Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (34 page)

“In the seventies, Led Zeppelin and the Who spent the hours on the road listening to their prized bootleg Derek and Clive tapes,” Rob Sheffield wrote for
Rolling Stone
in 2007, referring to the foul-mouthed, blue-collar characters created by British comedians Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. “These days, Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster are the traveling rock musician’s comedy duo of choice, inspiring a fanatical MP3-trading cult. Like an indie-rock Bob & Ray, they improvise long, absurd dialogues about . . . jerks you know, or maybe the jerk you are.”

The cult began with a now-legendary 1997 bit (titled “Rock, Rot & Rule”) that Scharpling and Wurster produced and distributed themselves via cassette tapes. The forty-seven-minute phone interview, which first aired live on radio station WFMU near New York City, featured host Scharpling and Ronald Thomas Clontle, a fictional rock critic from Lawrence, Kansas, played with deadpan brilliance by Jon Wurster. Clontle classifies all musical artists into three categories: rock, rot, or rule. Clontle makes maddening statements—“[the eighties British group] Madness invented ska”; Frank Zappa rots because “humor has no place in music”—and it doesn’t take long for the phone lines to light up with callers ready to berate him for his ignorance. But the real comedy gold of “Rock, Rot & Rule” is the comedy interplay between Scharpling and Wurster.

Growing up in central New Jersey, Scharpling seemed destined more for a career in music than for one in radio comedy. When he met Wurster in 1992, at a My Bloody Valentine concert at the Ritz in New York City, Scharpling was running a New Jersey indie label and fanzine called
18 Wheeler
. He and Wurster (in real life, the drummer for Superchunk, Bob Mould, and the Mountain Goats) became friends after discovering their shared love for Chris Elliott and his short-lived Fox sitcom
Get a Life
.

Scharpling has gone back and forth between music and comedy writing for his entire career. In the mid-nineties, he was hired by WFMU to host a noncomedic, all-music show. After receiving acclaim from the comedy community for “Rock, Rot & Rule,” which Scharpling intended as a one-time bit, his show ultimately evolved into
The Best Show on WFMU
, which made its official debut in October of 2000. (The title of the show, Scharpling has said, was always meant to be self-deprecating. “I was such a footnote up at WFMU that I was making fun of my stature there,” he’s claimed.) In 2002, while continuing with the show, he joined the writing staff of the television comedy-mystery series
Monk
, where he worked as a story editor and eventually rose to executive producer before the show ended in 2009.

Writing witty dialogue for
Monk
paid his bills, but Scharpling’s work on
Best Show on WFMU
was slowly building his reputation as one of the funniest writer/performers in underground comedy. Over the years, not much about the content has changed. Scharpling still plays records and then interviews people, some real and some fictional.

Scharpling and his longtime co-conspirator Wurster have created hundreds of characters, the majority of whom live in the fictional town of Newbridge, New Jersey. There’s Roland “The Gorch” Gorchnik, who’s absolutely certain that the Fonz (i.e., the Henry Winkler character from
Happy Days
) was based on him. There’s “Philly Boy Roy,” the former mayor of Newbridge and pencil factory employee who loves everything about Philadelphia, from Tastykakes to the eighties band the Hooters. There’s overweight barbershop singer Zachary Brimstead, and two-inch-tall racist Timmy Von Trimble. And there are also guests who don’t come from Scharpling and Wurster’s imagination—actual comedians who also happen to be
Best Show
fans, like Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifianakis, and Fred Armisen.

Among comics and humor writers (as well as musicians), Scharpling is akin to royalty. Listening to the
Best Show
’s long-form comedy has for years been unofficial homework for Conan O’Brien and his writing staff. When Patton Oswalt guest-edited
Spin
magazine’s first “Funny” Issue in 2011, Scharpling and Wurster were given a feature profile. “It’s one of those rare things in pop culture,” Jake Fogelnest wrote of
Best Show
for
Spin
, “like, say,
The Wire
—that you actually get angry with your friends for not knowing about.”

In 2013, a few months after this interview took place, Scharpling—after more than six hundred episodes—left WFMU and took
Best Show
with him. He plans to direct and spend more time writing. Past and “best of” episodes can be found at wfmu.org/playlists/bs.

I’ve read that you started working at the age of ten. Is this true? If so, it sounds like something out of a Horatio Alger novel.

That’s true. When I was around ten, I would run errands for a music store in Summit, New Jersey. It was a store that sold records and other music-related items, like sheet music—just a place I wanted to hang out. I would clean up and run these tasks so I could buy all these records. That was my main goal. I think I made five dollars an hour. Then, when I was twelve, I was a busboy at a New Jersey diner. I worked there for about two years. Eventually, when I was about fifteen, I worked as one of the janitors at my own high school.

Was this something of your choosing? I can’t imagine any child wanting a janitorial job, especially at their own school.

Another kid, who was a couple of years older, was working as a janitor, and I liked the guy. We were friends. He said, “So, you do this after school, and you get the keys to the school. You get to push that extra-wide broom down the hall, and you get to spray-clean the floor and you use a mop. Then you get to go into the classrooms. You get the keys to everything.”

And what was the appeal of that?

I’d go to the classrooms and look through the grade books to see what my friends were getting.

Did you ever change any of the grades?

No, no. It was not
WarGames
. [Laughs] I wasn’t going to hack into the system. I don’t know why I did that job, truthfully. It was such a bad decision. It was just horrible. It was clear that it was not helping my social standing by doing that.

I did that for about a year. By this point, I was completely obsessed with music and comedy—equally. Eventually, I was able to afford a color TV for my room. I also bought a Betamax tape machine. I’d rent movies and watch and tape all these comedy shows. I would stay up and watch TV later than most kids. I remember watching that first Letterman late-night show [
Late Night with David Letterman
, February 1, 1982].

Actually, even before that late-night show, I remember watching Letterman’s daytime summer show [
The David Letterman Show
, June to October 1980]. It aired in the morning. I remember discovering that show while flipping through the channels. I saw a birthday cake blow up. That was such a ridiculous image. I remember thinking it was funny in a way that really spoke to me. Here was a guy who was younger than most everyone else on television, and he looked different, and he was sarcastic about everything and everyone else. I think I had that streak in me; this was something I could definitely connect with.

Very funny, very strange. Some bits were almost as scary as they were funny. Like the Chris Elliott characters. Almost frightening.

Were you also a fan of horror?

I loved horror as a kid—I’d watch horror movies and read horror comics—but then there came a point when it only repulsed me. When I realized how rough life actually was, I didn’t need to see people getting killed for no reason. I realized that people get killed unfairly all the time anyway. Life is fragile. It was no longer entertainment for me.

But there is a connection between horror and comedy, not to mention other genres. They’re all math problems ultimately. When I was writing on
Monk
, I learned pretty quickly that comedy writers were able to write mystery somewhat easily. It was just like writing a joke: the rhythms of the setup, the misdirection, the payoff. That’s what mystery ultimately is. The structure is just 1-2-3. There’s a long arc, but then there are shorter elements sprinkled throughout. And then there’s the big payoff. Just like comedy.

So comedy writers can write mystery, but can mystery writers write comedy?

No, actually. I think you can jump from comedy into other genres, but not necessarily from other genres into comedy. Or at least not so easily or automatically.

Did you have to teach yourself the elements of mystery?

I did. I just wasn’t familiar with that genre. I watched all of the Alfred Hitchcock movies and all the episodes of [the 1970s TV mystery series]
Columbo
. I wanted to see how one doles out suspense and how one sets up a ticking clock. I wanted to see what made a scene suspenseful, how to make a whole story suspenseful. If you’re open to doing your homework—and really just embracing it—a comedy background is very helpful.

I suppose comedy is like type-O blood. It’s the universal donor.

If you know how to build jokes, you can write any other genre, including mystery and horror.

Where do you think the creative drive in your personality came from?

I’m not sure. Nobody can get you there. My parents were doing the best they could, but they had gone directly from high school to working jobs. And that’s what I came out of. I was the first person in my family to go to college. My parents just did not know how to deal with some kid who at seven or eight years old was writing crazy things, like comic books or scripts to
Battlestar Galactica
. You know, my parents were working class.

I remember high school as being so frustrating. I hated school, just hated it. But anytime there was a chance to do anything creative, I was all over it. I remember one time we had to break off into groups in history class and write a Civil War–era story. So I broke off into this group, and I remember we ended up creating this story that was so insane. It was so aggressive and hyperviolent. It ended with a fight between a slave and a slaveowner, in front of a cotton-baling press. The slaveowner falls into it and comes out of the machine in the shape of a cube.

We had to read the story to the class, and we were laughing so hard. Everyone else wrote a real story, and we wrote a Bugs Bunny cartoon that ended with someone falling into a cotton-baling press—and coming out as a cube. It was just so out of step with reality. [Laughs] The teacher was horrified. Not that we got in trouble; it was just like, “No. That’s not how you do this.”

So what did that experience teach you? That you could have fun outside the confines of what teachers and administrators wanted from you?

I didn’t even know what it was. I just felt it was this chance to do something. I didn’t even know what to do with this feeling, this drive to make something. It was an urge and there was nowhere for it to go. I do not come from a background of performing. Nobody in my family is really creative. There was nobody to say, “Since you are interested in this, you should go do this, or go do that. Or go to this school.” There was none of that. I was just dropped in the middle of the ocean, not really sure which way to swim. Or sink.

I was living in New Jersey, thirty miles away from where everything was going down—but it was like another planet. I didn’t know how to get from where I was to
there
. It could have been the moon. I was operating as such a second-class citizen, anyway. I felt like I didn’t have a place in New York City. I felt like I would always be exposed, that I would hear, “Who in the hell do you think you are?” But at some point, the compulsion and the need to create eventually outweighed any of the insecurities that went with it. I felt that I just had to do
something
. That something was
going
to happen.

So, while still working at the music store, I started writing and publishing a fanzine in the late eighties called
18 Wheeler
. I was about twenty. It was a chance to combine music and comedy. At this time, there were so many awesome music fanzines, and I just wanted to create something similar.