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

by Mike Sacks

  I don't know that I'd call it “common” among comedy writers, but I can think of at least four or five others who have it.

  How long does it take you to write a typical Shouts …amp; Murmurs piece for The New Yorker?

  A long time. The hard part is coming up with the ideas, letting the ideas simmer, then going back and seeing if there's anything there.

  Specifically, how long are we talking about?

  It can take months or even years for an idea to click. I am usually suspicious of any idea of mine that I love right away.

  How much re-writing goes into a typical Shouts piece?

  Quite a bit. I usually start a piece by writing notes — just a bunch of jokes. I'll spend three or four days doing that. The jokes don't usually change, but which jokes are used can change. That's often how I can tell how good a premise it is — how easily the jokes come.

  The piece itself usually goes through at least a few drafts. I think it was Ernest Hemingway who said writing is re-writing. And he was a hilarious guy.

  Ironically — and this is true of sketches too — the better the idea, the less editing and punching-up is usually required. My editor at The New Yorker, Susan Morrison, edits with a light hand, which is nice.

  How often are you unable to complete a New Yorker piece after starting?

  Most of them go someplace — sometimes just not to a very amusing place.

  And how often is a piece of yours rejected by The New Yorker?

  Maybe a third. Maybe half. When I first started sending them pieces, back in the eighties, they rejected my first eight or ten submissions. Finally, a very nice editor there, Dan Menaker, sort of took me by the hand and gave me some tips. My next piece got in.

  Any last words of advice for those readers looking to break into humor writing?

  If you spontaneously come up with funny things — and I mean writing funny things, not just saying them — and if other people seem to like them, then consider humor writing. Also, don't kill anyone. When people see “murderer,” they automatically think it's probably not funny. That's just the way people are.

  Larry Gelbart

  Larry Gelbart's Seven Tips to Becoming a Successful Writer

  Be sure to get to your desk as early as you can and make as many unnecessary phone calls as possible.

  Check your e-mail and respond at length to anything unimportant.

  Honor all requests for your autographed photo from anywhere in Poland or India, where you are obviously a star.

  Thoroughly clean your keyboard and monitor.

  Go over yesterday's output.

  Lunch.

  Nap. (You're not a machine, you know.)

  Larry Gelbart became a legend by finding comedic fodder in subjects most people would not consider inherently funny: war, religion, Dustin Hoffman in drag. Throughout a career that's lasted fifty years — an anniversary that eludes many of even the best of marriages — Gelbart has proven to be one of comedy's rare Renaissance men, responsible for groundbreaking work in every conceivable genre, from TV and radio to Broadway and cinema.

  While a teenager in the late forties, Gelbart was already writing gags for the likes of such major talents as Bob Hope, Jack Paar and Danny Thomas. Less than ten years later, Gelbart joined the now mythical writing staff of Caesar's Hour. Along with Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil (and Danny) Simon, Gelbart was part of a team that many consider to be the finest in the history of television.

  The comedy scene soon turned sour for Gelbart, however. In the late fifties he quit Hollywood and moved to England, frustrated over Communist blacklisting. But he returned in the sixties to write a successful Broadway play, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and to revolutionize television yet again.

  When CBS hired Gelbart in 1972 to create the pilot for a TV adaptation of Robert Altman's 1970 comedy M*A*S*H, he could have easily gotten away with a few warmed-over jokes about the Korean War. Instead, he turned the series into a comedic commentary on the horrors of combat — portraying death, surgery, and madness in ways that had mostly been ignored or glossed over by network television.

  Gelbart continued his creative winning streak into the next decade, writing scripts for “Oh, God!” (1977) and Tootsie (1982), and, in the process, was nominated for two Academy Awards for best writing. A half-century into a career that would impress anyone — in or outside the industry — Gelbart continues to write every day, working toward perfecting a skill that many would think he had perfected long ago.

  You once said that, as a writer, one's style is formed by what one can't do. Now, how did you come to this conclusion? Were there different styles of comedy that you dealt with that were more difficult than others?

  I should have said “subject” instead of “style.” This would be the subject matter, rather than the style, of a comedy piece. Experience has taught me that what seems like a slam dunk rarely makes the most successful finished product. While confidence is always a comfort, risk provides a good deal more adrenaline. The project that requires me to learn about characters I've never met is the kind I enjoy the most. I'm always drawn to those subjects least likely associated with comedy, such as war, or God, or finance — in other words, subjects that I'll have to wrestle with. I want to go to places I've never been before, in a sense. If my interest is piqued, perhaps audiences' will be, too.

  Are there any specific examples in which this happened? Where you took on a difficult subject, for the challenge?

  I was referring to M*A*S*H and “Oh, God!” And even A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which was timeless in its depiction of human frailties but required massive research on ancient Rome — years before HBO discovered it.

  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is such an intricate work. How do you visualize a project like that? The summary of the play, alone, can run more than a full page.

  At the risk of making it all seem somewhat metaphysical, you usually see things in your head, even before you're able to capture it in writing — whether it's a movie or a television show or, in this case, a stage show. You are watching it before anybody else does. You can visualize it. You see the characters, you see the situations, you get it. In my case, I saw it day and night for about five years. The problem, of course, is how to get what you see in your head onto the screen or stage.

  Has this become any easier for you throughout the years?

  I think so. I mean, after a while it's not so much a question of, “Can I do this?” It becomes more a case of, “When I do this.” You get better at the craft. Your talent for writing may not be sharpened, or your originality. None of that has anything to do with craft.

  If practice doesn't make perfect, then it certainly can hone your ability to do the things you want to do. For instance, needing to get the feel of a scene. How do you know when a particular one is finished? You may not need three pages to get across what you need to get across. Half a page will do the same thing. Or even just a single sentence. Or even one word — if it's just juste enough.

  I keep thinking of what Miles Davis said about his style of jazz. He said, “It's what you don't play, you know.” However pretentious it might sound, I think of writing as a kind of music. A writer, like a musician, can hit the melody — and at just the right tempo — with precisely the right amount of whatever sense or nonsense is needed.

  With comedy, would the jokes be the equivalent of the melody?

  The plot is the melody and the jokes are the grace notes. I tend to think in those terms a lot. I think about how much less equipment a writer of dialogue has, as compared to what's in a music composer's toolbox. Writers are, by comparison, impoverished. We have to work with what we have.

  How old were you when you first started writing professionally?

  Sixteen.

  That's a very young age to earn a living as a humor writer.

  It helped that I was the product of two shtetls. I learned jokes from my father, but I learned humor t
hrough my mother.

  My father was a barber in Chicago for years and years before the family moved to California in the early 1940s. He quickly built up a huge clientele of famous people — and a number of infamous ones as well. Even before we moved out West, he had shampooed and pampered the heads of a good many notable people. The list is extraordinary. Not only was he cutting the hair of people like John F. Kennedy, but he had also, strangely enough, been Jack Ruby's barber back in Chicago in the forties. At that time, Ruby was known as “Sparky Rubenstein,” his nickname serving as an acknowledgment of his quick temper.

  Did the Warren Commission know about all this?

  If my father had been working in Texas, I'm sure he would have also been Lee Harvey Oswald's barber. Judging by his photos, Oswald could have used a far better one.

  My father knew every joke anybody ever told. That was his currency as a barber — jokes. It was very hard to tell my father a funny story that he didn't already know. And he was great at telling them. He was wonderful at it.

  On the other hand, my mother had a really ironic, and sometimes needling, wit. It was from her, I believe, that I inherited whatever talent I may have for deflating a painful situation by turning something inside out; by making comedy a kind of victory. Where you have, maybe, not the last laugh but the only laugh about something. That I got from her.

  The first thing my mother did when she arrived in America, from Poland, at the age of fifteen, was to take a job behind a sewing machine in some Chicago sweatshop. I don't think she ever realized her full potential. She was stuck. Her wit was akin to prison or gallows humor; it was always slightly dipped in acid. I just hope she knew what a good audience she had in me.

  Can you give me an example of a joke your father would tell versus a joke your mother would tell?

  My father would have told a joke like, “A bum came up to me and asked for a bite, so I bit him.” My mother would probably have just made some smart-ass comment like, “Anybody can be a bum today.”

  What was their first language?

  Yiddish. Neither of my parents could write in English, although my father tried to later in life. I actually didn't speak English until I was about five. People who switch to another language tend to treat it with much more curiosity. The second language is fresher to them, and they see more potential for expression in this new tongue.

  Wasn't it your father who helped you get your first job?

  He did, yes. One of his Hollywood clients was Danny Thomas, who, in the early forties, was appearing on the Maxwell House Coffee Time radio show. Danny had about a seven-or-eight-minute section on each program, in which he played the role of Jerry Dingle, the Mailman. The character was a Walter Mitty type.

  My father would shave Thomas every Sunday afternoon before the program, at the CBS studios. I had written some material in high school: talent shows, sketches, that sort of thing. My father took it upon himself to tell Thomas that he thought his son could be a comedy writer — without ever bothering to tell his son what the hell he was up to. Thomas, being a nice guy, told my father to have me write something so that he might judge for himself. Thomas liked what I came up with and gave it to the show's head writer, Mac Benoff. Mac thought enough about what I wrote to ask, “Why don't you stop by my house after school and work with me?” So, for the next couple of months, I would finish my last class and, still in my R.O.T.C. uniform, stop by to see Mac and learn how to put a radio show together.

  What was that first script you showed to Danny Thomas?

  Each week, Thomas's character would deliver a package to a dentist, or he would deliver a letter to an architect, and he would invariably be insulted by that person. Very paranoid, Thomas's character would then mutter to himself something like, “Architect, big deal! I could've been an architect!” Harp music would break in and Thomas would become “Jerry Dingle, world-famous architect.”

  So I wrote a sketch, not too cleverly, but certainly understandably, about Thomas being insulted by a barber. He then dreamt out loud about how he could become “Jerry Dingle, world-famous barber.” It was good enough, I guess.

  I worked with Mac for two months or so, until an agent from the William Morris Agency, a wonderful man named George Gruskin asked me, “Would you like to do more of this?” Naturally I said yes. George got me onto a radio show called Duffy's Tavern, that took place in a bar. I stayed on that show for two years, at a salary of $50 a week.

  I'm not familiar with Duffy's Tavern.

  The show had no running jokes; no relationship jokes. It was very light on story. Really, it was just words, words, words. Duffy's relied on a lot of writer tricks: malapropisms and spoonerisms and a few other — isms. Jokes like “This is just a mucus of an idea,” or “Let's not jump to seclusion.” We'd also write a type of a joke that we'd call a “bull,” which would be something like: “I don't need any help being stupid.” In other words, the character would think he was making a point, but he was really denigrating himself.

  I soon got to see what was possible to do with words — how you could bend them, twist them, augment them, play with them endlessly. Using words as though each one were a trampoline. I learned that each could be the basis for a wider expression beyond the word's definition.

  It was a lesson that was to last a lifetime. If you just listen to an episode of M*A*S*H — not watch it, just listen — it's not a bad radio show at all.

  How much material would you and the other writers have to produce for these radio shows over the course of a season?

  We had to write a tremendous amount of material. In those days, a radio season was thirty-nine programs a year.

  Was this good training for you later in your career? Your having to produce a lot of material so quickly?

  Invaluable. I notice with some television shows these days that writers do not have to, or are unable to — create a new episode every week. There'll be a repeat, or some other show will be broadcast in its place. Well, nobody ever stood in front of a microphone in the early days of radio and said, “I'm sorry, but we don't have a show this week. So why don't you just listen to this instead?”

  But what a great experience! It all seemed so normal then. Now, when I see a 16- or a 17-year-old kid, I think, My god! At that point in my own life, I was sitting down with grown-ups and writing grown-up material.

  I wasn't just some kind of mascot. I was a contributing member of the staff. It must have been a kick for them. It was certainly much more fun for them to have me around than someone they perceived to be a real threat.

  How did you start writing for Bob Hope?

  I was drafted at eighteen, and when I got out of the Army, I teamed up with a writer named Larry Marks, and we went to work for Jack Paar — then starring in his first radio show — and then eventually for Bob Hope. Hope wanted to give us $1,250 each.

  So this was $1,250 a year?

  No, a week.

  A week? What year was this?

  This was in 1946. Eighteen and single. Just thinking about it now makes my mouth water. I worked for Hope for four years at that salary, and I never took that job for granted — believe me.

  What was it like to write jokes for Bob Hope? He's such a pure joke comedian. You must have been required to come up with thousands upon thousands of jokes.

  The most important thing for Hope, always, always, always, was the monologue. Whatever else he achieved in his career, he always considered himself primarily a monologist. The writers would look at what was going on in the world — current events, such as Bing Crosby having another son, or maybe it was the World Series, or maybe it was Oscar time. There were also political jokes, but they weren't very barbed. Hope never had any interest in drawing blood. He was very scrupulous at that point in his life about not siding with one political party or the other.

  A few teams of writers made up the staff. Each team would write twenty jokes or so on each monologue topic. At a staff meeting, Hope would then read everyone's jokes aloud; hundreds of them.
He'd put a check mark next to any joke that he liked. He'd then read them all over again. If he still liked a previously checked-off joke, he'd make a slanting strike through the check mark so that it looked like an “X” with a hook on the left. If he didn't like the joke the second time through, he just drew a line through it, and the joke hit the wastebasket.

  Then he would read all the material a third time, and if he still liked a joke, he would put a circle around it. Those jokes that survived all three readings were then separated and stapled together and put into some kind of a sequence that would form that week's monologue — which is not to say that he would remain completely satisfied. He might call a writer anytime during the week and say, “Look, I don't like that one joke. Can we get a bigger kid” — he would call his jokes “kids” — “can we get a bigger kid for that spot?”

  He called his jokes “kids”?

  Yes.

  Almost as if he thought of them as his own children.

  What do you mean, “almost”? He saw these kids far more often than he saw his own.

  Hope's delivery was so strong. Even if he delivered an unfunny joke, it would become funny just through the sheer force of his personality.

  I remember, in the late forties, being backstage at a theater in Blackpool, England. I was with a date, and Bob told a joke with the word “motel” in the punch line. The audience roared, and so did my British date. “Do you even know what a motel is?,” I asked her. When she said she didn't, I asked her why she was laughing. Her answer was, “I don't know! He's just funny!”

  Very often Hope's writers would find ourselves in these remote places — in Alaska or in Okinawa — just weird places. We couldn't travel with a lot of actors on those tours. So, occasionally the writers would be called upon to play characters onstage with Hope. These were roles that would have been assigned to professional actors had we been back in Hollywood. I remember the first time I performed with Hope, each of us standing behind his own live microphone. I delivered my line, and Hope came back with his line, and I felt as though I had been knocked back physically. The power of his delivery was amazing. If Jack Benny was the Fred Astaire of comedy, then Bob Hope was its Jimmy Cagney.