And then sometimes Actors have what they call “ideas.” Usually it involves them talking more, or, in the case of more experienced actors, sitting more. When Actors have ideas it’s very important to get to the core reason behind their idea.
Is there something you’re asking them to do that’s making them uncomfortable? Are they being asked to bare their midriff or make out with a Dick Cheney look-alike? (For the record, I have asked actors to do both, and they were completely game.) Rather than say, “I’m uncomfortable breast-feeding a grown man who I just met today,” the actor may speak in code and say something like “I don’t think my character would do that.” Or “I’ve hurt my back and I’m not coming out of my dressing room.” You have to remember that actors are human beings. Which is hard sometimes because they look so much better than human beings. Is there someone in the room the actor is trying to impress? This is a big one and should not be overlooked. If a male actor is giving you a hard time about something, you must immediately scan the area for pretty interns.
2) “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”
This is something Lorne has said often about Saturday Night Live, but I think it’s a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go.
You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute. (And I’m from a generation where a lot of people died on waterslides, so this was an important lesson for me to learn.) You have to let people see what you wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring on live TV.
What I learned about “bombing” as an improviser at Second City was that bombing is painful, but it doesn’t kill you. No matter how badly an improv set goes, you will still be physically alive when it’s over. What I learned about bombing as a writer at Saturday Night is that you can’t be too worried about your “permanent record.” Yes, you’re going to write some sketches that you love and are proud of forever—your golden nuggets. But you’re also going to write some real shit nuggets. And unfortunately, sometimes the shit nuggets will make it onto the air. You can’t worry about it. As long as you know the difference, you can go back to panning for gold on Monday.
That’s what was so great about Will Ferrell. He would do sketches that were absolutely his voice and what (I assume) he loved most—Bill Brasky, Robert Goulet, and Cowbell—but he would commit just as fully to tap-dancing next to Katie Holmes in the monologue. He’s the Michael Caine of sketch comedy.
He could be in something awful and it would never stick to him.
3) When hiring, mix Harvard Nerds with Chicago Improvisers and stir.
The writing staff of Saturday Night Live has always been a mix of hyperintelligent Harvard Boys*
(Jim Downey, Al Franken, Conan O’Brien) and gifted, visceral, fun performers (John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jan Hooks, Horatio Sanz, Bill Murray, Maya Rudolph). Lorne somehow knew that too many of one or the other would knock the show out of balance. To generalize with abandon, if you had nothing but Harvard guys, the whole show would be commercial parodies about people wearing barrels after the 1929 stock market crash. “Flendersen’s Poverty Barrels, Replacing Clothes Despite Being More Expensive since… Right Now. Formerly known as Flendersen’s Pickles and Suspenders: A Semiotic Exegesis of Jazz Age Excess and the Failings of the Sherman Antitrust Act.”
If you had nothing but improvisers, the whole show would be loud drag characters named Vicki and Staci screaming their catchphrase over and over, “YOU KISS YOUR MUTHA WITH THAT FACE?”
Harvard Boys and Improv People think differently because their comedy upbringing is so different. If you’re at the Harvard Lampoon, sitting in a castle with your friends, you can perfect a piece of writing to be exactly what you want and you can avoid the feeling of red-hot flop sweat. Especially because you won’t even be there when someone reads it. But when you’re improvising eight shows a week in front of drunk meat-eating Chicagoans, you will experience highs and lows. You will be heckled, or, worse, you will hear your own heartbeat over the audience’s silence. You will be bombing so hard that you will be able to hear a lady in the back put her gum in a napkin. You may have a point to make about the health care system in America, but you’ll find out that you need to present that idea through a legally blind bus driver character or as an exotic dancer whose boobs are running for mayor. (I would like to see that sketch, actually.) Ultimately, you will do whatever it takes to win that audience over.
Harvard Is Classical Military Theory, Improv Is Vietnam.
This is all to make the case that Harvard boys and Second City/Groundlings people make beautiful comedy marriages. The Harvard guys keep the Improvisers from wallowing in schmaltz. (Steve Higgins used to joke that every Second City sketch ended with sentimental music and someone saying, “I love you, Dad.”)
The Harvard guys check the logic and construction of every joke, and the Improvisers teach them how to be human. It’s Spock and Kirk. (I guess if you want to tie all my metaphors together, it would be Spock wearing a baldric and staying up all night to write a talk show sketch with a mentally ravaged Rambo Kirk.)
I tried to apply Lorne’s lesson when staffing 30 Rock, and it has worked well so far. Our current staff makeup is four Harvard nerds, four Performer-turned-writers, two regular nerds, and two dirtbags.
4) “Television is a visual medium.”
Lorne has said this to me a lot. It basically means “Go to bed. You look tired.” You may want to be diligent and stay up with the writers all night, but if you’re going to be on the show, you can’t. Your
“street cred” with the staff won’t help anybody if you look like a cadaver on camera. Also, don’t be afraid to make them get your hair, makeup, and lighting right. It’s not vanity, because if you look weird, it will distract from what you’re trying to do. If you look as good as you can, people will be able to pay attention to what you’re actually saying.
5) “Don’t make any big decisions right after the season ends.”
This is the same advice they give people who’ve just come out of rehab. After a grueling period of work (or what passes for grueling work in our soft-handed world) you will crave some kind of reward.
Don’t let this cause you to rush into a big decision, like a new house or a marriage or partial ownership of a minor league baseball team, that you may later regret. The interesting thing about this piece of advice is that no one ever takes it.
6) “Never cut to a closed door.”
Lorne sighed this once in exasperation over some sketch I can’t remember. The director had cut to a door a moment too early, before the actor entered, and Lorne felt we “lost the audience” in that moment. This can mean a lot of things: Comedy is about confidence, and the moment an audience senses a slip in confidence, they’re nervous for you and they can’t laugh. Lorne would have preferred that the camera cut follow the sound of the actor knocking on the door. Which is to say that the sketch should lead the cutting pattern, which is to say content should dictate style, which is to say that in TV
the writer is king.
In its most extrapolated version, I think “Never cut to a closed door” means “Don’t forget about showmanship.” Make the entrance well-timed and exciting. Make the set look pretty at Christmastime.
Add some dancers! There’s no harm in things looking fun, and you don’t get extra credit for keeping things indie and grim.
Or—and this is a distinct possibility—it doesn’t mean anything and he was just in a grouchy mood.
7) “Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at three in
the morning.”
This one is incredibly helpful. We work long hours at these shows, and no matter how funny someone’s writing sample is, if they are too talkative or needy or angry to deal
with in the middle of the night by the printer, steer clear. That must be how I got through that first job interview. I was not dynamic, but at least I wasn’t nuts.
8) Never tell a crazy person he’s crazy.
While never stated overtly, this seems to be Lorne’s practice. There were many times in my nine years at the show when I couldn’t understand why Lorne wouldn’t just tell people to “knock it off.”
Eccentric writers would turn in sketches that were seventeen minutes long; immature performers tried fits and tears when their sketch was later in the show than they’d like. My every terrible instinct would have been to pull these culprits aside and scold them like a schoolmarm. “Please explain to me why your sketch should get to be three times longer than everyone else’s. Why won’t you take the perfectly reasonable cuts I suggested?” “How dare you pitch a fit about what time your sketch is on? Some people didn’t get to be in the show at all. Do you think you’re working harder than everyone else? We’re all working hard!” But there is not one management course in the world where they recommend Self-Righteousness as a tool.
Lorne has an indirect and very effective way of dealing with the crazies. It is best described by the old joke that most people know from Annie Hall. A man goes to a psychiatrist and says, “My brother’s gone crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” And the psychiatrist says, “Have you told him he’s not a chicken?” The man replies, “I would, but we need the eggs.” Lorne knows that the most exhausting people occasionally turn out the best stuff. How do I explain the presence of crazy people on the staff if we’re following Rule #7? Easily: These crazy people are charming and brilliant and great fun to see at three in the morning. Also, some people arrive at the show sane and the show turns them crazy.
In fairness to others, I will use myself as an example. In October 2001, Manhattan was a tense place to work. But we all continued to work because it seemed like the Churchillian thing to do. One Friday morning I was sitting in my tiny dressing room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, trying to write jokes for Weekend Update. I was reading a thick packet of newspaper clippings, looking for something fun to say about Afghanistan, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, the anthrax postal deaths: It was grim. Then, on the TV
hanging in the corner, Lester Holt came on MSNBC and said, “Breaking news. Anthrax has been found at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. CDC officials are investigating the potentially deadly substance, which was found in a suspicious package addressed to NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw and mailed to his offices in 30
Rockefeller Plaza.” If you have decent reading comprehension skills you will remember from the beginning of this paragraph that I, too, was at 30 Rockefeller Anthrax Plaza. Not 45 Rockefeller Plaza.
Not 1661 Sixth Avenue. 30 Rockefeller Plaza. “Nope,” I thought. “I give up.” I put on my coat, walked downstairs past my friends and coworkers without saying anything. I walked right past the host for that week, sweet Drew Barrymore, without telling her what I had heard. I just went to the elevator and left. I walked up Sixth Avenue to Central Park West. I walked up Central Park West to 96th Street and across 96th Street to my apartment on West End Avenue, where I would wait to die.
Several hours later, Lorne called and said gently, “We’re all here. You and Drew are the only ones who left… and Drew came back a few hours ago, so… We’re ordering dinner, if you want to come back in.” It was the most gentle, non-Bossypants way of saying “You’re embarrassing yourself.” I got back to work that evening just in time to find everyone assembled on the studio floor. Andy Lack, the head of NBC News, was addressing the crew in an emergency briefing. Once again, nothing is creepier than a bunch of adults being very quiet. Mr. Lack explained that the envelope was found in the third-floor NBC News offices, so the CDC would be “swabbing” workers from the second floor to the sixth floor, just to be safe. (Remember all those fun catchphrases from 2001? “Swabbing,” “Cutaneous,”
“Cipro,” “I am Zoolander.”) Some of our camera guys were irate that we on the eighth floor would not be swabbed. They occasionally filled in down in News. The discussion got heated. As I watched from the audience balcony, I remember feeling tremendous affection for everyone there. I felt like we were a family and that if we had to go, at least we’d all go together. I guess I forgot that just a few hours earlier I had booked it out of there, leaving them all to die. I have a uniquely German capacity to vacillate between sentimentality and coldness.
The point is, Lorne did not do what I would have done, which is to say, “You’re being crazy. Get back in here. Everyone else is here. Do you think you’re more important than everybody else?” He also didn’t coddle me, which is what I would have done if I were trying to overcompensate for my natural sternness. “Are you okay? If you need to take a couple days off, I’m sure we can manage, blah, blah, blah.”
Instead, he found a way for me to slip back in the door like my mental breakdown never happened. “We’re ordering dinner. What do you want?”
He knew how to get the eggs.
Peeing in Jars with Boys
My first show as a writer at Saturday Night Live was September 27, 1997. The host was Sylvester Stallone. It was the first time I had ever seen a real movie star up close. Real movie stars do look different from regular people. They are often a little smaller and usually have nicer teeth, shoes, and watches than anyone else in the room. Mr. Stallone smoked a cigar during the host meeting, which was pretty badass. I don’t remember what sketch ideas I pitched in that first meeting, but I know that on that first writing night, I completely froze up. I sat at my computer from one P.M. Tuesday afternoon until nine A.M. Wednesday morning and nothing came out. I wasn’t used to sitting by myself and writing. I’d been improvising with five other people every night for two years. I ended up submitting an old sketch that I had written as part of my job application.
Needless to say, my sketch didn’t get picked for the show, but I was assigned to help “cover” a sketch that Cheri Oteri had written with another writer. Writers are often assigned to help produce sketches that the performers write. I followed Cheri and writer Scott Wainio around through rehearsal, occasionally pitching jokes for the sketch that were (rightfully) ignored. During the dress rehearsal, Lorne gave us the note that he couldn’t understand Stallone in the sketch and we should ask him to enunciate more. I stood nervously outside the host’s dressing room with Scott Wainio. He had been there a year already, so I figured he’d know what to do. Scott’s experience level was evident when he looked at me and shrugged. “You tell him.”
My trademark obedience kicked in and I found myself knocking on the door and being ushered in. Judge Dredd himself was on the couch in an undershirt, smoking another cigar. He looked up at me. I muttered, “In the Rita sketch, you were a little hard to understand. Can you just enunciate a little more?” Stallone was unfazed. “Youcannunnastanme? Youneeme nanaunciate maw? Okay.” He couldn’t have been more easygoing about it. My guess is that this was not the first time in his career he had been given that note. I went back outside and manually released my butt cheeks. Over the years I came to realize that the movie star hosts of the show were just people who wanted to do a good job and (with the exception of a very small handful of d-bags) were eager for any guidance. Who were the d-bags, you ask? I couldn’t possibly tell you. But if you want to figure it out, here’s a clue: The letters from their names are sprinkled randomly through this chapter.
The only other thing I remember about the Sylvester Stallone show was that they did a Rocky-themed monologue and they needed someone to play Rocky’s wife, Adrian. Cheri really wanted the part—she was little, she was from Philly, she could do a good imitation of Talia Shire—but instead, somebody thought it would be funnier to put Chris Kattan in a dress. I remember thinking that was kind of bullshit.
I wasn’t privy to the decision-making process at the time; it was my first week, after all. When I reminded producer Steve Higgins of it recently, he (understandably) couldn’t remember whose idea it was, an
d thought that it might have even been Sylvester Stallone’s. No offense to Kattan, whom I love, or Sylvester Stallone, but I think Cheri would have been funnier as Adrian. Now, an anecdote about somebody at the show being frustrated and feeling cheated is hardly worth mentioning. It happens to everyone, male or female, at some point every week. Saturday Night Live runs on a combustion engine of ambition and disappointment.
But I tell this specific tale of Cheri being passed over for Kattan-in-drag because it illustrates how things were the first week I was there. By the time I left nine years later, that would never have happened. Nobody would have thought for a second that a dude in drag would be funnier than Amy, Maya, or Kristen. The women in the cast took over the show in that decade, and I had the pleasure of being there to witness it.
A FAQ (Freaking Always-asked Question)
People often ask me about the difference between male and female comedians. Do men and women find different things funny? I usually attempt an answer that is so diplomatic and boring that the person will just walk away. Something like “There’s a tremendous amount of overlap in what men and women think is funny. And I hate to generalize, but I would say at the far ends of the spectrum, men may prefer visceral, absurd elements like sharks and robots, while women are more drawn to character-based jokes and verbal idiosyncrasies….” Have you walked away yet?