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

by Mike Sacks

  I've never even thought about that.

  Really?

  I'm not sure I have any reason to think that it did. But my mother was probably more responsible for my becoming a performer than anyone else. She got me hooked on applause. When I was very young — almost in my pre-conscious existence — she would prop me up on an easy chair to perform soliloquies.

  Almost like the young Mozart.

  At these recitals I got my first big laughs and didn't know why. I learned later that what made my “act” so popular was my habit of saying at the end of each selection, “Everybody clap.” But I had a slight speech problem with the letter “l,” causing it to sound like, “Everybody crap.” This feature probably netted extra bookings — in every living room in Gibbon, Nebraska.

  My mother really was a huge fan of show business and entertainment. She loved going to shows and would even direct dramatic scenes starring the neighborhood kids. And she instilled that love in me.

  Did you perform comedy when you were in school?

  In my magic acts, I did. I would join extra-curricular clubs I didn't give a shit about, such as student council, just for the opportunity to get up onstage and give a speech. The other candidates would give dreary, straightforward speeches, and I would write a funny poem and get virtually every vote available.

  A lot of humor writers and comedians seem to have taken up magic as kids. Do you think there's a connection between comedy and magic?

  Only that most writers are shy when younger, and magic gives them an opportunity to be funny while hiding behind props.

  It's that perfect crutch. I used to get paid up to $35 for performing magic at neighborhood birthday parties and for friends. One time, I was booked into a 1,000-seat auditorium at a state fair to open for Ed Stibe and His Wonder Horse. Do you know how many people showed up to see us? None. I never went on. And I don't think the bastard even paid me.

  What did your parents do for a living?

  They were teachers. My father actually taught in the same high school I attended. How I envy people who had his class! I still run into his former students all over the world, and they tell me how great a person and teacher he was. But I was such a self-conscious little twerp. I was embarrassed with the idea that my father taught in my school. My father used to laugh, because between classes I would pass his classroom, and I would always avert my eyes for fear of anyone making the connection.

  Why do you think students loved your father so much?

  He was terribly smart, and he was also very funny. He had this important trait of making people like him and making people feel liked. He was a great man. He attracted the most forlorn loser types. People would say, “Al Cavett was the only person I've ever liked in the whole world.” This even extended to Charles Stark-weather, the serial killer from the late fifties.

  Charles was our garbageman. I was at Yale when the murders happened, and I was walking past a newsstand one morning when I saw the headline, “Lincoln, Nebraska Murder.” I called home, and my stepmother said, “Yeah, your dad used to talk to Charles every single time he picked up our trash. Charles didn't talk to very many people, and your dad felt sorry for him.”

  It turns out Starkweather slaughtered a gas-station attendant about five blocks away.

  So your father took in Charles Starkweather like a stray puppy?

  I guess in a way he did — if a puppy can slit throats. My father had always said that Charles was a pitiful person, misled and kind of lost.

  You once pointed out that the Midwest has produced its fair share of serial killers; not just Charles Starkweather, but also the In Cold Blood murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. Have you ever figured out the connection?

  I don't know what it is. I really have no idea. But, you know, the Midwest has also produced its share of talk-show hosts. Johnny Carson grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska, which is not too far from where I grew up.

  As a kid in the forties, I saw Carson perform as “The Great Carsoni” — that's what his magic act was called — in a church basement in Lincoln, Nebraska. Years later, he was amazed when I told him about this.

  How did Carson treat you in that church basement?

  I went backstage, and I saw him setting up for his show. This is something that usually upsets magicians, because they want to be left alone before a show. But as soon as Johnny learned I was a fellow magician, he became very kind. After his performance, I watched him step into his car and glide off into the night — he told me years later that it was a secondhand Chevy. He was a huge star, headed back to Omaha, where he had a 15-minute television show.

  Did Carson have stage presence that early in his career?

  Oh, god, yes! He was famous around the University of Nebraska community. He would perform at school events and at other functions. He was a local celebrity.

  Johnny really loved me, and I think it was the Nebraska connection. He invited me out to dinner once in the early eighties — this was after I wrote for him. We were in a booth, and we were swapping stories about old shows and about our early experiences with the opposite sex. He started talking about a TV special he had just done in Norfolk, Nebraska. This was Johnny Goes Home [NBC, February 1982]. It hadn't been aired yet, but it had just been edited. When he went to his old school, all his old teachers were lined up waiting for him. They applauded him. He teared up telling me this.

  He had the reputation for being very aloof with most people.

  I loved going on The Tonight Show. One time, as he was introducing me, he said, “Dick Cavett is here tonight — we always have sort of a fatherly feeling toward Richard.”

  When I watched the show later that night, I could see that he said this with genuine — almost tearful — affection. We were so attuned to each other on the air that a staff member once told me, “You're the only guest Johnny has on where he allows himself to lean back in his chair.”

  Once, at the end of the show — there were four of us on the couch by then — Johnny asked what we were doing. Everybody had a movie or a play or a TV series to plug. I had nothing. He had brought me out first, so I was farthest down the couch, next to Ed. I hoped he wouldn't get to me.

  I was praying to the gods of comedy, when I heard, “And you, Richard?” I heard myself say, “I'm working on a new sitcom. It's a humorous version of Gilligan's Island.” The laugh was cyclonic. Johnny did his “off the chair” thing he did when genuinely convulsed. I wish I had a copy of that show.

  As for him being aloof, he couldn't endure the small talk and social chitchat that he faced offstage. One day he slipped away from some tourists who had conered him in the hallway outside his studio. He came over to me and said, “What makes the average person so goddamn boring?” I loved it. The way to Johnny's heart was to produce a deck of cards and ask, “Could you teach me how clean up my double lift ?”

  Let's jump back a few years to your first writing job, which was for Jack Paar's Tonight Show. The story about how you landed this job in 1961 has become legendary.

  Listen, if we had lived in an age of security in the early sixties I never would have pulled this off. After graduating from Yale in the late fifties, I began working for Time magazine as a copy boy for $60 a week. I noticed an article one day in the Time office, about how Jack Paar wasn't happy with his monologue — that he was worrying about the quality of the jokes. I just happened to see this article with the words “Jack Paar” in heavy type.

  I wrote some jokes for a monologue and stuck them in an envelope with “Time Magazine” stamped across it. I knew where The Tonight Show studio was, from having snuck in several times. I walked over to the studio, and I entered as if I belonged there. Just by chance, I saw Jack leaving the men's room and walking down the hallway toward me. I could tell that he noticed “Time Magazine” on the envelope. He was feuding with Time then, so those words really jumped out at him.

  I handed Jack the envelope and then took a seat in the audience, waiting to see if he told any of my jokes.


  It's almost a story from another age — from a Dickens novel.

  It really is. The number of events that had to fall into place for this to have worked was too contrived by half. I often think about that. If I hadn't seen that article, or if a guard had rightly kept me from going into the building, or if I hadn't seen Jack in the hallway, I would now be a plumber. Not that there's anything wrong with being a plumber.

  Did Paar perform any of your jokes that night?

  I was sitting in the audience, watching his monologue, and he didn't use one of my lines. It nearly killed me. I thought, Well, that was a dumb idea.

  But after the monologue, Jack took a mic into the studio audience. A woman asked him, “What do you think about those people on the pirate ships?” There had just been a story in the news about a Portuguese ship that was being held by pirates. He responded, “Wouldn't it be great to hear a voice coming over the loudspeaker: ‘Attention! This is your pirate speaking.’”

  This was one of the jokes I had written, and it got an enormous laugh. Then he used more of my lines. After the show, we got in the same elevator. He said, “You want to write, don't you, kid?” I told him that I did. I got the job shortly thereafter.

  What was it like to write for him? He was known for being somewhat mercurial.

  When he hired me, he said, “Better be funny, pal!” Can you imagine the pressure?

  The staff always wondered what mood Jack would be in each day. Would he be up? Would he be down? That was always a problem with him. Jack was the most fascinating neurotic I ever met on this earth. But that was the key part of his magic: a sense of danger that made him exciting to watch.

  The British theater critic Kenneth Tynan once said that if Jack were talking to a guest — even if the guest were Cary Grant — you would never take your eyes off Jack. You were always afraid that if you did take your eyes off him, even for a moment, you would miss a live nervous breakdown on your home screen.

  But does a viewer of late-night television necessarily want to see a near-breakdown night after night? Doesn't it become exhausting?

  It was a little extreme night after night, but I don't know if it was exhausting. In a lot of ways, Jack really made it all look effortless. When I left his show, around 1968, to host my own show, he gave me the best advice I ever received: “Kid, don't ever interview anybody. That's just David Frost with a clipboard. Make it a conversation.”

  As hard as this is to believe, Jack never used cue cards or a prompter for his monologue. Before each show, he would write out the monologue in long hand, with a very nice fountain pen. And he would look at the jokes a few times, and that was it. He would sometimes forget, but rarely.

  Did you work for Jack Paar when he walked off The Tonight Show, because censors didn't allow a joke to be aired that involved a “water closet,” or toilet?

  No, I wasn't writing for him yet, but I did watch that show as an eager viewer. I think it took place in 1960. I just thought it was wonderful. And I noticed he said, “I'm going to leave The Tonight Show.” Interesting that he referred to it as The Tonight Show, rather than “my show” or The Jack Paar Show. It was always The Tonight Show.

  It was an institution, and he knew it, and he was willing to leave it. When he returned about a month later, his first words were, “As I was saying before I was interrupted …”

  Do you remember any jokes you wrote for him over the years?

  I gave Jack one famous line. It was a joke borne of exasperation and some anger. Jayne Mansfield was going to be a guest on the show. It's hard to remember now, but she was almost as big — in all ways — as Marilyn Monroe. She was a huge star at the time, and Jack was very excited. He rejected all the intros as inadequate for this magnificent event. He said to all of us, “You guys haven't written me an intro I could use in three months!”

  I put a single sheet of paper into the typewriter and typed out an intro that went: “Ladies and gentlemen, here they are … Jayne Mansfield.”

  It's become a classic line.

  It's been stolen many times, actually. Not too long ago, a journalist sent me a letter from Harper's, speculating on where that joke first came from.

  It's funny, but I really wonder how I even came up with it. It's not at all like any other line I ever wrote. It's subtler than a joke really needs to be.

  It's so pristine. You cannot improve on that joke.

  Every part fits. I've always maintained that your first wording with any joke is always the correct one. You should always go with that first version. When you start asking questions, like “Should I slow down the punch line by another beat and a half?” or “Should I add something to make it a little clearer?”, well, you should never, never do that.

  I once wrote a joke for my stand-up act that went, “I don't know much about caviar, but I do know you're not supposed to get pictures of ballplayers with it.” It always got laughs, but I then overthought the joke and changed it to: “I don't know much about caviar, but I suspected something when I noticed that this caviar came with pictures of ballplayers.”

  The joke didn't need that over-explanation. I'm not sure why I even felt the need to change it. The first and simpler version was better.

  Have you ever understood why jokes come so easily to you?

  The whole thing is a mystery — how one person can read a newspaper article and come up with ten jokes instantaneously, while another person could never — not in a hundred years — come up with a single joke.

  Beyond that, it's also a mystery as to why some humor writers can write in ways that other humor writers can't. It's making that leap from a perfectly acceptable joke to one that just shines. There are plenty — more than plenty — of humor writers who are unable to make that leap. Many simply do not have an ear for jokes, just like they don't have an ear for music. They're comedically tone deaf.

  How would a beginning writer even know if they had an ear for humor? I would think that it would be like smelling your own breath — a difficult, if not impossible, feat.

  Sometimes shows would “audition” a writer for thirteen weeks. There was one writer, I can't quite remember his name, let's just say Joe Connor, who would have a tendency to spell out every joke. It became so bad that his name became a verb among the other writers for ruining a joke: “Have I Joe Connored this joke too much? Or maybe I should Joe Connor this a little, because I'm not sure the audience will get it.” It was sad. I had to change the wording on his jokes whenever I had the chance.

  Once your name becomes a verb, I suppose it's time to leave your chosen profession.

  Either you have it or you don't. I would almost get high writing jokes. It wasn't so much meditating as a feeling of exhilaration. Something would thrill in my veins, and I couldn't stop once I was in this place. The jokes would just start to roll out from under my fingers. They would just keep coming and coming.

  One of the things that interests me about humor writers is that with other professions — say, doctor, electrician, bank manager — there's very little mystery; you learn the trade, and then you perform it for years, becoming more and more proficient along the way. But it seems that a lot of veteran humor writers find their craft just as mysterious as they did when they first began.

  It's just as inexplicable to me now as it was when I was a kid. And I don't want to analyze it too much, or think about it too much, for fear of it disappearing for good. It's such a blessing when it does happen — your angel has appeared once again.

  I remember visiting relatives when I was nine. The adults were all sitting around a table. I loved to hear adults joke and talk. One of the adults was talking about a friend, and she said something like, “Well, that was a long time ago. My friend was just a babe in arms.” I then said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “And now she's a babe in someone else's arms.” The adults laughed, but they also gave me some very strange looks.

  Several years ago, I played the narrator in a Broadway production of The Rocky Horror Show. I was given
the opportunity to do two comic monologues in the show — it could be about anything in the news, anything current. I had my hand in my pocket one night up onstage, and a voice from the audience yelled, “Hey, Dick! Ya playin' with yaself?” And I heard myself say, “I have people who do that for me.” I don't think I had ever used that line before. It was almost as if I were on humor automatic pilot and I was hearing this joke at the very same time that the audience heard it. It was out of my mouth before I even thought about it. The angel had appeared to me again — with a little help from a jackass in the audience.

  After Jack Paar left The Tonight Show in 1962, you stayed on to write for Johnny Carson. Did you find it easier to write for Carson than Paar, since you were closer to Carson? Was Carson's persona easier to capture than Paar's?

  Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I had left The Tonight Show to write for Merv Griffin on his daytime show, The Merv Griffin Show. It's funny to even think about now, but a lot of people forget that Merv's show and Johnny's Tonight Show debuted on the same day [October 1, 1962]. And Merv received almost all of the positive reviews. There was even a rumor that Merv might even take The Tonight Show away from Johnny. But then Johnny hit his groove.

  To really succeed as a comedy writer, you have to be able to write in different comics' voices. As far as finding it easier to write for Johnny or Jack Paar, I knew both their sounds. I knew how they thought, and I knew how they talked. It was easy for me to write in a comedian's voice. One night, someone had written down on an audience-response card that their hometown had cleaner streets than New York. I gave Johnny a line that went: “Pompeii, after Vesuvius went off, had cleaner streets than New York.” I could just hear it in his voice. Can't you? It's essential to hear the comics in your head when you write jokes for them. If you can't do that, you'll never make it as a comedy writer. Mort Lachman, who was Bob Hope's head writer for years and years, told me this: “You turn 'em on in your head and they do the work for you.”

  So, no, it wasn't necessarily easier writing for Johnny than Jack. But I never wanted to let Johnny down. One day I wasn't feeling very well, and it was one of those days when I just didn't care very much. I gave Johnny the minimum, probably four jokes per page. I kind of spread them out to look as if they had filled both pages — maybe eight jokes total. Johnny called me on the phone and said, “Richard, I think you're capable of a little better monologue than this.” And I died. It gives me the chills to think about now. It felt like I had just let a favorite teacher down. But it was very good of him to do it that way. He jolted me out of my miasma.