Because this is a book about comedy, and because I’m being paid by the word, I thought I’d spend some time talking about comedy in general. Not that comedy can be taught: I’ve never taken a comedy writing class, nor have I worked with a comedy writer who has. Humor isn’t something you study or analyze—it’s just something you pick up. As a kid, you watch the shows that make you laugh and you begin to discriminate between the funny (Bugs Bunny) and the not funny (Woody Woodpecker). When I was six years old and watched Woody Allen do stand-up on The Ed Sullivan Show, I thought, This guy really gets me.
Comedy became my savior. As a kid, if you’re bad at sports and not good-looking, you start trying to be funny yourself. You begin by repeating the great jokes you heard; then you try doing your own jokes in their style; finally, you do your own material. If no one laughs, you quit comedy and become a bitter alcoholic. But if they do laugh—ah, if they do!—you go into comedy and become a bitter alcoholic.
It’s exactly the same as the way a baby learns to talk—the baby is just listening, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Eventually the baby will babble a few sounds, and this will get amazing feedback from the parents. So the baby will learn a word, then a few more, and pretty soon the kid will be talking so much you wish he’d just shut the eff up. But no baby ever learns to talk from taking a class. You never meet a baby who says, “I’m studying talking with this professional talker down at the Learning Annex. Last week, he taught us ‘ba-ba.’”
* * *
I was born three weeks early. My mom had gone to see the Jacques Tati comedy Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, and she laughed so hard she went into labor. I always thought this was an exciting origin story: “I am Comedy Man—born from the power of Laughter!” But twenty years later, I actually saw Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, and I couldn’t figure out what my mom was laughing at. It’s not that the jokes were bad; it’s that they were nonexistent. Tati was a comedian only the French could love.
So why am I funny? (If you’re thinking that I’m not funny, well, screw you!) I don’t think I have a talent or a gift—I write comedy because I just can’t help myself.
Exhibit A: I’ve traveled throughout the world, from Algeria to Zanzibar, and I’ve only gotten food poisoning once. It was from a health food restaurant in Beverly Hills. I lay in bed sweating and shivering for three days before I finally dragged myself to the emergency room. When the doctor asked me my symptoms, I told him in a string of jokes—this is how I talk: “Doc, my tongue is the color of Whoopi Goldberg, and I’m actually throwing up food other people ate. And stuff is oozing out of both ends of me—I’m like a human cannoli!”
The doctor laughed and called the nurses in: “Do it for them!”
So I did a second show for the nurses. I was dying . . . but I was killing.
The doctor patted me on the back. “Mr. Reiss, if you can make all these jokes, clearly you’re not that sick.” He sent me on my way.
An hour later, they found me collapsed in the hospital parking lot.
Exhibit B: My wife and I went to Hawaii on our honeymoon, and we visited Pearl Harbor. (This is a convenient symbol for how the whole honeymoon went.) We were standing over the wreck of the battleship Missouri—one of the most solemn spots in America—and I started laughing. Here’s why: I looked over and saw a group of tourists from Tokyo, smiling and chatting away in Japanese. I imagined they were saying, “Nice work, boys. Look at the hole in that boat! This is a day that will live in famy.”
Being funny is like being tall. People always ask me, “Are there ever days when you wake up and you’re not funny?” No one asks Kobe Bryant, “Are there days when you wake up and you’re not tall?”
Like Kobe Bryant, I’m just lucky there’s a job that pays me to be this way. A century ago, someone like Kobe would work in a store—he’d be the guy you ask to get stuff off a high shelf; similarly, a guy like me would be locked in the basement of a madhouse, wrapped in cold, wet sheets.
But I’m not a madman, a genius, or an artist. I’m actually more like a chicken. Sometimes things form in my brain, and they get bigger and bigger, until I have to write them down just to free up some space in my head. It’s the same way a chicken lays an egg. And when people eat that egg, the chicken is probably thinking, Really? You like that? It just came out of my butt.
I’m just lucky I can do this for a living, because I have no other skills. I can’t sing or dance or play a musical instrument. I can’t skate or ski or speak a foreign language. I typed this whole book with one finger.
So what would I do if I couldn’t write comedy? I’d write for Jimmy Fallon. Look at it: “Fallon” is kind of just “no laff spelled backward.
The fact is, if I couldn’t write comedy, I’d probably be a funny lawyer. The kind who gets a lot of laughs in court. And then his client goes to the electric chair. For shoplifting. (I told that joke in Qatar, and a Saudi Arabian in the audience went, “Yeah? So?”)
There were three great comedians in my formative years—Bill Cosby, Bill Murray, and Richard Pryor—and they wrecked comedy for a generation. How? By never saying anything funny. You can quote a Steve Martin joke, or a Rodney Dangerfield line, but Pryor, Cosby, and Murray? The things they said were funny only when they said them. In Cosby’s case, it didn’t even need to be sentences: “The thing of the thing puts the milk in the toast, and ha, ha, ha!” It was gibberish and America loved it.
The problem was that they inspired a generation of comedians who tried coasting on personality—they were all attitude and no jokes. It was also a time when comedy stars didn’t seem to care. Bill Murray made some lousy movies; Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy made even more; and any script that was too lame for these guys, Chevy Chase made. These were smart people—they had to know how bad these films were, but they just grabbed a paycheck and did them. Most of these comic actors started as writers—they could have written their own scripts, but they rarely bothered.
Then, at the end of a decade of lazy comedy and half-baked material, The Simpsons came along. We cared about jokes, and we worked endless hours to cram as many into a show as possible. I’m not sure we can take all the credit, but TV and movies started trying harder. Jokes were back. Shows like 30 Rock and Arrested Development demanded that you pay attention. These days, comedy stars like Seth Rogen, Amy Schumer, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and Jonah Hill actually write the comedies they star in.
So what is comedy? I’ve spent my whole life making it, and yet I have no idea. I’ve read all the philosophers on humor—Aristotle, Freud, Henri Bergson—and they’re completely clueless. The latest theory, according to a fascinating book called The Humor Code, calls comedy an act of “benign transgression.” For example:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
It was an act of benign transgression.
I think all these theories are nonsense. Comedy is too weird and wonderful and subjective to have an overarching theory. I mean, what unites Nichols and May with Cheech and Chong? Nothing, except that they both suck.
I do have a theory of jokes, however. It’s not comprehensive or profound, but it’s an observation I’ve never heard anyone else make: When a joke is over, it’s over. All the loose ends are tied up, the journey is complete. All the weirdness that preceded the punchline now makes sense. Here’s an example:
A duck walks into a pharmacy and asks for ChapStick. The druggist says, “Will that be cash or credit?” And the duck says, “You can put it on my bill.”
Think of all the questions this story raises: Why is a duck in a pharmacy? Why does he need ChapStick? He has no lips. He can talk, too? But none of this surprises the druggist; he’s just worried how he’s going to get paid.
But with that punchline—“You can put it on my bill”—all those questions collapse. In a crazy twist of logic, it all starts to make sense: we have no further questions, and we don’t care whether the duck gets over his case of chapped bill. The hell with him.
I love the illogical logic of some jokes. Take this line by George Carlin: “Beethoven was so deaf he thought he was a painter.” It kind of makes sense.
(I consider Carlin the greatest comedian ever. He delivered his jokes beautifully, and they’re funny even when I steal them.)
A joke doesn’t have to be illogical, either—sometimes a punchline wraps it up like a tidy mystery story. Let me close by telling one of my favorites:
A bartender is closing up shop and sees a patron lying on the floor. He picks him up, the guy falls down. He picks him up, the guy falls down. Finally, the bartender slings the guy over his shoulder and carries him to an address he finds in the guy’s wallet. When they get to the guy’s house, the bartender stands him up again—he crumples in a heap.
The bartender bangs on the door and the guy’s wife answers. “Here’s your drunken bum of a husband,” the bartender says.
The wife asks, “Where’s his wheelchair?”
Great Comedies You’ve Never Seen (But Should!)
The American Film Institute made a list of the hundred greatest comedies of all time, called “AFI: 100 Years . . . 100 Laughs.” That works out to one laugh per year, or roughly what Dane Cook has given me.
The AFI list is very solid, with lots of movies you really should see: Annie Hall, Animal House, Airplane!, Groundhog Day . . . all the usual suspects. I don’t really care for their top two picks: Tootsie (a man in a dress?) and Some Like It Hot (two men in dresses?), although I do like number sixty-seven, Mrs. Doubtfire (a man in an old-lady dress).
Nazis don’t seem funny, but they score three films on the list, the Hitler hat trick: The Producers, To Be or Not to Be, and The Great Dictator. But where are the funny zombies? There’s a surprising number of great zombie comedies and none of them made the list: Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead, Dead Alive, Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness, and the deeply satirical Dawn of the Dead, where zombies stumble around a mall like brain-dead consumers.
You should see every one of Tex Avery’s hilarious cartoons, as well as the live-action cartoons they inspired: The Mask, Kung Fu Hustle, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The Marx Brothers have four films on the AFI list, but they made a couple of later films that are very underrated: Go West and A Night in Casablanca.
And any comedy fan has to see the documentary The Aristocrats. In it, seventy-five different comedians tell the exact same joke—and it’s not even a very good joke. But they all tell it in different styles, and it demonstrates how many different ways there are to be funny. It’s also the Olympics of comedy, as you judge which comic tells the joke the best. I agree with the filmmakers’ choice: Gilbert Gottfried.
Finally, here’s a list of great comedies you’ve never seen and probably never heard of:
The Six Greatest Books About Comedy (Besides the One You’re Holding)
Tweets for the Sweet
I loved everything about the abovementioned Poking a Dead Frog except the title: what the hell does that mean? The book even taught me something new: that late-night comedy shows are recruiting their writers from Twitter. It’s a great showcase for young writers—The Simpsons’ newest staff member, Megan Amram, got her start on Twitter, amassing 700,000 followers. It’s also a great training tool for aspiring writers—the 280-character limit enforces brevity, a comic necessity, and the number of likes and retweets provides instant feedback on how funny the jokes is.
And so, at the age of fifty-seven, I started tweeting, and even after thirty-five years as a professional, it’s making me a better comedy writer. Follow me at @MikeReissWriter. Here’s a sampling:
OJ leaves prison: I just want to be left alone so I can shiv a former wife. Whoops! I mean ‘live a normal life.’
-----------
Chevy Chase turns 74 today. Thanks for all the year of laughter and all the great movie.
-----------
To those who say name is destiny, I counter with Pete Best, Donny Most, and Cedric the Entertainer.
-----------
Justin Timberlake sees a doctor:
JT: Got this feeling in my body
DR: I really need more to go on.
JT: I can’t stop the feeling
DR: It’s MS.
-----------
NEWS: MAN BURNS AT “BURNING MAN”
His last words: “The irony stings. But what really hurts is the burning.”
-----------
Trump doesn’t act like a President. He acts like Gary Busey playing a President.
-----------
Jimi Hendrix would be seventy-five this month. If he’d lived, he’d be dead by now.
-----------
“The cabin boy, the pastry chef
The Gustaffson Fam-i-ly
Dave Pendergast and the rest . . .”
—The 9 people who died in the wreck of the SS Minnow
-----------
If you’re looking for good news in these turbulent times, think of this: Julia Roberts hardly ever makes movies anymore.
-----------
Hidden message in my note to Trump: first letter of lines!
You suck
Oh, you suck
U suck
Suck, you do
U suck
Christ, you suck
Know what? You suck
-----------
Unlike Coldplay songs, no two snowflakes are exactly the same.
-----------
After a long battle with depression, Charlie Brown has killed himself. Friends, family overcome with good grief.
-----------
Wouldn’t it be cool if George Romero died and came back as a zombie?
Or George Lucas died and came back as a robot?
Or Michael Bay died?
-----------
“Madman Lures Five Children to Abandoned Building—Four Die.”
—Synopsis of Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory