Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (44 page)

If you woke up and were eighteen again, how long would it take to convince yourself that everything that’s happened since has been merely a dream?

Not long at all. Ten minutes.

In November of 2007, you appeared as yourself in a
Simpsons
episode, signing autographs at a comic-book convention. George Meyer, a writer for
The Simpsons
, said that he once visited you at a convention and that you looked “alert, but dispirited, like a falcon trotted out for third-graders.” How do you feel about these conventions?

I’ve always felt like such an outcast at those events, but in the past it was sort of pleasant. I never used to mind it, and it used to have this weird appeal. Now they’re just so horrible; they are like a big media conglomerate. It’s like going to Sundance or something—just this hideous group of agents and horrible people trying to promote themselves. No charm at all.

Do you think that today is the heyday of graphic novels and comics?

I think so—certainly in terms of current work, narratively and aesthetically. It would be hard to find an era that was much better. There were certainly people who could draw a lot better in the old days, but it was very rare to find a great writer who could also draw.

What do you see as the future of the graphic novel?

I don’t know. When I started out, nobody—none of my peers in art school or anywhere else—would have thought of this as a viable career. They wouldn’t have said, “I am going to write and draw a graphic novel.” I used to hear classmates from art school say they wanted to work on children’s books. Everybody thinks they can write a children’s book, and it’s something semirespectable to work on.

I receive letters from young writers asking for advice about a “career” in comics. If somebody asks me, I always say not to do it unless you can’t
not
do it. If you need encouragement from a stranger, then you shouldn’t do it.

Once you are a cartoonist, the best advice I ever received was from Robert Crumb. He told me to just get away from cartooning for awhile. He told me he wished that he had taken up some other form of art, like sculpture; that it was important to do more than just sit at a desk and perform the same repetitive act over and over again. That it was fantastic just to be able to get away from the drawing board, to actually talk to other human beings and to gain some perspective on the many freedoms you take for granted as a cartoonist.

After fifteen years in a room alone, you can start to feel as if you’ve unwittingly sentenced yourself to solitary confinement. It’s no wonder that pretty much every cartoonist over fifty is totally insane.

Do you ever see yourself
not
doing this?

If I get old enough and my eyesight gets really bad or I can’t hold a pencil, maybe. Outside of that, I don’t see ever stopping.

There’s a book that came out more than fifteen years ago—a fiftieth-anniversary index of the members of the National Cartoonists Society. It’s a book of photos and short bios of hundreds of old-time American cartoonists, and for some reason a few “younger” nonmembers, such as myself, were included. I was thirty-seven at the time.

There are dozens of photos of these old codgers smiling with these stupid grins on their faces. But you can see the sadness underneath. It’s such a grim document. My friend [and fellow cartoonist] Chris Ware told me he had to actually hide his copy of the book, because he can’t bear to look at it.

What did you both find grim about it?

All these lives spent behind the drawing board; fifty years on a daily strip that no one remembers.

What’s the lesson for you—that you don’t want to end up like that?

I sort of
do
want to end up like that—that’s the pathetic part about it. I look at that book and I am thrilled to be a part of it. It’s sort of like the ending to
The Shining
, when the camera zooms in on that group photo with Jack Torrance at the black-tie party in the 1920s.

There is something so great about becoming that guy.

Writer,
A Series of Unfortunate Events

Before you became a best-selling children’s author with
A Series of Unfortunate Events
, published under the pen name Lemony Snicket, you wrote books for adults. Why did you make the switch?

My editor read
The Basic Eight
[a 1998 adult novel for St. Martin’s Press]. The book is narrated by a teenage girl. My editor didn’t think she could publish such a book for young people, but she thought I could write something that she could publish for children. I was sure she was wrong.

Do you think children’s books have changed since
A Series of Unfortunate Events
was first published in 1999? Have publishers come to accept the notion that a children’s book can be funny without being preachy?

In terms of straight percentages, I don’t actually know if that’s happening. There seem to be just as many syrupy books for kids as always, but I do think the good books aren’t slipping below the radar like they might have in the past. More attention is being paid to children’s literature.

Were you a fan of Roald Dahl’s? I’ve always found his work, both for children and adults, to be as dark as the work of any horror writer, and yet incredibly funny.

I was. Even Dahl’s lesser works for children have a kind of wondrous quality about them. I always loved
The Magic Finger
[Harper & Row, 1966], which is about a girl with magical powers.

All of Dahl’s stories have this chaos and menace where the readers are encouraged to smack their lips over the downfall of nasty people. To me, that has a delicious, yet unsavory, vibe.

Dahl’s stories also never seemed to have a real tight arc, which I always appreciated. In
James and the Giant Peach
[Knopf, 1961], a huge peach grows in James’s yard. Inside the peach, James finds giant insects. His parents have died, and off he goes with these bugs on adventures. But there’s never a sense that James is learning something about himself. It’s just a pure, crazy journey.

The older I get, and the fewer tight arcs I’ve experienced in which I learned something about my life that enabled me to go forward, the more I appreciate these books.

A lot of readers who otherwise would have loved Dahl are put off by his anti-Semitism and reported nastiness. Should that affect whether parents allow their children to read his stories?

I’d think it would affect whether or not you wanted to have him over, not read his work. If you start refusing to read writers who weren’t nice people, your shelves are going to be mighty undernourished. Dahl’s anti-Semitism is overstated anyway, although his nastiness is understated, so that might balance out.

A favorite childhood book of mine was
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
[Knopf, 1964]. I reread it recently but had forgotten that the Oompa Loompas were Pygmies from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle.” A far cry from the happy-go-lucky orange cuties who appear in the 1971 film version
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
.

I do remember that, and it seemed unsettling even when I was a kid. There was a very menacing quality to Dahl’s writing. Beyond the Pygmies, there was this bizarre candy in the original book capable of doing all these strange things. They cut this out of the movie, but there’s an extended joke in the book about square candy that looks round. The kids look through the window of a lab, and they say the candy is square. Wonka then opens the door and the square candies turn “round” to look at them.

Wonka says, “There’s no argument about it. They are square candies that look round.”

There’s something about Dahl’s books that incorporates the fear and the sadness and the chaos that exists in life while also managing to be funny. He doesn’t make the world a funny place where only funny things happen. His tragedy is honest, and it doesn’t always have redeeming qualities about it.

You don’t feel that kids are too young to learn the truth about life?

They already know it. Even if you have an extremely happy childhood, you’re going to learn about chaos and heartbreak and all the rest of it on the playground.

Manohla Dargis of
The New York Times
called the whitewashing often found in children’s literature the “tyranny of nice.”

I think that’s a good way of putting it. It’s an author using his or her position of power to attempt to force-feed an unrealistic version of the world on those who most likely already know that such a world doesn’t exist. That’s something I’ve always tried to avoid, especially when it’s come to humor.

You made it very clear at the start of
A Series of Unfortunate Events
that things weren’t going to turn out happily for the characters. You wrote: “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.”

The books for kids that have stood the test of time—like
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
or
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
—have been strange and chaotic and bizarre. The treacly crap has drifted away. I mean, you can still find Bobbsey Twins books, but they seem to be only for adult collectors and other fetishists. No honest-to-goodness child would ever read that sort of thing.

Was your publisher concerned that some of the scenes in
A Series of Unfortunate Events
were too graphic for kids? In the first volume,
The Bad Beginning
, the fourteen-year-old character, Violet, is nearly married against her will. In
The Vile Village
, the character of Jacques is murdered before being burned at the stake. And, reminiscent of what took place four years previously on 9/11, a large building—in this case a hotel—burns in 2005’s
The Penultimate Peril
, the second-to-last volume.

Before I wrote
A Series of Unfortunate Events
, I thought that only kids with happy childhoods would enjoy the books. I thought it would be a safe way for them to explore other, not-so-nice worlds. But I found the opposite to be true. It surprised me, especially considering how tragic certain parts of those books are.

It wasn’t so much the publisher who was worried, it was my agent. She was certain that no publisher would ever want to buy books like this, whereas I never saw these books as representing anything that was really all too new.

How did you see them?

I saw them as being part of the long tradition of orphans getting into dire trouble. I also saw it as creating a worldview that was just as much about hilarity as it was about heartbreak. Funny and ghastly at the same time. The tragedy becomes exaggerated, and then the exaggeration becomes funny. The emotions travel on a circular path. The reader feels terrible, terrible,
terrible
, and then suddenly it becomes very funny. That’s reality.

Do you enjoy being around children? It seems that many children’s authors, including Roald Dahl, weren’t too fond of their own audience.

The truth of the matter is that I’m always disturbed by someone who says they like or dislike children. To me, that’s like saying you either like or dislike adults. There are so many different types.

Yes, but some adults feel that
all
children are exactly the same.

True. It seems that children are one of the last minorities about whom you can make huge sweeping generalizations and no one will care.

I see this everywhere. I recently read an interview with a woman who was writing about pre-teen culture, and she said that girls love to be pretty and want to grow up to be princesses and want to be rescued by boys, and so on. And I thought, If you were to substitute any other minority for “girls,” you’d never work in publishing again.

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 all this 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!

When it comes to writing humor for kids, I always think back to when I was a kid myself and teachers would talk to me like I was an idiot. The teachers I really liked were the ones who spoke to me the same way they would to other adults. It was respect.

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.

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

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.

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 find this capacity missing with a lot of writers.

I’d also recommend stealing 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 wrote the beginning of
Snicket
when I worked for a dying man. I was working as an administrative assistant at the City College of San Francisco. My job was to answer my boss’s 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.

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 this isn’t taught in the creative-writing programs is a crime.

Finally: I’d avoid reading interviews with writers. None of us know what we’re doing. You can learn more from reading a good book than all the floppy advice from the people who make them.