Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (30 page)

Host,
WTF with Marc Maron
; Performer,
Late Show with David Letterman
,
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
,
Comedy Central Presents
; Creator/Writer,
Maron

For awhile, I hit a wall where in my mind the choices were pretty dire. I didn’t have any idea how I was going to continue to make a living. There was real fucking fear there. For one reason or another, the timing was right in the medium [podcasting] that I chose in 2009, and things evolved.

Quite honestly, I try not to have regrets in my life, because it is what it is. But whatever I went through, there was not a plan. My process creatively is not an easy one. I’m impulsive, I’m filled with anxiety, I don’t have the ability to compartmentalize, I don’t have the wherewithal or the confidence to plan and follow through when working toward a goal. Everything has always been very immediate to me, and that is exhausting. It could really have gone either way. In talking to other people and looking back at my own career, the people who were more aware of their talent and how to use it, and more aware of their limitations and what they were really shooting for, were able to find their place a little easier. If you start out as a comic, you want to be a big comic. But as you get older, you realize, “Wow, there are only a few of those at any given point in time, and it’s a tough life.” The possibilities of not getting to that level, where you can really bank some money or build a career, are very high. Depending on what your ego can handle at those crossroads in life, you might say, “I do write great jokes, and I know I want to be involved somehow, so how do I adapt?” The ability to get away from your ego enough to recognize your limitations, and to take action toward becoming a writer or working for a sketch group—that’s a big moment. The thing I now know is that the people who were aware and cognizant of the business ultimately found a little more peace of mind—a place to express partially, if not more so, their particular sense of humor.

A lot of the dudes I started with, the ones who didn’t fall away or end up club comics for life, very early on went into writing. Whether you get into producing, or directing, or management, relationships are built early on; crews start out generationally. You build those relationships when you’re all struggling, and those are the relationships that are going to carry you through a career—if you’re lucky enough to have one.

As far as whether you choose this career, I have not found that to be a choice. In my experience, somehow or another, your brain has already told you that this is a reasonable life to live, which is nuts. That comes with the territory. You’re going to have those things, no matter how crazy or insecure you are, that continue to propel yourself into this life. Some of that may be rebellion; some of that may be, “Fuck you, Mom and Dad.” Some of that may be grandiosity. But whatever it is, you’re already in it. And the deeper you get into it, it’s very hard to get out of it, even when things aren’t going well.

Don’t kid yourself: A lot of people fade away. A lot of people become tragic, whether they see it that way or not. I don’t know. There’s always this weird thing in show business where you never know when success is going to happen. It’s not a meritocracy; so much of it is about some weird shit aligning that’s usually out of your control, and you catch your break. And a lot of people don’t ever catch it.

I’ve learned from talking to people over the last few years on my podcast [
WTF with Marc Maron
] that people who work hard find something. There’s a certain amount of entitlement when you’re a young comic living the life, like, “Oh, it’ll happen,” even if you’re getting high every day and sleeping until three. The truth of the matter is that eventually you’re going to have to do the work. You’re going to have to find your consistency and your groove—somehow.

You just have to do it. There’s no schooling; there’s no anything. Find a place where you can get onstage and do it. Do you have favorite comics? Watch them. It’s very self-explanatory: You stand up there, by yourself, and you try to get laughs. I usually say, “Look, you might bomb, you might do great, but you’re not going to always do great. You’re not always going to bomb.” You have to figure out once you do it whether or not you’re infected with the bug that makes you keep wanting to do it. When you get off that stage, no matter what happens—whether they hated you or loved you—you have to get up there again. And if you do get up there . . . well, good luck, and welcome to the life.

Comedy isn’t always the domain of comedians or traditonal comedy writers. Sometimes a writing professor who works alone in an office, doesn’t have a Twitter following or a TV show, and has never told jokes at comedy clubs can have a fundamentally better grasp of how humor works than those who make their living writing and saying things they call “comedy.”

Enter, stage left . . . George Saunders, one of the very best writers working today—and also one of the funniest. Born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas, and raised in the south suburbs of Chicago, Saunders originally sought a career in geophysical engineering. After graduating from the Colorado School of Mines in 1981, he worked as a “seismic prospector” for an oil exploration crew on the Indonesian island of Sumatra (where, according to
The New York Times
, he discovered Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
, having read “virtually nothing” until that time), and then worked later as a technical writer for an environmental engineering company based in Rochester, New York. Saunders has also been employed as a Texas bar band guitarist, a Beverly Hills doorman, a Chicago roofer, an LA mover, and even a slaughterhouse worker in West Texas. (In a somewhat backhanded compliment, online magazine
Salon
used the following headline in a 2000 article about Saunders: “Knuckle-puller Makes Good.”) Somewhere in there, during what he calls “a series of attempts at channeling Kerouac,” Saunders enrolled at Syracuse University and earned an MA degree in creative writing. And then in 1996, at the age of thirty-seven, Saunders published his first collection of short stories,
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
. At the time, according to
The New York Times
, David Foster Wallace declared Saunders “the most exciting writer in America.”

Over the past two decades, Saunders has published several more best-selling and critically acclaimed books, including the short story collections
Pastoralia
(2000),
In Persuasion Nation
(2006), and
Tenth of December
(2013); the novellas
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
(2000) and
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
(2005); and an essay collection,
The Braindead Megaphone
(2007).

Saunders has received numerous awards, including the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Award, which he was granted in 2006 for “bring[ing] to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos and literary style all his own.”

In the past, you’ve talked about growing up in South Chicago, and that, as a child, you felt total freedom. But how do you think South Chicago affected you as a writer?

I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns. They were just merciless in terms of grammar and syntax and spelling, which was incredibly helpful later: They gave us the tools we could later use to build our taste. They forced us to become little language fiends—almost like, say, a great chef might force his kids to become food fiends. That taught us basic discernment. Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you’ve done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I’m always being edited by my inner nun. So in some ways this is good—it makes for good revision. But it can also be killing—you’re never satisfied.

How about as far as humor? Is it tied in any specific way to Chicago?

I think I got the idea that the high-serious and the funny were not separate. The idea that something could be gross and heartfelt at the same time. Some of the funniest things in South Chicago were also the most deeply true—these sort of over-the-line, rude utterances that were right on the money and undeniable. Their truth had rendered them inappropriate; they were not classically shaped, not polite, and they responded to the urgency of the moment.

In Chicago, people often told these odd little Zen parables, ostensibly for laughs, or to mock somebody out, but behind which I always felt were deeper questions looming, like who we are, and what the hell are we doing here, how should we love, what should we value, how are we to understand this veil of tears.

Do any specific anecdotes come to mind?

My whole childhood we lived next door to this family I’ll call the Smiths. We didn’t know them very well at all. At one point, Mrs. Smith’s mother, who was in her nineties, passed away. My dad went to the wake, where this exchange occurred:

Dad: “So sorry for your loss.”

Mrs. Smith: “Yes, it’s very hard.”

Dad: “Well, on the bright side, I suppose you must be grateful that she had such a long and healthy life.”

Mrs. Smith (mournful, dead-serious): “Yeah. This is the sickest she’s ever been.”

My dad came home just
energized
from this. I loved his reaction. My family was such a big influence on me. There was a real respect for language. It was understood as a source of power. Everyone was funny in a different flavor. You could make anything right—diffuse any tension, explain any mistake—with a joke. A joke or a funny voice was a way of saying: All is well. We’ll live. We still love you.

Can you talk a bit about your mother and father?

My father was from Chicago and my mother was from Amarillo, Texas. They met at a dance when my father was stationed down in Texas, in the air force. They were nineteen when they married, and had me when they were twenty-one. My dad is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, but he didn’t go to college right out of high school. He got out of the air force and moved back to Chicago and he did a bunch of different things—he was a collection agent for State Farm Insurance and then ended up as a salesman for a coal company. This was when there were still a lot of buildings being heated by coal. For awhile he was selling directly to landlords, and apparently sneaking into basements to do reconnaissance on the type of coal they were getting from other companies. But then he gradually worked his way up, and when I was in grade school he became vice president of the company. Around that time he had a falling-out with his boss and quit. He bought a couple of now defunct fast-food franchise restaurants called Chicken Unlimited, and that’s what he did while I was in high school. Well, that’s what we
all
did: worked in the restaurant. My mother and sisters worked the counter; I drove the delivery truck; my uncle managed one of the stores.

The main beauty of that job was getting to go in there day after day and see this parade of American characters. For many of those people, our restaurant was the closest thing to family they had: lonely, lonely, lonely. It would have been impossible for me, before that job, to imagine how filled America is with lonely, isolated people.

Many of the characters in your stories, whether they are good or bad, young or old, tend to be quite lonely.

What I remember about all this is that particular gloating teen delight that there were such crazies in the world and that I wasn’t one of them. But also the way this got complicated by coming to know them, by seeing them in these sad private moments, in our restaurant, sitting at one of our plastic booths all alone. The other kids and I were actually pretty good and gentle to them when the chance arose. But, of course, among ourselves, it was all posturing and harshness and war stories about what “the wackos” had done that day. Makes me sad to think of it at this thirty-year distance.

Do you remember any customers in particular?

Oh, sure. There was a woman we rather brutally called, but not to her face, “The Wacko.” She’d come in around four in the afternoon and chain-smoke and chain-drink Pepsis hour after hour. She used to wear a ratty imitation fur coat and talk to herself. She lived in a complex behind the restaurant. Almost the minute she got home, she’d call for delivery: a pack of cigarettes from the machine we had in the store and a large Pepsi. She’d sometimes order three or four times a night. I was the delivery guy, so I’d go over—I made seventy-five cents a delivery—and she’d be in this furnitureless apartment, shaking and talking to herself. And she wasn’t all that old either. She later slit her wrists and jumped in the Chicago River—only to be pulled out by some passing hero.

Then there was a guy whose claim to fame was twofold: He’d try to pick up girls by wearing his old security guard uniform and harassing them at the mall, and it was his “old” security guard costume because he’d gotten fired from his job as a security guard after being caught doing what he described as “allegedly masturbating against the curb of a Fotomat.” I didn’t even know what that meant, exactly. In his defense, he always claimed innocence. But the charge seemed pretty . . . specific.

And then there was “Gagger”—for some reason he didn’t even get an article in his name. He was an old man dying of emphysema, who would come in and sometimes literally cough himself unconscious in a back booth. He had no family and so we were it for him, more or less.

You’ve talked in the past about how important compassion is when it comes to writing. That writing, in your opinion, is an exercise in compassion. You strike me as someone who is not only a compassionate writer, but also a compassionate person.

Yes, but people think of compassion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he’s about to cry. And I don’t think that’s it. I think of it more as a quality of openness that comes with being in a state of unusual attentiveness.

Yes, but with other writers, I don’t always sense compassion when it comes to humor or satire. I’m not sure if they don’t have full control of their toolbox or if they’re just not compassionate. Can satire work if the writer isn’t a compassionate person?

Sure. I think a harsh truth can be compassionate, in the sense that it speeds us along from falseness to truth. So, if a friend is wearing something ridiculous, you can say, “You look like an idiot,” and maybe that will save him. I think we wouldn’t want to assume that compassion is always gentle.

I think this quality you’re talking about in my work might be more about fairness than compassion. By which I mean one’s willingness to stake out a position (
Kevin sucks!
) and have a lot of fun with that, and then run around the table and assert another position (
Although Kevin does care for his sick grandmother
) and then do it again (
But yuck, Kevin masturbates while thinking about whales!
) and another (
And yet Kevin once saved a man’s life
).

I sometimes think of this as “on the other hand” thinking—just that constant undercutting of whatever (too) stable a position you find yourself occupying.

You once said that satire is a way of saying, “I love this culture.”

It’s hard to be sufficiently involved in satirizing something you don’t like. That’s just sneering. Satire is, I think, a sort of bait-and-switch. You decide to satirize something, so you gaze at it hard enough and long enough to be able to say something true and funny and maybe angry or critical—but you first had to gaze at it for a long time. I mean, gazing is a form of love, right?

Right, but gazing is also a form of fear, too, I’d think. As well as staring at something beautiful, one can also stare at someone, or something, different from the norm, such as a freak at a sideshow.

In either case, it’s attention. You are paying attention to the thing, spending your time on it, which is a form of . . . something. Love? Respect? You’re honoring the thing with your attention and allowing it to act upon you, to change you. In terms of writing, if you are writing and rewriting a paragraph or section that concerns a person, you are allowing your initial, often simplistic or agenda-satisfying notion of that person to be softened or complicated—you have to, for technical reasons. If you don’t, the reader will anticipate where you’re going and be pissed or bummed when you go there.

So I think it’s the attention that matters. You are paying attention to this fictive creature via paying attention to the words that have caused him to—sort of—exist. It’s a kind of double-attention-paying. And the more attention you pay, the more you’re going to eliminate the lameness in what you’re doing. Even if your idea is to pillory someone, doing this double-attention thing is going to force you to pillory him at a higher level, more honestly.