An Interview with Ben Glenn II, Television Historian

How did canned laughter come about?

The concept actually goes back at least five hundred years. History tells us that there were audience “plants” in the crowds at Shakespearean performances in the 16th century. They spurred on audience reactions, including laughter and cheering—as well as jeers.



How about more recently?

Canned laughter was used to a certain degree in radio, but its first TV appearance was in 1950, on a rather obscure NBC situation comedy, The Hank McCune Show. Remarkably, there are a couple of clips from the show on YouTube. Shortly after the show’s debut, there was an article in Variety noting that the show’s canned laughter was a new innovation, and that its potential for providing a wide-range of reactions was great. Of course, that eventually came true.



How odd did the laugh track sound to those early TV audiences?

I can only imagine that it seemed odd to viewers, but using a laugh track held many advantages for television producers. The most important was that it made it possible to film exteriors and on location. It gave producers freedom. For example, scenes from Leave It to Beaver were shot outdoors on RKO’s—and later Universal’s—back lot. With the laugh track, a studio audience was no longer absolutely necessary.



Who invented the canned-laughter machine?

Actually, its official name is the Laff Box, and it was invented by a man named Charles Rolland Douglass. He served in World War II, and when he returned to civilian life, he worked as a broadcast engineer at CBS. Douglass was responsible for everything from recording sound levels during production to adjusting them in post-production.

Shows often needed sound correction before broadcast. Sometimes a joke didn’t get a big enough laugh, or, in the case of a famous I Love Lucy episode, the laugh was too long and had to be cut down. This particular episode was broadcast in March 1957, and it was called “Lucy Does the Tango.” The laugh, in response to Lucy dancing the tango with raw eggs stuffed into her shirt, lasted about sixty-five seconds.

There were other reasons, too: For example, I once attended a taping of Alice in the seventies, and the actors kept blowing their lines. Of course, by the third or fourth take, the joke was no longer funny. A Douglass laugh was inserted into the final broadcast version to compensate.



How did Douglass originally invent the prototype for the Laff Box?

According to his wife Dorothy, Douglass would bring home tapes of television shows and then pore over them for hours and hours in his living room, finding and isolating the precise audience reactions he wanted. He spliced together tapes into spools—essentially tape loops. There was a keyboard for this machine, and each key was connected to a separate tape loop. At the bottom was a pedal that would either increase the volume or fade it out. So, really, it was like playing a musical instrument. And Charles Douglass was a virtuoso at the keyboard.



It’s actual tape we are talking about?

Oh, yes—analog tape, recorded in mono. Incidentally, Douglass ran into a real problem with the advent of stereo television around 1976, when he had to convert his laugh tracks, which were mono, into simulated stereo. The result wasn’t entirely successful, as the sound of the re-engineered tapes didn’t quite match the sound of the show. It was the beginning of the end of the great Douglass laugh tracks.



Where did the laughs on the Laff Box originate?

Reportedly, the earliest reactions came from a Marcel Marceau performance in Los Angeles in 1955 or 1956, during his world premiere North American tour This would make sense, because Marceau was, of course, a mime, and therefore, the only sound in the theater was the audience’s reaction.

Other reactions are widely thought to have come from The Red Skelton Show, especially the show’s mime sketches. I can state this with relative certainty, as it has been reported repeatedly by various sound engineers who worked closely with Douglass. It’s interesting to note that the Skelton show aired on CBS, where Douglass worked. So, in theory, he would have had access to those tapes. But, in the end, it’s also important to note that we may never know his exact sources.

As far as my research shows, there were never any interviews with Douglass or with anyone who worked at his company, Northridge Electronics. The secrecy surrounding his work is Hollywood legend. Only a very few people witnessed him using his machine, and it was always kept padlocked when not in use. Part of this secrecy was to protect his invention, to be sure. But part of it, too, was that, for some, inserting a laugh track may have been the same as admitting that a show wasn’t funny—or not “funny enough.” There was a real stigma surrounding the use of the laugh track, which continues to this day.



Have you ever seen a Charles Douglass Laff Box?

I have seen photographs of it, but very few people, including myself, have ever seen this machine firsthand.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to some of the original “laugh-track men” who worked with Douglass during his heyday. What they have to say is fascinating. What’s even more interesting is that they continue Douglass’s tradition of secrecy by speaking only off the record, and with the condition that I not reveal their names. It’s still a secret, even fifty years later.



That’s astonishing—you can even find C.I.A. and F.B.I. agents who are willing to talk once they’re retired.

I know, but this is a very small industry. It’s a brotherhood—very insular.

When they spoke with me, they described Douglass’s method, which is quite fascinatiing. Producers would call Douglass into the studio to “laugh” a show. Douglass would show up with his Laff Box, which he carted around on a dolley that he invented. When he was finished, he’d pack up his machine, load it on his dolly, and drive off to the next job.



What made Douglass so good, exactly? Is there an art to canned laughter?

Oh, absolutely. First, Douglass knew his material inside out. He knew his library extremely well, which makes sense, because he had, of course, compiled it himself. He had dozens of reactions, and he knew where to find each one. In addition, he sped-up the reactions just a bit to heighten the effect.

Douglass’s work was crisp and clean. It was a real craft. And the range of reactions that he was able to find was incredible. Some of the big belly laughs are great. You just don’t hear laughs like that anymore. I also love the “shock” and “surprise” reactions, such as when a big audience says, in unison, “Whoa!” Those were used frequently on The Munsters when something extra-outrageous happened.

One more thing—Douglass not only had a terrific “ear,” he also had a terrific memory. Over the years he would not just add new tracks, but he would revive old ones that had been retired and then retire the newer tracks. For example, tracks heard in sitcoms of the early 1960s resurface years later in the late 1970s. The ABC series Delta House, which was a spin-off of the movie Animal House, is a perfect example. However, by this time, Douglass was using his most extreme reactions almost exclusively, and the result was pretty awful. To my ear, it rings of desperation.



How long would it take Douglas to add the proper laughter to each show?

It took him about one day to complete a thirty-minute episode. His daily rate was $100.



And he was the only person doing this? He could have charged a lot more than $100.

I know, which is probably why competitors began to appear, in the mi-seventies. Around that time, Carroll Pratt—who was a sound man trained by Charles Douglass—started his own company, Sound One. One of the company’s innovations was a set of new reactions entirely different from Douglass’s tracks, which, by then, were so familiar and ubiquitous that they sounded artificial. Sound One’s laughs sounded more natural, although they still had some very recognizable reactions. This was quite a departure from Douglass’s work.



I’m not a fan of canned laughter per se, but some 1960s sitcoms were so poorly written that I can’t help but think that canned laughter only improved them.

No question! In my view, the laugh track only adds to the fun of these shows, whether they are well written or not. I mean, Mister Ed, which I think is quite well written, would be so much less fun to watch if it had no laugh track. As far as shows with weak scripts—take The Flying Nun, for example—the laugh track saved that show.



Do the laughs today differ from the ones in the past?

They most certainly do. Today’s sitcoms are based mostly on witty reparté and no longer rely on outlandish situations or sight gags, such as you would see in an episode of Mister Ed or The Munsters or Bewitched—and today’s muted laughs reflect that. Generally, laughs are now much less aggressive and more subdued; you no longer hear unbridled belly laughs or guffaws. It’s “intelligent” laughter—more genteel, more sophisticated. But definitely not as much fun.

There was an optimism and carefree quality in those old laugh tracks. Today, the reactions are largely “droll.”



In what sense?

Just the way in which they sound. In the past, if the audience was really having a good time, it shone through. Audience members seemed less self-conscious and they felt free to laugh as loudly as they wanted. Maybe that’s a reflection of contemporary culture.

In the fifties, the laughs were generally buoyant and uproarious, although somewhat generic, because Douglass hadn’t yet refined his structured laugh technique. In the sixties, however, you could hear more individual responses—chortles, cackles from both men and women. The reactions were much more orderly and organized.

I can actually tell you the exact year that a show was produced, just by listening to its laugh track.



Have you ever detected an actual, authentic laugh on a live-action sitcom?

Yes, just once. There is one episode of All in the Family in which a reaction is real. The next TV season I heard it on a canned-laughter series, and I thought, Hey! That’s the same laugh I heard on All in the Family! But that’s been the only time—so far. I’m always listening.



How about shows that were supposedly “filmed before a live studio audience,” such as Cheers?

Cheers and other shows were indeed filmed in front of live audiences, but they were “sweetened” in postproduction by Northridge Electronics. Cheers was shot in the eighties and nineties, but you can still hear laughs recorded in the fifties and sixties.



Is there any type of comedy TV show that’s not sweetened?

Virtually everything you see on television has been manipulated—except late-night shows where the audiences are pumped. Even Sunday Night Football is sweetened. The Academy Awards broadcasts are sweetened—both with applause and laughter. They are sweetened live, right on the spot. In fact, Charles Douglass’s son Robert, who now runs Northridge Electronics, has won multiple Emmy Awards for sweetening the Oscar broadcasts.



When Robert accepted his awards, was the applause sweetened?

“I’d have to go back and view the tape, but it’s quite possible.”



Who’s in charge of the canned laughter on sitcoms today?

As far as we know, Northridge Electronics still produces the majority of canned laughter on television, and Robert Douglass carries on the family tradition by remaining as tight-lipped as his father. But the business is no longer a monopoly. There are many postproduction houses doing this work. The Laff Box has been replaced by the laptop, and I’m told there are multiple sets of laugh tracks that contain laughs specific to certain countries and cultural groups. Whatever the case, the technique is certainly a lot more sophisticated than in Charles Douglass’s day—which, to my mind, is not always a great thing. Nothing will replace those classic, vintage tracks, and I wish they’d bring them back.

And so, love it or hate it, canned laughter carries on into the next generation.



Thank you.

My pleasure.




[Applause]

Full Story

COMEDY TODAY, by David Kelly

Larry Gelbart, who died on Friday, was a driving force behind the TV show M*A*S*H and the movie Tootsie, as well as a great Broadway musical (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and a very good one (City of Angels). He wrote for Sid Caesar in the ’50s, and he even wrote several pieces for the Book Review in the ’90s, including a review of Christopher Buckley’s novel Thank You for Smoking (which he found “hilarious”).

In an entertaining and informative new book, And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft, by Mike Sacks, we learn that Gelbart’s father, a barber, cut the hair of both John F. Kennedy and Jack Ruby (“If my father had been working in Texas, I’m sure he would have also been Lee Harvey Oswald’s barber. Judging by his photos, Oswald could have used a far better one”).

Here’s one exchange between Gelbart and Sacks:

GELBART. You want to know what I think is missing from comedy today?

SACKS. What?

GELBART. Jews.

SACKS. [Long pause] Are you kidding?

GELBART. It’s too goyish, it’s too scholarly, it’s too … when we talk about Caesar’s Hour, when one thinks of that time, all of the material was basically written by first-generation people. They were not that far from Europe. They were children of immigrants, and largely uneducated. There is something else that has crept in now, and it’s taken over. More corporate. …

I just think it helps to be hungry. And you don’t have to be Jewish to be that. I mean … I don’t think anybody has ever been funnier than Richard Pryor in his early years. You could feel the hunger. There’s a smart-alecky aspect to comedy now. I’m not saying you have to be born in a whorehouse or that you have to be born in Poland, but I think there’s a disconnect. The money is so huge, all of the hunger seems to come from the corporate side – the hunger to have a huge, revenue-spinning hit.

Full Story here

THE SAD TALES OF COMEDY WRITERS, by Christopher Borrelli

And Here’s the Kicker, by Mike Sacks

I made the mistake of reading Mike Sacks’ new big book of interviews with comedy writers, And Here’s the Kicker (Writer’s Digest, $17.99), just after reading all 693 pages of The Stories of John Cheever, and while you might think the light Q&A format and subject of the latter would be a welcome relief after the loathing and suburban dislocation of the former, you would be wrong. Comedy writers are horrible individuals–no, “horrible” is wrong. Comedy writers are truly miserable people.

Funnier than the philanderers and alienated blue bloods of Cheever, but more self-aware in their misery, comedy writers are doomed to stare headlong into it, while making fun of it. The professional comedy writer, as And Here’s the Kicker provides fascinating evidence, is simply unable to enjoy–the best of them are deficient of a bright side.

Which is why comedy comes in–it serves as a kind of fleeting placebo, offering the briefest illusion of relief.

Or as the deeply pessimistic Simpsons writer George Meyer tells Sacks, comedy “kept me alive” and “showed me an alternative to the grim worldview of thwarted adults.” He may have written many of the best-loved installments of that classic, but taken as a whole, his episodes–Homer quits church, Bart quits Thanksgiving, Lisa loses trust in government–suggest a man fixated squarely on the meaninglessness of existence. Sounds familiar.

Sacks’s talk with Todd Hanson chips away at a profound sadness you may have been laughing too hard to notice in The Onion. Hanson, who helped establish the satirical newspaper at the University of Wisconsin in 1989, has been its head writer for 20 years, a remarkable length of time to churn out one dark headline after another. But Hanson says he has a rule: “I don’t find jokes funny if they’re not honest.” Which is as quietly insightful as any a description of that wincing laugh you’ve suffered from Hanson’s best work. He’s the guy behind “Local Man Might as Well Give Up” and “Utter Failure to Spend the Rest of Day in Bed.” (Indeed, for that last one, Hanson was the guy pictured in bed.)

After devouring And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft, a compulsively readable dissection of the comic mind by Vanity Fair staffer Mike Sacks, I want to give its author the highest praise any writer can give another: His book made me insanely fucking jealous, and not just because he’s kicking ass on Amazon.

Sacks has written a book I wanted to write myself. Even more unforgivably, he’s done a better job than I probably would have. A few years back, I thought about writing a book of interviews about the craft of comedy to be called Dying Is Easy. (As in, “but comedy is hard.”) Like many of my ideas, it never made it past the daydreaming stage.

I’ve always found the creative process fascinating, especially where comedy is concerned. But I wondered whether delving deep into the mechanics of comedy would be edifying or tedious. Would traveling deep inside the comic mind be a Willie Wonka & The Chocolate Factory-like journey through a wondrous and fantastical sphere, or a dispiriting field trip to the hot-dog factory? Does analyzing comedy drain the joy out of it?

Kicker answers that last question with a defiant, “Oh God no, Fuckface.” One of the many things I loved about Kicker is its A.V. Club sensibility. Back in the day, The A.V. Club interviewed a lot of obscure/random folks because we didn’t have access to big names. This worked out well, as Mr. T and Herschell Gordon Lewis had a lot more to say than the hot actress of the day. Similarly, Sacks didn’t get Stephen Colbert or Sacha Baron Cohen or David Letterman or Ricky Gervais to spend five hours delving deep into their work, but he did snag Colbert Report producer Allison Silverman, longtime Cohen collaborator Dan Mazer, Letterman writer Merrill Markoe, and Gervais partner Stephen Merchant. Silverman, Mazer, Markoe, and Merchant deliver fascinating insights into the methods and processes of Colbert, Cohen, Letterman, and Gervais respectively.

I knew of Markoe by reputation, but after reading Kicker, I feel like I’ve spent a few hours picking her brain over dinner. In one of my favorite passages, Markoe says she was attracted to Letterman—her longtime boyfriend—in no small part because she was impressed by his choice of nouns. How fucking beautiful is that? Is there anything more geekily romantic than word-selection-based mating? The interviews have a casual intimacy that’s enormously winning. Sacks (who, full disclosure, interviewed me for an upcoming Vanity Fair online piece), followed Jack Paar’s advice to a young Dick Cavett: “Kid, don’t make it an interview. Interviews have clipboards, and you’re like David Frost. Make it a conversation.” Appropriately enough, Sacks gets some great stuff out of his freewheeling conversation with Dick Cavett, from an anecdote about being on a dinner date with Marlon Brando, and getting propositioned by a woman eager to be the meat in a Dick Cavett/Marlon Brando sex sandwich (incidentally, Dick Cavett Marlon Brando Sex Sandwich is so going to be the name of my new ska band) to a blackly comic story about a guest—a health buff, no less—who literally dropped dead of a heart attack while Cavett was interviewing him.

As with Markoe, I knew M*A*S*H creator Larry Gelbart only by reputation, as a respected comedy veteran. Now I feel like I know him as a writer and a man. In fact, I kind of want him to be my grandfather. Gelbart gets one of the book’s best and most surprising lines when he argues that what comedy is really missing these days is Judaism. That’s like saying the NBA desperately lacks tall black men, and musical theater is in dire need of gay men. Gelbart says comedy has lost the scruffy underdog vitality Jews historically brought to it, that it’s become too whitebread and WASPy. I don’t agree with him at all. In my mind, Jewish comedy is American comedy; it’s had such an enormous effect on the mainstream that it almost doesn’t make sense to delineate between Jewish and non-Jewish comedy. But it takes balls to decry the lack of Judaism in comedy. Now that I think about it, what comedy is really missing is Harvard Lampoon alumni. When are those guys finally going to make their presence felt?

The greatest of Sacks’ finds is Irving Brecher, an ancient, now-deceased old fogey who wrote for Bob Hope and the Marx brothers while barely old enough to shave. In a perfect world, Brecher would be treated like an American treasure. Journalists would line up to pick his brain and mine the wisdom and experience he’s accrued. In this imperfect world, we’re lucky Sacks took advantage of his decades of juicy anecdotes while there was still time.

It would be easy for interviews about the craft of comedy to come off as dry or academic; Kicker is anything but. These are funny fucking people. An unspoken spirit of friendly competition and one-upmanship courses through these interviews: Nobody wanted to be the stiff of the bunch, especially in such distinguished company. So Kicker is filled with exchanges that linger in the mind. Here’s my favorite, from an interview with Mad Magazine fold-in guru Al Jaffee:

Sacks: Was there a sense of camaraderie in the golden age of Mad, say from the early sixties through the mid-seventies?

Jaffee: Oh, a great deal. Absolutely! Mad’s publisher, Bill Gaines, did something very clever: He would take the whole staff on an annual trip abroad. And we lived together for anywhere from seven to seventeen days. We hung out together. We all went out to restaurants together.

These trips were also an inducement to produce more material; if you didn’t hit your cutoff each year, you weren’t allowed on the trips. In the beginning, it was 20 pages of published material, and later you had to produce 25 every year. The trip was a reward for increased contributions. I was one of a few contributors who was on every single trip. I never missed the cutoff.

Our first vacation was to Haiti in 1960.

Sacks: Why Haiti?

Jaffee: We went there to pay a visit to the one and only Haitian subscriber to Mad. On the entire island, there was only that one subscriber, and he had let his subscription lapse. So when we got there, Bill Gaines took a bunch of writers and illustrators over to this guy’s house and knocked on the door. When the guy answered, Bill offered him the gift of a renewal.

In exchanges like these, Sacks conjures up an entire world lost to the ages. The image of the entire Usual Gang Of Idiots descending upon Haiti to offer a renewal to a single gobsmacked subscriber is one I will cherish. How can the world be an altogether cruel and detestable place when it contains stories like that? The Haiti anecdote follows an even more fascinating exchange about “The Lighter Side Of…” creator Dave Berg:

Sacks: What was Dave Berg like as a person?

Jaffee: Dave had a messianic complex of some sort. He was battling… he had good and evil inside of him, clashing all the time. It was sad, in a sense, because he wanted to be taken very seriously, and, you know, the staffers at Mad just didn’t take anybody seriously. Most of all, ourselves.

Sacks: Do you think Dave Berg’s inner battle later expressed itself in his strip “The Lighter Side Of…”

Jaffee: It came out in a lot of things he did. He had a very moralistic personality. I mean, he moralized all the time. And his gags were very suburban middle-class America. Plus, he was very religious. He wrote a book called My Friend God. And, of course, if you write a book like that, you know that the Mad staff is going to make fun of you. We would ask him questions like, “Dave, when did you and God become such good friends? Did you go to college together, or what?”

I think Dave had a feeling that his contribution to the success of Mad wasn’t appreciated enough. And I think this bothered him. He once told a staff member that he received so much fan mail that they had to hide it from him. And he really believed this. Naturally, most of us would just roll our eyes, because we didn’t expect tons and tons of fan mail; and if there was fan mail we always received it. I guess Dave felt he was carrying the whole magazine, and he should have been treated royally.

Of course, not everyone is fascinated by accounts of the tormented psyches of legendary Mad writers. I sure am, and I suspect that a lot of A.V. Club readers feel the same way. In fact, I’ll go even further: if you aren’t fascinated by stories of Dave Berg’s existential angst and God complex, then buy yourself a suit and a nice wooden box, ’cause you’re dead to me. Harsh? Maybe.

Kicker has a dual audience: It’s for comedy geeks who can’t get enough information about their favorite shows, movies, and performers (like Paul Feig’s plans for Freaks And Geeks, had it survived to a second season, or the exact number of times Cohen was pulled over by the cops while shooting Borat) but it’s also very clearly pitched to aspiring comedy writers. It’s filled with great advice on how to make it in an insanely difficult field. If someone were to ask me how to break into comedy writing, I would encourage them to read this book and previous Show-Biz Book Club entry Born Standing Up.

Kicker builds to a funny, sad, tremendously insightful group portrait of the comic mind. It’s an almost sociological dissection of the strange creature that is the comedy writer. In his glorious extended ramble through the minds of comedy greats, Sacks finds a number of common denominators, like depression, self-doubt, raging insecurity, a predilection toward obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a borderline pathological need to entertain.

It’s enormously comforting to realize that some of the most gifted writers in the world (other Kicker subjects include David Sedaris, Harold Ramis, Buck Henry, Mitch Hurwitz, Robert Smigel, Dave Barry, Bob Odenkirk, George Meyer, and The Onion’s great Todd Hanson) wrestle with the same demons we do. They are a fucked-up, wondrous breed of misfit. They’re not normal; they’re better than normal. They’re lucky to have a gifted chronicler like Sacks documenting their curious ways and odd customs for posterity.

SCOTT SIMON, host:

Analyzing why something is funny is a little bit like trying to fathom why people fall in love. You might be able to do it, but by the time you do, you feel just a little foolish about falling for that person, or that joke. There’s a new book, “And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft.”

Mike Sacks, a veteran magazine writer, who’s now on staff at Vanity Fair, poses questions to old comedy hands, including Larry Gelbart, who co-wrote “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” as well as wrote the television show “M.A.S.H.,” to new hands like Steven Merchant, who invented “The Office” with Ricky Gervais, Tom Hanson of The Onion, and classical comedy writers, including Dave Barry, David Sedaris, Allison Silverman, and Harold Ramis.

Mike Sacks joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

Mr. MIKE SACKS (Author): Thank you.

SIMON: And from Martha’s Vineyard, Harold Ramis of Second City, SCTV, “Ghostbusters,” director of “Groundhog Day,” “Analyze This,” other classics of comedy. His current film is “Year One.” Thank you very much for being back with us.

Mr. HAROLD RAMIS (Writer-Director): It’s a pleasure.

SIMON: Harold, I guess you’ve talked about this over the years, but among the revelations in this book is that you, right after graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, you had a job you find particularly instructive for someone who wants to go into comedy and theater.

Mr. RAMIS: You might be referring to working in a locked psychiatric hospital.

SIMON: Yes.

Mr. RAMIS: Yes. That was interesting. So I did seven months in a psych ward of a general hospital, actually.

SIMON: As a staff member.

Mr. RAMIS: As a staff member, yeah.

SIMON: But I’m interested because you don’t mean to be funny when you say this was good preparation for theater and films.

Mr. RAMIS: Well, actually, I had two jobs back-to-back. I worked in the psych ward, then I taught school in the crowdest square mile in the inner city of Chicago – Robert Taylor Homes. And it was 1968, I was teaching the year Martin Luther King was assassinated. And it seemed like those two jobs back-to-back woke me up to aspects of human behavior and the human experience that I might not have been exposed to coming from a, you know, a nice Jewish family and going to a nice suburban college.

But I saw extremes of behavior and extremes of poverty and political agitation that I could have only have experienced vicariously if I hadn’t had these jobs.

SIMON: Mike Sacks…

Mr. SACKS: Yes.

SIMON: …your interview with Buck Henry…

Mr. SACKS: Yes.

SIMON: …the classic line among so many, I guess we should say, from “The Graduate”: plastics – sounds like it could’ve been almost anything else.

Mr. SACKS: It could have been, but the reason he used the word plastics is because a college professor of his used to use it all the time, and he was thinking back on his college years and remembered that, and just put it in. He said he had no idea it would become such an iconic line.

SIMON: Why is plastics funny and, say, nylon isn’t, or stocks and bonds isn’t?

Mr. SACKS: You want to answer that, Harold?

Mr. RAMIS: I’ve sat in rooms with well-paid comedy writers trying to think of the funniest candy bar name or the funniest soft drink, you know? There’s a moment in “Caddyshack” where Ted Knight offers Danny the Caddy: How ’bout a Fresca?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. RAMIS: Fresca is funnier than Coke, it’s funnier than 7-Up or Pepsi, you know?

SIMON: And is Yoo-Hoo too funny or too obvious?

Mr. RAMIS: Yoo-Hoo’s trying too hard.

SIMON: Yeah.

Mr. RAMIS: Yeah. But, you know, we make these judgments. And grown people, educated people have long debates about these things. And I’m sure plastics just sounds funnier.

SIMON: Harold, can I get you to talk about t-t-timing?

Mr. RAMIS: Well, you know the old joke about timing. You pretend I’m the great old comedian. You ask me, what is the secret of your success? Go ahead, do it.

SIMON: Okay.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIMON: I can’t believe I’m walking into this.

Mr. RAMIS: Go ahead.

SIMON: But, Harold, what’s the secret to comedy?

Mr. RAMIS: Timing.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIMON: Ouch.

Mr. RAMIS: But it’s true, and some of the actors I’ve worked with, some people score – there’s a conventional rhythm, it’s almost like classical music, where you watch a sitcom. You don’t even have to listen to the words. It could be in a different language. You know when the punch line’s coming and you know when the audience will laugh.

But then you work with people who resist any hint of conventional timing. Bill Murray’s one of those actors who will always, he’ll never do what you expect. And it’s not just timing, it’s dynamics too. And timing is one of the mechanical dynamics of comedy. But Bill was an actor who would always defy your sense of it. Lisa Kudrow has that too. She’ll always read a line different, in different rhythm.

And it could be frustrating when you’ve written something in a very conventional rhythm and you have an actor who doesn’t do that, because they’re real actors and they’re actually trying to create meaning instead of just trying to create timing.

Mr. SACKS: A lot of the writers did compare joke writing to writing a tune where the joke itself would be the melody. And when it feels right, when it sounds right, you just know it.

SIMON: We asked people for some questions for the both of you. May I share them with you?

Mr. SACKS: Yes.

SIMON: I guess this goes to you first, Mr. Sacks, but again, Harold, any reflection on it. Are there any generalizations you can make about comedy writers? I mean, childhoods, happy, unhappy?

Mr. SACKS: Yeah, it seemed that a lot of them spent a lot of time alone as kids. They lived inward lives. They lived in their head. They weren’t necessarily out on the weekends partying. They were either at home watching comedies, reading comedy or practicing their own writing.

But what was interesting too, I found a link – only because I too suffer from this – I asked all the writers if they suffer from OCD, and I would say 70 percent said that they did, which was surprising for me.

Mr. RAMIS: I have several – I wouldn’t say they rise to a psychiatric disorder, but I’m fairly compulsive. Sometimes I think just having the discipline to turn out real writing is in itself a kind of compulsion and requires a certain fierce order.

But the thing you said about this alienation is interesting to me, that they’re alone in their rooms. Sometimes, you know, humor becomes like, you know, my son’s a good basketball player, that’s the way he attracts people to him. You know, I told jokes. It could come from a kind of loneliness.

And also I think a certain amount of alienation is helpful for a comic posture, for developing a comic view of the world. It’s easier as an outsider than someone in the mainstream. You know, I used to talk about Rodney Dangerfield’s no respect thing and how honestly he came by that. And you know, I, unfortunately, never did standup because I thought I could not develop a persona based on I get too much respect, you know?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. RAMIS: You need to feel like an outsider and a bit of a loser to get up there and so assertively express your own shortcomings and talk about your body parts or your most painful and difficult relationships.

SIMON: A listener named Jay Shea asks: how do you know something you write is really funny? And I’ll explain parenthetically: when you’re making films, for example, Harold, you have to have a pretty good that something in a script is funny before you have a thousand extras and a Mercedes Benz on the set.

Mr. RAMIS: Yeah, and how surprising it is when you get all that together…

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. RAMIS: …and you realize, wow, that’s not funny, or that’s not as funny as we thought or hoped. On the market research surveys they do with recruited audiences to test movies, the audience is ask to check an adjective that describes the movie. And they’re given a list and funny is on the list. And when a comedy has 30 percent of the people checking funny, it’s considered that’s the norm.

So you know, 30 percent – that’s three out of 10 people thinking it’s funny. It’s not a lot.

Mr. SACKS: It’s interesting. Steven Merchant mentioned that when he was making “The Office,” right after he finished they showed it to test audiences and it scored very, very low. In fact, he said the second-lowest in history next to “Women’s Lawn bowling.”

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIMON: Now, that was a funny show.

Mr. SACKS: Originally it was, then it became (unintelligible).

Mr. RAMIS: Larry David, in his – the powder room in his house in California, has a letter from NBC telling him how bad “Seinfeld” tested and they don’t think they should pick up the show.

Mr. SACKS: I guess if something sticks out to such a degree and makes, you know, is so different from what came before it, audiences may not be used to it.

SIMON: John B. Thomas asks, what’s the funniest clean word in the English language?

Mr. SACKS: You got one?

Mr. RAMIS: I’m thinking. I have some blue ones but not a clean one.

Mr. SACKS: The funniest clean word, wow, that’s tough. I’d need a panel of comedy writers, and we do have to pay them a lot. I could probably find that out for a thousand bucks.

SIMON: Well, I mean, for example, is Hoboken funny because it’s Hoboken or because…

Mr. SACKS: It’s a K in it.

SIMON: Yeah.

Mr. SACKS: You know, there’s that thing about Ks from “Sunshine Boys.”

SIMON: Right.

Mr. SACKS: Ks are funny – Hoboken. Plastics has a K sound, Fresca.

Mr. RAMIS: Sacks.

SIMON: Kangaroo.

Mr. RAMIS: Kangaroo.

SIMON: That’s, I think, the funniest zoo animal.

Mr. RAMIS: Rodney Dangerfield improvised a line in “Caddyshack.” There’s a gopher that’s plaguing the golf course and at one point the gopher puppet steals Rodney’s golf ball. And Rodney improvises: Hey, that kangaroo just stole my ball. Calling a small rodent a kangaroo is hysterical to me.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIMON: Gentlemen, it’s been very nice talking to both of you. Thank you so much.

Mr. RAMIS: Same here, Scott.

Mr. SACKS: Thanks, Scott.

SIMON: Mike Sacks and Harold Ramis. Mr. Ramis, of course, one of the comedy creators who appears in a new book organized by Mike Sacks. It’s called “And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft.”

TOUGH CROWD

The setup: 21 depressives, neurotics, and social misfits walk into a book. Meet comedy’s all-stars.

BY KIMBERLEY JONES

Mike Sacks spent two years interviewing comedy greats from past and present, including Buck Henry, Bob Odenkirk, and David Sedaris.

The title of Mike Sacks’ new book on comedy, And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft, sounds straightforward enough, but it really only hints at what happened when Sacks started talking with comedy greats from past and present, including Buck Henry, Harold Ramis, Mad magazine’s Al Jaffee, and The Simpsons’ George Meyer. Another 19 interviews didn’t make the final cut; “some of them,” says Sacks, a humorist and Vanity Fair staff writer, “were really quite awful.”

These aren’t quick chats, but rather the fruits of two years’ research and around about 10 hours of interview time per subject. In his book, Sacks digs into the inner workings of the comic mind (a sometimes deeply troubled one) and into the inner sanctum of the writers’ room, from Caesar’s Hour to Saturday Night Live. He plucks practical advice on what not to do when trying to get a job (in case you were wondering, “it’s not smart to send in a résumé on a Mylar balloon”). And every so often, Sacks fawns, if just a little bit. (Like you’d keep your cool talking to a guy who once wrote for the Marx Brothers.) Put together, And Here’s the Kicker, which hits shelves on July 8, is a fascinating mix of cultural reportage, how-to, and hagiography.

Austin Chronicle: So how much are the humorists included in your book an indicator of your own comedic sensibility? Are these “the ones” for you?

Mike Sacks: I had carte blanche. I could pick whoever I wanted. Truthfully, a lot of them said no – Steve Martin said no; Albert Brooks said no; Tina Fey said no. A lot of women said no. But these are people that I just love. … It just mattered to me if I liked their work and if they were willing to talk to me for 10 hours.


AC: Did your opinion of some of the writers change in the process?

MS: Um, yeah. I would say that in some cases my respect grew, and in other cases, it didn’t. … But some of these people are so consistent – Bob Odenkirk, Marshall Brickman, Mitch Hurwitz, David Sedaris – that I couldn’t help but be awed by these people. Like, Larry Gelbart’s been producing since he was 16 years old, and he’s now in his 70s. And the people he’s written for are Bob Hope upwards, Tootsie he wrote, M*A*S*H [the TV series].

Irv Brecher – he was 94 years old when I spoke to him. And that guy was absolutely amazing. He remembered his phone number from 70 years ago. And he was still, you know, funny and remembered stories. Just to be able to talk to people like that was worth it. … It was just a bridge to another time … to ask him what it was like to write for the Marx Brothers or [to be contemporaries with] Dorothy Parker or S.J. Perelman. It was just astonishing. And unfortunately that time has gone. With him dying, there’s not too many left who have dealt with those classic humor writers. But it was so great to be able to talk about them as real people and not just as people one reads about.


AC: You mentioned Marshall Brickman, who used to be Woody Allen’s co-writer. In your book, Brickman talks about the original cut of Annie Hall – I don’t suppose you asked him if that original cut exists somewhere in a bunker?

MS: I did.


AC: You did?

MS: Yeah, I wanted to publish the full script in the back of the book. He said he was fine with it, and then he said, “But you just have to ask Woody.” And I thought, “That’s not going to work.” So I asked Woody Allen’s sister, who represents him, and she said no way. I just wanted to look at it, and he said he’d be willing to have me over just to look at it, but then, I don’t know. I guess he changed his mind. I think it’s the type of thing where they feel that it turned out so well as is that maybe the original script wasn’t as good as people might have imagined it to be.


AC: There’s also the moment in that interview where Brickman is talking about Annie Hall, and he says: “Who knows why that film works? I have no idea.” When I read that, I couldn’t decide if I should feel happy or completely dejected that even Marshall Brickman didn’t know what he was doing when he did it, or how he did it.

MS: Right, well, I think his point is that even when you have a tremendous amount of talent involved, there’s so much room for error that you never know how it’s going to end up. And that one had a tremendous amount of problems: It was re-edited, rewritten, they had to go back for more shoots, and I think they were kind of surprised that it turned out to be this explosion. It just hit at the right time in the right way. You know, he’s worked with Woody Allen before on movies that haven’t been as successful. I guess it’s always a mystery as to how something will turn out. …

I think a lot of it is kind of luck. Todd Hanson [The Onion's head writer] – here’s someone who was working washing dishes and was just doing this for fun, no expectations that it would lead anywhere. He wasn’t studying humor in college – I don’t think he graduated college. He was very talented, and he was lucky. He hooked onto a good thing at the right time, at the right place. I think a lot of these people will admit that they’re talented, but they also admit that they know a lot of talented people that they came up with who are still waiting tables or working temp jobs or whatever. There’s definitely luck involved with that.


AC: It was a little disheartening to hear someone like Larry Gelbart, who’s had so much success, still sound so frustrated at the end of his career.

MS: It was. I felt bad for the guy, because, as you said, he doesn’t have much time to spare, and he’s working on these projects that never get off the ground, and you think, “Hey, if this guy is having problems, then anyone can have problems.” But at the same time, it’s sort of reassuring to hear that everyone is struggling at every level. … There aren’t writers who reach a point where they just sit back and relax and everything they write will either be published or produced. Even David Sedaris writes pieces that aren’t published.


AC: What about the dream dead-person interview? The one that you wished you could have included?

MS: Well, I’m a big fan of Jean Shepherd. Have you ever heard of him?


AC: I recognize the name.

MS: He used to write for Playboy …

AC: Wait, he didn’t write A Christmas Story, did he?

MS: He did. In fact, he was the narrator.


AC: Really? He had a great voice.

MS: He was a radio personality. He’s a great writer. [He wrote] very, very funny stories about his childhood that are done in a very solid manner; they’re not done in the nostalgic-type way. And he died not too long ago – four or five years ago.


Also I think S.J. Perelman, maybe.

But, you know, the reason I wanted to do this book, too, is because there are no books out there with interviews or an oral history from current humor writers. A lot from Your Show of Shows and things like that. So I didn’t really wish to interview those who are past –it was more important to me to interview those who were going to be classic humor writers in the future, who might not have had a chance to be in a book yet and talk about their craft and the way they came up.


AC: Two “future classics” you spoke with are Stephen Merchant [co-creator of the BBC's The Office] and Paul Feig [Freaks and Geeks]. I bring those two up because Feig talks about comedy that’s rooted in the pain center, and Merchant talks about comedy that hits the pleasure center. In terms of your own likes and dislikes, which do you gravitate to more – the painful comedy or the pleasurable?

MS: Well, I find painful pleasurable. That’s what I was trying to ask both of them: Can’t there be a pleasurable pain center? And Paul Feig said yeah, there can be, but no one’s going to watch it – or not necessarily no one, but not to the degree that it would be a huge hit. There’s always a small degree of people who are going to like that, but mostly people want to feel it in the pleasure center of the brain rather than the other center.

The humor that I like is usually connected to characters. It’s authentic to their character, and if that character happens to be a loser and a sad sack, well, then that’s just part of it.

Cool book alert: And Here’s the Kicker

You’re invited to two parties: One is for glitzy, super-famous Hollywood types. Another is for humor writers. Which one do you attend?

Answer: Go with the funny folks. Not only will the A-listers ignore you, they probably won’t make you laugh, either.

In his new book, author Mike Sacks learns how many of the most successful humor writers got their start–and how they’ve managed to stay on top. And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft (Writer’s Digest, $17.99) includes wisdom from Stephen Merchant, Harold Ramis, Bob Odenkirk, Robert Smigel, Paul Feig, Mitch Hurwitz and others.

Mike was kind enough to let me excerpt his insightful and funny interview with David Sedaris from the book. In it, the best-selling humorist talks about how he got started, how he was approached by the New Yorker and how his essays come together. He also talks about the whole controversy involving “fiction vs. memoir” and mentions the New Republic article that accused him of fabricating some details in his stories.

And Here’s the Kicker is in stores now . . . .

And Here’s the Kicker
Interview with comedy writing expert Mike Sacks. By Ben Kaplan

Mike Sacks is a New York-based journalist who’s written the bonafide comedy writer’s handbook called And Here’s the Kicker. A cross between a how-to manual, gag reel and 21 mini-biographies, the book features such writers as Buck Henry, Al Jaffee, Marshall Brickman, Harold Ramis and Dave Barry delving into their most famous works, which includes everything from The Graduate to stories in The New Yorker to launching The Onion to writing for The Simpsons, Bruno and Annie Hall. And Here’s the Kicker is presented as 21 Q&A’s, so Ben Kaplan subjected the 40-year-old Tulane-graduate to a similar ordeal.

Who would you want writing the Mike Sacks story and why?

David Sedaris would be nice. If he ever wanted to write a story about my life, he’d be more than free to do so. Hear that, David? Get on it.

How did you decide Larry Gelbart would make a better interview than Chris Rock?

The life of a humour writer has always interested me: who are the nameless, faceless people behind the scenes writing the jokes that the performers will tell in front of audiences (and get all the credit for)? How did they get there? What’s their job like? Are they okay with being nameless and faceless, and not getting the credit that they deserve?


Irving Brecher wrote for Groucho Marx and died 13 months after your interview. What can you tell us about him?

Irv was incredibly sharp, even at the age of 93, and had fabulous stories about writing for the Marx Brothers, working on the screenplay for Wizard of Oz and having a first-hand look at the size of Milton Berle’s penis. He compared it to a “salami chub.” One doesn’t hear references to “salami chubs” much anymore, at least in reference to my own penis.


TV writers are given a lot of territory. Aren’t screenplays every comedy writer’s dream?

When you look at The Simpsons, Freaks and Geeks or Arrested Development, you can see some of the sharpest humour writing of the past 25 years. The Simpsons Movie didn’t come close to the TV show in terms of being funny and sharp.


What advice would you give an aspiring comedy writer?

Network as much as possible with like-minded people, write every day (or as much as you can), and never give up–unless you really stink. How do you know if you stink? Check out page 254 of my book.


In the book, you show off an encyclopedic knowledge of comic history. Where did your own fascinations begin and how much research did you do for the 21 interviews?

Truthfully, I’m no more an expert on comedy than anyone else, I just did a tremendous amount of preparation for each interview–up to 30 hours or so. And I also deleted any questions that made me sound like an idiot. But I always was a fan of comedy, dating back to Late Night with David Letterman. I thought that show was brilliant, and I was a particular fan of the bits that Chris Elliott would perform on the show. His characters were bizarre and scary and funny and wonderful. I think he was brilliant when he was on that show.


What was the hardest part about trying to line-up your subjects?

Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, most of the writers who didn’t get back to me were women.


If God granted you one wish, and you chose to use it on securing one last interview, who would that person be?

Jean Shepherd. He wrote the stories that the movie A Christmas Story is based on. I loved his writing and, beyond that, he was an amazing story teller (he appeared on overnight radio for more than thirty years). He died about six years ago.


Which interview most closely resembled pulling teeth?

It’s funny you should say that because my father is a dentist. But, yes, more than a few interviews didn’t go so well. I interviewed 40 writers total, and 21 made the final cut. Perhaps one day you’ll hear the interviews on some sort of blooper reel.


What was the funniest thing the funniest person you interviewed told you?

David Sedaris told me a story about having written an episode for Seinfeld. He’d never seen the show before. The producer liked David’s work and asked him to contribute. So David wrote an episode that had to do with Elaine babysitting her psychiatrist’s dog, who just happens to have elephantitis of the testicles. Obviously, the show never made it to air. I told David that I actually saw that very episode on Full House, but he didn’t believe me.


Was there a common thread between subjects?

OCD cropped up with the majority of these writers. I only asked because I, too, suffer from OCD. I actually contacted Dr. Oliver Sacks (no relation, minus the mental illness) to ask if there was a connection between being humour writing and suffering from OCD, but he said he knew of none. Depression was also a common factor, not too surprisingly. If a reader thinks that writing humour is all fun and games, then maybe this book won’t be for them. There’s a lot of sadness that surrounds humour, that’s always been the case–at least with the best humour.


So, unfortunately, not every one of our readers is going to buy this book. Give us the book’s second best joke.

As far as the second best joke, here it is. It’s a “Deep Thought” written by Jack Handey: You know what would make a good story? Something about a clown who makes people happy, but inside he’s really sad. Also, he has severe diarrhea.