Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (9 page)

Comedian; Writer,
Conan, The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Best Week Ever

Recently, I was trying to think of some sound advice for aspiring comedians and comedy writers, and the thing I kept coming back to was how different the comedy landscape is now to when I was starting. There are two big differences: 1) There are way, way, way, way more people now pursuing stand-up, comedy writing, and acting as a career, and 2) There are many more tools and institutions in place to facilitate the pursuit of comedy as a career. Between the ability to take classes at UCB, to network on Facebook and Twitter, to post your own videos on YouTube and Funny or Die, and the endless avalanche of blogs and Tumblrs, aspiring comics can instantly begin creating comedy, finding an audience, and receiving feedback on their material. But, like I said, these tools have increased the number of aspiring comedians exponentially. Currently, it seems that comedy is no longer the exclusive territory of the emotionally confused person drawn to it as a means of finding themselves and working through their anger and fear—that would have been me. Now it’s become legitimized as a career that you can pursue after college. You can basically take Comedy Grad School if you go to the Upright Citizens Brigade or any one of the other improv programs.

That being said, my advice to aspiring comedians and comedy writers would be to start with one very basic question: Is this really what I want to do? Because it is for a ton of other people. And since there’s so much white noise of constant, relentless comedy content pouring out of all these aspiring comics and writers, you’re going to need a very unique comedy voice to stand out, and you’re going to need to work very hard for a very long time to separate yourself from the pack.

Actually, perhaps an even better question to ask yourself would be: Do I
need
to be doing this? Most of the comedians I know, myself included, felt there wasn’t a choice in the matter. It wasn’t, “Oh, neat, this will be a fun career to pursue.” It was, “I need to figure out who the fuck I am by making people laugh.” So once you’ve worked through all those questions and feelings, my advice becomes simple: Write and perform comedy constantly and relentlessly for years and years until you’re awesome at it, all the while making tons of great friends in the comedy world. Eventually, one of those friends will get their foot in the door of “showbiz,” and opportunities will begin to open for you.

If you
can
do anything else with your life and still be happy, do it, for crying out loud.

“‘Do you like what you doth see . . . ?’ said the voluptuous elf-maiden as she provocatively parted the folds of her robe to reveal the rounded, shadowy glories within. Frito’s throat was dry, though his head reeled with desire and ale.”

So began the opening paragraph of
Bored of the Rings
, a 1969 full-length book parody of the J. R. R. Tolkien fantasy novels. The book is remarkable for a few reasons: Unlike most parody books, it’s remained in publication for more than forty-five years. Also, as one of the first parodies of a modern, popular bestseller, it’s inspired several generations of pop culture parodists, including future writers for
Saturday Night Live
,
The Onion
, and Funny or Die. But perhaps most significant,
Bored
was the first major work from two young writers named Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, recent graduates of Harvard University who were just a year from co-creating one of the most influential—if not
the
most influential—comedy magazines of the twentieth century: the
National Lampoon
.

Born on June 7, 1945, Beard grew up from the age of nine at the Westbury Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He first discovered his writing talents at the
Harvard Lampoon
, but comedy writing was just a recreation for Beard, not a serious career aspiration. After graduating from Harvard in 1967, he planned to attend the university’s law school, but after applying in a “halfhearted way,” he was rejected. In an equally fortuitous spurning, he and fellow Harvard scribe Doug Kenney were booted out of Harvard’s ROTC program, in Beard’s case for failing to attend a military ball. “We all went up to the ROTC offices to try to get a hearing,” Beard says, “but the colonel in charge refused to see me.” Instead, he ran into a sergeant, who recommended that he join the local Army Reserve. He did, and it saved him from a stint in Vietnam.

In 1970, Beard—along with Kenney and Rob Hoffman, with a generous loan from Matty Simmons, one of the publishers of
Weight Watchers
magazine—founded the
National Lampoon
. Within a few years, the
Lampoon
had more than one million readers. Nobody was safe from its take-no-prisoners, slash-and-burn satire, from Richard Nixon to John Lennon. Even the Kennedy assassination was open for ridicule. “My insurance company?” Kennedy asks in a full-page
Lampoon
ad parody, as Oswald points a rifle out a sixth-floor window behind him. “New England Life, of course. Why?”

Beard served as the
Lampoon
’s executive editor from 1970 to ’72, and then editor-in-chief from 1973 to ’75, where he watched over a motley crew of brilliant satirists including Christopher Cerf, Michael O’Donoghue, Sean Kelly, Chris Miller, P. J. O’Rourke, Bruce McCall, Michel Choquette, and Gerry Sussman. Beard has often been described as the magazine’s “calm center,” especially during moments of crisis or tension, which were constant occurrences. In an article published by the
Columbia Daily Spectator
in 1972, Beard recounted how the
National Lampoon
received numerous death threats, including nine sticks of dynamite sent from Utah. One letter from American soldiers in Vietnam read: “We would all like to hang you by the Toes and Beat you with a big stick until you couldn’t walk.”

Far from just an editor—and one of the very best editors of humor in the publishing world—Beard was also an accomplished writer, penning many of the
Lampoon
’s most popular recurring sections, such as News on the March, and larger features, like 1974’s “Law of the Jungle,” an incredibly dense document, written in legalese, that delved into the complicated rules of the animal kingdom. A short excerpt: “The crows are still paying royalties to the heirs of an obscure, long extinct reptile, for their [copyrighted] use of their ‘caw-caw’ cry. Interestingly, the heirs are a subspecies of flounder, who are, of course, mute. Animal law is full of such fascinating arrangements.” The twelve-thousand-word piece, according to Beard, was written “in less than a day.” In comparison, this entire interview—including introduction—runs less than half that length.

Unlike his
Lampoon
peers, Beard never made the transition from print into other comedy genres. He had no involvement with any Broadway musicals or radio shows or TV shows or the wildly successful
Lampoon
movies like
Animal House
. Instead, he quietly retired from the magazine in 1975 and went into near seclusion. Beard, in the years since, has been described as “enigmatic,” “reclusive,” and “odd.” He is not known for giving interviews, having turned down every opportunity to participate in the numerous biographies written about the
Lampoon
.

Over the past three decades, Beard has written, or co-written, thirty-five books, including
Latin for All Occasions
(1990),
French for Cats: All the French Your Cat Will Ever Need
(1991),
The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook
(with Christopher Cerf, 1992),
O.J.’s Legal Pad: What Is Really Going On in O.J. Simpson’s Mind?
(1995), and
Encyclopedia Paranoiaca
(with Christopher Cerf, 2012).

In doing research for this interview, I read that your father was born in 1881. I find that incredible. The distance between 1881 to the 1970s-era of
National Lampoon
feels like it could never, in any possible way, be bridged. Such two vastly different worlds.

It’s true. And it
is
incredible. Even more incredible is that my great-grandfather was born in 1834. Try connecting the pre–Civil War era with America in the 1970s. Just a huge gap. But, yes, my father was born in the nineteenth century. Believe it or not, he had a friend who was on the
Titanic
.

Did his friend survive?

Lawrence Beesley was his name, and he survived. He was in second class, a few decks below the top deck. Like my father, he was a Christian Scientist, and clearly he did not smoke or drink. He was reading in his bunk when he felt a bump. He walked to the top deck, where he saw a few people milling about. No one seemed in a great panic. That’s really what fascinated me. Everyone was calm. There was very little noise.
4
He returned to his room to read and then heard from above a shout, “All passengers on deck with lifeboats on.” Beesley went up to the lifeboat deck, and everyone was saying that the men should be on the left side, the port side, and they’ll be picked up there. And Beesley, being no fool, said to himself, “Hmmm, I think my chances are better here on the starboard side.” He wasn’t pushing women aside—I believe this to be true.

He stayed and saw a rescue boat being lowered. The guy operating the boat yelled, “Hey, you. We got room in here. Do you want to jump in?” So Beesley jumped off the rail and into the lifeboat, which floated away. It was one of the first to escape. Beesley later said that everyone in the boat thought they’d have to later slink back in shame when the
Titanic
didn’t sink. And they’d all look like a bunch of cowards. Well, that was a problem they did not have to confront. Beesley later wrote a book about his experiences [
The Loss of the SS Titanic: Its Story and Its Lessons by One of the Survivors
].

Did you ever meet Lawrence Beesley?

No, he was long gone. I spoke to my father a little bit about it and he told me the story of what Lawrence had told him. Lawrence also told my father that when the
Titanic
went down, he saw the boat tip over. He said it broke—not quite in half—and he heard the boilers come loose in their mooring and go out the side of the ship, like a huge locomotive going under. He saw the funnels go down. And this description of the splitting of the ship turned out to be accurate when [in September 1985] they found the pieces on the ocean floor. It had broken exactly where he had said it had broken.

Did you, too, grow up under the Christian Science faith?

No. My father was a Christian Scientist, but he had come from a long line of Protestant Irish who ended up in the South, in Birmingham, Alabama. When they came over from Ireland, Alabama was a pretty prosperous place. My father was born there, and then lived for awhile in Louisville.

You weren’t raised in the South. How did your family eventually end up north?

My father’s mother, my grandmother, was very smart. She was also a very difficult woman who lived to be one hundred. She was evacuated out of Atlanta ahead of Sherman’s army when she was a child, and I think she ultimately came to realize that, at least for the time being, the South had no future. So she packed up the family and moved north. My father eventually ended up in New York City, where I spent a few years, before I was sent off to boarding school at the age of ten, in 1955, first to the Rectory School and then to Taft, both in Connecticut.

Do you think that attending boarding school molded you into the comedy writer you later became?

Oh, completely. I don’t recommend it. But if you want to get a perfect education as a writer, and if you want to have eight years of Latin before you go to college, well then, this is the place to go. Basically all we were taught was how to read and write the English language. We had to write a thousand-word essay every week. At Taft, in the English class, they had an exam called the 2-8-2. You had a little blue book, and the teacher would write a phrase from a Shakespeare play on the board. You had two minutes to think, eight minutes to compose, two minutes to correct, and then you put your pencils down: 2-8-2.

That
is how you train writers.

Often writers have all the time in the world.

Absolutely, and we don’t do shit. Then again, in boarding school, with no girls, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do besides write that thousand-word, stupid-themed essay each week.

I’d assume that Latin later came in handy when you wrote
Latin for All Occasions
. The book, published in 1990, helpfully provided readers with the Latin translation of hundreds of phrases, including “You have shit for brains.” That would be
Stercus pro cerebro habes
.

That’s right, as well as the Latin phrases for “You are a total asshole” [
Podex perfectus es
] and “Screw you and the horse you rode in on” [
Futue te ipsum et caballum in quo vectus est
]. So, for that alone, maybe all those years of boarding school were worth it.

Were you allowed a television at boarding school in the late 1950s and early 1960s?

No, we weren’t even allowed a radio. I can’t ever remember hearing or watching much comedy at all, although later, I clearly remember Ernie Kovacs. More than anyone, Kovacs had a huge impact on me. Completely unexpected and original. There was no one else like him.

His shows were so primitive. Very low-cost sets. Everything was shot on kinescope, which is just filming off a TV screen. But the comedy was amazing. He had a skit called “The Nairobi Trio,” which was three performers dressed as gorillas with derby hats and overcoats, pretending to play music. Beyond bizarre, but it worked. Where did that idea come from? The guy was a space alien. Every once in a while, you run into these space aliens. There’s no other explanation.

A space alien in the sense that he was disconnected from the rest of us?

Yes. But he was also connected—I suppose a space alien who fit in on Earth—and that’s the only way to produce resonant humor. If you’re too connected, it becomes tedious. If you’re too disconnected, it doesn’t work. You have to be separate but still secured. Genius, absolute genius.

One of the things I love about your career is that it’s strictly geared to print, which almost seems like a lost art. Most comedy writers now only seem interested in print if it somehow leads to a TV or movie career.

My generation came along when there was a huge changeover. I graduated from Harvard in 1967. When people graduated from the
Harvard Lampoon
, they went to law school, they became architects, a few of them went on to medical school, or they went to work on Wall Street. If you were a writer—and there weren’t many—you mostly wrote for print, not Hollywood. Most clung, of course, to
The New Yorker
,
Playboy
, and books. Within ten years of my graduation, however, all the writers headed west, to write comedy for television shows.