Tag: Comedy Books

I recently finished a great comedy book, “And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft” by Mike Sacks. I got a ton of useful quotes from it, and this is the last of four parts. I recommend buying the whole book, as there is a lot of insight inside. Since the book is interview style based, I’ve put the writer’s name above all of the quotes that are attributed to him.

DAVID MINER

“The best representative is the one that finds you, not the other way around. This is because he or she (no matter how high up the food chain) was excited by your work.” (180)

“Unsolicited e-mail may as well be spam. Send a letter in an envelope. If it’s not worth a first class stamp to you, it’s not worth thirty seconds to me.” (180)

“Ask a represented writer friend for a reference. References from clients are the ones we take most seriously.” (181)

“If you are just starting out, go along with the enthusiasm of the representative that is interested in working with you – no matter what his or her title. All that matters is that he or she believes in you.” (181)

DAVID SEDARIS

“This first writing teacher had suggested that I got to graduate school. But something inside me though, No, it’s better that I just start writing. That’s sort of my job as a writer, isn’t it? Just to write?” (184)

“I get up, I go right to work, I take a break, and then I go back to work at night. I don’t just sit at a desk for two minutes and then say, “oh, okay. I tried. Maybe tomorrow.” (196)

“You can’t teach a lot of things. That’s the scam of any kind of art school. There are a lot of people who excel in school, but once they don’t have homework anymore, whether it’s painting or writing or whatever, they can’t function. They need a professor telling them to write a story by such and such a date. In the real world, the most important part is sitting there and writing. It’s not easy to function in that vacuum, but that’s what you have to do.” (196)

GEORGE MEYER

“You have to be willing to look stupid, to stumble down unproductive paths, and to endure bad afternoons when all your ideas are flat and sterile and derivative. If you don’t take yourself too seriously, you’ll bounce back from these lulls and be ready for the muse’s next visit.” (208)

“You can’t keep bitch slapping your creativity, or it’ll run away and find a new pimp.” (208)

“Most TV shows are exhausting. The network figures out how many shows will literally kill the staff. Then they do one fewer.” (211)

“If I could eliminate either advertising or nuclear weapons, I would choose advertising.” (212)

“We’re not aiming for consistency. We’re not making screws; we’re trying to innovate and keep a step ahead.” (212)

“The season is long and punishing. Sometimes you ring the bell; sometimes it falls on your head.” (212)

“Experience as much as you can and absorb a lot of reality. Otherwise, your writing will have the force of a Wiffle ball.” (213)

ALLISON SILVERMAN

“A lot of comedy is about status shifts, and I would mark down whenever a shift would occur.” (235)

“It’s very important for any host or performer to not battle an audience but, rather, to become partners with them. As soon as you look needy or uncomfortable, the audience becomes worried and stops laughing – which is a big problem. Going out onstage and thinking of the audience as an enemy only makes you look more needy.” (237)

“It can be that way with a career too. There are a lot of times when your biggest task is just to stay calm and keep working.” (243)

ROBERT SMIGEL

“Downey once summed up SNL sketches this way: actors love to act in sketches about a crazy person in a normal situation, and writers love to write sketches about normal people in a crazy situation.” (251)

“Letterman, Steve Martin, Kaufman and Larry David, these guys were every bit as smart and extreme and inventive as any performer or writer who cultivated a reputation as being too cool for the masses. But they were just so brilliant and smart that they figured out a way to do what they wanted to do on network TV.” (253)

“You don’t necessarily need an academic education. What’s just as important, is to be self-educated – to read and soak in as much as you can from the world at large. Del Close once said, “The more you know about, the more you can joke about.” And he had funnier heroin material than I’ve ever had.” (260)

“It’s a cruel profession where there will probably never be enough work for people who are truly funny.” (261)

“If you think you have some talent, just try to find opportunities. Find like-minded people and keep writing. If you’re good and maybe lucky, it’ll probably work out. And you won’t hate yourself for not trying. Just have something to fall back on.” (261)

DAVE BARRY

“What you’re basically saying in a humor column is: I’m funny because you laugh. But that doesn’t put you above anybody. Pomposity or authority doesn’t work very well with humor.” (274)

“A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.” (275)

DICK CAVETT

“To succeed as a comedy writer, you have to be able to write in different comics’ voices.” (284)

“It’s essential to hear the comics in your head when you write jokes for them. If you can’t do that, you’ll never make it as a comedy writer.” (284)

“In some ways, the life of a stand-up was better than the life of a writer. You could affirm that a joke was funny right away. You didn’t get that sitting in front of a typewriter.” (285)

DAN CLOWES

“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.” (291)

LARRY WILMORE

“One of the reasons why comedy has fallen out of favor – too many writers aren’t writing about anything that anyone cares about. It’s all pop-culture references.” (296)

“If you score in the beginning, you’re gold. You can just recite your act in a monotone and it’ll still kill. That’s the key: the first thirty seconds in front of a tough crowd are very important.” (297)

“Dominance is very important. Jerry Seinfeld once said, “To laugh is to be dominated.” (297)

“Never listen to execs. Just do your own thing. Whether it happens or doesn’t happen, at least you did what you wanted and you tried. That’s what writers have to get into their heads – no matter what you come up with, it won’t ever be as bad as the executives’ suggestions.” (300)

“You can’t please everyone. You just try to do what you think is funny. If you attempt to appease advocacy groups, good luck. You can do it, I suppose, but it’s not going to be funny.” (302)

“”Breaking the story” means getting the skeleton of it down on paper. Once you have that structure, you can work from it. It’s always easier to have that framework ready as soon as possible.” (305)

“I didn’t care about the jokes so much as the story. The jokes are always the easiest to produce.” (305)

“These are just jokes. You can always come up with more later. Never become too attached to what you write; otherwise, you’ll never survive as a TV comedy writer.” (306)

“I look for a unique voice – maybe something I haven’t quite read before in terms of style and imagery. I can point out pretty quickly if this writer has a different point of view. Mediocrity is pretty easy for me to sniff out. Try to write from your experience. Try not to be derivative, like so many writers can be with references to pop culture. Investigate your own life.” (307)

“Beyond that, only do comedy if you love to do it. I love comedy, and I love to make people laugh, I truly respect the people who came before me and who did it well. It’s important to know your history – if only to know what you shouldn’t be writing.” (307)

JACK HANDEY

“Steve Martin’s sensibility appeals to smart people and dumb people alike. That, to me, is the best comedy.” (311)

“If there’s one thing I learned about TV comedy, it’s that people don’t like sketch comedy in prime time.” (314)

“Aggressive, dark comedy, when it works, is really the best.” (315)

“It can take months or even years for an idea to click. I am usually suspicious of any idea of mine that I love right away.” (318)

“The jokes don’t usually change, but which jokes are used can change. That’s often how I can tell how good a premise it is – how easily the jokes come.” (318)

LARRY GELBART

“While confidence is always a comfort, risk provides a good deal more adrenaline.” (322)

“The problem with Sid was that he was at the mercy of the decision makers, the network people, who – yes, they respect talent, but they respect numbers a good deal more. If you don’t cut it – if your time slot’s not paying the rent – it doesn’t matter how gifted you are. They would have canceled Michelangelo if no one came to the Sistine Chapel.” (330)

“When you’re writing and come to a rough spot and the ideas just aren’t flowing, put down dummy text and keep on moving – especially if it’s at the end of the day and you’re going to stop. Your brain will never stop for the day, even if you have stopped working, and there’s a very good chance you’ll come up with something better. Also, at the very least, you’ll have something to come back to the next day, instead of a blank page. That’s important.” (335)

I recently finished a great comedy book, “And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft” by Mike Sacks. I got a ton of useful quotes from it, so this is part three in a rather long series of posts. I recommend buying the whole book, as there is a lot of insight inside. Since the book is interview style based, I’ve put the writer’s name above all of the quotes that are attributed to him.

IRVING BRECHER

“I didn’t even think about it, really. I just thought they were funny. I didn’t know any better.” (109)

“The circus is funny on its own. And when you throw in more funny, it becomes too much. You need a solid framework.” (112)

Q: So the Marx Brothers films were shown to audiences and then tweaked in the editing room?
“No, not the films. The brothers would travel around the country performing the script live.” (113)

“I don’t believe that you can teach anybody to be a top comedy writer. If anything, you have to teach yourself.” (115)

“I would say that if you think you’re funny, then do it. As long as people genuinely respond to what you produce, keep at it. If their laughs seem genuine, keep writing. And don’t stop. Never stop.” (117)

BOB ODENKIRK

“We would ask ourselves about every sketch, “Is it funny? Really, truly funny? Or do we just think it’s funny because we really want it to be funny?” That doesn’t sound very scientific, but I think there’s an important truth there. We took this very seriously. It was very, very important to us. Second: What is this sketch about? That was a little challenging sometimes, because we’d have an idea that seemed funny, but the sketch didn’t really have anything to say.” (122)

“When writers would pitch ideas at meetings, I would talk at length about every idea. Because when you shit on a writer’s idea quickly, they either clam up or they pitch ideas just for the sake of pitching them and just to sort of waste time. They know everything is going to get shit on, and they’re more apt to pitch something that even they don’t believe in. so you get this list of shitty pitches that are being bandied about.” (125)

“My feeling was “Brian, you are a funny guy. You wrote this because you saw something funny here. What is it? What was funny to you? Because if we can all understand why you thought it was funny, then maybe we can make it great, or maybe we can all agree that it is not very good. But you didn’t intentionally just write a piece of shit.” (126)

“Then people get older, and they just don’t want to hear a new idea. They want to sit back and watch the same people do the same thing they did last week. That’s what TV exists for – it exists to be a mild sedative.” (129)

“Robert Smigel used to talk about finding the core joke of your sketch, which was something that struck me as a great lesson and one of the first things that a writer should think about when it comes to sketch comedy.” (132)

TODD HANSON

“How many people can say that something like that happened to them? That they and their friends have this little group in which they did this little fun thing together and then it ended up becoming internationally respected? Most people go through their entire lives without ever having anything like this happen. They get married, they have kids, they grow old, and they die. And nothing like this ever happens to them. But it happened to me. That’s amazing. What are the chances it’s going to happen twice? I’m going to go out on a limb and say probably zero. But don’t get me wrong. I still complain every day.” (137)

“I don’t think there is any point in making a joke that is not an honest joke.” (138)

“Everyone on the staff felt that it was just something to do where we would feel less like we were wasting our lives. Nobody ever had a goal of getting paid, let alone thinking we were going ot become media figures or have our work read all over the world. It was just something you did two nights a week when your shift ended.” (139)

“I don’t care if we are outside of the mainstream – I prefer it that way.” (140)

“People will often ask, “How do I get a job writing comedy?” And I just … it just annoys the fuck out of me. I always answer: “You do it for free for ten years and then, if you are really lucky, you get to write humor as a full-time job.” And they look at me like, “That’s not what I want to do.” (140)

Q: Any advice for those readers who dream of writing for The Onion?
“Start your own paper. Do your own thing. That’s what I would recommend to anybody who wants to do anything, not just write for The Onion. Do it for free and have fun. Whether it’s writing comedy or making music or painting or performing interpretive dance. If you want to do something creative, you should have a better reason for wanting to do it than to make money. If you want to make money, my advice is to sell shoes or go into banking.” (141)

“Comedy is extremely hard. It’s not just like, “this is so great!” It’s a hell of a grind.” (141)

“Mark Twain said, “The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.” He also said, “There is no humor in heaven.” (147)

BEN KARLIN

“Three things are needed to be successful in comedy, but I think it applies to almost everything. First, you need natural talent. Second, you need skill development. Third, you need ambition. Everyone’s ratio is different, but the most successful people have all of them.” (147)

MARSHALL BRICKMAN

“TV’s a monster. It just eats up material. It’s impossible to be continuously good. That’s why I’m amazed when I see a TV show that’s good consistently, night after night, week after week.” (151)

“I’ve always thought that television exists for the audience as a kind of parental entity. If it’s on TV, then it’s been certified by someone, somewhere. And if Johnny did a joke about Nixon or the mayor or whomever – then it became oaky to do jokes about that person.” (151)

“It’s easy to write for someone who’s already established a persona.” (152)

“It’s the hardest thing to develop a persona. That’s why movies and plays about fictional comedians are almost never truly convincing. Because it takes years for the audience to help a comedian shape a comedic persona.” (152)

“Developing a comic character requires a collaboration with the audience. It’s the only way you can do it. You have to get out there and do a variety of material. Over time, certain things, statistically, will continue to work, and other things will drop away, and the audience will tell you what seems correct for you – for what you project onstage as a personality.” (153)

“A lot of material was taken out because the audience just doesn’t care how clever the authors are. They only want a good story. And they’re right.” (155)

“After watching it, we thought, “Where’s the relationship?” When people come to me with ideas, sometimes they say, “I want to do a story about a war” or “I want to do a story about a hospital.” And I’ll always say, “Tell me the story in terms of a relationship.” (157)

“It’s a mistake to think that what you’re seeing up on the stage or on the screen is what the author intended. It isn’t. it’s always the result of a hundred compromises and accidents, both good and bad, and if you’re lucky, you get lucky.” (158)

“The great rule I learned from Woody is that when you get in a room with another person, you’re both responsible for the result – assuming that there’s a reasonably equal level of talent.” (159)

“Even though a great line or idea might be uttered by one person, it may have been triggered or stimulated by what the other party said.” (159)

“What I like to do is to turn ninety degrees from something that’s headed towards sentimental and undercut it.” (161)

MITCH HURWITZ

“I put in “call forwards,’ which were new for me. I inserted hints of events that hadn’t happened yet. And, of course, there’s no way you can get laughs out of that.” (170)

“I’m sure there are many great comic voices who really don’t quite understand what they’re doing – who are just true originals. But the rest of us tend to understand what already exists and then try to go further with it.” (173)

“In any creative endeavor, there needs to be progression. If there is no progression – no innovation – you’re finished.” (173)

“One of the key ingredients with humor is surprise.” (176)

“The system behind TV development is designed to fail. If you, as a producer, jump through all the hoops that the network asks you to jump through, the show probably won’t work. If you look at the success of the best shows, almost all are a result of someone breaking the rules.” (177)

CLICK HERE FOR PART 4

I recently finished a great comedy book, “And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft” by Mike Sacks. I got a ton of useful quotes from it, so this is part two in a rather long series of posts. I recommend buying the whole book, as there is a lot of insight inside. Since the book is interview style based, I’ve put the writer’s name above all of the quotes that are attributed to him.

DAN MAZER

“Most of the comedy writers I know are complete disasters socially. You put them in a room together, and it’s just a car crash. It’s horrible.” (56)

“They have the same type of childhood. Not necessarily unhappy childhoods so much as lonely ones.” (56)

“My mum would have been proud if I were a serial killer. She would’ve boasted that I’d murdered thirteen prostitutes and left no forensic evidence.” (57)

“I still don’t go out much. But I do think it’s vital to leave the house and meet people and explore life, to get inspiration for your work. The scourge of comedy is when it eats itself – when comedy writers watch sitcoms and think, Oh, you know, such and such a show is great. Let’s do something a bit similar to that. I think that’s wrong, really. I think the idea is to live life and take inspiration from that experience, as opposed to just getting inspiration from other artists and their work.” (57)

“At the end of my second year, I told my parents, “Look I’m not going to be a lawyer. I’m going to try and make a career in comedy.” I think my parents just ignored it and pretended it wasn’t happening, because it was just too traumatic for them. They already pictured me in a barrister’s wig and had probably already told their friends I was a lawyer.” (59)

“You find little bits here and there, and you toil away, and you do things you think are funny, and you make a nice living, and people might talk about something you wrote. But occasionally you might find a nugget. You just find this thing that is completely different and special, and you have a moment when you just know. At that point, you have to trust that instinct and really go with it.” (61)

“I think we hold a mirror up to people. We don’t edit things to make people look more stupid or ignorant. A lot of people come out of the Ali G interviews looking great.” (61)

“It’s one thing to do something funny, and that’s great, and all you can do as a comedy writer is to write funny things and hope that people find them. But the idea that so many people found this character and he became such a phenomenon is incredible to me.” (63)

“It was a genuine pop-culture phenomenon. And I think if you try to go out and create something like that, it won’t happen; it was just a weird confluence of events.” (63)

“Americans are generally more polite. That is, up until the point when they snap. And then when they snap, they snap instantly and fiercely. There’s just this moment, and then the switch flicks, and that’s it.” (64)

“That’s half the process: finding the right people to interview.” (65)

“I think some performers have one or two of those things. Some have brains. Some are funny. And some are daring. But Sacha has all three. And that’s a unique combination.” (68)

“We probably have a file of scripts and jokes that extends to about three thousand pages. We write so much material for each three-minute segment. And Sacha is brilliant at keeping it all sort of filed together in his head. He’s able to access any joke instantly and brilliantly. There are jokes from years ago that Sacha will be able to call on.” (69)

“Sacha goes to extremes with each character. If he’s playing Borat, he won’t shower the night or two before an interview. It’s an amazing devotion to detail. Even Borat’s underwear is authentic for the character. It has a Russian label on it, so that if Borat strips and somebody catches him, his underwear won’t say “Wal-Mart.” (69)

“There are two things I would say are the key to comedy. One is character. All good comedy comes from character. In my mind, jokes are one thing, but without a convincing protagonist and somebody you care about, your comedy is on a path to nowhere… Number two is to have a voice. Have an opinion. Try and say something. I don’t think it’s enough to just write trifling jokes. You should have a point of view. Have the confidence in what you think. Don’t let the executives or your own self-doubt dilute what you want to say.” (70)

MERRILL MARKOE

“If I know there is something I am supposed to be doing or saying or wearing, I feel compelled to resist – particularly with creative endeavors, like writing. If I see an obvious punch line or plotline driving toward me, I can’t help but make a sharp left turn into the unexpected. I don’t like to replicate what I’ve seen done before – I don’t like to give people what they expect. I think it’s my job to come up with a surprising angle or to add some personal twist.” (74)

“One immediate task – when we were determining how to construct a daily format – was to create segments that could be repeated.” (76)

“I had Dave’s voice all analyzed and figured out, because not only did I live with him, but I was preoccupied with creating a show that would please him. Nowadays we call that sort of thing “co-dependence.” But in those days I simply called it “being head writer.” (82)

“A friend of mine calls TV writing the “golden handcuffs.” You get hooked on the idea of making big money as a reasonable and worthy trade-off for lack of artistic control. So you stop worrying about whether you are meeting your own needs for self-expression and just focus on the size of your bank account.” (83)

“Real human beings don’t behave in big broad strokes. They behave with tiny, exacting, site-specific details. Your stupid McDonald’s employee should be different than mine.” (85)

“You need to find a way to get enough distance from yourself to effectively edit and rewrite your own work. And I do a lot of editing and rewriting. A lot.” (86)

“Don’t be overly attached to every syllable and detail of your work. Your commitment is to making the whole thing work. So you have to allow yourself to throw out sections you may love if they block the flow or seem unnecessary. Tell yourself you can save them and use them elsewhere later. Even if you never do, lie to yourself if it makes it easier.” (86)

“Take a moment to imagine how you will feel when your work is published. Anything that you think will make you uncomfortable or ill at ease… get rid of it.” (86)

“You have to allow your first draft to be really bad. Just throw a lot of things out there and get it on paper. The hardest part of the process is just getting a first full draft. The fun part, if any of it can be considered fun, is when you start to improve the piece through the editing and rewriting. That is definitely where the art is: knowing what to save, what to throw out, what to embellish.” (86)

“In the end, nothing works except sitting down to write. And then, even sadder, actually writing. “ (87)

“Robert Benchley explains, “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” (87)

PAUL FEIG

“Tragedy is when something bad happens to you; comedy is when something bad happens to somebody else.” (89)

“That’s the great thing about humor. You can take those experiences, and if you recount them in a funny way, and if they’re truthful and real, they will always become funnier.” (91)

“Real life experiences are rife with bad decision-making. And bad decision making is, in a lot of ways, the key to comedy.” (91)

“Movies are mostly about spectacle and huge stories… On the other hand, TV is about assembling a group of friends that you visit and hang out with every week.” (94)

“I’ve seen more comics storm off the stage and yell at people, slam their mics down, and do weirder things than you could ever imagine. There’s a real insecurity that comes with being funny. You’re on a razor’s edge. Comedy is an attempt to control things, and it just so happens that you’re trying to control people through laughter. But laughter can go off the rails at any given point.” (94)

“That’s not to say that Hollywood doesn’t care about quality but that they only want the quality when it’s going to bring in money. Nobody in Hollywood wants to do something that they’re proud of but that nobody is going to see.” (97)

“You need the show to be grounded. When it’s grounded – when the characters are living, breathing, real people – then you, as a writer, can do practically anything with them.” (98)

“The cruel side of me likes creating situations where people get buried deeper and deeper.” (100)

“You want characters to respond as they would in real life. They’re saying things quickly without thinking about them. But when you write, you can take months to finish a script. So everything the characters say has been so well thought out that it becomes almost perfect. But that’s just fake.” (100)

“You can get away with a lot by having just a simple expression.” (101)

“That’s what I liked about the show ending so suddenly: loose ends are never tied up in real life.” (101)

“If there’s any magic, it only exists to create a chemistry within a group of talented people – actors, writers, directors, producers – who are willing to work together and allow each of the others to do their best work. I personally don’t think that’s a hard mix to create again. It’s not always going to work, but I think it could work if enough talented people with a vision are willing to make it work.” (102-103)

“At the end of the day, none of us is that different. Freaks, geeks, jocks, whoever. The events we experience as human beings are fairly similar. The circumstances are different, and the surroundings and the social strata are different. But, you know, insecurity is insecurity. And loneliness is loneliness. And the basic human circumstances are all the same. If you’re telling honest stories that are done in a special way, magic can definitely be duplicated.” (103)

CLICK HERE FOR PART 3

I recently finished a great comedy book, “And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft” by Mike Sacks. I got a ton of useful quotes from it, so this will be a rather long series of posts. I recommend buying the whole book, as there is a lot of insight inside. Since the book is interview style based, I’ve put the writer’s name above all of the quotes that are attributed to him.

BUCK HENRY

“I think all writers should have a voyeur nature. You have to look and listen. That’s why some writers might run out of material; they’re not looking, they’re not listening.” (6)

“If you ride in limos for too long, you tend to forget what cabs, buses, and subways are like. You lose contact. I think it’s important to stay in contact with the outside world.” (6)

“All the great filmmakers from the past knew something about real life.” (13)

“One of the characters says, “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV.” That’s an American disease. And it’ sonly become truer now than it was when the movie came out.” (13)

“When you’ve been in improvisational theater, you get used to capturing the characteristics of people who are really out there in the world. And if you’re up on stage every night for a year, or two years, or three years, with the audience yelling suggestions at you like “Do Chekhov, but do it with Chinese characters,” you get used to an immediate commitment to lunatic ideas. You gain a confidence. Most of the SNL cast members came from that background.” (16)

“In one of the samurai sketches, John hit me in the forehead with a samurai sword. He put a real gash in it, and I needed a bandage. And by the end of the show, when the cast members were saying good-bye, all of them had bandages on their heads.” (17)

“Timing is when a movie comes out. Timing is what the country’s political disposition is when a movie is released. It’s what people are thinking about – what they want to see. You really can’t control that as a writer. But if you’re talented, it’ll all work out in the end. I mean, not all the talented writers will make it, of course… but for the most part, if you’re talented, I think somebody will find you.” (17)

STEPHEN MERCHANT

“In a documentary, there’s no real narrative. Usually in a documentary, a narrative I just created unofficially.” (20)

“There’s nothing wrong with a huge audience. But in reaching for that huge audience, you could possibly compromise your material or maybe try to second-guess what an audience wants. We genuinely thought that The Office was funny and that it was truthful, and maybe there would be a million and a half like-minded people who thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. And if that happened, then we’d think, oh, well, we had fun and that was good. And that would be that.” (21)

“When we first showed The Office to test audiences in Britain, we received one of the lowest scores ever – the only show that beat ours was one that featured women’s lawn bowling. That’s why you can’t judge these focus groups.” (22)

“The best sitcoms are about creating an environment in which you want to return and poke around for another half-hour.” (22)

“The most important things in life are to find a job you like, to make a difference, and to find someone you love.” (25)

“Initially we started off trying to improvise, and then we typed the dialogue, but that was a very slow way of working. Ultimately, we bought a Dictaphone tape recorder. We would improvise into it and sort of refine the dialogue a little, and then we would edit it down later so that it could be typed up. It just seemed the only way to create that ebb and flow of real dialogue, where people stop and start and they don’t use proper grammar. Speech patterns are very different from what you would get if you were to just write dialogue.” (25)

“I think we kind of liked that the audience was not entirely sure how they should feel.” (29)

“We never sit down and think about what subjects we are going – or are not going – to tackle. We just do what feels right. Audiences see certain topics, and their immediate reaction is anxiety. You can’t talk about this, you can’t joke about that. Our feeling is that the more we accept people who may be different, the more we should be able to joke about our own discomfort. If I have friends who are disabled, I can make jokes about their disability, just like they can make jokes about my height or Ricky being overweight. Of course, if you’re meeting someone in the street for the first time, you don’t start making those cracks, because it’s inappropriate. But to us it’s that fascinating stew of discomfort and ignorance that becomes a great recipe for laughter. We’re not laughing at the disabled; we’re laughing at people’s discomfort with disability.” (30)

“We want our shows to be aimed at a sort of reasoning, smart, intelligent audience that can steer its way through ambiguities.” (31)

“There’s always a danger that we as comedy fans are writing comedy for other comedy fans. Whereas the average viewer – and I don’t mean this in a disparaging way – but the average viewer doesn’t sit around thinking about how jokes work. Its just not something that’s important to them. They just want the joke to be funny. So you can’t be too clever. You can’t assume reference points and sophistication that are not there.” (31)

“Sometimes you can get too up your own ass.” (31)

JUDD APATOW

“Whenever we got stuck, Garry Shandling always said, “What is the truth here? What would someone actually do?” He pushed his writers to go deeper to the core.” (33)

KEN LEVINE

“Before anything else, you have to learn how to write. And you learn writing by teaching yourself.” (34)

“One way to stand out is to write a holiday-themed script.” (35)

“Just make it “Jessica enters.” That’s all you need. Describe the action quickly, and get on with it. But you can sprinkle the scripts with inside jokes, such as: “Character orders a three-pound lobster (therefore breaking the show’s budget.) Small jokes that will reward the reader.” (35)

“When I go on staff, I want the producers and everyone else to think, Man, we cannot do the show without this guy.” (35)

HAROLD RAMIS

“An audience member told me, “When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.” I said to myself: Why wouldn’t you want o think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head?” (37)

“The other end of the spectrum isn’t funny: “I get so much respect.” No one will laugh at how great things are for somebody.” (38)

“I was more intrigued by the alternative comedy posture. The characters I enjoyed creating were the dropouts and the rebels. They voluntarily opted out of the mainstream. It wasn’t because they couldn’t join it. It was because it wasn’t worth doing. Or there was some serious hypocrisy going on. Or it wasn’t cool.” (38)

“I worked in a mental institution in St. Louis, which prepared me well for when I went out to Hollywood to work with actors.” (39)

“Michael Shamberg said, “Comedy works in two ways. Either you have a normal person in an extraordinary situation or an extraordinary person in a normal situation.” And A Confederacy of Dunces was about an extraordinary person in a series of extraordinary situations.” (42)

“I’m always more offended by dishonesty and hypocrisy than by an honest portrayal of the real world.” (45)

“Often, Rodney Dangerfield thought he was bombing on the set, because no one was laughing. He just didn’t know from that world. He really knew nothing about the process of filmmaking.” (47)

“It’s the editing room that saves your ass. If you took all the improv from Caddyshack and did it onstage, you’d bomb half the time. One thing I learned to do was shoot enough improv so I could actually shape it in the editing room.” (47)

“If you’re cutting away on a joke, you’re probably doing it because you can’t top that joke. If the scene is still building and is still rich, you keep going.” (47-48)

“In any genre, viewers want to feel something. They want to have an experience. There are more well-made movies than good movies. That’s sort of my new mantra. Plenty of people can shoot beautiful films. There are a lot of great edits, a lot of great designers. But where is the content? Who are the characters? Is it moving? You want the audience to feel something, and if it’s comedy, you want them to laugh hard, even if it’s at the expense of a better shot or a better edit. There are many times when the editor will say to me, “Well, that’s not a real good cut.” And I’ll say, “Yeah, but it’s funny. Let’s just do it.” (48)

“I always tell students to identify the most talented person in the room, and if it isn’t you, go stand next to him.” (48)

“It’s like that great saying, “You ride the horse in the direction it’s going.” Billy goes his own way. But he’ll go my way if he thinks it’s a good way. So my job is not to force the actor to do anything; it’s to convince them. Billy was smart enough to know a good thing when he heard it. If I said, “Try this” or “try that,” and it was really funny, he’d do it.” (49)

Q: Do you have a target audience in mind when you write?
“No, I write for everybody. Or, really, for anyone who can read and is not hopelessly fucked in the head.” (50)

“I just did what I wanted to do and what interested me. As I tell writing students, the only thing you have that is unique is yourself.” (51)

“The other approach is to skip the pitch and just write it. You don’t want to waste a lot of time waiting for an editor to evaluate the pitch. Just write it – either the editor will laugh or not.” (53)

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2

I recently finished  “Comedy At The Edge: How stand-up in the 1970’s changed America” by Richard Zoglin.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it. Here’s some (okay A LOT) of quotes from it:

“New York City alone, as I write this, has nearly a dozen-compared with just three in their ‘70s heyday. But the sense of adventure has been replaced by the programmed predictability of a General Motors assembly plant. The comics all sound pretty much alike these days, with the same patter to loosen up the crowd.” (2)

“Stand-up comedians who reached their artistic maturity in the late’60s and ‘70s saw themselves as rebel artists. Unlike the comedians of an earlier generation.” (2)

“By their very presence onstage – alone in front of a mike, telling it like it is- they were advertisements for honesty and authenticity, a rebuke to the phoniness and self-righteousness of your parents’ generation.” (3)

“The old comics made jokes about real life. The new comics turned real life into the joke.” (5)

“Even at their peak of creativity and popularity, these stand-up innovators were often itchy to move on. They didn’t feel validated (or make enough money) until they proved themselves in other fields – movies, TV sitcoms, directing. Stand-up comedy may be the only major art form whose greatest practitioners, at any given time, want to be doing something else.” (5)

“Many of them had relatively short stand-up careers. Unlike rock stars, they couldn’t go on indefinitely with greatest-hits tours. The old jokes had to be constantly refreshed, and that became harder as they aged – as their material became familiar from TV and the cocoon of fame enveloped them, cutting them off from their real-life sources inspiration.” (5)

“The result was a brain drain that short-circuited the careers of many young comics, who came to regard stand-up not as an end In itself but as a road to sitcom stardom.” (6)

“”I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false values,” Bruce once said.” (10)

“Lenny Bruce was incapable of separating the comedy from the comedian.” (13)

“Carlin was disciplined about his work, a compulsive student of his own career who kept a detailed log of every gig he did.” (19)

“Carlin said, “I think I was looking for familiar frames of reference that lend themselves to distortion. Because distortion is one of the most important things in comedy. You look at an ordinary event, an ordinary tableau, and you say, what element can I distort in this? And suddenly you have at least the potential for a joke.”” (25)

“Carlin showed that stand-up comedy could be a noble calling, one that required courage and commitment and that could have an impact outside of its own little world. And you could make a lifetime career of it, without burning out or self-destructing.” (40)

“Richard Pryor: “I wanted to do more black material, but I had people around me telling me to wait until I had really made it and then I could talk to the colored. I knew I had to get away from people who thought like that and the environment that made them think like that.”” (48)

“I was working very hard and wasn’t making great money but I loved it because I was doing the material I wanted to do,” Pryor said. “I learned what freedom is.” (50)

“The power of Pryor’s comedy had its drawbacks as well. Plenty of comedians, white and black, emulated his rough language and in-your-face style but missed the empathy and vulnerability that informed it.” (63)

““In stand-up, being ahead of the country is the same as being behind. All that matters is the right moment,” said David Steinberg.” (71)

“Robert Klein says, “I had an education. I was intelligent. I wanted to say something.” (77)

“If I was going to have a career on The Tonight Show,” Klein realized, “I couldn’t be talking past people.” (79)

““Klein wasn’t afraid of going over the audience’s head,” said Jerry Seinfeld.” (81)

“Like most people in show business, Budd Friedman’s interest in you was in exact proportion to how he could use you at the moment.” (89)

“Budd Friedman had his little principles: ‘You can never blame the audience. It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.’” (90)

“When Larry David went on, all the comics in the bar would rush in to see him,” says Albrecht, “and all the people in the audience would rush to the exits.” (105)

“Most comedians worry about being funny,” says Dennis Klein, a comedy writer who was friends with Albert Brooks for year. “Albert is the only one who doesn’t worry about that. He worries about everything else.” (110)

“What I thought was so amazing was that the audience knew Jack Benny’s persona so well that he didn’t do anything. All he had to do was react. Most comedians have to create the confusion. All he had to do was look at it. And that was such a profound, clear comedy character.” (116)

“As I studied the history of philosophy, the quest for ultimate truth became less important to me, and by the time I got to Wittgenstein, it seemed pointless,” Steve Martin told Time magazine. “Then I realized that in the arts, you don’t have to discover meaning; you create it.” (128)

“Says Martin, “I decided that to deny the audience the punch line was the secret of modern comedy. I sort of analyzed the one-liner, which was the style before I started working – OK, here’s the punch line, how funny do you think it is? And I thought, well, if there were no punch lines, it would create its own tension, and eventually the audience would start laughing and they won’t know why. And that’s a better kind of laugh.” (133)

Steve Martin: “I came up with a plan, which was to observe myself when I laughed, and figure out what it was that made me laugh, and try to put it into material. And the second biggest artistic and commercial decision I made was to drop the politics, to go very solipsistic. I just wanted to break from the depth of that political infestation in comedy. It was very pervasive. It was just making me another one of the group.” (133)

“The lesson for Martin: he needed to stop being an opening act and hold out for headline spots – even if it meant going to smaller clubs. “My opening act was going nowhere,” he says. “There’s a kind of psychological aspect to opening: even if you killed and you’re better than the headliner, they only remember the headliner.” (134)

“I think my material didn’t change so much as its delivery,” says Martin. “And the delivery was just that total confidence.” (134)

“When someone up front would leave to go to the bathroom, Martin would enlist the rest of the crowd in a practical joke: when the poor sap came back, Martin instructed them to laugh at everything he said even before the punch lines. Three thousand people playing a prank on one unsuspecting schlub. It was brilliant lunacy.” (135)

“When the crowd lingered, Martin led them outside, saw an empty swimming pool next door, and on an impulse, told everyone to climb inside, forming a human sea while he “swam” across their bodies.” (135)

“Says Lorne Michaels, “we were burned-out. He was sunshine. We were very much about being taken seriously. And Steve was braver than that. He didn’t care.” (136)

“I knew that while I was hot, I had better switch to something,” Martin says. “I had no intention of turning over my act and getting a new act. I knew it was over when it was over. And I thought, now’s the time. I’m hot enough to make a deal. You’re on a train and it’s going one way and another train passes and it’s going another way, you gotta leap onto that other train when your paths are crossing.” (139)

“Martin demonstrated that experimental comedy was not inconsistent with entertaining huge numbers of people.” (140)

“Once you got that Tonight Show break, you’d better be ready – with enough material to last more than one appearance.” (142)

“Seinfeld put off his Tonight Show debut for months while he gathered enough material to avoid the David Sayh trap.” (143)

“Then they open up that curtain, and at that moment you feel something nudging your Adam’s apple, and it’s your asshole trying to get out.” (143)

“Carson was so secure in himself that he never had a problem laughing his ass off when somebody was funny.” (145)

“What Leno demonstrated to me, by being on stage,” says Letterman, “was the importance of attitude.” (154)

“Leno was a glutton for the road, a comic who never met a crowd he didn’t want to win over. Letterman never liked performing outside of the comfortable cocoon of the Comedy Store.” (156)

“Kaufman, the conceptual comic whose big joke, most of the time, was that he didn’t have an ounce of talent in his body.” (160)

“My style in the beginning, especially in the smaller clubs, was not to be on the mike,” Kaufman recalls. “Because if you were on mike, you invited the standard thing where people could kind of lose track. So if I didn’t go on mike, they were immediately listening.” (162)

“Andy would always watch the audience,” says Zmuda. “The theatrical moment for him was not onstage, but what’s taking place in the crowd.” (174)

“Kaufman always felt inhibited by Taxi, and reduced the number of episodes he did in the later seasons. “He wanted to be on the cutting edge,” says Zmuda. “He felt all of TV was a sellout. We couldn’t tell the difference between Full House and Saturday Night Live.” (176)

“When Kaufman played Harrah’s in Reno, according to Zmuda, he paid a visit to the Mustang Ranch, the famed Nevada brothel, and vowed to sleep with all forty-two girls in the house before the end of his weeklong run. He accomplished the feat just under the wire, Zmuda says.” (177)

“An administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the comedians, as independent contractors, could not be unionized.” (200)

“Oh my God, the parties we had there,” says Rick Overton. “Inexplicable stains everywhere. Waitress who go, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ then when you’re looking for a condom, say, ‘It’s in the third drawer.’”

“Getting a TV sitcom, however, was a Faustian bargain for any stand-up comic who was serious about his art. On the one hand, it could make you famous beyond your wildest dreams. On the other, it neutralized your best talents by putting you at the services of formulaic scripts, ensemble casts, and network restrictions on language and content. You might get an ovation when you walked back into the Improv, but it wasn’t necessarily deserved. The skills of live stand-up needed constant maintenance; it wasn’t easy to pick up again after you stopped doing it regularly.” (213)

“The TV sitcom changed the dynamics of the stand-up profession. IT drew comedians from New York to Los Angeles faster than ever. It encouraged them to develop clean, family friendly routines that would be palatable to a mass TV audience. And it altered their career ambitions.” (215)

“They were the comics who got so good at their jobs that they could leave it behind – for movies or a TV series. In the ‘60s it would have been called selling out. In the ‘80s it simply meant that stand-up was losing much of its urgency and vitality, a sense that it was central to what was happening in the culture and the country.” (216)

“Any art works best when it’s the only pinhole of expression that a human being has,” Seinfeld says. “Everything that they want to express gets forced through that little hole.” (217)

Seinfeld: “Klein was a hipper guy, but he was talking to unhip people, and getting them to laugh. If I could sum up my entire philosophy of comedy in one sentence, it is to be hip without excluding. That’s the key: staying on the front of the curve, without leaving the mainstream audience behind.” (218)

“Seinfeld was known among his friends as the professor of comedy. He studied joks and worked diligently on new material. He made sure he spent at least an hour a day writing, compiling his ideas on a pad of yellow lined paper. “Jerry was the first one I saw who understood the importance of craft,” says Larry Miller. “He would write every day. I only started doing that about three years in.” “His life was always very efficient and clean and uncluttered,” says Resier. “He used to have a wallet that had one credit card and however many crisp bills he needed. And one piece of paper of one word ideas he wrote down that day. He’d try out that stuff. Jerry did new stuff regularly and methodically.” (219)

“I was at the top of the food chain in New York,” Seinfeld says. “I didn’t like everyone looking up to me. I figured that wasn’t good for my growth.” (221)

“Most of the great innovators of ‘70s stand-up, like avant-garde artists of many eras, faced the problem of watching their outsider art become part of the mainstream culture – rubbing them of their originality and their raison d’etre.” (222)

“Stand-up comedy in the ‘70s helped created the world we live in, and the way we look at it. It made us more cynical about our leaders, and more suspicious of authority of all kind. It forced us to take a close, skeptical look at the media world that has overwhelmed us. It made us more open about ourselves, and more willing to tolerate differences in others. It freed up our language and showed that our most embarrassing memories are nothing to be ashamed of, because others share them too. It made us observant and questioning and smart. It taught us not to sit still for anything, but to talk back.” (224)