Poking A Dead Frog Part 25

Dan Guterman may be the funniest writer you've never heard of.

Over the past decade, Guterman has written for some of the most respected comedy outlets in both print and television, including The Onion (19992010), The Colbert Report (201013), and Community (2013). Guterman's also written for The New Yorker and coauth.o.r.ed two best-selling books: Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of the Planet Earth, 73rd Edition and America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't.

Guterman clearly cares deeply about his craft: "Dan is one of the most serious funny people I know," says Peter Gwinn, a writer at The Colbert Report. "I used to make fun of a scene in the pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip when someone hands Matthew Perry a script. He reads it, and then with a dead-eyed, unsmiling expression, says, 'This is funny.' Because no one is really like that-no matter how jaded a comedian you are, when you read something funny, you at least crack a smile. But Dan comes pretty close. He's constantly thinking about whether something is funny, which to him is too important a pursuit to waste energy on laughing."

Carol Kolb, former editor-in-chief of The Onion and the person responsible for hiring Guterman, says, "When Dan started writing for The Onion, he was only seventeen years old-a baby! He was just some weirdo kid up in Canada who apparently didn't leave his apartment much, but his ideas were so great and so funny. There was no learning curve with him. He was one of our top writers right out the gate."

Guterman would go on to become the satirical paper's head writer, responsible for some of The Onion's most memorable headlines and articles, including "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job," following Barack Obama's victory in 2008. From 2004 to 2009, Guterman also penned The Onion's weekly horoscope section. In his words, "They were the perfect vehicle for short-form dark humor." Guterman would spend one day a week crafting these perfect little jewels, an apex of sophisticated comedic thoughts distilled in as few words as possible. Some of Guterman's divination from the heavens: Aries You'll spend your remaining years hooked up to a machine, which is sad, as it's the kind that checks e-mail and sends out texts.

Cancer Everything will go according to plan, except for the injured hostages, the brief shoot-out with police, and the fact that you were just trying to make toast.

Virgo You've never really thought of yourself as a cat person, but the splicing, trans-binding, and DNA resequencing will soon change all of that.

Gemini Your tryst with a married woman will come to an end this week when she finally asks you for a divorce.

Capricorn The stars f.u.c.king give up-if you want another slice of blueberry pie, just go ahead and have another slice of blueberry pie.

In his five years as the writer of the Onion's horoscopes, Guterman penned more than three thousand.

When did you first become interested in comedy?

I was always making people laugh growing up, but I didn't know comedy was an actual thing until very late. It never occurred to me that comedy was something that I could do professionally.

I was born in Brazil, and my dad brought our family over to Montreal when I was seven. Growing up in Brazil, the only comedy I was exposed to was pretty broad: large men in diapers banging on pots while large costumed apes ran around in a frenzy. That's all I knew.

Brazilian comedy is lighthearted-it's not the comedy of sarcasm and subversion. So when I first saw SNL and Kids in the Hall, it freaked me out. It was so loud and aggressive. And it was played straight. It would genuinely frighten me.

Can you give me a specific example?

I remember being really unnerved by some of Jack Handey's work. There was one Fuzzy Memory, about a group of kids pretending to "play pirate," and that meant robbing innocent pa.s.sersby with these immense machetes.13 And that scared the c.r.a.p out of me. I didn't pa.r.s.e it as a joke. I was ten years old and just horrified.

The Chicken Lady sketches [played by Mark McKinney] on Kids in the Hall were also terrifying. McKinney played a half-woman, half-chicken creature. It was strange and unsettling, and it imprinted on me in a very visceral way. It makes sense that I ended up writing comedy that draws from darker themes. It had a big effect on me when I was a kid.

Were you a fan of Steve Martin's?

I didn't know who Steve Martin was until I was about twenty. [Laughs] I was totally out of the loop.

The movie Ghostbusters? Animal House? Any comedy?

No. My parents had nothing like that around the house. No records, no movies, no comedy books. I only found those things much later, on my own. Both of my parents have not-great senses of humor. When I was a kid, I remember my father telling a dirty joke-the kind you'd hear on the playground at school-and I remember him just howling with laughter. I would sit there, dumbfounded, as this fifty-year-old man would be doubled over on the ground. I mean, it's not like it's their fault. It was just a cultural difference.

When you finally did discover comedy, what became your first love?

I was sixteen when I found out about the National Lampoon. I discovered "satire" for the first time. And it blew me away.

I had no idea that comedy could be more than just jokes. That the whole thing could be in service of exposing some truth. Now there's nothing wrong with just writing a joke. A great joke is a great joke. But to realize that I could also say something that I believed in, or describe a worldview I shared, or attack a dishonesty that bothered me, through comedy-that changed everything. I was obsessed. I would walk from used bookstore to used bookstore to find old Lampoon issues. I'd be in those stores, rummaging through box after box of horrifying secondhand p.o.r.nography to track them down.

Lampoon pieces like "The Vietnamese Baby Book" [January 1972] by Michael O'Donoghue were amazing. Just so daring and confident, but still measured and nuanced. Targets were introduced and then savagely cut down in a matter of sentences. Jokes like "Baby's First Handprint"-which had three fingers missing due to Agent Orange-or "Baby's First Word: 'Medic'"-these were more than jokes, they were powerful antiwar statements phrased as jokes. To read something like that-something so unexpectedly powerful-was an incredible rush. O'Donoghue was using the rhythms and mechanics of comedy to articulate despair. It was so wonderful.

National Lampoon's 1964 Yearbook Parody [published in 1973 as a book], co-written by Doug Kenney, was also incredible. Youthful idealism bludgeoned by the creeping realization of one's own limitations. Dreams careening headlong into brick walls. It's all very painful and wonderfully funny.

The 1964 Yearbook Parody proved what could be done with an intricate and sprawling work of parody. This wasn't just a short magazine piece, typeset in the style of what was being parodied-this was an actual one-hundred-and-seventy-five-page physical yearbook, complete with awkward photos, meaningless quotes, and desperate cries for attention. Kenney was creating an entire world, with a giant cast of characters, each with their own intensely average lives.

I think this was also the first time that I realized how effective patience can be. Instead of spilling everything at once, Kenney would slowly leak out details, here and there, until his portrait of fading adolescence came into focus.

Some of the National Lampoon material hasn't aged well. A lot of it is shocking and aggressive for the sake of being shocking and aggressive. But the material that was great is still every bit as impressive today.

How about more current comedic influences?

A year or so after finding the Lampoon, I stumbled across The Onion. I had just gone through a major depressive episode, and reading The Onion made me feel so, so good. It was incredible. It was like the Lampoon, but, you know, consistent. If you want to read the sharpest satire that's ever been published, track down every issue of The Onion between 1999 and 2002. The fact that I got to write for it when I was seventeen is ridiculous. I had no business sitting next to the geniuses who created it.

I remember when I was asked to take over the horoscopes. At the time, the horoscopes were being written by John Krewson, who basically created the model and is probably the most talented writer I've ever worked with. I had admired the horoscopes so much. To me, they represented the pinnacle of comedy writing. So when Krewson said he thought I could handle them, it was overwhelming for me. I just closed the door of my office and started sobbing. [Laughs] In a good way.

What about television comedy? Did anything excite you?

I loved watching Late Night with Conan O'Brien. The show would do these high-concept comedy bits on a level I had never seen before. Bizarre sketches that would lead out of the studio and into long pretaped segments. There was a summer episode performed entirely in front of a crowd of six-year-olds. It was silliness on a huge scale and treated with the utmost of seriousness. The perfect blend of highbrow and lowbrow. I couldn't get enough of it.

That was almost twenty years ago. It's crazy. I'm starting to feel like an old man in comedy. Soon I'll be totally out of touch.

Out of touch with what?

With what's popular with the kids. I'm not sure today's generation would go for the absurdist, slyly subversive brand of comedy that Late Night with Conan O'Brien did so well. I don't know. Kids today don't seem to want any substance in their comedy.

Would this hold true even for The Colbert Report or Community, two shows you've written for?

Colbert is a wonderful show. It's filled with great satiric insights on a nightly basis, but I don't know if the kids are watching it. And Community is maybe the rarest of shows-a network comedy that's constantly challenging itself both structurally and emotionally. Great, challenging comedy is still out there, but not as part of the mainstream. Colbert and Community are definitely in the minority.

[Laughs] You're talking like you're ninety. In fact, ninety-year-old comedy writers don't feel this way about "the kids" and their comedy.

Yeah, but I'm not a young sprite, either. I've been writing, without break, for fifteen straight years. The Onion s.n.a.t.c.hed me up when I was super young. I'm pretty much done. I've put in my time. I'm very tired.

Tired from having to produce jokes every morning?

Yeah. The stress of constantly having to deliver takes a toll on you. Add deep-seated insecurities on top of that and you end up pus.h.i.+ng yourself really hard. I have more than just pride in my work-it's an unhealthy, all-consuming obsession. I want to write a joke so good that it somehow rights the rest of my life. That's the nice thing about having demons. It makes you very productive.

Are you unhappy with your chosen career? If you weren't writing comedy, what else would you be doing?

No. I feel incredibly lucky to get to write comedy for a living. And I'd be miserable doing anything else. But writing comedy isn't carefree and lighthearted work. People think that being a comedy writer is nothing but laughs. And maybe it is for some writers. But for me, it's tied up with all sorts of complicated issues.

The interesting thing about comedy writing is that you're doing this very creative, often very personal thing, but you're expected to produce in this totally noncreative way. My job is to churn out comedy, which is this intangible and temperamental thing, but at the rate and consistency of an a.s.sembly-line worker. It's tough. Especially if you're drawing from an emotional place. Synthesizing trauma into entertainment can be great. But having to go to that dark well twelve hours a day is really draining.

What's the hardest part? That you wake up and have a bad morning, you're not feeling funny-maybe you've had a long night or a fight with your wife-and you then have to head into work and create something funny?

Your job is to be funny whether you feel like it or not-there are people counting on you to deliver. You're there to provide an endless stream of jokes and pitches and ideas. You're there to feed the beast. And the beast doesn't care if you only got four hours of sleep. That said, I don't know if being in a bad mental s.p.a.ce makes it harder to create comedy. Oftentimes, you can channel anger or distress into something really good.

There must be tricks you've learned over the years, right? Things that make the relentless demands a little easier to handle?

Sure. When you're exhausted, or feeling uninspired, you can sometimes lean on mechanics and joke construction. Things like manipulating rhythm to deliver a surprising conclusion, or escalating flawed logic, or changing the point of view of a joke halfway through-they all help to bridge the gap between moments of pure inspiration.

But that's getting into a whole other crisis: I wish that my writing was more organic. A lot of it comes from the demands of the job, of course. The crazy deadlines, the pressure one has to produce under-but I still worry that I over-intellectualize the way I write comedy. That I'm not instinctual enough. It's a hard thing to explain, but if I were to break it into percentages-and I think it's telling that I'm breaking it into percentages-my writing would be 70 percent inspiration, 30 percent math.

The danger, when you do it for long enough, is that comedy can become a series of variables in a mathematical equation. I know that if I balance the equation correctly, that if I manipulate x and y in just the right way, the end result will be laughter. Maybe some of that has to do with me being a left-brain guy, but the whole thing b.u.ms me out. You never want to generate material that feels soulless. It'd be nice to be the kind of writer who drew purely from a place of inspiration. I wish my process was more of a mystery. I wish every joke was a surprise to me as I was writing it.

Yes, but if you were to experience a huge, all-encompa.s.sing sense of elation or surprise every time you wrote a joke, you'd go insane.

Maybe. Don't get me wrong-there are still moments of incredible excitement. Especially when I stumble onto something I've never done before. Something that feels completely, totally new. Something where I can't say, "Oh, this joke has this type of idea from that joke, and that idea from that other joke I wrote." That's when it's really exhilarating.

How did the job at Colbert work? What was a typical day like for you?

Every morning there would be a pitch meeting where we'd talk about the latest news and our take on it for Stephen the character. Then Stephen would choose the pitches he liked the most, the writers would be paired off in teams of two, and then everyone would get sent upstairs to write up the chosen pitches into scripts for the day's show. Each team usually had a little over an hour to produce a finished script-which is not a lot of time. Working on the show was a huge adrenaline rush. You'd get back to your office with your partner and the two of you would instantly start pitching jokes for the script while the clock ticked away. It's definitely not a job for the faint of heart.

The show was really good for me. I'm in my head so much of the time. Writing for Colbert forced me to be more present. It made me a much better comedy writer.

So you would pitch jokes for the script aloud? How did it go from oral pitches to a written script?

One writer would sit at the keyboard, the other would pace back and forth, and both would start writing the script aloud. Whatever you agreed was funny would get typed up.

And you had only around an hour to do this?

[Laughs] It was crazy.

Was there an advantage to pairing up with another writer?

Writing with a partner was totally new to me. Basically, the show's process borrows a lot from Stephen's improv background. There's this philosophy when you do improv to never say no; to always be open to going down a comedic avenue that's been pitched to you. It's amazing how often we'd stumble onto something that was funny just by seeing where a certain train of thought would lead us.

Also, the nice thing about working aloud, where you're basically talking out every line of a script, is that it kept the show from sounding overly written. When you write alone, and have all the time in the world, you end up rewording sentences, editing and re-editing clauses, playing around with syntax-and your jokes tend to stiffen up as a result. They sound labored over. Your writing is more p.r.o.ne to feeling unnatural. The oral process at Colbert was great at preventing that.

At first it was scary. But after I had a couple months to adjust, I calmed down and really loved it. At The Onion, I was handed my a.s.signment and then had anywhere from half a day to a day and a half to produce an article. The writers would just go back to their offices and shut everyone and everything off. They wrote slowly; when they were stuck, they left the building and took a walk. It was a process that fed on seclusion and solitude. But at Colbert, because we had to produce twenty-two new minutes of comedy every day, there was no time for that kind of luxury. There was no staring at a computer screen for twenty minutes in search of the perfect next sentence; you had to find that perfect next sentence in seconds.

That was the other nice thing about working in pairs. It was this amazingly collaborative and selfless process that allowed for polished material to be created quickly. You'd pitch an idea for a joke, your partner would refine it, you would refine his take on it, and in forty-five seconds you'd suddenly have a great bit.

And the only reason that this sort of back-and-forth works is because Stephen has created an incredibly supportive environment where everyone feels totally comfortable blurting out the first thing that comes to mind. We'd all say things we regretted multiple times a day, but we'd also end up saying something that would crack open a tricky idea or would save a script, and it was all because we weren't overly self-conscious. More so than the brilliance of the writing, it's the communal atmosphere inside those offices that makes that show one of a kind.

When I was interviewed for the job, I remember feeling like they were really happy with my submission packet, and that they had only brought me in to get a sense of what kind of a person I was. They know they've built this comedic Shangri-la, and they don't want to bring in anyone who's going to dismantle it. You get the sense that someone could be an outright genius, but they'd still pa.s.s on him or her if they were a f.u.c.king a.s.shole.

How involved is Stephen in the daily writing process?

Everything goes through Stephen. Every word goes through Stephen. Depending on the day, he'd rewrite anywhere from a few paragraphs to entire scripts. What that guy is capable of is jaw-dropping. He made us look good all the time. You'd write what you thought was a great joke and then he'd read it and he'd laugh and then he'd instantly pitch a tag for your joke that was twice as funny as the joke itself. To be honest, I've never seen anything like it before. Comedy just poured out of him, and it all came out completely polished and perfect and unexpected and hilarious. And he did it at will.

How much of the interview segments on Colbert is written versus improvised by Stephen?

I'd say about 75 percent of his interviews are completely improvised. [Laughs] It's mind-blowing.

Stephen is not just riffing-he's riffing in the voice of a character that is simultaneously a conservative archetype and a comedic deconstruction of that archetype. And he's doing it while arguing with an economics professor, or a presidential biographer, or a botanist specializing in Amazonian plant life. The man is impossible.

What was the difference in writing jokes for The Colbert Report versus jokes at The Onion?

At The Onion, the goal was to never have something sound like a joke. Comedy was delivered as fact. Because of that, I was used to a really dry and understated approach. And you write jokes differently that way. You try to hide the mechanics of them a bit more. Nothing's ever written in set-up/punch line order. You're squeezing jokes into introductory clauses. You're mixing setups and punch lines together. So when I went to Colbert, I had to learn how to write a hard joke again.

What does that mean, a hard joke?

I just mean a joke that's going to get a big laugh. The advantage of print is that you don't care if your audience laughs or not. You care, but the medium gives you some distance. You're not standing right there when the punch line is delivered. So you're less concerned with whether it's met with a chuckle or a laugh or just a nod of appreciation.

But when you're writing for TV-in front of a live audience-you want laughs. I mean, it's pretty key. At The Onion, you can argue, the point was to make them not laugh. You were trying to phrase comedy in a way where at first glance someone would mistake it for a genuine newspaper article.

Writing for TV is a different skill set. It forces you to become a performer in a way. The timing is different when something is performed versus when it's read silently on a page. You become more sensitive to some things. Economy of language is really important. You can't weigh a joke down with extra words, or you'll lose that joke on TV.

And how about the difference between writing jokes on Community versus The Colbert Report?

A lot of what I did at Colbert translates to Community, but because Community is a single-camera show, without a live audience, I can also write the way I used to at The Onion. I can sneak in jokes that don't pay off right away or that a viewer might miss the first time. I love comedy that's a slow burn, where it takes a couple of seconds to connect all the different bits of information in a joke before it lands. There's this delayed reaction that is wonderful. Thinking. Thinking. Huge laugh. You can't do that for a show with a live audience-that's death. You can do it every now and then, but you don't want two seconds of complete silence after the end of a joke before you get a laugh. It's awkward. It feels like something has gone wrong.

The great thing about Dan Harmon, and the reason I wanted to work for him, is that he always puts the work first. He's there, day in and day out, trying to write the best possible twenty-two minutes he can. He's not concerned with reviews, or with how the show will do in the ratings, or how hard he has to push himself to achieve the results he wants. The only thing he cares about is quality. And I think that translates on-screen.

Community is also nice because I get to mix emotions. I like comedy that has moments of heart in it, or sadness, or fear. I like comedy that makes people feel different things while they're laughing. The Onion and The Colbert Report were the same way. It's what I'm naturally drawn to.

You just mentioned the word fear and have used it a few times since we began the interview. Are you a fearful person?

[Laughs] I was scared a lot as a kid, especially of animals. I was attacked over and over again by animals.

When I was fourteen months old, living in Brazil, my parents accidentally set me on top of an anthill. I got bit hundreds of times and had to be rushed to the hospital. I have no memory of that, though.

Then when I was around four, a monkey at a zoo threw a hardened piece of feces at my head. Again, no memory of it, but a traumatic event nonetheless.

The one incident I do remember was when I was eleven. My family and I went to the San Diego Zoo, where they had a Birds of Prey exhibit. We sat in this little outdoor amphitheater, and these falcons and eagles flew all around us catching food. At the end of the show, they had a place where you could pose next to the trainer and this bald eagle and get a photograph taken. Everyone lined up for the photo, except for me-I was terrified. So I stood maybe fifteen feet to the side. I remember picking up my head and making eye contact with the bald eagle, and two seconds later that d.a.m.n thing was on top of me, clawing at my back and pecking at my head. I had to be rushed to the medical tent. I always thought the incident was telling. All that eagle had to do was make momentary eye contact with me, and thousands of years of raw instinct kicked back in-one glance and that eagle identified me as easy prey. That sums me up pretty well as a person. [Laughs] I cast the shadow of a trembling field mouse.

Do you think that comedy writers are more p.r.o.ne to fear and depression? Or is it just that comedy writers tend to talk a lot more about depression than those in other occupations?

It's hard to say if comedy writers are more depressed. It's definitely an image that's been popularized and, to a certain extent, romanticized.

For me, having someone laugh at something I've written is all about getting approval. Sometimes I wonder if I write compulsively because it's the most direct way I have of regulating my brain chemistry. It's all about overcoming a deficiency. Medication helps, but that hit of approval from an awesome joke or script can't be beat.

And it goes way back. When I first started getting noticed for being funny, back in high school, I would keep track in a notebook of exactly how many times per period I would make the cla.s.s laugh. "Seven times, first period, Monday." And then I would try to beat that number the next day. There was never a honeymoon period with comedy. I took it way too seriously, way too early.

Talent, intelligence, hard work-they all help, but nothing sharpens your writing faster than the desperate desire for validation. Having your self-worth inextricably linked to your work may be unhealthy, but it's also responsible for most of my success.

Well, at least this particular compulsion is productive.

Sure. But, then again, I don't know how productive it is when I'm writing tweets at 3:00 a.m. after fourteen hours at Community. Apparently, writing on a critically acclaimed network comedy isn't enough. Apparently, I still need to be told by a complete stranger that I'm funny at 3:00 a.m.14 Has this compulsion to write jokes, at all times of the day or night, gotten more extreme over the years?

Actually, it used to be worse. When I met my wife, Mary, I was twenty-two years old, and I was living like an insane person. There was writing all over the walls in my bedroom. They were covered with joke ideas. G.o.d bless her heart. I remember when I went down to visit The Onion offices in person for the first time in 2000, Mary carefully transcribed every single scribble onto a piece of paper and then painted my walls white. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me.

She's my life. I love her so much, and for a million different reasons. I was a disaster before Mary came along. Still to this day, if she goes away for the weekend, I instantly regress. Three hours after she's out the door, there's suddenly food all over the bedroom floor and I'm naked for some reason. It's terrifying.

Do you ever wonder where comedy will be one hundred years from now? I often wonder if it will be totally indecipherable to us.

I'm not even sure where it's going to be ten years from now. It changes so fast. But in the end-it doesn't really matter. Comedy for me is about expressing something inside myself. And the human condition will always be around.