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

by Mike Sacks

  I suppose kids don't have the representation that other minorities might have.

  Also, a lot of adults don't seem to have the thinking skills that are critical to understanding kids. I hate these broad generalizations that adults come up with only because they believe this is how kids should think or act. How do you know?

  Does part of that have to do with adults forgetting what it was like to be a child?

  I think so. It's one thing to forget about your childhood, but don't transfer your incorrect memories onto kids who are now living through that time. Or, at the very least, don't write about it!

  Do you have any interest in writing humor for adults?

  For better or worse, there's just more appreciation of the humor genre within children's literature. Beyond the fact they're very difficult to write, comic novels are also difficult to sell to adults. There are a few authors who get away with it, but, overall, publishers are not excited by humor unless it's a children's book, where there's more room for that type of book in a commercial sense.

  How extensive is your self-editing process?

  All of my books are a lot longer in their first drafts than they need to be. I always cut them down drastically. I'm a huge rewriter; it's extremely important!

  I don't know whether this is true or not, but there's a story about John Coltrane and Miles Davis — they were playing together in the mid-fifties. Coltrane was into playing very, very long sax solos, some lasting for more than an hour. Miles Davis asked him to rein it in a bit.

  Coltrane said, “I don't know how.”

  And Davis said, “Take the horn out of your mouth.”

  I always think of that story when I'm looking at a beautiful chapter I wrote, and I just can't imagine cutting one word of it. I then think, Actually, yes you can. It's not that hard.

  I find this capacity missing with a lot of writers.

  How so? They're not capable of eliminating their own work?

  I don't think writing students should be taught to merely trust their instincts and not work on the craft of writing. The best writers I know scarcely ever had that feeling. They felt — and still feel — a sense of insecurity, which is vital.

  The amount of arrogance you need to even think of becoming a writer is so high that you need to counterbalance it with a hint of modesty.

  Whenever I've taught a writing class, my standard opening gamut has been to have students write for fifteen minutes. I'll then ask if any of them have anything good to share. There are always a couple of students who say, “Yes, I do.”

  I say, “Okay, well, the rest of you can throw what you've written away. Throwing your work away is better than not having written anything at all.”

  There's no shame in writing crap. Sooner or later something — anything — will hopefully be produced because of it.

  Any last words of advice for the aspiring children's writer?

  Steal paper from work. And not only paper, but printer cartridges. Seriously, I did this for years before I could afford to write full-time.

  I worked for a dying man. My job was to answer his office phone and to inform people, if they asked to speak to him, that he was dying. He managed to live for over a year, so people eventually stopped calling. In that time, I managed to start Lemony Snicket.

  I recently met this underground writer, or so she calls herself, who was complaining about the price of self-publishing. I thought, If you don't know how to steal enough paper to print out your own stories for free and to advance and improve yourself as a writer, you're not an underground writer. More than that, you don't deserve to be a writer.

  That's my advice. Why isn't that taught in the creative-writing programs? It's a crime.

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

  SELLING YOUR MOVIE SCRIPT TO A STUDIO EXECUTIVE

  Advice from a Film Executive at Twentieth Century Fox

  Do not send unsolicited submissions — legally we can't read them no matter how funny the title or description. We are liable for severe legal repercussions. It has to come from a W.G.A.-agent, manager, or producer.

  Write your script with a development executive in mind … we read tons of scripts. When a writer has a point of view — a voice and / or a sense of humor in their screen directions — it makes us laugh, and we enjoy the read all that much more.

  Don't ask for your screenplay back once it's been submitted.

  If you are pitching your script to an executive, do not offer to act out any of the scenes.

  Try to be somewhat funny in person, or at least somewhat socialable, likeable, and clean. Never scrimp on personal hygiene. Even though you are a writer, we still need to like the people we want to work with.

  Do not tell stories about how you refused to take Steven Spielberg's notes on a recent project, or how some “stupid” development executive gave you notes, which you later ignored. We want to know that you will be flexible and responsive when we ask you to make changes.

  Do not act mean to our assistants, as they tend to get promoted quickly, and you never know who will be working for whom one day. So be extra nice when speaking to assistants — they are not there for your every want or need.

  Bruce Jay Friedman

  INTERVIEW BONUS

  During his four-decade (and counting) writing career, Bruce Friedman has published eight novels, four story collections, numerous plays, and such screenplays as Stir Crazy (1980) and the Academy Award-nominated Splash (1984).

  Though he never became a literary household name, Friedman has many famous admirers and friends. Godfather author Mario Puzo once described Friedman's stories as being “Like a Twilight Zone with Charles Chaplin.” Neil Simon adapted Friedman's short story “A Change of Plan” (originally published in Esquire magazine) into a 1972 movie blockbuster, The Heartbreak Kid, directed by Elaine May and starring Charles Grodin and May's daughter, Jeannie Berlin. And Steve Martin, who turned Friedman's semi-autobiographical book The Lonely Guy (1978) into a feature film in 1984, provided a back-cover blurb for Friedman's story collection, Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos (2000), that perfectly, if not sarcastically, summarized the sentiments of so many of his contemporaries and would-be imitators: “I am not jealous.” (Gordon Lish, the well-respected publisher of, among others, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Don DeLillo, is also blurbed on the back-cover: “Bruce Jay Friedman is an American original whose least engaged considerations can beat the crap out of almost anything else on this block.”)

  Friedman may dismiss most of his stories as “little ones,” but he wrote at least one full-length novel, Stern, that is widely considered to be his masterpiece. The book, published in 1962, and which John Kennedy Toole (author of A Confederacy of Dunces) once called his favorite modern novel, tells the story of a man, the eponymous Stern, who takes his family out of the city and moves to the suburbs. But what he discovers there is far from the small town bliss of his imagination. He's attacked by neighborhood dogs. He develops an ulcer. His family is harassed by an anti-Semite, who, during one altercation, pushes Stern's wife to the ground. Suburbia is not what he'd hoped for. In fact, it's a dangerous landscape where a Jewish man with urban, paranoid sensibilities believes he is in constant, Gentile danger.

  Born in the Bronx in 1930, Friedman's initial ambition was to become a doctor. When that didn't pan out, he decided to pursue a career in writing, earning a Bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. But his true literary education didn't come from academia. Instead, he learned most of what he needed between the years 1951 and 1953, when he served as a First Lieutenant in the United States Air Force. As he tells it, his commanding officer saw promise in the young Friedman and suggested he read three novels: Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River; James Jones's From Here to Eternity; and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. After consuming those novels in a single weekend, Friedman realized that he wanted to attempt to write for a living.

  Along with Kurt Vonnegut, Friedman is ofte
n credited as being one of the pioneers of “dark comedy.” From plays like “Steambath” (1970), in which it's revealed that a Puerto Rican steamroom attendant is God, to short stories, such as “When You're Excused, You're Excused” (first published in the anthology Far From the City of Class, 1963), in which the main character tries to convince his wife to let him skip Yom Kippur to work out at the gym, Friedman's take on humanity is almost always bleak, but hilariously realistic.

  In his foreword to Black Humor, an anthology he edited in 1965, Friedman argued that the thirteen writers represented in the collection weren't just “brooding and sulking sorts” determined to find levity in the world's misery. Rather, they were “discover[ing] new land” by “sailing into darker waters somewhere out beyond satire.” Not surprisingly, the very same sentiment could be used to describe Bruce Friedman.

  I've read that you don't like to be known as a humorist.

  I don't, especially. Thurber, Benchley, Perelman — they are the great humorists. They set out to make you laugh. That's never my intention, although it's often the result. As a writer, I couldn't possibly be more serious. Sometimes the work is expressed comedically. The hope is that it's unforced and doesn't seem worked on, which, of course, it is.

  I'm not much good at jokes, can't remember them. However, once upon a time, I volunteered to be the master of ceremonies at a sorority event at the University of Missouri, which I attended in the late forties and early fifties. The mic went dead after about six jokes, all of which were borrowed from a Borscht Belt comedian. The room was filled with gorgeous women who began to talk among themselves and to cross and uncross their legs.

  I became rattled and shouted out, “Will you please quiet down? Don't you see I'm trying to be funny here?” I then fainted. Someone named Roth helped revive me. “What did you have to faint for?” he asked. “You were terrific.”

  So you agree with Joseph Heller that humor isn't the goal, per se, but the means to the goal?

  I'm not comfortable with the idea of “using” humor to achieve a purpose. I can't imagine Evelyn Waugh, while writing Decline and Fall, saying, “I think I'll use a little humor here.”

  Every once in a while I'll catch myself chuckling over something I wrote. But that's generally a bad sign.

  In l965, you put together Black Humor, a collection of short stories featuring such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Terry Southern, John Barth, and Vladimir Nabokov. In the foreword, you popularized the term “black humor.” You've since said that you feel somewhat stuck with that term.

  I do. I hear it all the time, and it makes me wince. Essentially, it was a chance for me to pick up some money — not that much, actually — and to read some writers whose work was new to me.

  In retrospect, a more accurate term would have been “tense comedy” — there's much to laugh at on the surface, but with some agony running beneath. I had no idea the term “black humor” would catch fire to the extent that it did — and last these many years. The academics, starving for a new category, wolfed it down.

  What similarities did you notice among these “black humorist” writers' works?

  Each one had a different signature, but the tone generally was much darker than what was found in most popular fiction at the time. It also confronted — perhaps not consciously — social issues that hadn't been touched on. Pressed to the wall, I'll use a term that's sickeningly in vogue today: it was edgy.

  Why do you think the term “black humor” became so popular, so quickly?

  It's catchy, and that's appealing to publishers, critics, academics. Some of it may have had to do with the political and social climate of the mid-sixties. The drugs, the Pill, the music, the war — comedy had to find some new terrain with which to deal with all of this. I imagine each generation feels the same.

  After the book was published in l965, my publisher threw a huge “Black Humor” party — I still have the invitation — and the whole world showed up. I recall Mike Nichols and Elaine May having a high old time. The “black humor” label started to get reprinted and quoted after that party, and it never stopped. Ridiculous.

  When did you begin writing your first novel, Stern?

  In l960; it took about six months. I had been trying to write another book for three or four years but it never came together. Certain notions aren't born to be novels. I figured that out — at great expense.

  Stern, published in l962, seems like a break from the type of books that came before it. Stern seems more ethnic; more psychoanalytic. The main character is an anxiety-ridden Jewish nebbish, who feels taken advantage of by his Gentile suburban neighbor. The book was very influential for a lot of writers, including Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and, later, John Kennedy Toole. When you were working on it, did you feel as if you were working on something new?

  I was simply trying to write a good book, and an honest one, after struggling with one that kept falling apart. I was living in the suburbs and feeling isolated, cut off from the city. I constructed a small and painful event, and wrote a novel that centered around it. I hoped it would be published and that afterwards I wouldn't be run out of the country. I'm quite serious. I thought I'd hide in Paris until it all blew over. Such ego. It's not as if I had a dozen book ideas to choose from. Stern was the one I had — the story felt compelling — and that's the one I wrote.

  This main character was not your typical macho, male literary hero; he was fearful about many things, including sex.

  I certainly had that side at the time. All writing is autobiographical, in my view, including scientific papers.

  My agent, Candida Donadio — she also represented Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon — told me I had written a very ugly book. I was devastated by that.

  What did she find “ugly” about it?

  She never explained it. Years later, she claimed she loved it and always had; but that wasn't the case. Actually, the book she did love — truly love — was my first book, which never came together. In a dead man's scrawl, the kind you see in Westerns, she swore she'd get the book published. And then she died. I'd be reluctant to publish it, even now, assuming I could find a copy.

  What was it called?

  You Are Your Own Hors D'Oeuvres. A key character was an early Martha Stewart type who toured Air-Force bases assuring the wives of officers that they did not have to worry about being bad hostesses. The thrust of her lecture was embodied in the title. The hero, Green Sabo, was a young lieutenant who tagged along and had adventures along the way.

  Related to all this, Stern was a book that was in direct contrast to that first book and to the short stories I had written up to that time. I'm told that it was a departure from much of the era's fiction. The New Yorker literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman called it “the first true Freudian novel.” The only book that had a distant echo was Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road. And, of course, John Cheever's stories, which touched on suburban alienation in New England.

  Do you think Stern influenced Revolutionary Road?

  I doubt it, but I do know that Yates was aware of it. I knew him when I was working as an editor in the fifties and sixties, at the Magazine Management Co., which published men's adventure magazines. He just showed up without explanation, this man with a handsome and ruined look, and attached himself to our little group — and then he disappeared. From time to time he'd call me from the Midwest to ask if I could get him a job. It annoyed me that he thought of me as a publisher or producer — who could do such things. Never once did he acknowledge that I was a writer. But I later learned that Stern was one of the few novels that he taught in his writing classes.

  Yates had a difficult life. He was a major alcoholic, and he always struggled for money. In other words, your basic serious novelist.

  It's a shame that his life was so difficult. He was a brilliant writer, and a very funny one.

  I agree. He was a gifted man — his writing was pitch-perfect — but he probably had a demon or two more than the rest of us. There
was an incident in which a few writers and editors, including myself, went out for a drink, and Yates joined us. He drank so much that he collapsed and fell forward, hitting his head on the table. My secretary at the time, who hadn't paid much attention to him, scooped him off the floor, and off they went together. I never saw either of them again. They ended up living together.

  Tell me about your experience editing adventure magazines for the Magazine Management Co. What were some of the publications under the company's umbrella?

  There were more than a hundred, in every category — movies, adventure, confession, paperback books, Stan Lee's comic books. I was responsible for about five magazines. One was called Focus — it was a smaller version of People, before that magazine was even published.

  I also worked as editor of Swank. Every now and then the publisher, Martin Goodman, would appear at my office door and say, “I am throwing you another magazine.” Some others that were “thrown” at me included Male, Men, Man's World, and True Action.

  Swank was not the pornographic magazine we know today, I assume?

  Entirely different, and I don't say that with pride. Mr. Goodman — his own brother called him “Mr. Goodman” — told me to publish a “takeoff” on Esquire. This was difficult. I had a staff of one, the magazine was published on cheap paper, and it contained dozens of ads for automotive equipment and trusses, which are medical devices for hernia patients.

  It wasn't even soft core porn; it was flabby porn. There was no nudity, god forbid, but there were some pictures of women wearing bathing suits — not even bikinis — and winking. There were also stories from the trunk — deep in the trunk — of literary luminaries such as [novelist and playwright] William Saroyan and Graham Greene [The Power and the Glory] and Erskine Caldwell [the novel Tobacca Road]. When sales lagged, Mr. Goodman instructed me to “throw 'em a few ‘hot’ words.” “Nympho” was one that was considered to be arousing. “Dark triangle” would be put into play when the magazine was in desperate straits.