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And Here’s the Kicker...

In journalist Mike Sacks’s first book, And Here’s the Kicker…Conversations with Top Humor Writers About Their Craft, he poses the kind of questions comedy geeks would dream of asking their idols to 21 comic celebs. The resulting Q&As delve into the long careers of legends like Buck Henry and Al Jaffe, and reveal that there are real-life versions of well-known characters created by the likes of Harold Ramis, Paul Feig and Dan Mazer. Here are some highlights.

Dan Mazer
(Borat, Da Ali G Show)
Do you know what I find with most comedy writers, or at least the ones I know? I think a lot of them genuinely might have some form of Asperger’s. Most of the comedy writers I know are complete disasters—socially. You put them in the room, and it’s just a car crash. It’s horrible.

Merrill Markoe
(Late Night with David Letterman)
Dave and I worked on a 1978 CBS variety show called Mary, starring Mary Tyler Moore and featuring Michael Keaton. I don’t know if it qualifies as the “trenches” of show business, but I do know it was canceled after three or four episodes, even though 60 Minutes, was the lead-in and Mary Tyler Moore was America’s sweetheart. The show was an uncomfortable combination of old-showbiz-style variety, mixed with a miscalculated attempt to include some of that wacky, absurdist comic sensibility that the kids liked so much from that new program Saturday Night Live. For example, the Mary show did a parody of the Village People song “Macho Man” that had Dave and Michael Keaton dressed in L.L. Bean catalog outfits, in a setting that was made to look like a scene from Deliverance. I forget where the comedy was supposed to be in all this. I do know the powers-that-be didn’t realize that “Macho Man” was a gay anthem. I also remember vividly that Dave was in real agony about this bit of levity.

Harold Ramis
(Caddyshack, Groundhog Day)
I worked in a mental institution in St. Louis, which prepared me well for when I went out to Hollywood to work with actors. People laugh when I say that, but it was actually very good training.

Paul Feig
(Freaks and Geeks)
I’ve never considered myself to be a writer who’s great at making up stories and plots. What happens when you make up a story is that you tend to fall into this standard set of A leads to B leads to C. We’re all used to a standard trajectory for television and the movies; there’s a typical route that a writer can go in a story. When we were doing Freaks and Geeks, we always wanted to avoid that typical route. Real-life experiences are rife with bad decision-making. And bad decision-making is, in a lot of ways, the key to comedy. I go through such a rigorous process of not making up material in my memoirs that my wife gets mad. She yelled at me when she read my manuscript for the longer version of Superstud—the one that didn’t make the final cut. She told me that I didn’t have to be so honest, that I didn’t have to tell these stories exactly as they happened. But if I did that, I might as well have written a novel.

Mitch Hurwitz
(Arrested Development)
One [of my high school plays] was called Wet Paint, and it was about a kid—believe it or not, exactly my age—who wanted to write sketches. The audience would then see the sketches this character wrote. Most are too embarrassing to even think about now; they were just so hackneyed and amateurish. One was about a disaster movie that took place on an escalator. The escalator stopped suddenly, and all of the riders had to find their way to safety. That was my biting take on automation. I returned to my high school recently to see the students perform a play they wrote called Waiting for Hurwitz, which was about the 25th anniversary of my original show. I spoke to some of the performers afterward, and I gave them what I thought was good advice about Hollywood and other such matters. Later, I couldn’t help but think that it was very wrong of me to encourage anyone to go into entertainment—let alone these kids.

Robert Smigel
(Saturday Night Live)
More than 30 years ago, [my father] developed the cosmetic tooth-bonding technique. He’s much more important to dentistry than I could ever be to my own profession.… My father’s actually very funny. He has his own odd bedside manner. I’ve seen him ask patients who have cotton in their mouths non-sequitur types of questions, like, “If you were forced to save only one of your grandchildren, which one would you pick?” Jon Lovitz goes to him, and he’s always telling me how my dad’s funnier than me.

David Sedaris
I started writing in a diary when I was 20 years old, but I didn’t write a story until I was 27. I recently spoke to my first writing teacher about that story, and he said, “I remember that piece! That was such a great parody of Raymond Carver!” You know, it wasn’t meant as a parody. I worked on that first story so hard that I just thought, Well, no one will be able to tell how heavily influenced I am by Raymond Carver. But if there had been a Raymond Carver–parody contest, there’s no doubt I could have submitted this story.

And Here’s the Kicker…Conversations with Top Humor Writers About Their Craft (Writer’s Digest Books, $17.99 paperback) is in stores Wed 8.

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