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

by Mike Sacks

  It is stitched together, yes. And yet it works for the audience, because Dustin is such a brilliant actor — far more brilliant as an actor than he is as a collaborator. I do think he should have won the Academy Award that Ben Kingsley ended up winning in 1983 for Gandhi.

  Dustin in a dress is just irresistible, and the audience is certainly not sitting there saying to themselves, This couldn't have happened all in one day. The audience did like the movie, but there are things I'm still bothered by. Tootsie had what Hitchcock called “refrigerator moments.” Have you heard this expression?

  No. What does it mean?

  It means that you see a movie, and everything makes sense, but then, later that night, when you're home and you're hungry and you go to the fridge, you think, Wait a minute … that one scene? The one that took place in the course of a day? The scene that was ninety-seven hours long? It makes no sense!

  Has the Hollywood experience gotten any easier for you over the years?

  Not really. I recently had the same type of experience with Robert Redford on what was meant to be a sequel to The Candidate. He wasted two years of my life trying to scratch an itch he couldn't quite explain. Two years! And it was at a point in my life when that kind of time is no longer petty cash. It was very frustrating. But everybody goes through what I call “star dreck.” Paddy Chayefsky's last credit was for Altered States, remember? And he refused the credit. If the man who wrote Network had to go through the madness of the studio favoring the director's vision of a screenplay over the writer's, what more is there to say?

  You know, some people in Hollywood treat me like I'm a monument. They just want to drive around me and take a closer look — maybe even have our picture taken together. But I'd much rather have less of that type of respect and more of the other kind: the kind where they leave your work alone.

  Not that I haven't as well, but the business has gotten old. It's also become something I would have to study very hard to be — it's gotten mean. And it's not just movies. Most TV series are now owned by networks. How funny are corporate people? Organization, which is famously known as the death of fun, is now, illogically enough, churning out sitcoms.

  I guess the only real original comedy happens in clubs, where you have people of every stripe saying whatever they want to say about anything they choose; people who have yet to get a single note from an executive.

  You want to know what I think is missing from comedy today?

  What?

  Jews.

  [Long pause] Are you kidding?

  It's too goyish, it's too scholarly, it's too … when we talk about Caesar's Hour, when one thinks of that time, all of the material was basically written by first-generation people. They were not that far from Europe. They were children of immigrants, and largely uneducated. There is something else that has crept in now, and it's taken over. More corporate, more smart-ass.

  I just think it helps to be hungry. And you don't have to be Jewish to be that. I mean … I don't think anybody has ever been funnier than Richard Pryor in his early years. You could feel the hunger. There's a smart-alecky aspect to comedy now. I'm not saying you have to be born in a whorehouse or that you have to be born in Poland, but I think there's a disconnect. The money is so huge, all of the hunger seems to come from the corporate side — the hunger to have a huge, revenue- spinning hit.

  Are you saying that it's no longer an industry where a 16- or 17-year-old kid would be invited in and then tutored in the ways of comedy?

  I don't think so. Then again, maybe it wasn't the norm then either.

  The love of the writing, is that still something that you have?

  More than ever. I now think of writing as a privilege — as a gift that's been given to me. Any day that I don't get to write something — anything — is a day I have to spend being someone other than who I am.

  Any advice you'd care to give to those writers out there just beginning their careers?

  When you're writing and come to a rough spot and the ideas just aren't flowing, put down dummy text and keep on moving — especially if it's at the end of the day and you're going to stop. Your brain will never stop for the day, even if you have stopped working, and there's a very good chance you'll come up with something better. Also, at the very least, you'll have something to come back to the next day, instead of a blank page. That's important.

  But in general terms, just sit your ass down in a chair and hope your head gets the message. Isaac Bashevis Singer's advice for the struggling young writer was to stop struggling and write. As for me, I don't have any other advice. If I did, I would have had a far more trouble-free life and a much, much better career.

  Quick and Painless Advice for the Aspiring Humor Writer, part seven

  GETTING YOUR COMIC BOOK OR GRAPHIC NOVEL PUBLISHED

  From Eric Reynolds, Editor, Fantagraphics Books

  You do not need an agent to publish a graphic novel or comic book.

  I prefer to see as much of a finished piece as possible. It's not absolutely necessary for you to send a large amount of material, but it does enable me to appreciate the work as a whole.

  The cover letter should not be lengthy. It should, however, sum up what you want to achieve with your work (a comic book series, a graphic novel, or something else).

  Do not submit a plot synopsis. Send finished work.

  It is better to mail in your submission rather than submit by e-mail. If you want your work returned, include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

  We receive about fifteen to twenty-five submissions a week, about a thousand a year. Out of these, we might buy two or three unsolicited manuscripts. But if you are talented, you will be noticed. We discovered the Hernandez Brothers [Love and Rockets] this way, as well as R. Kikuo Johnson [Nightfisher].

  Roz Chast

  BONUS INTERVIEW

  During an interview with Roz Chast at the 2006 New Yorker Festival, comedian Steve Martin read aloud from one of her cartoons. It was a fictional help-wanted classified, touting the “opportunity of a lifetime.” Among the many absurd qualifications, applicants were expected to have an up-to-date trucker's license and knowledge of quantum physics.

  “There is so much literature involved,” Martin remarked about this cartoon, and others. “So much writing.”

  For some cartoonists, complimenting their writing is akin to an insult. After all, theirs is mostly a visual medium; too many words add unnecessary clutter. Chast has always been a master at finding the perfect balance between the literary and the visual. Her cartoons do not depend on funny pictures to sell the joke. But, at the same time, they never seem overcrowded and dense with needless explanation or rambling punch lines. She's a rarity among her creative brood — a cartoonist whose humor can be appreciated without the drawings.

  As with all great writers, she has a fascination with the tiny, seemingly insignificant details that are usually and all too easily ignored. Her cartoons — which have appeared in The New Yorker since 1978 — have featured an array of hilarious and over-the-top characters, some of whom bear an uncanny resemblance to her own family members.

  But many of Chast's most famous creations are insentient and not in any way alive, beyond their tendency to mouth off. Chast has devoted entire comics to those items usually relegated to the background and usually ignored — wallpaper, lamps, boxes, electrical cords. She specializes in finding the “inner voice” of these objects — or, as her mother once referred to it, the “conspiracy of the inanimate.” In one late seventies cartoon, she gave a toaster a bow tie, a vase a string of pearls, and dressed a grandfather clock in a skirt and a straw hat. (“You can dress them up,” she wrote in the accompanying caption, “but you can't take them out.”).

  Born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in the mid-fifties, Chast did not grow up aspiring to become a professional cartoonist. Even when she began drawing — her first original comic strip, which featured two anthropomorphic birds named Jacky and Blacky, was created at the
age of five — it never crossed her mind that she might someday make a living in cartoons. But within only a few months after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design (which she attended with the future members of Talking Heads), Chast was already publishing her work in Christopher Street magazine and The Village Voice, and, still in her twenties, she was invited to join the approximately forty cartoonists under contract with The New Yorker.

  Today, Chast lives with her two children and husband, humor writer Bill Franzen, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where she continues to write and illustrate her cartoons, as well as the occasional book.

  How much did The New Yorker mean to you growing up in Brooklyn in the fifties and sixties?

  Not much, truthfully. The New Yorker wasn't something that I focused on when I was a little kid, even though my parents subscribed. I read Highlights for Children. It wasn't until I was about eight or nine that I discovered the old New Yorker cartoonists like Charles Addams.

  My parents were both involved with education. My mother was an assistant principal at a Brooklyn elementary school, and my father taught high school. Each summer, we would drive from Brooklyn to Ithaca, New York, to Cornell University, and we'd rent graduate-student housing, because it was cheap. When my parents attended lectures, they'd stick me in the browsing library in the student center. There was one section that contained only cartoon books. I would look through these books and just die.

  I especially loved Charles Addams. It was the funniest stuff I had ever seen — just amazing. I still remember the books: Monster Rally, Addams and Evil, Black Maria, Drawn and Quartered ….

  What was it about Addams's cartoons that appealed to a 9-year-old?

  For one thing, I “got” them. I couldn't relate to some of the other New Yorker cartoons, like the ones in which grown-ups said witty things to each other at a cocktail party. That just didn't make any sense to me; I had no idea what a cocktail party was, really.

  But with Addams, I understood the jokes. It was sick humor — very black. They were funny to me. Plus, there were kids in them! A few of his cartoons I've never forgotten. One had an entire family pouring boiling oil onto a group of holiday carolers. In another one, the Uncle Fester character is waving to the car behind him to pass, even though he knows an oncoming truck is approaching. Or the cartoon where Uncle Fester is grinning as he watches a movie, while everyone else sobs. So many great ones! Very transgressive.

  Wolcott Gibbs, the New Yorker writer, once wrote that Addams's work was a denial of all of the spiritual and physical evolution in the human race. Maybe I related to that.

  Even when you were nine?

  Oh, when I was a kid I was obsessed with all sorts of weird, creepy, dark things. I was fascinated with medical oddities and bizarre diseases. My mother's sister was a nurse, so we always had The Merck Manual lying around. I didn't understand much of it, but I did understand the symptoms. Just the faint possibility that I might have leprosy or lockjaw or gangrene … tantalizing and terrifying.

  I'm still fascinated with that sort of thing. Last night I watched this incredible medical show on television and [laughs] … I shouldn't laugh, because it's not funny at all, but the show featured a woman who turned silver.

  She turned what?

  Her skin turned silver, but I can't remember why.

  I suppose it doesn't matter, really.

  It doesn't matter, it's true.

  Oh, actually, I do know why! When she was a kid, a doctor prescribed nasal drops that had silver in it.

  And you're not confusing this person with a superhero?

  No, she was definitely just a normal woman who turned silver. The condition is called argyria.

  To me, that's the ideal type of disease show. If I watch a show that features, say, a man with an extra arm growing out of his shoulder, I know that I don't have that condition and I never will. Same with parasitic twins. Horrifying, but not contagious.

  What is it about these medical conditions that fascinated you? Are you intrigued by the outsider element?

  Have you ever seen Dear Dead Days? It's a book by Charles Addams [Putnam, 1959], and it's a compendium of all of these odd images — weird photos of patients suffering from rare diseases, criminals, revolting or frightening architecture, wheelchairs. I loved that book.

  Many writers and cartoonists are fascinated by people who live on the outskirts of society — criminals, the mentally ill, those suffering from deformities.

  Those people are more interesting than the everyday humdrum. To quote [photographer] Diane Arbus, “Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”

  I suppose it's also helpful for a creative person to look where others might not be looking.

  Maybe. If I could, I would look where everyone else is looking. But my attention is always drawn elsewhere. When I was in school, trying to listen to the teacher talk about the French and Indian War, I would be distracted by irrelevant things like the ugly shoes she was wearing.

  You drew a New Yorker cartoon about that.

  I did. It was called “Newly Discovered Learning Disabilities” [December 3, 2001], and one of the entries was “Doodler's Syndrome.” The child in the cartoon insisted on drawing and didn't hear a thing the teacher was saying — very similar to my own experience.

  You'd be labeled A.D.D. today.

  Oh, absolutely! It's still very hard for me to pay strict attention to something that I have to listen to. I once drew a cartoon called “Adult Attention Deficit Disorders” [The New Yorker, June 7, 2004]. It included “Financial Information Disorder,” “Driving Directions Deafness,” and “Technical Manual Fatigue Syndrome.” I suffer from all of them — and more.

  I'd love to be able to pay attention to a lecture about saving money on my taxes, but I'm always fascinated by the silver person sitting in front of me.

  How often does that actually happen?

  Not often enough.

  Were you a fearful child?

  I remember I was afraid of kites, but I have no idea why. Actually, I can sort of guess: I had an uncle who told me that if I were to hold onto a kite long enough I would be lifted into the sky.

  I'd say that's a pretty good reason. Everyone seems to have an uncle like that.

  Yes, they do. Kids believe anything you tell them. I did, anyway. I could easily convince myself that something bad was about to happen, or that I was about to come down with a terrible, incurable disease.

  My parents were older than all of my friends' parents. They came from a world where people actually did get diphtheria. I remember my mother describing having had diphtheria as a child; she said it was like having “a web across [her] throat.” My grandmother supposedly stuck her finger down my mother's throat and pulled out the web. This was very real to me. I heard that diphtheria story many times.

  My parents were both forty-two when they had me in 1954. They were a link to another time and place, and that affected me greatly. A lot of my friends had parents who had experienced the excitement and the prosperity of the fifties, whether they were “red-diaper babies” or “Eisenhower babies.” My parents didn't seem to know anything of that; I might as well have been raised during the Depression. My parents grew up poor in households that spoke mostly Yiddish. They were from the Old World.

  How did your parents feel when you achieved success? Did they understand your cartoons?

  Sort of, but they were more excited that I had insurance [laughs].

  Did your parents allow you to own comic books?

  My parents were very serious; they did not like pop culture at all. Comics were considered “crap.” They did buy me Classic Comics, however. Have you ever seen them? They're illustrated versions of Moby Dick, Robin Hood, and other works of literature.

  They were like pieces of candy that looked great but tasted terrible. The sad part was that an illustrator actually drew them. So much wor
k went into them, and they were really horrible. They were like the “Prince Valiant” comic strips in the newspaper: meticulously drawn, but, to me, a waste of good comic space.

  Were your parents influenced by the Senate subcommittees on juvenile delinquency in the 1950s? And the 1954 anti-comic screed, Seduction of the Innocent, by the psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham? The book implied that comic books would lead our nation's children to ruin.

  I think it might have been more of a class issue. They thought comic books were for stupid people, and if I didn't want to be a stupid person with a stupid job who was going to live a stupid life in a stupid apartment and marry a stupid husband and have stupid children, then I shouldn't be reading comic books.

  I did manage to borrow some issues of Mad magazine from my cousin. I loved Don Martin and the way he wrote out all those amazing noises his characters made. I loved the way his characters' shoes would bend — you know, the top part of the shoe would sort of bend over at a 90-degree angle. He just drew funny. I've never forgotten one cartoon in particular, for some reason: a man in a bathroom is using a towel-dispensing machine, and a sign says: Push Down and Pull Up. This guy takes the whole machine and pushes it down and pulls it up, and rips it off the wall. The joke itself wasn't even that great. It was just the way Don Martin drew the guy's expression. He drew great expressions.

  Were Archie comics allowed in the house?

  To my parents, Archie was the devil. So, of course, that's what I wanted to read the most. I thought Archie comics were fantastic. Even though they already seemed kind of dated when I was reading them in the sixties, Archie and Jughead and Betty and Veronica were very seductive to me.

  Seduction of the innocent.

  Right. It was sort of a parallel universe with all these people who didn't look like they lived anywhere near Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn. There were no girls with beehive hairdos, or people who would punch you in the school hallways for no apparent reason.