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

by Mike Sacks

  One of the painters said, “We can't work. There's a man sleeping in that room.” I said, “Don't worry about it. Just paint around him.” Terry fell asleep in this Marquis de Sade room, and woke up hours later with photos of Mickey Mantle on the walls. He didn't say a word, just shook it off and went on his way.

  You leased an apartment with an S& M room?

  It was a lovely place, had a great terrace, lots of space. It just happened to have a guest room with all that bondage equipment.

  What was Terry doing in the room before he fell asleep?

  He'd had a big night. Let's put it that way.

  Do you think Terry wasn't respected in the latter part of his career because he wasn't producing “quality lit”?

  Terry is the one who invented that phrase. He was an easygoing man, contented, amused by life. I don't think he ever felt bitter or resentful with the way things turned out in his career. I know he had grave financial difficulties toward the end of his life — but he wasn't a complainer.

  He was respected throughout his life by the people who counted, so to speak. And there are all these new readers coming along. His books and films exist, ready to be enjoyed.

  You've written eight novels and more than one-hundred short stories. After all these years, is writing still difficult for you?

  Actually, I've written more than two-hundred short stories — half of them are languishing in an archive.

  But god yes, writing is still difficult and always will be. I'm suspicious of writers who go whistling cheerfully to the computer.

  Are there any writers' tricks you've learned over the years that have made the process a bit easier?

  Not really. I'm hesitant to begin a short story unless I know the last line, or a close approximation of it. I'm always apprehensive when I begin work each day. After a lifetime of this, I still can't get it clear that the actual process of writing tends to erase the fear.

  I'm not the first to point out how essential it is to, on occasion, discard a favorite passage in the interest of pushing on with a good story. Isaac Bashevis Singer said that the wastebasket is a writer's best friend. He also said that a writer can produce ten fine novels, but it doesn't mean that the next one will be any good. It mystifies me that after a lifetime of writing, it would still be like this. I should be able to solve any problem — but it doesn't work that way. Each story or book presents a new challenge. That's probably a good thing, though. It keeps me on my toes.

  I wonder if your readers understand how difficult it is to write a short story. Even though the story is smaller in scope, everything has to be pristine.

  I don't feel that a short story is necessarily smaller in scope than a novel. I read a short story by John O'Hara recently that has more dimension packed into its three pages than many novels.

  To go back to your question — in archery terms — you either hit the bull's-eye in a short story or it fails. I sometimes think there's an invisible fuse that runs through a good story and, at the end, it ignites. There is no margin for error. You can't take time out to admire the scenery, as you can with a novel. Norman Mailer called the short story “the jeweler's art,” which I think is apt.

  The short story is the stepchild of American literature. Publishers — and many writers — think of it as a step in the direction of a novel, not an end in itself. Sort of like saying the runner who excels in the l00-yard dash isn't much of an athlete.

  One last point: I think many of our acclaimed novelists do their best work with the short story: Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates.

  Do you still write every day?

  Yes — or at the very least, I worry about it.

  I do some teaching, and I put the emphasis on focus, as well as the importance of making every sentence count. Francine Prose once quoted a friend as saying this requires, “putting every word on trial for its life.” I believe this. You can read the entire works of a major writer and never find a bad — or unnecessary — sentence.

  Do you have any specific instructions for those students who want to write stories with humor?

  I'd suggest they stay away from irony or satire; there's very little money in it. You're likely to wind up with reviews — like some of mine — that say, “I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.” There's no such question in Dickens. Most readers would prefer to know exactly where they stand, where the author stands, and how to respond. Ergo, no irony permitted.

  I also like the writer Grace Paley's single piece of advice: “Keep a low overhead.”

  As for television writers, in comedy or drama, there's a simple rule: Include the line “We have to talk,” even if your characters have done nothing but for half an hour. Producers love that line. Writers are brought in and paid a fortune for their ability — and willingness — to write that line.

  Daniel Clowes

  INTERVIEW BONUS

  The fictional (and sometimes autobiographical) comic universes of Daniel Clowes's — he detests the term “graphic novel” — aren't the idealistic utopias conjured up by so many of his comic peers and predecessors. There are no heroes, super or otherwise; no precocious children wiser than their years. His comics, much like Robert Crumb's work, are about not-so-lovable losers who aren't so easy on the eyes. These characters live in urban wastelands or mind-numbingly boring suburbs where nihilism passes for hopefulness, football is understood as “sublimated homosexual rape and Oedipal hostility,” and sometimes dogs are born without orifices. He writes about characters with names such as Needledick the Bug-Fucker, Hippypants and Peace Bear, Zubrick and Pogeybait, and Dickie: the Disgusting Old Acne Fetishist.

  Clowes, who was born in Chicago in 1961, was by his own estimation a “shy, loner, bookworm kind of kid.” He first realized he could draw after attempting (unsuccessfully) to reproduce his favorite Batman covers. “I was convinced [the covers] were either done by a machine or they had a special tool that made the lines perfect,” he told The Guardian. “If I could get that tool, I too could create Batman comics.”

  After studying art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Clowes graduated in 1984 with few career prospects. He discovered the Hernandez brothers' brilliant and influential Love and Rockets comic-book series at a local comics store and decided to send some of his drawings to their Seattle-based publisher, Fantagraphics. The editors there recognized his talent and quickly signed Clowes to their stable of artists and writers in the mid-eighties.

  His first series, Lloyd Llewellyn (1985–86), a parody of 1950s gumshoe detective noir, lasted only six issues. But his next attempt, called Eightball, would evolve into a lifelong odyssey. Originally subtitled “An orgy of spite, vengeance, hopelessness, despair and sexual perversion,” Eightball was introduced in October 1989 and featured an array of bizarre story lines and controversial comedic rants, with such notables as “I Hate You Deeply,” “Ugly Girls,” “Sexual Frustration,” and “The Sensual Santa.” He became popular with the kind of people who had previously never entered a comics store.

  His most famous series, first published in Eightball #11–18 and then reprinted as its own comic in 1997, was Ghost World. Set within a suburb with no name and no distinctive characteristics, beyond the usual detritus produced by chain stores and fast-food restaurants, it followed the lives of two teenage girls and best friends, Enid Coleslaw (an anagram of “Daniel Clowes”) and Rebecca Dopplemeyer (an anagram of seemingly nothing, even though it was attempted), after their graduation from high school as they grapple with the melancholy that's inevitably a byproduct of the late-teen maturation process. The character of Enid in particular feels disconnected from the “obnoxious, extroverted, pseudo-bohemian art-school losers” that surround her, and she ends up befriending a lonely older male 78-rpm record collector (is there any other type?) who soon becomes her sole confidant.

  How somebody like Clowes, a man then in his thirties with no sisters and no children, could write so plausibly about adolescent girls remains a mystery. When Enid bitterly c
omplains about a teen magazine seemingly aimed at her demographic, it feels suspiciously (and occasionally uncomfortably) like eavesdropping on the conversation of an actual teenager. It should come as no surprise that some have compared Ghost World to Catcher in the Rye, even though literary purists might protest.

  When Clowes collaborated with director Terry Zwigoff on the movie adaptation of Ghost World, released in 2001, he approached the task with the same all-encompassing devotion he gave to his comics — it took more than five years and nearly two dozen drafts before they finally got it right.

  Is it true your first professional published work appeared in Cracked magazine?

  That's true. I contributed to Cracked from around 1984 to 1989, though I think I only published one piece under my own name. After that, I was “Stosh Gillespie” — Stosh was the name my father originally wanted for me.

  Any particular reason?

  He worked in a steel mill when I was born, and several of his Polish co-workers had that name. Also, I think he was trying to bum out my mom.

  As for Gillespie, it's my middle name.

  Were you even a fan of Cracked?

  Nobody was ever a fan of Cracked.

  Growing up, my friends — okay, “friend” — and I used to think of Cracked as a stopgap. We would buy Mad every month, but about two weeks later we would get anxious for new material. We would tell ourselves, We are not going to buy Cracked. Never again! And we'd hold out for a while, but then as the month dragged on it just became, Okay, fuck it. I guess I'll buy Cracked.

  It was like comedy methadone.

  Right. Then you'd bring it home, and immediately you'd remember, Oh yeah, I hate Cracked. I don't understand any of the jokes, and [Cracked mascot] Sylvester P. Smythe is the most unappealing character of all time.

  I don't know if you've ever seen Sick magazine — just one of many Mad rip-offs over the years* — but they actually had an even uglier mascot: Huckleberry Fink. He was just so ineptly drawn that you didn't know what the hell he was. I think he was a freckled hillbilly. And instead of “What, me worry?” [Mad's Alfred E. Neuman's motto], his was something like: “Why try harder?”

  Were you given free reign at Cracked?

  Maybe too much. My friend Mort Todd was the editor-in-chief for several years, and we created some truly ridiculous material. We did parodies of TV shows that nobody our age, much less the 9-year-olds reading the magazine, had ever seen — stuff like Ben Casey [ABC, 1961–1966] and The Millionaire [CBS, 1955–60]. I don't think we ever bothered with a show from our own era [the eighties], or even the seventies.

  Did any Cracked readers complain?

  Oddly enough, nobody ever wrote in to say, “What in the hell are you doing parodying Dragnet and [1950s sitcom] My Little Margie?”

  Cracked was a strange place. They had a consistent, revolving audience of 9 and 10-year-old kids who would innocently pick it up at the grocery store for a year or two before moving on. In the front section of each issue there would be photos of children holding up their issues of Cracked, or posing in front of giant Sylvester P. Smythe birthday cakes with confused, lukewarm smiles on their faces.

  Cracked did achieve one note of distinction: it managed to somehow convince Don Martin to leave Mad and join them in 1987. Mad is still upset about this.

  They were furious. Don had been at Mad for more than thirty years.

  I remember Cracked throwing this big, fancy dinner for Don and Mrs. Martin in an attempt to woo them over to the other side. Don's wife was really a character. She acted as his agent and was upset about the way Mad had treated him. She thought they paid too little, and she was angry that they wouldn't allow Don to own the rights to his own work. Companies would call Don and ask, “Can we make a calendar or T-shirts with your work?” And he'd have to say no.

  Both were very happy to jump ship. Don received a little more money per page — I think $100 more — and he retained the rights to his own work, which was more important to him.

  How happy was he at Cracked?

  As far as I could tell, he was happy. He never seemed to notice that Mad was somewhat respected, while Cracked was thought of as the lowest rag imaginable.

  I left as soon as my comic Eightball started to catch on a bit. I began to receive freelance offers from The Village Voice and Entertainment Weekly and other magazines.

  When did you start writing for Esquire?

  In the late nineties. Dave Eggers, who was an editor for Esquire then — but who had not yet written his first book [A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius] or published the first issue of his literary journal McSweeney's — wanted me to create a comic for Esquire's fiction issue in '98. The story was called “Green Eyeliner,” about a slightly unhinged young woman who was arrested for pulling out a gun in a crowded movie theater.

  The fact that Esquire would even publish a comic for “adults” in their fiction issue was really a big deal, it turned out. No one remembers the actual specifics of that comic, only that it was published.

  I wonder why it was such a big deal — your comics had been out for years by that point.

  It was one of the many “comics aren't just for kids and fat collector creeps anymore” moments in what has become never-ending fodder for journalists.

  Did you ever imagine that you'd one day have a serial comic strip in The New York Times Magazine?

  Back in the early Eightball days? Never in a million years.

  Your strip, “Mister Wonderful,” about a shy middle-aged man on a blind date, ran in The New York Times Magazine in nineteen installments, beginning September 2007 and ending February 2008. How was it received?

  The New York Times doesn't have a comments section on their website, but the editors did tell me that they received some nice letters — although, of course, I never saw any of them. And there was apparently one letter from some touchy crank about halfway through the run of the strip objecting to the use of the word “Jesus.” So, of course, the editors stood up for me by instantly forbidding the word “Jesus” and “God,” even though it had been used frequently throughout the first ten episodes.

  Were you given free reign by the Times to write whatever you wanted with “Mister Wonderful”?

  As far as subject matter, they never said a word, but as I said they were very touchy about language — their little “stylebook” is very important to them. Aside from “Jesus,” for instance, I wasn't allowed to use the word “schmuck.” Mad's been using the word for fifty years! It's not as if I were using it in the Yiddish sense: “Wow, that guy has a huge cock!” I even found an old William Safire column from the NY Times magazine about “schmuck.” He wrote something like, “The original meaning of the word has long ago been forgotten, and it's commonly accepted for general use.”

  I showed this to the editors, but they told me, “No. We can't run the word.” I could have acted like an asshole and told them I was going to end the strip halfway through, but this was a really good assignment for cartoonists. I didn't want to be the guy who killed it for everyone else.

  I suppose you have to play the game.

  Sometimes that can be a good thing, I suppose. I was restricted — but this restriction ultimately helped the comic. I wasn't allowed to use the word “Jesus,” but once I was faced with having to replace it, I got more focused on what the character was actually trying to say — or not say — and I realized how much of a crutch the “Jesuses” had become. The central character was a repressed guy who was terrible with women, so any time he was further repressed by not being allowed to fully relieve his frustration it only helped.

  When I worked on the movie Ghost World, there were restrictions that you wouldn't believe. For instance, we weren't allowed to show a painting of Don Knotts — unless we had Don Knotts give us permission. It's all about rights, clearances, lawyers. We wanted a character to sing “Happy Birthday to You” — but we couldn't unless we paid something like $10,000, so we just cut the scene.

  In comparis
on, not being allowed to use certain words in a comic strip became no big deal. You have to work with the situation you're given.

  I assume you never had any interest in creating a syndicated strip for newspapers?

  No, that's a whole different genre — an entirely different genus of cartoonist. The ones I've met tend to be these odd, suburban, country-club types. And just because the format worked with audiences in the 1920s doesn't mean it's still the greatest idea today.

  Early in your career, did you find that people had a difficult time labeling you? The type of work you produced wasn't your typical style of comic.

  They still have a difficult time. I've been called everything from a “graphic novelist” to a “comic-strip novelist” to just a “cartoonist.” I've always preferred “cartoonist,” because that seems the least obnoxious.

  I used to tell people I was a “comic-book artist,” but they'd look at me as if I'd just stepped in dog shit and walked across their Oriental rug. I never knew what to call myself, but I was always opposed to the whole “graphic novelist” label. To me, it just seemed like a scam. I always felt that people would say, “Wait a minute! This is just a comic book!” But now, I've given up. Call me whatever you want.

  At what point did you notice that people were beginning to understand what a “graphic novel” actually meant?

  For me, there was a sea change by 2001 or 2002, around the time the Ghost World movie was released. Average citizens like my parents' neighbors started to say things like, “Oh, you do graphic novels! I love [Art Spiegelman's] Maus!” A few years earlier, they would have thought of me as the lowest pornographer.

  What were some of your comic influences growing up?

  I have a brother who is ten years older than me, and he gave me his stack of comics from the late fifties and the early sixties — a lot of horror and sci-fiand crappy superhero comics.

  Which did you prefer, Marvel or D.C.?