Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (52 page)

Supervising Writer,
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
; Senior Writer,
The Onion

I would say that the best humor comes from things you’re passionate about. Write what you’re passionate about, and what you know about, and it always translates better. One of my first big bits on
Fallon
was Jimmy impersonating Neil Young singing
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
theme song. I’m a huge Neil Young fan, and I’m a huge fan of nineties TV, it’s what I grew up with. When you’re able to take something you love and put a funny spin on it, it’s always going to feel that much more genuine.

I definitely try to watch other late-night shows. I have some friends who work on
Colbert
, which is a great show, and I’ll just flip around, or I’ll watch clips that I see posted online. But more than anything, I think the important thing is to keep your own sensibility. You should always be excited about what you’re writing. Because once you get to the point where you’re like, “Ugh, this is a job, and I gotta shit out some jokes,” then you’re in trouble. It’s good to take a step back and remember that you have an awesome job where you write jokes for a living. Of course, every comedy show has a certain quota of jokes that you just have to do. It is a job. But if you can find enough bits that you’re in love with, that you’re excited about, it keeps you invested and it keeps your sensibility intact. Because when you’re excited to write something, you think, This feels right.

I always tell aspiring comedy writers, “Just write as much as you can. That’s the only way you’re going to get better at it.” Do it any way you can—write a bunch of jokes on Twitter, start a web series, start a funny Tumblr—anything. Just produce funny writing and eventually it’ll get noticed. All it takes is one person in the comedy business to notice you and find your stuff funny. I’ve been lucky enough to be in positions where I can help out people I thought were funny, and now a few of them work at
The Onion
and at
Fallon
.

And that’s another thing: If you get any success in comedy, help out your friends who are trying to do the same but who might not have a job yet. I was lucky enough to start right out of college at
The Onion
, and I helped a couple of my friends get hired there. Same thing at
Fallon
. You would hope that your friends, if they succeed first, will help you, too. Help each other out, and everybody wins.

In April 1969, Mel Brooks did something that would strike fear into any writer—he walked onstage at the Academy Awards and tried to follow the act of two universally beloved and iconic entertainers: Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles.

Brooks was no comedy novice. He’d cut his teeth on a show with the most legendary writing staff in television history,
Your Show of Shows
(1950–54); co-created (with Buck Henry) the wildly popular TV series
Get Smart
(1965–70); and written and performed on several
2000 Year Old Man
albums with Carl Reiner. But this was different. Brooks was up for Best Original Screenplay for
The Producers
, his feature debut as a filmmaker, and Rickles and Sinatra, the presenters, had the audience in stitches with their impromptu bits about cue cards and fascist Italians.

When Brooks’s name was called—his competition included Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes—he accepted his award, grumbling to Rickles, “You did twenty minutes. You killed my whole thing already.” But he eventually wrestled away the mic, and managed to do the impossible; he upstaged the bigger names. “I’ll just say what’s in my heart,” Brooks said. “Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks was raised by his mother, Kate. His father, Max, a process server, died of kidney disease when he was thirty-four and Brooks was just two. He was the youngest of four boys. Although they were poor, “so was everybody else,” he says. When he was nine, his uncle took him to see Ethel Merman in
Anything Goes
on Broadway, and he immediately decided that he wanted to go into show business.

At twenty-four, he was hired as a writer for Sid Caesar, first on
Your Show of Shows
and then on
Caesar’s Hour
(1954–57), where he worked with future legends such as Neil Simon (
The Odd Couple
), Mel Tolkin (
All in the Family
), and his future collaborator Carl Reiner. Brooks made a big impression on Reiner, who on a 2011 HBO special recalled Brooks’s first pitch during a writers’ meeting: “This guy I never saw before got up and started talking about his problems as a Jewish pirate.”

Brooks went on to write and direct a half-dozen comedy classics, including
The Producers
(1968),
Blazing Saddles
(1974),
Young Frankenstein
(1974),
High Anxiety
(1977), and
History of the World: Part I
(1981). Regrettably, there was never a
History of the World: Part II
. Brooks has also written two hugely successful Broadway musicals based on his own movies,
The Producers
(2001 )and
Young Frankenstein
(2007), and probably one more by the time you read this. He’s one of only eleven people on the planet who belong to the elite EGOT club—artists who’ve won at least one award in each of the big four of American creative awards: an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. As Brooks once said in
History of the World
, “It’s good to be the king.” He was pretending to be Louis XVI (and his head had just been nestled within Marie Antoinette’s ample bosom) but he might as well have been talking about his own life and career.

Brooks will never again have a moment like he did at the 1969 Oscars. These days,
he’s
the legendary entertainer that nobody wants to follow. But Brooks isn’t the kind of comedian to push aside younger performers or hog the spotlight. This was apparent in November 2012, when Brooks appeared as a guest on ABC’s
Jimmy Kimmel Live
to promote the DVD boxed set
The Incredible Mel Brooks: An Irresistible Collection of Unhinged Comedy
. The eighty-seven-year-old comedian didn’t just let his considerably younger and less experienced host take the lead; he was also sweetly encouraging when Kimmel’s jokes fell flat. “It almost worked,” Brooks said after one of Kimmel’s gags imploded. “It’s a good premise.” Dropping a less than casual hint, he added, “I wrote for
Your Show of Shows
for ten years, and I happen to be free now.”

You might just be responsible for getting more people into the field of comedy writing than any other person in the history of mankind.

You’ve left out Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and a couple of others.

Yes, but the writers’ room at
Your Show of Shows
is seen as the equivalent of the 1927 Yankees—as good as it gets. The image of bantering with writers of such talent, I’m sure, influenced more than a few writers to get into the comedy field.

Maybe, but it wasn’t all fun and laughs. It wasn’t all like [the 1993 Neil Simon play]
Laughter on the 23rd Floor
. We worked hard. There was a hostility in the air. It was very highly charged. It had to be, you know? The room was filled with this amazing talent, and it was competitive. Sometimes the room was just bathed in laughter. Other times, the competition was fierce. You’d brawl over each line, each joke, each idea.

You’re not making it out to be like the writers’ room on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
.

When you have that many creative minds fighting over so much creative material, it’s bound to get heated. These shows were weekly, live, each of them ninety minutes long.

Looking back, I do think the writing staff was about the best bunch of comedy writers ever assembled under one roof. You had Joe Stein, who wrote
Fiddler on the Roof
and
Zorba
;
Larry Gelbart who created the sitcom
M*A*S*H
and who wrote the screenplay to
Tootsie
. Brilliant. You had Mike Stewart, who was just the typist for the room! He later went on to write
Bye Bye Birdie
and
Hello, Dolly!
This was the typist, not even a writer for the show!

Not as frequently mentioned was Lucille Kallen, who was another tremendous writer. She wrote a lot of the domestic sketches. Very hard worker, she was very talented. And then there was Mel Tolkin, who was our head writer. One of the best comedy writers who ever lived. Just a wonderful comedy writer. He’d sometimes write extraordinarily cheap jokes. You know, “She married a station beneath her. He got off at 116th Street and she got off at 125th Street.” Bad, bad, wonderful-bad jokes. He sculpted a lot of the monologues, domestic sketches with Lucille. Also, a lot of parodies of foreign movies.

Your Show of Shows
would frequently parody foreign movies, which was rare at the time. How many of the viewers even saw these movies? Did the writers even see these movies?

Well, nobody in America had ever seen a foreign movie, but we, the writers, were from New York. We were New Yorkers. There were a lot of movie houses that showed Japanese movies, French movies, Italian movies, certainly. We were all familiar with the format, the style, the look and feel of these movies. The trick was to make these parodies funny to viewers who hadn’t seen the original. But yes, sometimes, we would parody a movie that none of us had even seen. We just assumed that it would look a certain way, and then we’d parody what we imagined.

The writers for
Your Show of Shows
seem to have been very street-smart. These weren’t writers who studied comedy in college.

Well, you’re talking to one of them who never graduated college. I mean, I only had maybe a year of college at the most. I was a street corner comic in Brooklyn. I wasn’t the funniest and I wasn’t the best. There were many great street corner comics who really would give you the state of the neighborhood, the world, in these one-liners. A lot of what I learned came from those street corners, especially when it came to being funny.

Do you think that affected the comedy, when it was more streetwise? Now, a student can actually major in comedy at college.

I do think the comedy was different. We had real-world experience. A lot had served in World War II. The comedy had to have been affected by that alone.

I don’t think there is such a thing as studying comedy writing. There’s no way. If anybody could be a teacher of it, I consider it would be me. I’ve done as much, possibly more, comedy writing than anybody who has ever lived. And yet I can tell you that it’s almost impossible to teach. I had a friend who was an actor. His name was Andreas Voutsinas and he was Greek. He played the gay roommate [in the 1968 movie]
The Producers
. He once said to me, “Or you got it or you ain’t.”

He began the sentence with
or
, which I loved. What he said wasn’t grammatically correct, but the point is that you got to have it from the beginning. Either you got it or you don’t. You can’t teach writing. You can teach some of the basics of writing: act one, two, and three; how to create a premise; how to develop a story; how to sharpen jokes. But you can’t ever teach people how to get talent in their guts. You can’t teach people how to express this gut-level talent. That’s just impossible.

If you learn by anything, you teach yourself. And mostly you learn by your flops. Whenever I lecture at schools, I say, “Don’t avoid the flops. The flops teach you what
not
to do in the future.” That’s just as important, if not
more
important, than teaching you what to do. What
not
do to.

What specifically did you learn from your flops?

Many times, especially when I first left
Caesar’s Hour
in 1957, there was a lot of hubris in my writing. There was a lot of arrogance. I would think, The hell with this. If they don’t get it, they don’t get it. But
I
get it, it amuses
me
. Sometimes I would laugh at very personal, private, obscure jokes, which delighted me. But I realized, How many people is this for? I’ve got to include some of the audience, or else. I learned from several failures this way.

I wrote a TV pilot in the early sixties for ABC called
Inside Danny Baker
. It was about a little kid with an imagination and a vision. He dreamed of being different things, like all kids do. He was like a young Walter Mitty–type. It’s really a good little show; it could have been a nice little series. But it didn’t work. It was too personal. I was that kid. I didn’t lower myself enough with, you know, sex jokes. You want things to sell; you’ve got to make them somehow down and dirty and attractive. It was too simple, too pure, and I was pleasing myself. I should have said, “It’s just a little too mild to get on television.”

What I’m saying is that you just can’t be too far in your own head. What I eventually happened upon is a combination of high and low. To give you a specific example, in
High Anxiety
, I had references that people might never have heard of, such as names of psychiatrists, types of analysis, specific references to Hitchcock movies. In
High Anxiety
, an audience would have had to have seen at least three or four Alfred Hitchcock movies to understand what the hell any one scene was about. At the same time, there was action, there was suspense.

That would go for
Blazing Saddles
, too. You had a line like, “The only thing that stands between me and that property is the rightful owners,” but there was also a cowboy punching a horse. There were cowboys sitting around a fire, eating beans, farting. You know, just basic thrills that a writer has to give an audience. And I didn’t leave those thrills out.

With
Inside Danny Baker
, the show that I mentioned earlier, it was just the story of this kid and his dreams. It was all too personal.

And yet a joke takes place in
Blazing Saddles
that I’d imagine only a very small percentage of audience members would understand. It’s in the scene when the Indian chief, played by you, comes across a group of black settlers. The character shouts to the heavens, in Yiddish, “
Shvarzers, loyzem gayne
!” Translated: “Blacks. Just let them go.”

Right. Meaning that these blacks were no harm to the Indians. That this was a group even more downtrodden and poorly treated by whites than the Indians. Now that’s an example of a joke that I think is high. You have jokes that maybe not many would understand but that serve a higher point. And the point is that there’s an underlying sense of right versus wrong. The audience knew where I stood on racism and other issues. You can be silly, but you still have to hew to the underlying truth. If my heart’s in the right place, I can go anywhere.