Poking A Dead Frog Part 15

At the highest level, revision is about antic.i.p.ating 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.

Your stories have a surreal, dreamlike quality to them. Do you ever dream your story ideas?

I do. I once dreamed that this old girlfriend-someone I had treated kind of s.h.i.+ttily at the end of our relations.h.i.+p-came up to me and said: "I just want you to know: I have a baby."

Was it your baby?

No, it was quite clear that it was not mine. This was her way of saying: "I survived, and even thrived, a.s.shole." And in the dream I was like: "That is so great. I am so happy for you." To which she replied: "No. I have a baby. And he is just incredibly smart. Watch." And then the baby started talking, reciting all these facts and equations and so on. But then I looked down and noticed a zipper on the back of the baby's head. He was wearing some sort of mask, this smart-making mask. And the dream ended on this realization. So that mixed tonality is even present in the dream, I guess. It's sad, with some sci-fi, but it's also sort of a funny idea.

And then in writing that story-"I Can Speak" [The New Yorker, 1999]-what you do is squirm around until you find the right narrative stance. It's a very intuitive thing, when you first stumble on to an idea, of figuring out how to start, what voice to use, and all of that.

This whole story-writing thing is like riding a bike. If the bike is leaning left, you need to lean right. If a story starts to feel maudlin, darken it up. Too earnest? Put in some crude thing. It's essentially your psyche wrestling with your psyche. You have, say, two or three main personality go-to's and they are always wrestling. But this process is not so different from what we do every day, as we try to be charming or functional or liked. "Eek, I've gone too far with Ed. Better say something flattering." Or: "I am sounding strident. Better counteract that with some humility." And of course each of us has his or her own way of doing this, his or her own set of issues that tend to throw the bike off balance, and then ways of rebalancing it along whatever axis is ours.

The most popular types of characters in comedy these days seem to be adults unwilling to grow up. This is common in Hollywood, as well as in literature. The eternal teen. But your characters tend to be real adults who are doing their best to live, struggling mightily. There's no Peter Pan Syndrome at work.

I think I had a little advantage in this, in that I didn't really get started until I already had a regular life-a job, a wife, two kids-so the idea of eternal youth had flown. And it had flown for good reason, by which I mean: I was totally on board with it having flown. I didn't feel reduced or compromised by having a job and family. The whole 1970s idea of "selling out" had been rendered anachronistic and even gross by the extent of my love for my wife and kids. Beatniking was not an option anymore. So then I had to learn that the things that were actually bothering me or challenging me during the day were valid subjects for literature. Mostly, at that time, what was bothering me was 1) not having enough money to provide for my family in the way they deserved, and 2) having a job that required me to spend basically my whole day doing things that I didn't want to do and were simultaneously hard and boring but that were, at that time, the only antidote to (1). So I suppose that's a fundamentally adult conundrum: no place to run, because the trap you're in is made of love. Love plus material paucity.

Your characters tend to be bizarrely optimistic. In your short story "Bounty," one of the characters says, "[My sister] Connie is a prost.i.tute. I'm a thirty-year-old virgin, but all things considered, we could have turned out a lot worse."

That has something to do with American optimism that is really mostly denial energy. Critical thought becomes negative. Negative thought means you're a loser. So don't do it.

Another characteristic I notice about your characters is that even the "bad" ones-the characters who work for big corporations and tend to do evil things-still have a good deal of humanity in them.

I never bought into the whole corporation-as-evil thing after I worked as a geophysical engineer for a company called Radian Corporation, in Rochester, New York. The "big evil corporation" was us. All of us. And everyone who was there, including the managers, was there for one reason, and that was to support his or her family, to make a living.

You can see this philosophy in quite a few of your stories. Your 2010 New Yorker story "Escape from Spiderhead" is about two prisoners forced to partic.i.p.ate in laboratory experiments involving new drugs, one of which is a love potion. And yet, the "bad guys"-in this case the scientists-break the rules by going offsite to buy the prisoners delicious snacks.

Sure. The idea is that even the "bad guys" don't see themselves as such. Have you seen those color photos and videos of the SS guys and gals at Auschwitz cutting up on the weekend, singing and dancing and joking and so on? They thought they were the good guys. Mostly that sort of black-and-white, Cruella de Vil flavor of evil is, I think, a creation of comic books and movies and TV-and one that has, sadly, started to dominate in our epistemology of evil, and is maybe now leeching out into the real world. We'd be better served, I think, to start with the idea that all of our enemies get up in the morning feeling like they're out to serve good. That's a more realistic and effective view of evil, I think, even just in terms of how it actually occurs and also how one might start to defend oneself or work against that evil. If you see the 9/11 guys as pure rabid monsters, there's nothing to do but kill kill kill. But if you can ask: Okay, what was the guy like the day before he decided to be a terrorist? What was nascent? What other direction might he have gone? What would the necessary conditions be to get a parallel version of him-or some current version of him-to take that other, more peaceful, path?

In Persuasion Nation, there is a terrifying and very effective story called "93990." The story is written in the form of a dry bureaucratic doc.u.ment about a scientific study-or "a ten-day acute toxicity study"-performed on twenty monkeys. The cold, precise language reflects the horrors of what occurs. I bought a used copy of the book, and I found the following Post-it note on the t.i.tle page of this story. I have no idea who wrote it, but it's obvious that this particular story affected him or her very deeply.

Hopefully he or she meant the story line, not the prose quality. Did they leave a phone number, so I can check?

Was the idea for this particular story dreamed?

No. I worked at a pharmaceutical company in Albany, New York, in the late eighties, just after our first daughter was born. That was based on a true story.

This story was based on a real event?!

I worked summarizing tech reports for the company's FDA submissions. I worked upstairs and the animal labs were downstairs. I have a strong memory of leaving work at five o'clock, liberated, so happy to be going to see my wife and our baby, and taking a shortcut through the lab, and seeing about fifteen beagles in slings-that's right, beagles in slings. They slung them up like that, supposedly, to stabilize their heart rates for the next day's study. Seems like that might have had the opposite effect, if it were me being slung. They also tested rats and rabbits and monkeys.

My job was to summarize all of the animal tests that had been done for a particular proposed drug. This would be maybe five thousand pages. And we had to get the whole thing down, in summary form, to less than a hundred pages to submit to the FDA. So I had to read-or, more honestly, scan-these larger doc.u.ments and summarize them.

A memo very much like what's in the story one day came across my desk: this miracle monkey who could survive every dosage level. And then they killed it at the end, per the protocol. So I photocopied the summary and took it home and held on to it for a few years. And, as I recall, I was flying home from out west and thought of that, and wrote a quick draft-I can't remember, but I might have had the memo with me. Maybe I'd planned to write it on the trip. It's all kind of hazy. But I was pretty good at that kind of language by then, and also had really internalized the way these studies were done and so forth. So I just turned the volume up a little, to make the movements within the real memo more evident to a reader who hadn't had the benefit of reading the hundreds of nonmoving memos that I'd had.

I wonder if it helps a writer to have worked difficult jobs, such as yourself.

Not necessarily. I mean, look at Flannery O'Connor, Tolstoy, or Proust. It helped me, I think, but it also could have completely messed me up. There was this narrow window of a few years where, if I hadn't gotten something going, it would have been too late, given my fiscal situation-my energy for writing would have been gone and my life would have become too busy to write a first book.

The weird thing about writing is, whatever the question, there's no "one size fits all" answer. Because writing is hard, and subjective. We like to think, you know: "The key must be X!" And the X equals "work weird jobs," or "cut the story down in half," or "show, don't tell," whatever. But it is totally person-centric. n.o.body's truth applies to anyone else, at least not completely. So you go into it alone.

But in my case, I do think that the difficult-job period was good. It helped me to get a first read on capitalism and its hards.h.i.+ps. It sort of gave me my material. I had a couple early close brushes with real poverty that scared the s.h.i.+t out of me. We had a dog once who almost got hit by a falling icicle when she was a pup and always flinched when she had to go by that side of the house. I am-when it comes to poverty-like that dog.

How easy could it have been for you to have remained in the working world? Not necessarily in a slaughterhouse or as a doorman, but as an engineer in an austere office? Someone who was a little different from the rest of the co-workers, the one not partic.i.p.ating in the trust games at the company picnic?

I think it would have been easy enough. There were real pleasures in that life. And people are pretty adaptable. I mean, all kinds of people do it. I think we do what we need to do and our real spiritual and emotional growth occurs around that, no matter what.

The thing that made it easier at the time was that I was far from the only one who felt weird. I'd go so far as to say that most of us felt that way-that we were not supposed to be there, or were too cool for the setting, or that this was a temporary glitch in the greater glory that would be our life. There was definitely an ironic thing in the air. This was especially true of those of us who were below a certain line-basically, those of us who were not in management felt that way.

It was a great chance to get into a more or less "typical" life and just stay there. It was beautiful, actually. And it was a great inoculation against simplistic thinking when it came to "the corporation" or "big business" or "the suburbs" and all of that. I don't like the lazy way of telegraphing those things you sometimes see in fiction or on TV, something that indicates that a concept like "suburb" automatically means: "shallow c.r.a.phole." That's not interesting, to see things only as simple blocks of meaning.

In previous interviews, you've talked about the presence or absence of magic in writing. How does a young writer create a sense of magic in their work without overthinking it?

Yes, that's the million-dollar question. Or, since we're talking about fiction writing, the five-thousand-dollar question.

I can't speak for anyone else, but my feeling is that you have to first and foremost keep your eye on the fact that your prose has to kick a.s.s. It has to compel and entertain, and your job is to make that happen, per your taste. And my experience has been that this process isn't so much intellectual or cerebral as we sometimes, when younger, think it is. We think of writing as an intellectual act, which of course it is, but it's also an act of entertainment and engagement and arguably has to address those needs before it can do any sort of intellectual work.

So my first job as a writer is to make the prose undeniable. And for me this is mostly a gut-level or "ear" thing. Maybe it's like music-people can talk and think and write endlessly about Miles Davis, but I doubt, in the moment of playing, that Miles Davis was doing much thinking, per se. What he was doing-well, who knows what he was doing. But whatever it was, it was the result of years of prep. Writers also prep themselves with years of reading and thinking and talking and so on. But in the moment of doing, I think we have to admit that something magical and inexpressible and irreducible is going on. And that this moment is what distinguishes an interesting writer from a dull one. And what distinguishes this interesting writer from this other one over here. And what I find exhilarating is that we don't have to worry too much about what exactly that magical thing is-we don't have to reduce it or own it or be able to explain it. We just have to be able to do it. Our job isn't to describe that state, but to learn to get there, and occupy it, using whatever tricks we've learned to get us there.

Does an internal melody come into play when you write? Or a musical rhythm?

Yes. That's just what I mean. There's the "sound" of the sentences, although for me this is internal. I sort of feel it at the back of my throat, which is not separable from meaning, or from the prose's ability to convince. But language is the main tool you have in prose as you are trying to close the deal. Compelling language equals belief. Blah language erodes belief in the fictive reality. At least I think so.

You just mentioned Miles Davis, but Davis was not always a people pleaser; he was known to literally turn his back on audiences. Where's that balance between wanting to create new music-or literature-while, at the same time, not alienating a large portion of your audience who might just want to hear "My Funny Valentine" over and over again?

For me, this hasn't really been an issue. My work first got meaningful when it got entertaining. Maybe because of my background, I'm at my smartest and most intellectually genuine, I think, when I am trying to keep the reader reading.

You have an extremely strong writer's voice, but you've said that it took you seven years to find that voice.

Yes, it took a long time. I think part of getting a voice is accepting the notion that one's natural voice-the voice that's first arrived at-isn't necessarily one's "true" voice. That is: That revision is as important as that first initial riffing impulse.

My early drafts usually don't sound much like "me." They're overly clever and jump around a lot, and have more conversational fill in them-cliches and empty phrases and so on. And they meander in terms of their causality. Things happen for no reason, and lead to nothing, or lead to something, but with weak causation. But in revision they get tighter and funnier and also gentler. And one thing leads to the next in a tighter, more undeniable way-a way that seems to "mean." Which, I guess, makes sense, if we think of revision as just an iterative process of exerting one's taste. Gradually the story comes to feel more like "you" than you could have imagined at the outset, and starts to manifest a sort of superlogic-an internal logic that is more direct and "caused" than mere real-life logic.

The thing is, writing is really just the process of charming someone via prose-compelling them to keep reading. So, as with actual personality, part of the process is learning what it is that you've got to work with: How do I keep that reader reading? What's in my tool bag?

When I was a kid, I had this Hot Wheels set. A car would approach the "gas station," which was just two spinning rubber wheels that would push the car forward to the next "gas station." A story could be thought of as a series of these little gas stations. You want to keep the reader on the track-giving them little pleasure bursts-with the goal of pus.h.i.+ng them forward toward the end of the story.

So learning to be a writer could be understood as getting into relation with one's own little gas stations-finding out what sort of micromoments you are capable of creating that will keep the reader moving through the text.

One of the things that interests me about writing humor is this: How does a writer for print, after the one-hundredth reading of a sentence, still recognize that intuitive "pleasure burst"? It's all so internal. It could almost fester, it's so internal. It's not similar to performing a comedy routine where its success is immediately confirmed by applause or laughter.

That's the crux of the whole thing. You become deaf to your own prose after many readings of it. I think that might be the main thing every writer has to learn: How do I refresh my reading mind? And I'd say that this is the one area where I can objectively say I've improved over the years. It takes less time now to clear my mind and read what I've written in a relatively fresh way. I just try to approach the prose as if I'm a first-time reader. I'm trying, in my reading mind, to imitate what I think a first-time reader might feel. Part of this has to do with trying to divest yourself of whatever concepts you've accrued about the story-sort of like wiping fog off a window. Concepts like: Yes, this part is dull, but that's because it's essential to my critique of provincialism. Absent those things, what's left? Well, basically, that first-time reader is left: you, if you hadn't already read the thing a gazillion times.

When you're writing, how do you know when an ending feels right? How do you know when to stop?

Well, building off that "first-time reader" idea above: If we imagine that there's this meter in our head, with "Positive" on one end and "Negative" on the other, our job is to keep the meter in the Positive zone. If it drops into the Negative, ask ourselves why it's doing that, and edit accordingly; and better if the answer to "Why?" is an intuitive adjustment of the line rather than some big conceptual overlay.

So to finish a story just means that you can get through the whole thing with the needle up in the Positive-and then, at the very last minute, you are trying to put in something that will make the needle go all the way over. By that time, the theory goes, you will be so deep inside your story that your subconscious will be driving the car, so to speak. But there's no general principle-each story has its own "epistemology of ending." It's maybe like a long car trip with a close friend. You cover so much ground, things get rough, you talk them out, all of that-and then it's time to say good-bye. How do you say good-bye? Well, there's no one answer. Depends on that particular friend and trip but, by then, being so deep inside the trip, you'd know how.

One thing I always do is try to read the story all the way through, remembering that a first-time reader is not reading individual lines but is inside the story. By reading, we enter into this odd mind-state where each sentence is a microadjustment of both our imaginative reality-what's happening in the story-and what we might call our "sonic reality"-the c.u.mulative effects of all those sentences and the internal dynamics and all of that. It's so wonderfully complicated, the act of reading. But I understand it as a very visceral thing, just reading along as if for the first time, and what you're doing is noticing whether you're still charmed. Is the spell still in effect? If not, where did things go wrong?

And when you think of it, it's an incredibly hopeful process-this idea that I, over here, in my place and time and mental state, can actively communicate with someone over there, in some other time, and some other mental state-that I can reach across time and s.p.a.ce and circ.u.mstance and ring your bell. That argues for a sort of commonality of spirit that I find very thrilling.

ULTRASPECIFIC COMEDIC KNOWLEDGE.

BYRD LEAVELL.

Literary Agent, Waxman Leavell Literary Agency

Finding a Literary Agent for Your Humor Book

Can I just be brutally honest here? Agents never want to admit that they don't do a great job handling the submissions they receive but, well, they don't-or, at least, I don't. I was at a party twelve years ago, which would have put me at all of twenty-two years old, and a book editor I respected tremendously, George Gibson, told me something I never forgot. He said, "Go find your clients. Don't count on them coming to you. You'll always be remembered by the ones you tracked down." And I fundamentally believe that. Don't get me wrong. I do get pa.s.sed some amazing clients these days. What I don't do, though, is devote very much of my time going through the "my book is called Death Comes for Everyone" submissions.

Which is terrible. But, you know, there's never anything good in that submission stack. And I'm just not up to it anymore. Can I say that? I am going to get in trouble for this later. But there really isn't, G.o.dd.a.m.nit. You know where all the talented people are? They are out there hoeing corn on the Internet. They are putting up great content that people are reading and responding to. And they in turn are learning how to respond to their fans and how to build an audience and how to write what people care about. More than anything, they are learning how to be funny.

No one really gives my client Justin Halpern any credit. In 2009, Justin started a Twitter feed called s.h.i.+tmydadsays. Shortly after that I signed him and sold the book at auction for a pretty reasonable advance. Then Justin wrote the book and it ended up selling over a million copies in one year. Which is ridiculous. But everyone seemed to focus on how lucky Justin was, and no one seemed to focus at all on the fact that Justin had been out there for years trying to be funny on various sites that were paying him close to nothing. For Justin, that was invaluable. Justin Halpern is now one of the most talented humor writers in the country. Really. He is. Go read one of his books and then come back and say I'm wrong.

So don't even submit to an agent. You are just going to get rejected anyway. Because these days the idea isn't enough. Going to publishers with "I've got a great idea for a humor book" is about as useful as tweeting your breakfast menu. No one cares. Especially not publishers. All they care about is platform. They care if you've written something really, really funny and it's gone viral and five thousand people have commented on it. They care that your product is the perfect thing to turn into a book that works in the market. They care how many readers you can make aware of your book when it is finally published. You have to show agents that you can do all of these things, and then, and only then, do you get to show them how good your book is.

One last point. Most humor books are actually not funny. I'd put the percentage somewhere around 97 percent of books as not having a single laugh. So when you do get your book deal, all you have to do is make sure you are a part of that 3 percent and then watch how many copies your book sells.

PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE.

DAVE HILL.

Contributor, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, This American Life; Author, Tasteful Nudes . . . And Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation, The G.o.dd.a.m.n Dave Hill Show on WFMU I think the purpose of writing-and, really, with all comedy-is to fully entertain yourself. I look at my output, whatever it is-be it writing, performance, music, or anything-as more like an excretion, like what a snail leaves behind. It's just what comes out, and the more you can have it be what comes out naturally, the better it ends up being. The more you can remove any stakes or pressure-just write as fast as you can type-it's going to come out better. And then, at the very least, you have the raw material, and you can go back and hone it.

I once got asked to submit a writing packet for a comedy show. My thinking was, I'm not the right fit for this job at all. I'm not even in the running, but my friends are going to read this, and while they're sitting in the office going through this pile, I want to entertain them. So I wrote this packet thinking, There's no way in h.e.l.l anyone's even thinking of hiring me for this. It's more like I was asked to submit out of politeness or something. [Laughs] Later, they told me, "Your packet was honestly, hands-down the best one we got, and we want to hire you. Nothing was even close." I'm not saying I'd be capable of doing that again in any context, but I think because I wrote only for wanting to crack up my friends, and I was cracking myself up in the process, it worked. It was the first writing packet I ever wrote that I had any fun doing, and that's why I was able to make it good. Normally, you put pressure on yourself. And as soon as you think that you absolutely have to do a good job on it, you're in trouble. I tense up when I do that, and then it usually sucks.

When I first started getting into comedy and writing, I thought I needed an agent and a manager. I felt, I have to get my friends to introduce me to people and help me. And my friends would help, which was very nice of them. But I know now that this doesn't matter at first. I mean, it's nice to have an introduction. But you know, I was rejected by everyone. And understandably so. When I was first starting, I called someone who's my current manager, and they weren't even taking my calls. I couldn't even make it past the receptionist. I was crushed by that initial rejection. I thought I'd been rejected by the establishment of comedy. So I was like, "It doesn't matter; I'm on my own. I'm going to do my own thing." And once I did that, once I was truly at the point where I was not trying to get anyone's attention, that's when I got everything I wanted, including a manager. The point is, if you're like, "Oh, I gotta do this," that energy and that mental state does not help the situation at all.

Another thing that helped was I was fine with failing and being a complete moron. I think a lot of people in comedy have a slight concern about not being willing to be completely foolish. Not everyone, certainly. But it helped me to not care that much.

With my book, Tasteful Nudes [St. Martin's Press, 2012], I knew within three weeks of the proposal going out to publishers whether anyone wanted to publish it. But in that time, I realized probably the real reason that I dragged a.s.s, took several years to put the book proposal together, was because if no one wanted it, it was going to crush me so badly that I would never have written another word. Fortunately, it worked out. And, you know, if no one had wanted the book, I would have been b.u.mmed out for a few weeks, but I would have gotten over it. It's going back to not really giving a s.h.i.+t. Do your best to entertain yourself. Or entertaining the fifteen-year-old in you. Or just creating something that you want to see exist.

Find a way to remove that anxiety and pressure. Just do your best, the same way that you would try to do your best with anything, like making spaghetti. Basically, I think life is way more knuckleheaded than people make it out to be. It's making spaghetti, and then it's sitting with someone and having spaghetti. That's basically all life is.

My mom died a couple years ago. I spent so much of my adult life thinking, Oh, man, I've gotta do something to make her proud of me. And it took me right up until the end to realize, Oh, she's been proud of me this whole time. She doesn't give a f.u.c.k what I do. She doesn't want me to be a prost.i.tute, really, but otherwise, we're just sitting around watching TV, talking; it doesn't matter. We're just eating Chinese food. I realized the basis of any relations.h.i.+p is way less complicated than it's made out to be.

I'm probably a bit more scattered than I should be. I sort of wish I could rein it in, but when I try to do that, I realize I'm doing the things I want to be doing. Maybe not always on the scale I want to be doing them, but I'm thrilled that I can make a decent living doing what I want to do-just acting like an idiot. It's kind of my job.

TOM SCHARPLING.

"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 (t.i.tled "Rock, Rot & Rule") that Scharpling and Wurster produced and distributed themselves via ca.s.sette 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 cla.s.sifies 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 t.i.tle 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.