Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (23 page)

Writer/Producer,
30 Rock
; Producer,
New Girl
; Writer,
Pitch Perfect

The biggest thing that I learned as a writer at
30 Rock
was the importance of self-awareness. You are sharing fourteen hours a day with the same people, and having the same conversation all day long. You need to learn what role you play every single day in that configuration. I think a lot of writers end up not finding success, per se, because they don’t have that self-awareness to know where they fit in on any given day. For example, I know now that some days I have to be at the head of the table, I have to run the room, I need to be the leader. And then some days I tell myself, “Oh, this is a day where I have to sit back. This person is taking it. My job today is to be a good listener and support and add whatever I can.” I’ve seen so many people crash and burn from not understanding that, and feeling as if their role is something else. The truth is, in a writers’ room—and specifically in comedy, because you do so much together and it’s such a group process—if you’re not fun to hang out with, and you don’t have that self-awareness, you’re not going to do as well.

When I was a staff writer on
30 Rock
, one of the most valuable things I learned was to just listen and learn from the people who’ve done it for a long time and are a thousand times better at this job than you are. If they’re stumped on some story problem or a joke, and you feel you have a good idea, that’s when you should talk. But just don’t talk for the sake of talking. Again, understand where you fit in with the group. And that changes every year, because you get promoted, and the dynamics change and people leave and new people arrive. In the comedy world, at least in comedy writers’ rooms, it just feels like your personality is a big deal, almost a little bit more than what you put on the page.

When rewriting or taking notes, trust your gut if you really feel strongly about something. But understand that it’s a fine line between “Are you being thoughtful” and “Are you being lazy?” I find that sometimes I’ll receive notes from the network or the studio, and I’ll be like [emits moan of dread]. And I stop and think, Am I being lazy because it requires a lot of work to make that change? Or am I being thoughtful and just trusting my gut that I know better than they do? You have to really mull it over.

If you want to write for television, I strongly suggest that you watch a lot of television. Like, a
lot
. If you want to write movies, I strongly suggest watching a ton of movies. When someone says they’re a TV writer and they don’t own a TV, I just want to roll my eyes until they get stuck that way. [Laughs] If you’re going into an interview for a very particular show, you’ve got to know everything about it. I’m always shocked when someone admits that they’ve only seen a few episodes of a show they now work on. You just think, How did you not watch every episode before coming here?

I was writing [the 2012 movie]
Pitch Perfect
from season three to season six of
30 Rock
. It was pretty tough doing both. So I would write every weekend. And then I would write on the subway ride to work, and then I would write over my lunch hour. I was just constantly writing. And again, it goes back to you just really having to be passionate about what it is that you’re writing. I actually have such a love-hate relationship with writing. I kind of hate it. [Laughs] But you have to tell yourself, “I get to do this.” More importantly, “I just
have
to do this.” There’s nothing worse than having it in the back of your mind, that it’s something you need to do and you’re not getting to. Maybe you’ve felt that way. You’ve thought, I’m so tired, I’ve worked all day writing. How am I opening up this computer and starting this other project? But if you really want it, you’ll do it.

I do a thing where when I’m writing I put my television on Bravo, and I pause it on whatever show. Then I write until it unpauses itself, about forty-five minutes in, and then I get to watch for however long it’s been paused. When it catches up, I go back to writing and pause again until it undoes itself again. That’s my Saturday fun. [Laughs] Aren’t I a blast?

Carol Kolb isn’t a household name, except among comedy nerds and obsessive fans of
The Onion
, “America’s Finest News Source,” the most consistently brilliant news parody of the last twenty years. But for comedy aficionados, Kolb is an almost mythical entity. “We’re still not convinced that Carol Kolb . . . is a real person,” a writer at
Gawker
, the popular New York–based gossip blog, once admitted.

Kolb was born and raised in Spencer, Wisconsin—two-and-a-half hours north of Madison. She enrolled at the University of Wisconsin to study English and Latin, and found her way to
The Onion
only by chance, when Todd Hanson, one of the original
Onion
writers, visited her apartment to see the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue. The collection of more than three thousand rolls of toilet paper, taken from such tourist attractions as Mount Rushmore and the Alamo, was just a quirky hobby Kolb had invented for no other reason than to amuse herself. But the museum attracted national attention. She was featured in
Time
magazine in 1997, and later that same year, she was asked to join
The Onion
’s writing staff.

She became indispensable. Kolb quickly went from managing editor to editor in chief, and in 2001 moved, along with the rest of
The Onion
, to New York City. When
The Onion
tried their hand at TV in 2007, launching the
Onion News Network
, a web video series and (eventually) TV show, Kolb was brought on as head writer, helping
The Onion
win its first Peabody Award in 2009 (for creating satirical news that was “not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing”). After the
Onion News Network
was canceled in 2012, Kolb moved to Los Angeles with her husband, comedian Tony Camin, and started writing for TV shows such as
Kroll Show
and
Community
.

Was your childhood enjoyable? Were you happy as a child?

I wasn’t. I came from a really small town in Wisconsin, population 1,754. I had fifty people in my graduating class. Everyone was really stupid, including the teachers. Half of them were clearly hired just because they could also coach the sports teams. Most of the boys in my class would be gone for a week during deer-hunting season. I was always extremely shy. I got good grades but I never talked, and I had a “crying problem.” All the elementary school report cards my mom kept say “cries too easily” and “can’t stop crying,” all the way up through fifth grade. One report card reads “Crys easily.” With a
y
.

What was your home life like growing up?

I did have fun, but basically my childhood was pretty sad and pathetic. My parents fought—and still do. It’s now approaching fifty years. My dad worked at the Land O’ Lakes cheese factory, the only building in town over three stories, at a series of soul-sapping jobs in departments like “Slice” and “Loaf.” He didn’t really spend time with us, ever. He got one vacation a year and he’d spend it on a two-week fishing trip to Canada with his friends. I never thought to complain. I saw the other kids at school whose families couldn’t pull it together to get them a Halloween costume, or who, when we were older, talked about how their dad got drunk and tried to stab them. So it never really occurred to me to be critical of my dad just for not coming to my Christmas pageants.

My mom didn’t work after having kids and she always felt guilty about this—but also I think she was just afraid to get out there. She started losing her hearing when I was still young and that was part of the reason. Also, we only had one car and my dad took it to work—things like that got in her way. Not that she has ever been diagnosed, but she definitely has some anxiety disorder. At
The Onion
, I wrote an article called “Area Mom Freaking Out For No Reason Again” [July 22, 1999], as well as several other articles based solely on her. But she also has this dark sense of humor and would say very funny things in a straight, matter-of-fact way.

For instance, after my dad had a heart attack, he would still always be yelling about something, and my mother would mutter under her breath, “How was your heart attack?”

Ultimately, I credit her for my sense of humor.

How did your parents feel about your writing career?

In 2000, when I quit my day job as nurse’s aide at a horrible county psychiatric home to work full-time at
The Onion
, my mom wasn’t sure that it was a good idea—even though it meant I would no longer have to clean up human shit and get punched in the face. When I moved to New York, she was like, “Oh, no! You have to move to New York?!” I’m not even complaining that my parents aren’t supportive. They are proud of me—they get excited when I am on TV. But my mom is an obsessive worrier and she would rather I have a stable job like my sister who teaches Family and Consumer Sciences Education—the modern equivalent of Home Ec—at a junior high school. And my dad isn’t going to read or watch something just because I wrote it. I sound bitter, but I’m not at all. My parents are great and cute. They just live in their own world centered in Spencer, Wisconsin.

I’m pretty sure none of the other writers in this book have ever worked in a county psychiatric home. What was that experience like?

There were different floors for different types of issues. There was an Alzheimer’s unit. There was one guy, a former police chief, who got Alzheimer’s very young. He was probably only sixty or so and in great shape. It took five of us women to put him in pajamas because he didn’t know what was going on and his natural response was to fight. He would pull these tricky arm bends and foot sweeps on us. Giving him a shower was crazy. His wife would come to visit and just cry. That was sad.

The upper floors were where the real crazies were, younger people with schizophrenia and so on. These people would sometimes manage to get out for a bit, but then would be back in again after swallowing a handful of safety pins or whatever. There was one guy, thirty-five or so, who believed he was a leprechaun. He’d speak in an Irish accent and offer to grant wishes and stand on his head. I loved that he was so classically crazy—if I had read something with that character, it would have seemed like lazy writing. And then there were just a lot of really loud, demanding crazy people who didn’t like to bathe and would get violent very quickly if they wanted a soda and there wasn’t any left.

The bottom floor was for elderly people with dementia. The former drunks were always the worst—they tended to get mean when they lost their minds. There were some people who’d been there long enough so that they didn’t walk or talk anymore. The worst thing was that we had to spoon-feed these people puréed food. I mean, at a certain point it’s time to die—if they were at home they would just stop eating. But the state rules were such that we had to give these poor people three meals and a snack a day—so they lived on and on. Some of them refused to open their mouths. You had to coax them to open their mouths so you could put the mush in. Others naturally opened up their mouths like little birdies. Then there were those who had feeding tubes.

People, make a living will!

How do you think working at the psychiatric institute affected your comedic sensibility?

Well, I think working at a place like that makes you develop a thick skin. You deal with a lot of sad situations and annoying conditions. So I think you learn to not be emotionally affected by things as much. In that way, I think working there made me more able to make fun of “taboo” subjects. People would get so mad about
Onion
articles that involved certain subjects, whether it was disabled vets or dying babies or whatever. I just wasn’t so emotionally attached to the subject. It’s not that I don’t think certain circumstances or topics were sad or wrong, but to me there’s more than one emotional response beyond sadness or outrage. I can distance myself enough to see what’s funny about other subjects, too.

From what you were saying earlier, high school sounds like it was far from ideal. Was your college experience in the mid-nineties, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in any way an improvement?

Madison was—is—a great city. It’s a very liberal city. It has that classic free weekly paper,
Isthmus
, filled with stories about lesbians and medical marijuana and public radio. The college is huge, which I loved. Freshman year you could take classes in giant lecture halls and not have to interact with another human all day long.

These days, when I mention I went to the University of Wisconsin, people always mention the Badgers. Football was a huge deal at our college, apparently. I never went to a single game, a single tailgating party, or even watched a game on TV. It was this whole world I never interacted with the entire time I was going to school there. I guess on game days the entire neighborhood around the stadium becomes a sea of red and white, totally taken over by football fans. But I never went to that part of campus. It was all sports bars and jocks and business students living over there.

How did you come into the
Onion
world?

Madison is small enough that eventually I met people who worked at
The Onion
. I was putting these silly weird flyers up around town on the kiosks, and Joe Garden, one of the writers, called to say he liked them. Joe had been working at a liquor store on State Street, the main pedestrian street in downtown Madison. He had plastered the windows with funny hand-painted signs. One was a diagram of the brain with arrows pointing to “The Frontal Lobe,” “The Backal Lobe,” and “The Michelob.” The
Onion
editor at the time, Dan Vebber [later a writer for
Space Ghost Coast to Coast
,
Futurama
,
Daria
], recruited him based on that. Joe ended up working at
The Onion
for close to twenty years.

So, my neighbor across the hallway went to a couple
Onion
writer meetings—he didn’t really work out, but after a meeting he brought another one of the staff writers, Todd Hanson, over to a party I was having at my apartment. My apartment was set up like a fake museum. I called it the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue, and it was a curated collection of toilet paper stolen from around the country, presented in a very formal, very pretentious way, with an audio tour and lots of brochures.

I eventually wrote an
Onion
headline list and it went over well, and I was invited to come to meetings. I fit in right away.

How exactly did the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue start?

It started randomly. When I was a freshman, my friend and I would go to bars in neighboring small towns because they didn’t card. We ended up getting a roll of toilet paper from each of these places and then keeping them as a “souvenir.” The collection really took off when me and two of my other friends started going on road trips all over and stealing toilet paper from Graceland and MoMA [New York’s Museum of Modern Art]—and labeling where it came from with a black magic marker. We collected thousands of rolls and got other people to collect toilet paper when they went abroad. We also got people to mail us rolls from weird locations. The joke, I guess, was that all the toilet paper looked the same. It was just something fun to do. When the rolls had taken over the front room of our apartment, we opened it up to the public as the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue. I started making T-shirts and brochures and calendars and getting it in guide books. In no way did I think of it as an “art project,” but I guess it sort of was. It was also a way to mess with people.

The Onion
is now a professional company with a large revenue and staff. But what was
The Onion
like when you first started contributing in 1996?

The Onion
was so much smaller then. All the writers had day jobs. There were staff jobs for those who sold ads or did graphic design or whatever, but there was only one full-time staff position for a writer and another for the head editor. Maybe there was an assistant editor, too. All the writers just worked freelance for nothing—they got paid around forty dollars to come to meetings. The office was a crappy little place with stained carpeting and beanbag chairs. But it was really fun. It was like a club. Everyone was really invested in it. We acted like a group of friends. At that point we were still cementing the voice of the paper.