And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft
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That's true. That's kind of the class-clown thing. When I was a kid I was the classic class clown, and I would tend to make fun of whoever was telling us what to do. I just didn't respond well to being told what to do. Especially if it's in a kind of nan-nyish way. I still don't. Just ask my wife. I really don't like it, and I'll do things that I know are bad for me.
Is that why you're a Libertarian?
My parents were hard-core, Democrat Adlai Stevenson voters, and I grew up kind of agreeing with them. Then I went to college, during the Vietnam War — protest years, and I was sort of the classic college-student leftist. But then later, when I was working for the Daily Local News and got to watch government up close, I realized that everybody who worked for the government — everybody that I met anyway — all meant well, but they were just unbelievably incompetent. And it became clear to me that even though people generally mean well, you don't necessarily want them making decisions for you or having authority over you.
So it's not like I formally joined the Libertarian Party. I'm not a pure Libertarian in the sense that I think there should be no government at all, but that sort of thinking became my fundamental principal. The older you get — when you become the age of everybody running for president and you know more about people, or at least you think you do — you begin to realize that people only run for president to be in charge of everybody. There really isn't any other reason. We're not that stupid.
A lot of people buy into it, though.
Maybe we are that stupid.
A few of your more popular articles have dealt with subject matter with a much more serious bent. You wrote a beautiful article one year after United Flight 93 crashed on the outskirts of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on 9/11. You compared Shanksville to Gettysburg, and wrote that both towns, just out of chance, became associated not only with terrible events but with heroism. I thought this was an apt comparison, which I hadn't read anywhere else, even in the so-called serious press.
That was a difficult column to write. The Miami Herald really wanted me to write something about that one-year anniversary. In fact, they really wanted me to go to Ground Zero. I thought about that, but I wasn't in New York on 9/11, and I knew that many journalists and writers who had been in New York were going to be attending this event. The sheer volume of material written about Ground Zero was going to be huge and really good. I didn't see what I could add to all that, really. Later, and I can't remember who came up with the idea, the word “Gettysburg” popped up in conversation and everything just clicked for me.
Why?
I've been to Gettysburg a few times. It's one of the most moving places I've ever been. It's not that far from where Flight 93 went down, a few hours away, and there are a lot of parallels there. So that was the genesis of that column, and I was really glad I wrote it. To me, the story of Flight 93 is one of the most amazing of all the things that happened that day.
You returned to writing humor quickly after 9/11. How were you able to gauge that the time was right?
That was a really strange time. I remember talking to almost everybody I knew, including journalists and editors, and asking them, “What do we do now?” There were a couple of days when I didn't want to write anything. You know, I was just sitting there, staring at the television and crying. But I also had this feeling that throughout my entire life, all I've ever done, really, is write about silly stuff and make fun of things. There was always the lighter side of everything, and now suddenly, here's this event in which there's absolutely no lighter side that I can see. None. And in that kind of yawning chasm right after 9/11, it was hard to know whether there ever would be a lighter side to anything. I guess that, intellectually, I must have known better than that, but, emotionally, that's how I felt. It was like, My god, my whole life I've devoted myself to this crap, and here are these brave firemen and others who've suffered, and what is my life about? What am I going to do now? I had all these thoughts in my head. And then god bless The Onion. I laughed and laughed when their post-9/11 issue came out. It was great.
Did it seem to you that readers were ready to laugh, even needed to laugh again, long before the media decided it was okay to do so?
Exactly right! That is exactly right. I wrote one column after 9/11 that was quite serious. And I got a lot of mail in response, and it was almost all the same, which was, Thank you for that. I agree with you, it was a horrible event, but now please go back to being funny.
I actually went on a book tour pretty soon after 9/11. The media was convinced that the mood of the nation was somber and was going to stay somber for a long time, and that everything that everybody said or did on the news had to be somber. But the public very quickly said, All right, these fuckers attacked us. We're gonna get 'em, but we're not gonna stop laughing.
I think, just judging from my own mail and from what I would hear from readers, it was much different from what I was hearing from the media. I kept getting these interview requests from journalists who wanted to talk about what's going to happen to American humor? “Has irony really died?”
I remember thinking, Are you watching television? David Letterman came back on the air, with his show based in New York, and he started making jokes again. The audience and viewers seemed so happy to see this.
I came out of that whole event deeply impressed by … well, this is kind of corny, but I came away impressed by Americans. They're just an amazingly resilient people.
That's one of the things you dealt with in the Shanksville article. That if you're a student of history, if history tells us anything, it's that humans are very good at moving on and being resilient. And, also, that we need humor in our lives.
Right. And, in fact, there were new topics to write about and to be funny about after 9/11, especially dealing with the Code Purples and Pinks and whatever other codes we had for terrorism.
That whole War on Terror, you know, quickly became its own kind of joke. Obviously, not the part where we're actually accomplishing things with the terrorists, but with the ways it actually pissed us off by seeming to not do any good.
How difficult was it for you to write that first humor column after 9/11?
I was very self-conscious. I didn't want there to be anything that would remotely be construed as being in bad taste. But by that time, The Onion had returned, and Letterman had returned, and Americans were getting back to speed. I didn't find it too difficult.
My first humor article after 9/11 was generic. It was about a guy who made a jet engine to cool beer. He spent six months working in his garage on this incredibly highly engineered jet engine, and all it did was make a can of beer cold. I just wanted to do something reassuring. You know: People are still out there doing these types of things.
How often, over the years, has a newspaper refused to run a piece of yours?
I would say that with every fourth or fifth column, some paper somewhere would refuse to publish it. I was always amazed by the columns that would, for whatever reason, not run. I got into this one situation — I can't remember the name of the paper — but they kept saying I was on vacation. So, I finally wrote a column directly in response. I wrote: “No, I'm not on vacation and what this paper means is that they don't think you should be reading a column about dog farts.” So their editor, who was this prissy little man, started running detailed editor's notes in a separate column, contradicting me and arguing with me.
Is this common? To take a syndicated column that's already been edited and then tamper with it? Or to not run a column at all?
Newspapers can do whatever they want, that's the thing. I used to get so down because of that. People would say, I read your column in this newspaper and then I read it in another newspaper — the same column, and this column seemed a lot funnier than that column. One column would have a huge chunk of it missing, or they would just lop off the last six inches. Sometimes a column would have every punch line scissored out. I didn't want to have a reputation for being a prima donna or anything, bu
t sometimes I'd write letters to these papers and say, Listen, I'd really rather you not run my column at all than do this.
Why would they edit the columns? For length? For censorship reasons?
I'm not sure. It wasn't always clear whether they were shortening it for length or just cutting out what they thought might be offensive.
I always felt bad for Art Buchwald, especially in the last ten or so years of his syndicated column. The size of the column eventually shrank to the size of a postage stamp. How can you be funny with four hundred-words or less?
But Art kind of liked that. He used to say to me, “Readers don't want any more than four hundred words! That's all you gotta give 'em!”
How would the lack of space affect you? Did you feel that you had to launch into the humor more quickly than a columnist for a magazine might have?
That's just insecurity. I was always terrified that people would read only halfway through a sentence and not be amused, so I tried to have jokes everywhere. I would worry that it wasn't getting there quickly enough. That's always the advice I give people who send me humor to consider: it needs to be funny from start to finish. I just never had the confidence to take my time, to build slowly. I'm too insecure a writer.
There never seemed to be a distance between you and your readers, which exists between other newspaper columnists and their readership. Like, say, George Will, who is more of a lecturer and teacher.
That's probably because when George Will is writing about something, he's unquestionably done more research and reading and talking and thinking than most of the people reading that column. But when it comes to humor, you can't really act like that. What you're basically saying in a humor column is: I'm funny because you laugh. But that doesn't put you above anybody. Pomposity or authority doesn't work very well with humor.
How often would you use your columns to make a point?
Not often.
I can remember one instance, though, in which you used it to promote bicycle helmets for children.
I did, and that was really the only time I ever wrote a column in which I had a very specific positive goal from the start. I wanted parents to make their kids wear bike helmets because I just went through a pretty awful experience. My son was injured in a bicycle accident in 1996, but he was wearing a helmet. When I was in the hospital with him, I saw parents who had much worse experiences, because their kids weren't wearing helmets.
I was asked many, many times over the years to use my column for one cause or another, and I always said no. I'd say, Listen, what I do is entertain people — that's my job, that's why they're reading this column. If I start using it for other reasons, even if they're good reasons, I am sort of betraying the reason that people have started reading this column in the first place. I'll do what I can for your cause, but I will not use my column for that purpose.
So, for you, the joke always comes before the message?
Readers will say to me, “It's all in good fun, but you do a lot of good.” And I've always replied, “Yes, but even if I did bad, I'd still do it, because it's what I do.” My goal is to amuse people — that's it.
You've said that you never really thought about why something was funny or not funny until people started asking you about it.
I never realized that I was going to spend so much of my life talking about something that you can't really talk about. I've been asked so many times what's funny, and why is this funny whereas that is not funny? I've developed a few theories, but I'm not sure they're really my theories or just something I've learned to say in response to the questions about it. I'm still of the belief that A) you can't really know, and B) there is no absolute. My idea of funny is different from another's.
And yet you have the best definition of humor I think I have ever read: “A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.”
You know, it actually took me a day to come up with that one. Why do we actually laugh? I don't know that you can explain why we, as a species, laugh. Maybe it's just that there's a disconnect in our brains when we realize that obviously we're going to die but we can laugh anyway. There has to be a release. For me, it's either you laugh or you become religious.
If you were starting your career today, would you go into humor-writing for a newspaper? Or would you do it for the movies, or for another medium?
Starting right now, no, I don't think I'd write for newspapers. I think it would be much more likely that I wrote for the Internet. I'm not sure about movies. I sometimes wonder about that medium, truthfully. But the more immediate one, the Internet, is the one I like the most.
So no great desire to start over as a reporter covering the opening of a sewage plant?
No, but there has been a sewage plant named after me in Grand Forks, North Dakota. My career has come full circle. My name is now on the side of a plant that handles human waste.
And I'm sure some poor reporter in Grand Forks, North Dakota, has to leave the office to go and write about Dave Barry Lift Station No. 16.
Perhaps even as we speak.
Lucky guy.
Dick Cavett
Dick Cavett, as a talk show host on various show that have run for a record-breaking five decades on networks such as ABC, CBS, PBS, and CNBC, did what few of his contemporaries bothered to even attempt: he had conversations. Never one to simply sit behind his desk with a knowing smirk, waiting for his guests to finish promoting their latest projects so he could wrap things up with a well-crafted zinger, he listened to what they had to say, and he asked them questions that weren't prepared in advance by assistants on 4-by-6 cards. It was just two (sometimes more) people talking about whatever came to mind. When the laughs came — and they almost always did — they were genuine and true, never manufactured.
It could very easily not have happened. In 1961, Cavett — a few years out of Yale and a copy boy for Time magazine — boldly walked into the RCA Building (where The Tonight Show was filmed), found host Jack Paar in a hallway, and handed him an envelope of jokes. He was hired as a Tonight Show writer soon after, and eventually wrote for Johnny Carson when Carson took over the show's hosting duties in 1962.
Cavett's job security on The Tonight Show depended on his producing dependable one-liners night after night. As it turned out, the small-town boy, born in Gibbon, Nebraska, had a talent for writing comedy on the fly. And, even more impressive, he could write for any specific performer, tailoring each joke for that person's unique tone and mannerisms. Whether he was writing for Paar or Carson, or Jerry Lewis, Cavett's jokes always matched the meter and rhythm of the particular host.
Cavett got his own chance at the spotlight when Carson called in sick in 1962, and Cavett was recruited to temporarily replace his hero. His debut as a talk-show host was, to say the least, controversial. During his opening monologue, he explained that Carson was resting at home, recovering from a severe case of “Portnoy's complaint.” His reference to the Philip Roth novel was not lost on the NBC censors who recognized a masturbation gag when they heard it — one of Cavett's very first jokes on national TV, and he was already being bleeped.
ABC offered him his own talk show in 1968, and, from the very beginning, The Dick Cavett Show seemed almost destined for failure. Its time slot flip-flopped from daytime to late night to prime time and back again — and yet, somehow, Cavett attracted a loyal audience, mostly among the hipper, more “with it” generation. Cavett was widely referred to as “the thinking man's Carson,” if only because his show was unapologetically intellectual and openly accepting of his (barely) younger generation's counterculture.
Cavett was smart, dangerous, and willing to bring on guests who had something to say, rather than just to promote. Case in point: John Lennon appeared with Yoko Ono three times, and most of their conversations dealt with charities and political causes. Charles Bukowski, the underground poet who
made Skid Row seem sexy to those who would never live there, once claimed that he would appear as a guest only on Cavett's talk show. Appearing with Johnny Carson or Merv Griffin or anyone else, he said in his six-hour documentary The Charles Bukowski Tapes, would be “like eating your own vomit…. If you ever catch me on a talk show, you can shoot me…. Cavett's the only guy I respect.” Then again, only moments before, Bukowski had muttered, apropos of nothing, “Let's go to Paris and burn the town down, man.”
Perhaps Cavett's finest moment occurred in 1968, during an hour-long interview with one of his comedy idols, Groucho Marx. Cavett and Marx had been friends since their first meeting in 1961 at the funeral of playwright George S. Kaufman. During this interview — one of Groucho's last memorable TV appearances before his death in 1977 — he discussed shoplifting at Bloomingdale's as a child, being knocked unconscious for thirty minutes (also as a child), and the Vietnam War. About a third of the way through the interview, just prior to complaining about the nudity in the Broadway production of Hair, Groucho turned to Cavett and said, most earnestly, “You know, you're one of the best and wittiest conversationalists.”
No small compliment from a performer who was once quoting as saying, “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
It seems you had a tremendous hunger to escape the Midwest and make it in show business. What did you want to escape from?
I don't know. I wasn't one of those kids whose life was a nightmare until he escaped into showbiz or comedy. I never thought of it as escaping a terribly unpleasant place. There was never a feeling of “I can't stand it here another minute.” I just knew there was another place I wanted to be. I probably could have stayed and lived in Nebraska, but it never would have happened. I wasn't a suffering child, except when my mother died, when I was ten.
Do you think your mother's death affected your comic sensibility?