Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (27 page)

Do you think that today’s pop culture contains an overabundance of stimuli?

I have heard that 3D television can overstimulate the brain. But anyway, who cares really? That monster is out of the cage. I like all the eyeball dazzling as much as anyone. I am getting tired of big special effects and CGI movies about Armageddon and something from the bowels of the earth. But for all the babbling I do about radio and films of the thirties and forties, I’m happy to be around today. Most of the good stuff from that time is available anyway.

How far back does this dream to write go?

My first career ambition was to be a ventriloquist. I liked [the radio comedy team] Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy a lot. So I went and bought a book on ventriloquism. I told my parents that I wanted a dummy for Christmas. Some parents would have been shocked that their ten- or eleven-year-old boy wanted a doll, but mine didn’t have any trouble with it. They couldn’t afford therapy for me or themselves anyway. So I got my little friend, studied a bit, and performed at family reunions and school talent shows in the area. This lasted for two or three years.

Do you remember any specific jokes?

I had an uncle who’d lost his hair and I’d joke about how he wasn’t bald, he just had an “exceptionally wide part.” I would mostly just lift material from other ventriloquists.

Were you a fan of any movie comedians?

I was a big fan of the comedians who dealt with misfortune. Those who weren’t successful, happy people, but those who somehow triumphed. Even if they didn’t, they thought they did. W. C. Fields, a big influence. I was a huge Chaplin fan, but I was a much bigger Buster Keaton fan. Chaplin was obviously brilliant, but he could be a bit mawkish at times, whereas Keaton was all about funny.

Talking to me about influences is difficult, because I’ve had friends who have influenced my comedy. I have some very, very funny friends. When I was in the army in basic training, maybe the worst experience of my life, there was a guy in there who truly, truly was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. I have no idea whatever happened to him, it’s been a long time, but if he was able to put something on paper he could have certainly worked in the business. Often that’s the difference between those who make it and those who go on to do other things. Just putting something on paper. Over and over and over.

When you later attended college, did you major in creative writing?

I never took a college writing course. I was a literature major. It was only after I graduated in 1965 that I took a course in comedy writing offered by UCLA extension. I had always been interested in comedy. It was taught by a person I’d never heard of who claimed to have written a lot of things I also never heard of. In the end, it was not very productive.

What did this teacher claim he had written?

I think he’d done punch-up for some sitcoms. The only thing I remember him telling us that had any kind of relevance was that the best jokes are the briefest. One of the other students in this class was Garry Shandling. Garry had just arrived to Hollywood. I’m not sure he’d even remember it but we once chatted about how useless this class was.

Many who teach humor writing have never actually made a living at humor writing. The majority tend to be more fans of comedy.

It would be difficult to teach. We’re all perpetual students in this. You’re always learning something, no matter how long you’ve been at it. When you’re producing a television show and you’re talking out a story with a writer, that is—in a way—a professor-student relationship. I’ve been on both sides of that equation, and it’s as much a learning process for the ones running the meeting.

Are you still learning?

You’re always learning when it comes to comedy. It’s the nature of the game. There just simply aren’t any hard-and-fast rules. The margin of error with the writing of a joke can be very, very small.

Many times over my career I had a joke that I was absolutely sure about. It would work all week at the reading and at the rehearsal. But by the time it got in front of an audience, it was lukewarm.

That’s one of the things that fascinates me about humor writing. If you work as, say, a plumber or an electrician for forty years, I’d imagine your work tends to become less mysterious over time. Pipe A goes into Pipe B.
This
wire needs to be attached to
that
wire. With comedy, however, it seems that no matter how long you’ve worked in the field, it remains just as murky as it might have felt in the beginning.

It remains difficult. You never really know. But I think you develop a thermometer of sorts. I think you do become more sophisticated about what’s going to work and what isn’t. But because comedy is so subjective, what would put me on the floor will have you standing stone-faced. And it could change day to day.

Here’s why this business makes you crazy. It was early on in Kirstie Alley’s stay on
Cheers
. The beat was essentially Sam comes into her office to talk about something. She gives him a bad time, and he turns to leave and says something to the effect of, “You know, I bet when you smile, you light up a room. You should smile a lot more. It would really help.” She pretends to be coy and shy. Eventually she does end up smiling at him. The joke was Sam then saying, “I’ll be darned.” Meaning, her smile didn’t light up the room. And all week it worked. But when it came time for the shoot, it didn’t work in front of the studio audience.

Looking back, do you think that joke needed some tweaking?

We figured it out in editing. During production we thought Sam’s “I’ll be darned” was the joke. In fact, Kirstie’s reaction after the line when her smile turned to smoldering hatred was what we’d been laughing at all week. And, fortunately, it worked on film for the audience at home where it mattered most.

How did you go from taking an unproductive comedy-writing course with Garry Shandling to landing your first TV-writing job?

My brother and I wanted to write comedy. We were both dissatisfied with our lives. He was living in a Volkswagen bus with his wife. I began working as an advertising copywriter at a small firm in Los Angeles.

Les and I decided to try our hand at writing for TV.
Sitcom
wasn’t the same pejorative term it had been. There were at least three high-quality comedies on the air; they were all different. There was
All in the Family
. There was
M*A*S*H
. And there was
Mary Tyler Moore
. Les and I were big fans of all three but especially
M*A*S*H
and
Mary Tyler Moore
. We watched some episodes and fired off a spec script to both of them. This served as our audition. We just watched and thought we could do it. Simple as that.
M*A*S*H
responded right away. For the
Mary Tyler Moore
script, MTM Enterprises took eleven months to get back to us, during which time we had pretty much decided to quit. But after a couple of scripts they ended up putting us on staff.

MTM, which produced
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, was where you wanted to be as a TV comedy writer. There were so many good shows going on. It was really a community. MTM had picnics; they had tennis tournaments. It was just a fun place to be. It was a very bright, happening place.

Writing comedy as a team is always a difficult situation, even in the best of circumstances. But how much more difficult was it for you and your brother? Not only being writing partners, but also siblings?

We basically shared comedy DNA; we’d usually laugh at the same things, find the same people funny.

As showrunners, we kind of split functions. With comedy teams, one writer might be more joke-oriented; another might be more story-oriented. But it’s very hard to differentiate. Les is very good at organizing and putting stories in order and sequence. He’s more analytical. He was a good goalkeeper. I would say I’m a more active pitcher of stories and jokes. Obviously, there was overlap.

Were there ever fights over jokes?

There were, but if we got to the point where there was still a disagreement after discussion, we’d say, “Let’s just throw it out.” And over the years, arguments declined in frequency and intensity. No joke is worth the time and effort spent on talking about it. If you’re unable to come up with a better joke, that’s a bigger problem anyway. Also, we had to find a way to get along so as not to spoil family gatherings.

In 1978, you became the showrunners on
Taxi
. The executive producer of
Taxi
was Jim Brooks, who later went on to direct
Terms of Endearment
,
Broadcast News
, and
As Good as It Gets
. In Hollywood, Brooks is talked about in almost reverential tones, but with also a sort of fear. There are stories that to work for him is a rewarding experience that can also be quite challenging.

He was definitely a perfectionist. He always thought we could do better. I had a friend in comedy who said the worst day of his life was the day he met Jim Brooks—he realized he was never going to be the best. Jim has this fertile, fast, unpredictable comic perspective on things. We learned so much from him. He always had a fix. Even if it didn’t work, it usually led somewhere.

Jim and the other producers on
Taxi
[Stan Daniels, David Davis, and Ed. Weinberger] had this formula—and this is just my opinion—but they felt that creating a great show has to involve a lot of angst. There has to be pain. If the show has an easy week, it’s suspect.

Don’t most shows—especially great shows—involve great angst?

I’m not convinced that you have to have a painful process to get a good result. Certainly, you can’t be lackadaisical when you want something and it’s not coming. When you’re not getting what you want out of a scene, you’ve got to keep working at it. Believe me, Les and I had plenty of painful moments when we were later in charge, but we never insisted on difficulty being an essential aspect of the process.

One of the things that always struck me about
Taxi
is how melancholy its theme song was. It’s a very low-key opening for a sitcom.

I remember liking it a lot when I first heard it. Up to that point, it was only big feel-good openings for sitcoms. But for
Taxi
, the theme song is very subdued, and for a reason. There was a sadness to
Taxi
, I think. There’s a sadness to all the characters. Someone once described
Taxi
as being a show about hell. All of the characters were essentially stuck in a very bleak environment, struggling to get out. I can definitely see that.

We were obviously not going for a subdued theme when we created
Cheers
. We spent a tremendous amount of time on it; it went through many different versions. Two writers worked on that song, Gary Portnoy, who had written for Air Supply and Dolly Parton, and a writer named Judy Hart Angelo. The first version was god-awful. So pat, so on the nose, rhyming,
cheers
with
beers
. It ultimately took five attempts. But when we heard the final version, we knew. It’s interesting that with all of the writing talent that worked on
Cheers
over the years, the five words that are still the most associated with the show came not from any of us, but from the songwriters: “Where everybody knows your name.”

Taxi
had a huge cast. Was there ever a problem with a specific actor not being able to sell a joke that you wrote?

When you have a gang comedy as we did on both
Taxi
and
Cheers
, you have your leads, but you have to service everybody. This goes for both actors and their characters. Some actors are surer than others. Some characters are more multidimensional than others. Some you have to protect.

How do you protect a character?

You give them foolproof jokes. You give them jokes that don’t necessarily have to be played, that don’t depend solely on delivery. The cast was mostly very good on
Taxi
. I’m thinking of two characters at most.

One of the stand-out characters on
Taxi
was Latka Gravas, a mechanic from an unnamed foreign country, played by comedian Andy Kaufman. A lot has been written about Andy’s genius since he died in 1984 at the age of thirty-five, but could you recognize his genius at the time?

Andy was excellent in the role and yet I always felt Latka didn’t fit in with the rest of the characters on
Taxi
. The rest were all fairly realistic. Alex Rieger, the Judd Hirsch character, would be a point of contrast. The Latka character would have been better for an animated show. We went a little too broad with Latka. He was from a fictional country. He spoke in a completely invented accent and language.

Whether or not Andy was a genius, I don’t know. He was sui generis. I’ve never met or heard a performer like him. I think there was a sadistic streak in his stand-up. Like reading the entirety of
The Great Gatsby
to an audience. I do feel that the character of Latka was the best thing Andy did, and it’s how he will mostly be remembered.

What was Andy like to write for, to work with?

If Andy was unhappy he certainly didn’t show us that. He was mostly very cooperative—when he was himself. But Andy had it written into his contract that his lounge-lizard character, Tony Clifton, would be featured on two
Taxi
episodes each season. Clifton was everything Andy wasn’t. Loud, obnoxious, rude, misogynistic. So when we wrote these episodes, we’d give the Clifton character a minimal amount of lines. I think he had one or two at most. It had nothing really to do with the story. But Andy couldn’t even do that. Kaufman, as Clifton, was just all over the place, intentionally. The director would ask, “Can you say a line this way?” And Tony Clifton would say, “I’m doin’ it the way I want. You can go fuck yourself!” [Laughs] That may be the first time I ever laughed at Tony Clifton.

The upshot is that Andy wanted to be fired—or he wanted Tony Clifton to be fired. And he wanted the firing to be done in front of a lot of people on the soundstage. He wanted the security to come in. He wanted to make it a performance. Right after lunch one day, he was asked to leave the set. He exploded, “I’m not leavin’! You gotta deal . . . you gotta deal with
me
!” He went crazy, and the guards came in and escorted him out. He was screaming all the way. I guess in his mind, just great fun.