Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (31 page)

You seem to be the opposite of many writers who deal in satire, such as Mark Twain, whose work became darker and darker as he aged. For instance, in his uncompleted book
The Mysterious Stranger
, Twain questions whether or not God exists. With your work, however, there seems to be more and more evidence of lightness.

Yes, so far. But Twain was older then and had gone through some really dark shit—he went bankrupt, lost an infant son, outlived two of his daughters and his wife.

But of course some things are just dispositional. I think I’ve always been a fairly happy person, just in terms of my physiology. Also, I think you have to keep growing aesthetically in whatever way feels essential. You can feel in Twain that when he went toward that darkness he was, in some ways, going against his own early grain. He was facing facts, in a sense, being more honest, striving for his truth. At the moment, I’m trying to resist any kind of knee-jerk darkness that might have to do with some feeling of wanting to remain “edgy,” if you see what I mean. At this point, “more light” feels like “more honesty.” But, you know, we’ll see. One of the perils of any sort of interview is that the thing you are so passionately saying might turn out to be all wet, once you actually start working again.

Another thing I love about Twain is the way his clear-sightedness expresses itself in exact language. Also, to be as funny and loose as he is in
Huck Finn
but also dense enough with his language that it evokes a rich physical world—that is very hard, I think. He hits a lot of different modalities in that book. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s tragic, some of the language presages Faulkner, but also presages Nathaniel West.

If Mark Twain were around today, do you think he’d have a difficult time finding an agent and getting published? In today’s publishing world, humor and comic novels aren’t always “marketable.”

He’d still be a superstar. I mean that in two ways: I think his work is still great, so great that no one could deny it, so that, if you could erase all cultural memory of
Huck Finn
and then send it out fresh it would still be a sensation. Second, let’s say there was never any Twain to begin with and he was then born in 1957 or something—I think he would adjust to and imbibe this contemporary life of ours and do something unimaginable and great.

Who were your comedy influences?

I was a big fan of Steve Martin’s. It was absolutely new at the time, the early- to mid-seventies. We’d never seen or heard anything like it. Now I can see that what made his work so radical was that it was so self-aware, so postmodern: He was making comedy about the conventions of making comedy. But then it just felt . . . limitless, and honest. In those days so many comics were completely conventional. You’d see them on
The Tonight Show
, and they felt old-fashioned and sort of dead. I mean, George Carlin was around, and Richard Pryor—both geniuses—but I felt they were kind of outliers. They were radical and angry, whereas Martin presented himself as a sort of mainstream comic who tore the whole thing down from inside, very sweetly. He wasn’t really rejecting anything; he was accepting of everything, with the force of his charm and his will. I also picked up from him something that reminded me of the way some of my uncles were funny—that whole comic riff of pretending to be clueless, exaggerating that quality and not flinching. I loved that.

Who else?

I loved Monty Python for the wordplay—this sense that you didn’t have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and nerdiness and self-doubt, and
that
could be funny.

I liked the Marx Brothers for the irreverence, the way they tore everything down. That’s where humor enters the domain of the philosophical and starts to say: “What seems obvious, isn’t; what you think will sustain you, won’t; what you trust, will fail you; what you think is permanent, is fading; your mind will go, your body will rot, all that you love will be cast to the wind.”

I loved Dr. Seuss. The funny thing was, we never had his books in the house. My mother claims this is because my father confused Dr. Seuss with [pediatrician and child-care author] Dr. Spock, and considered Dr. Spock a communist. My father denies this. And honestly, it doesn’t sound like him—the guy who gave me Michael Harrington’s [1962 book on poverty]
The Other America
to read when I was in seventh grade, along with Upton Sinclair’s [1906 novel on Chicago working-class conditions]
The Jungle
. But who knows? Anyway, we didn’t have the Seuss books, but a neighbor did, and I remember whenever we would go over there I would sneak into the kid’s room and read all the contraband Seuss.

I loved the simplicity. Very elemental and profound. Also completely weird. You can’t trace any predecessor or agenda in those books. Just sui generis. I loved the level of detail—I used to sort of linger on the pages, especially the more panoramic ones.

Somehow I group Seuss with Samuel Beckett and Raymond Carver and Charles Schulz and the Picasso of those famous vanishing bull lithographs: Less is more, if the heart is in the right place.

You once mentioned that you had a stylistic breakthrough by writing Dr. Seussian–type poems. What was the breakthrough? Where and when did it occur?

It happened in a conference room at the engineering company I was working for in the mid-nineties. I was supposed to be taking notes on the call but not much was happening. So I just started writing these goofy little rhyming poems and illustrating them. I liked them enough to bring them home, and later that night my wife read them and . . . liked them. I’d just come out of the experience of having written a seven-hundred-page novel that didn’t work and it was mind-blowing to see that she was getting more pleasure and edification out of these ten poems I’d written off the top of my head than from this whole big book.

So that helped me turn the corner on accepting humor into my work. Humor and a whole bunch of other things I’d been denying for some reason: speed, pop culture, irreverence.

Did it take awhile to come to terms with the fact that you were a funny writer? There’s a feeling with many writers that if you’re not Hemingway-serious you’re not as important as you could be. That you’re not living up to your full literary potential.

I did have that feeling, yes, in a big way. I spent about seven years trying to keep humor out of my work, but finally had this catastrophic break, where I almost instantaneously rejected my rejection of humor. That was the beginning of my first book. It was sort of powerful: I just realized that I’d been keeping all the good parts of myself out of the fight—all the humor and irreverence and my extensive body of pop culture knowledge and fart jokes, and the rest of it. But I’d also been afraid to embrace, for example, a certain high-speed manic quality I have in person and in my thought patterns. So it was like throwing a switch when I finally got desperate enough.

What I’ve come to realize is that, for me, the serious and the comic are one and the same. I don’t see humor as some sort of shrunken or deficient cousin of “real” writing. Being funny is about as deep and truthful as I can be. When I am really feeling life and being truthful, the resulting prose is comic. The world is comic. It’s not always funny but it is always comic. Comic, for me, means that there is always a shortfall between what we think of ourselves and what we are. Life is too hard and complicated for a person to live above it, and the moments when this is underscored are comic. But, of course, they are also deep. Maybe the most clearly we ever see reality is when it boots us in the ass.

You once said that Kurt Vonnegut was more of a purist than Hemingway in his “aversion to bullshit.” What did you mean by this, exactly?

Well, it always seemed to me that Hemingway, especially in the later period, would ignore a lot of data, and sort of avert his eyes in order to stay in a certain kind of style we associate with him. His style became a prison of sorts. He had an ethos and a rep and he had all of that fame and I think by the end he was just writing stories that confirmed his view of things. Whereas I always felt Vonnegut was actively investigating. He had less of an agenda and so could present the world as he actually found it. His stuff was weird and weirdly shaped but, based on my experience, it had more of the real America in it.

Or saying it a slightly different way: Vonnegut wanted to investigate how life really is here on Earth. Whereas, especially in the later work, it seems to me that Hemingway had a big investment in turning aside certain realities—maybe in the name of style, maybe because he couldn’t see them, famous and enshrined and trapped in his image as he was.

Beyond Dr. Seuss, how well-read were you as a child?

I watched a lot of TV as a kid—I mean,
a lot
. Including hundreds of episodes of
Twilight Zone
and
Night Gallery
, both by Rod Serling. I would never have thought of these as being influential. But they had to be, I guess, just in terms of communicating some early idea of story shape and story expectation. I expect that someone of my generation would have to have had his or her storytelling mode colored—or corrupted?—by the volume of TV we watched and the odd storytelling mode TV occupied in those days.

When I was older, I attended the Colorado School of Mines to study geophysical engineering, so not only was there not much literature studied, there wasn’t much time for me to do it on my own either. I did it on the sly, in a spotty way.

Were you unencumbered by coming late to the literary game? In the sense that you didn’t feel buried beneath the weight of countless writers and classics?

Well, “unencumbered” is a generous way of putting it. Like saying to a monster that he is “unencumbered” by physical beauty.

When I finally figured out that I wanted to be a writer, I came at it with this combined sense of mission plus inferiority—which can be pretty good. In other words, I kind of conceded early that I wasn’t going to be a scholar of literature. I wasn’t going to be somebody who’d read and was synthesizing everything ever written. I was too far behind already. But I’d find a writer I loved and read him over and over, and copy him, and then read
his
favorite writers and so on.

I was surprised to learn that there are quite a few writers, like yourself, who also studied engineering: Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer, among others.

It might just be that an unconventional background liberates you from knowing the proper way of doing a thing. If you train ten people in a method, and the eleventh comes along untrained, he’s going to be off step, and maybe—
maybe
—this will be to his benefit. So when I look at other writers my age, I am struck by how different my life was from theirs when we were in our twenties. Sometimes this feels like an advantage—I read differently and with a different intention and got to do a lot of strange things. But other times it feels like a disadvantage—I lack a solid grounding in, say, the history of the novel, and so lack confidence and am tentative in that area. On the bright side, I do know how to identify many different minerals—or did, anyway.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that, for all my writing life, I’ll be coming from behind, and I should be happy to be a sort of mutt running alongside the pack. If I ever make the mistake of thinking I’m one of the alphas, I’ll blow the whole thing.

I’ve heard that, in the early days, nobody in U2 could really play their instruments. But that became sort of central to what they were doing. They played around that fact, essentially. That resonates with me: this idea of deeply musical, deeply feeling people who maybe don’t have virtuosic technical skills but who are able to make what they do have work for them.

I actually prefer U2 in the beginning of their career. There were mistakes, but maybe they were better in spite of, or because of, those mistakes. Can this also hold true for writers?

I think so. Maybe not “mistakes,” but a certain crudity of expression; this feeling that the writer is bearing so much vital news that he can’t slow down and be fastidious about presentation. Or, conversely, that his truth is so powerful that it is malforming the vessel that is carrying it. And for writers, with our infinite powers of revision, we can even go a step further: We can be spontaneous and messy and, liking that effect, revise the text so as to make it seem even more spontaneous and messy—while at the same time actually “clarifying” those qualities.

At the highest level, revision is about anticipating what most writers would do and then asking: Well, is there anything deeper or better or livelier that I could make happen? Not just for the sake of it, but because the new thing might really be richer? Can it somehow contain more “life” by eluding the usual tropes and expectations?

What I find with your writing is that the humor rings in a minor key that resounds in some very dark places. I once read a critic who described this style of comedy as “weighty humor.”

I think one trick as a writer is to let all of the people you are come to the table. Or let all of the modalities that reside in you—at least the powerful ones—come to the table. So, in me, there’s a maudlin part and a funny part and a dark part and an optimist, a pessimist, a part that loves sci-fi, a part that loves lean language. And this “allowing to the table” can only happen—or happens best—if you loosen up your conceptual expectations in regard to the story. So you might start out thinking that your story is this one thing, but then the trick would be to, at some critical moment, let it become whatever it seems to want to become. Let those other modalities in, come what may. And the criterion there is: Okay, this other modality that’s showing up, does it make the story better or worse? More or less interesting or energetic? And again this all happens on a line-to-line level. If it’s making the story better, then it stays, and the story has to revise its self-image accordingly. So you might look up from your story and find that something has entered into it that does not at all fit with your initial understanding of it or your original aspirations for it. And when that happens, that’s great—it means you’ve done the important work of befuddling the pedestrian part of yourself.