

  But is that a good thing — to work alone? Doesn't it help to bounce ideas off others?

  It does get lonely, truthfully. Writing by myself is something I rarely did as a staffer at SNL. The time crunch dictates that it be a very collaborative show. I really do love writing and working with other writers — the neurons fire faster. And it's good to have more input and to not have to work in a vacuum.

  How difficult was it for you as the head writer to deal with the criticism for Late Night in the early years? The show didn't have an easy time with critics or executives. Tom Shales, of The Washington Post, wrote in 1993 that Conan should “resume his previous identity, Conan O'Blivion.”

  I didn't really care about negative reviews, but it did piss me off when critics were lazy and wouldn't even give us credit for being new. When someone would say, “It's a low-budget Letterman rip-off,” it kind of reminded me to take it all with a grain of salt — because I knew, if anything, we definitely weren't that.

  So many of the main elements of the show were already in place from the first week: the “Clutch Cargo” bits, “In the Year 2000,” “Actual Items,” and others. The core of the show was already there. The show struggled for a while, mostly because Conan — and he's said as much — needed to learn how to be funny on camera the way he was funny in real life. He needed to look relaxed and confident, and he wasn't necessarily a natural at the beginning. If you're an aud
ience member, you really have to have confidence in your host. And I don't think audiences felt that at first.

  But there was this whole other audience that didn't care that Conan was green, and they were the ones that caught on right away. They were a younger audience, and they saw what the show was supposed to be. Conan was very likable, and that's extremely important — maybe most important. The audience has to like a host. If they don't, the show will fail no matter what you write.

  What was Late Night supposed to be? What did you want to create with the show?

  There's a theory that when you're young, you define yourself by what you're not. And I've done that many times in my life and in my career. But it's not as simple as just rejecting convention. You have to come up with an alternative. In the case of Late Night, creating new alternatives was tricky. Letterman had already done the ultimate “fuck you” to talk show conventions; he changed everything. To me, that was probably the most important period of comedy in my lifetime — that time between the late seventies and the early eighties when irony took over. Performers and writers were being funny in a completely different way.

  What I wanted to do on the Conan show was to go in the other direction and not break that fourth wall, and not comment on being a talk show. I wanted a show that would commit to a fake reality with fake characters. And it's not like that hadn't been done earlier; I always say we stole the part of Steve Allen's show that Letterman hadn't already stolen.

  Steve Allen's Tonight Show was a wildly inventive show in its time — this was the mid-fifties. Allen did the “Man on the Street” sketches and “found” humor that Letterman ended up taking to another level. But Steve Allen also had an ensemble of actors, like Tom Poston [The Bob Newhart Show, Mork & Mindy, That '70s Show] and Don Knotts, who would come onto the show and play characters.