by Mike Sacks
Many times over my career I had a joke that I was absolutely sure about. It would work all week at the reading and at the rehearsal. But by the time it got in front of an audience, it was lukewarm.
That’s one of the things that fascinates me about humor writing. If you work as, say, a plumber or an electrician for forty years, I’d imagine your work tends to become less mysterious over time. Pipe A goes into Pipe B. This wire needs to be attached to that wire. With comedy, however, it seems that no matter how long you’ve worked in the field, it remains just as murky as it might have felt in the beginning.
It remains difficult. You never really know. But I think you develop a thermometer of sorts. I think you do become more sophisticated about what’s going to work and what isn’t. But because comedy is so subjective, what would put me on the floor will have you standing stone-faced. And it could change day to day.
Here’s why this business makes you crazy. It was early on in Kirstie Alley’s stay on Cheers. The beat was essentially Sam comes into her office to talk about something. She gives him a bad time, and he turns to leave and says something to the effect of, “You know, I bet when you smile, you light up a room. You should smile a lot more. It would really help.” She pretends to be coy and shy. Eventually she does end up smiling at him. The joke was Sam then saying, “I’ll be darned.” Meaning, her smile didn’t light up the room. And all week it worked. But when it came time for the shoot, it didn’t work in front of the studio audience.
Looking back, do you think that joke needed some tweaking?
We figured it out in editing. During production we thought Sam’s “I’ll be darned” was the joke. In fact, Kirstie’s reaction after the line when her smile turned to smoldering hatred was what we’d been laughing at all week. And, fortunately, it worked on film for the audience at home where it mattered most.
How did you go from taking an unproductive comedy-writing course with Garry Shandling to landing your first TV-writing job?
My brother and I wanted to write comedy. We were both dissatisfied with our lives. He was living in a Volkswagen bus with his wife. I began working as an advertising copywriter at a small firm in Los Angeles.
Les and I decided to try our hand at writing for TV. Sitcom wasn’t the same pejorative term it had been. There were at least three high-quality comedies on the air; they were all different. There was All in the Family. There was M*A*S*H. And there was Mary Tyler Moore. Les and I were big fans of all three but especially M*A*S*H and Mary Tyler Moore. We watched some episodes and fired off a spec script to both of them. This served as our audition. We just watched and thought we could do it. Simple as that. M*A*S*H responded right away. For the Mary Tyler Moore script, MTM Enterprises took eleven months to get back to us, during which time we had pretty much decided to quit. But after a couple of scripts they ended up putting us on staff.
MTM, which produced The Mary Tyler Moore Show, was where you wanted to be as a TV comedy writer. There were so many good shows going on. It was really a community. MTM had picnics; they had tennis tournaments. It was just a fun place to be. It was a very bright, happening place.
Writing comedy as a team is always a difficult situation, even in the best of circumstances. But how much more difficult was it for you and your brother? Not only being writing partners, but also siblings?
We basically shared comedy DNA; we’d usually laugh at the same things, find the same people funny.
As showrunners, we kind of split functions. With comedy teams, one writer might be more joke-oriented; another might be more story-oriented. But it’s very hard to differentiate. Les is very good at organizing and putting stories in order and sequence. He’s more analytical. He was a good goalkeeper. I would say I’m a more active pitcher of stories and jokes. Obviously, there was overlap.
Were there ever fights over jokes?
There were, but if we got to the point where there was still a disagreement after discussion, we’d say, “Let’s just throw it out.” And over the years, arguments declined in frequency and intensity. No joke is worth the time and effort spent on talking about it. If you’re unable to come up with a better joke, that’s a bigger problem anyway. Also, we had to find a way to get along so as not to spoil family gatherings.
In 1978, you became the showrunners on Taxi. The executive producer of Taxi was Jim Brooks, who later went on to direct Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good as It Gets. In Hollywood, Brooks is talked about in almost reverential tones, but with also a sort of fear. There are stories that to work for him is a rewarding experience that can also be quite challenging.
He was definitely a perfectionist. He always thought we could do better. I had a friend in comedy who said the worst day of his life was the day he met Jim Brooks—he realized he was never going to be the best. Jim has this fertile, fast, unpredictable comic perspective on things. We learned so much from him. He always had a fix. Even if it didn’t work, it usually led somewhere.
Jim and the other producers on Taxi [Stan Daniels, David Davis, and Ed. Weinberger] had this formula—and this is just my opinion—but they felt that creating a great show has to involve a lot of angst. There has to be pain. If the show has an easy week, it’s suspect.
Don’t most shows—especially great shows—involve great angst?
I’m not convinced that you have to have a painful process to get a good result. Certainly, you can’t be lackadaisical when you want something and it’s not coming. When you’re not getting what you want out of a scene, you’ve got to keep working at it. Believe me, Les and I had plenty of painful moments when we were later in charge, but we never insisted on difficulty being an essential aspect of the process.
One of the things that always struck me about Taxi is how melancholy its theme song was. It’s a very low-key opening for a sitcom.
I remember liking it a lot when I first heard it. Up to that point, it was only big feel-good openings for sitcoms. But for Taxi, the theme song is very subdued, and for a reason. There was a sadness to Taxi, I think. There’s a sadness to all the characters. Someone once described Taxi as being a show about hell. All of the characters were essentially stuck in a very bleak environment, struggling to get out. I can definitely see that.
We were obviously not going for a subdued theme when we created Cheers. We spent a tremendous amount of time on it; it went through many different versions. Two writers worked on that song, Gary Portnoy, who had written for Air Supply and Dolly Parton, and a writer named Judy Hart Angelo. The first version was god-awful. So pat, so on the nose, rhyming, cheers with beers. It ultimately took five attempts. But when we heard the final version, we knew. It’s interesting that with all of the writing talent that worked on Cheers over the years, the five words that are still the most associated with the show came not from any of us, but from the songwriters: “Where everybody knows your name.”
Taxi had a huge cast. Was there ever a problem with a specific actor not being able to sell a joke that you wrote?
When you have a gang comedy as we did on both Taxi and Cheers, you have your leads, but you have to service everybody. This goes for both actors and their characters. Some actors are surer than others. Some characters are more multidimensional than others. Some you have to protect.
How do you protect a character?
You give them foolproof jokes. You give them jokes that don’t necessarily have to be played, that don’t depend solely on delivery. The cast was mostly very good on Taxi. I’m thinking of two characters at most.
One of the stand-out characters on Taxi was Latka Gravas, a mechanic from an unnamed foreign country, played by comedian Andy Kaufman. A lot has been written about Andy’s genius since he died in 1984 at the age of thirty-five, but could you recognize his genius at the time?
Andy was excellent in the role and yet I always felt Latka didn’t fit in with the rest of the characters on Taxi. The rest were all fairly realistic. Alex Rieger, the J
udd Hirsch character, would be a point of contrast. The Latka character would have been better for an animated show. We went a little too broad with Latka. He was from a fictional country. He spoke in a completely invented accent and language.
Whether or not Andy was a genius, I don’t know. He was sui generis. I’ve never met or heard a performer like him. I think there was a sadistic streak in his stand-up. Like reading the entirety of The Great Gatsby to an audience. I do feel that the character of Latka was the best thing Andy did, and it’s how he will mostly be remembered.
What was Andy like to write for, to work with?
If Andy was unhappy he certainly didn’t show us that. He was mostly very cooperative—when he was himself. But Andy had it written into his contract that his lounge-lizard character, Tony Clifton, would be featured on two Taxi episodes each season. Clifton was everything Andy wasn’t. Loud, obnoxious, rude, misogynistic. So when we wrote these episodes, we’d give the Clifton character a minimal amount of lines. I think he had one or two at most. It had nothing really to do with the story. But Andy couldn’t even do that. Kaufman, as Clifton, was just all over the place, intentionally. The director would ask, “Can you say a line this way?” And Tony Clifton would say, “I’m doin’ it the way I want. You can go fuck yourself!” [Laughs] That may be the first time I ever laughed at Tony Clifton.
The upshot is that Andy wanted to be fired—or he wanted Tony Clifton to be fired. And he wanted the firing to be done in front of a lot of people on the soundstage. He wanted the security to come in. He wanted to make it a performance. Right after lunch one day, he was asked to leave the set. He exploded, “I’m not leavin’! You gotta deal . . . you gotta deal with me!” He went crazy, and the guards came in and escorted him out. He was screaming all the way. I guess in his mind, just great fun.
This particular event has become infamous in the comedy community, but I can also imagine that if you were somehow involved—that if the show you were working on was being held up because of such a performance—it might not have been terribly entertaining.
If this happened today, it’d be all over the Internet. Everything Andy did would be. In a way it’s too bad Andy was before his time. He would have reached a lot more people on YouTube than he ever did on Taxi. Anyway, I found it surreal. I didn’t find it funny. I find it even less funny in retrospect that we allowed the indulgence. In the seventies, everything was a little wilder. It was, “Hey, let’s be part of this. We’re young. We’re hip. Let’s let it happen.”
We were having a party after the shoot on the Taxi stage one evening. Andy invited me and Jimmy Burrows, the director for most episodes, to come up to his dressing room and meet a poet. The poet was a lady—young, slender, and blonde. Andy introduced us as the producer and director and asked us to sit on the sofa. He informed us that the young lady preferred to write and read her poetry in the nude. She declined at first but then started to disrobe. At that point Jimmy, obviously not as big a poetry fan as I was, said we’d best be going. He reminded me that our wives were a matter of feet away at the party and would soon be wondering where we’d gone. Looking back on it, I’m thinking maybe that that’s what Andy wanted—our wives to walk in. Not out of any animosity toward us but just as, what . . . performance art? If all this had happened to somebody else I might have loved it.
It got stranger. Tony Clifton was once kicked off the set, and he returned with a gun. There were about two or three days when we said, “Well, we can put up with this.” But then we concluded that it wasn’t fair to the rest of the cast to allow this type of disruption to go on. We were shooting a television show. We eventually decided this was something we couldn’t tolerate. Call us party poopers, if you must.
From Taxi, you went on to create Cheers. You mentioned earlier that the setting for Taxi was quite bleak. With Cheers, however, I’d imagine it was extremely important, in a visual sense, to create not only an inviting bar for the fictional customers but also for the home viewers.
That’s right. Les, Jimmy, and I had sort of settled on Boston as the setting for the series. I had never visited Boston, so my wife and I went to look around. We were staying at a hotel across from a bar called the Bull & Finch. We started our journey of discovery there on a Friday afternoon. All the regulars were already expounding on the state of the world. I loved it. I looked around and told my wife, “We don’t need to go anywhere else. This is it.” She said, “You know, you’re going to spoil this place for their regulars.” I said, “Sure, I guess, if we get really lucky . . .” I hope they’ve forgiven us over time.
The Bull & Finch eventually became the third-biggest tourist attraction in all of Boston.
The regulars later did complain the bar was ruined. It became a huge industry. I feel bad about that. But, look, we had no idea anything like that was going to happen.
On the bright side, the owner of the Bull & Finch reportedly became a millionaire.
He did well, yes.
After Cheers ended in 1993, an entertainment company built facsimiles of the Cheers bar in airports and hotels around the country. In each, there were two animatronic characters, Bob and Hank, modeled after Norm and Cliff. One was a delivery driver, the other a businessman. They would crack corny vaudevillian-style jokes.
We were asked permission and we said, “Sure.” It was pretty much underway by the time we heard about it. I always found that strange. You entered a bar where no one, including the robots, knew your name.
Cheers was very much a character-driven show, less gimmicky and quieter than other sitcoms. Is this why it might have taken longer to hit with audiences?
It definitely took awhile to find an audience. The first year it aired, 1982, we were ranked seventy-fourth out of seventy-seven shows. I think we would have been canceled, but NBC didn’t really have any other shows to replace us. Over the summer, our competition showed repeats. It was then that the vast majority of the TV audience on Thursday night had to either talk to each other or tune in to watch us. When we began the second season, we had already made the top twenty. I’m not sure that would happen now. We wouldn’t have been given a second chance.
Another advantage was that we had more time per show. Sitcoms now have almost three minutes less content, around twenty-two minutes—we had about twenty-five minutes. The network now wants more room for advertising. Consequently, everything is condensed, and, especially when you’re first starting, you have to overwhelm people with comedy. As a writer, you don’t have the time to establish a character before they have to earn their first laugh. With Cheers, we had the luxury of more time. If you can get a joke right after a character’s introduction, that’s fine. If not, let’s wait.
Is it true that Bill Cosby was once up for the role of Sam Malone?
In the beginning, the network called us about Bill Cosby playing the lead character. We were Cosby fans but we took a vow, a blood oath, before we started the show, that we would never have a “name” in the title of the show, whether it be an actor or a character. Bill Cosby was a star. We wanted to avoid Bill Cosby in Cheers. Because if you ever lose that star, the show is over. So that was the main reason we didn’t use Cosby and I’m happy that we didn’t. I’m sure he’s happy, too. Two or three years later he came along with one of the most successful sitcoms in history.
Did the Cheers writing staff have any rules regarding jokes? What to avoid?
We had a rule that if writers were pitching jokes and two writers came up with the same punch line at once, it was gone.
Why?
If two writers arrived at the same joke simultaneously, someone in America would, too. Maybe that wasn’t the case, but it was one of our superstitions.
When a show lasts eleven years, such as Cheers, how can the writers even remember what jokes have already been used?
Jokes you can remember, particularly if they’re yours. There are entire plot lines I’ve forgotten, but I always remember specific jokes.
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If you’re on the air a certain amount of time, say five or six years, there’s no way you can remember all the shows you’ve done. For plot points, we had a show historian. All she did, essentially, was sit in the writers’ room when we were pitching stories and say, “You did that in season three.” By the end of our run, that was happening more and more. If you’re on the air a certain amount of time, there’s no way you can remember the shows you’ve done.
Cheers had a large writing staff, didn’t it?
It varied. We started with five writers full-time, and then a couple of writers would come in to do punch-up, including Jerry Belson [The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gomer Pyle–U.S.M.C., The Tracey Ullman Show] and David Lloyd [The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Wings, Frasier]. It was small for a week’s show, but that’s how we wanted it. We always considered it a compliment when we were called a writers’ show. To us, the writers were the stars of the show. After we’d been on a few seasons we had established writers actually sending us spec scripts.
Cheers certainly never talked down to its audience. I remember jokes that concerned Dorothy Parker and seventeenth-century poet John Donne. I don’t recall similar jokes on Laverne & Shirley.
We had a publicist at NBC at that time, and we had lunch with him one day. We were talking about the low ratings for Cheers, and he sighed and said, “I’m going to be honest with you. I just don’t know how to sell a show that does Arthur Schopenhauer jokes.”
A joke about a nineteenth-century German philosopher. Not exactly a “can’t miss.”
That’s what we liked about it. Diane met an old friend of hers from graduate school and they were going on and on about this and that. Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the subjects mentioned. Diane’s line at the end of the conversation was, “Well, that’s enough ‘Schop’ talk.” To them, it was screamingly funny. It would have been a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual pun that would have confused and annoyed anyone else who had heard it. It was very much a Diane joke. It wouldn’t have worked with Norm.
