by Guy Branum
A few weeks later, one of the women, Laura Swisher, asked me to be in a video she was making for the show she hosted. The network was TechTV, a cable network about technology that some guy who founded Microsoft but wasn’t Bill Gates started when he wasn’t busy owning the world’s largest yacht. The show was a late-night talk show about random bits of magic from the Internet; it was called Unscrewed with Martin Sargent. It was basically like Tosh.0 or Web Soup but eight years too early and three times less funny. Laura was doing a video about the new, dazzling trend of flash mobs, and she needed one sad man to be a flash mob of his own. I drove in to San Francisco, danced around for an afternoon in a tutu, then watched myself a few days later on what was barely television. I was proud of myself.
By this point in my career, I’d gotten fired from that one legal job, then I’d gotten hired by a company that telemarketed for high-end tech clients. I briefly quit that job to be campaign manager for a woman running for Oakland City Council, then realized that she expected the job to be something more akin to a body servant than a political consultant, so I quit her campaign and begged the telemarketing place to take me back. They did. She won her campaign and became one of Oakland’s least successful mayors.1 I stayed at the telemarketing job over a year after that, but eventually, I realized, I had to face my real life. I convinced the HR manager at the telemarketing place to include me in a bout of layoffs2 so I could receive unemployment, and I started aggressively applying for jobs as a lawyer.
It was in these circumstances that I performed said dance in said tutu for Ms. Swisher, and you can imagine my reaction when Ms. Swisher called me a few weeks later to tell me that her show would be needing a new online-content writer. The job was amazing, with full benefits and a very respectable salary. It would also mean that I’d get to be a writer—better yet, that I didn’t have to be a lawyer.
The show sent me the writing packet, and it had a very tight turnaround. I stayed up all night working on it and, a few days later, got called in for an interview. Then another interview. Then an assurance that I would find out in two to three days. For nearly a week, I stared at a phone—a landline, no less—waiting for it to ring. Fearing it would and fearing it wouldn’t. Fearing I wouldn’t be home to get it. Knowing that the thing I wanted was a thing I wanted so bad there was no way that phone could ever ring and deliver me from the drudgery of the law to the broad, sunny uplands of a career as a professional comedy writer. There was no way that phone could ring.
It rang. I was there to answer it.
Dick
I have previously expressed that The Dick Van Dyke Show occupied an important place in my childhood. It provided me with an idyllic vision of suburban domesticity, but it was also the first place I saw a creative workplace represented. The premise of The Dick Van Dyke Show is that Rob Petrie is a nice suburban dad who is the head writer of a variety show in New York. It’s two shows, really: a suburban family sitcom and an urban workplace sitcom. Actually it was three shows, because the cast was constantly pulling out vaudeville skills like singing, dancing, and stand-up comedy, so it was sort of a variety show, too. However many shows it was, it seemed like the best possible life a human could live.
The Dick Van Dyke Show was originally based on Carl Reiner’s real life as a writer for Your Show of Shows. Yes, Richie Petrie is Rob Reiner and Laura Petrie is that woman who says “I’ll have what she’s having” in When Harry Met Sally. It was also not the only attempt to mythologize the magic of the Your Show of Shows writers’ room. Laughter on the 23rd Floor is a Neil Simon play about his time working there; My Favorite Year was a play Mel Brooks produced about his time there. Why are these guys spending so much time writing about a workplace almost no one has experienced firsthand?
One answer is that they’re lazy. A writers’ room is where they work—they just want to write about their own lives.
One answer is that it cuts out a middleman. Workplace sitcom writers’ rooms are full of people writing jokes to put into the mouths of the employees of some fictitious business. In a show about a writers’ room, the business is jokes. There’s no clean-up on aisle three like on Superstore or app to launch like on Silicon Valley—it’s just jokes on jokes on jokes.
But the real answer is people want dish. We want to know how the sausage gets made. You didn’t come here for all this rhapsodizing about life as a writer. You’ve slogged through hundreds of pages of my turgid, self-congratulatory cultural “analysis,” and now you finally get what you came for: me telling you which famous people I worked with are fun-crazy and which are batshit-crazy.
Comcast3
In January 2004, I began my professional writing career as an Associate Online Producer at TechTV. If two things defined the viewership of TechTV, it was that, one, they were extremely technically knowledgeable about the subjects that were discussed on the network, and, two, they were male. Five months into my employment, TechTV was purchased by G4, I was moved down to Los Angeles, and these facts became even truer. My faggy, political, video game–ignorant comedic voice wasn’t an obvious fit for these Axe body spray–saturated networks. The people who hired me loved me and thought I was funny, but that didn’t assuage my fear. On my first day of the job, as on my first day at every writing job since, I’ve understood exactly why I wasn’t a perfect writer for the show, then tried to do everything I could to try to turn myself into that.
Here are the biggest lessons I learned from my four years writing for a network for straight guys:
1. Find the parts of your voice that overlap with the show’s voice, and let those parts grow.
2. If you’re writing a joke about a thing you don’t know about, make sure it’s not just factually correct but tonally correct.
3. Fall in love with the people you write for. If you can appreciate their strengths, you’ll write to them.
Eventually, I also learned:
4. If you’re authoritative and funny, you can make teenage boys be fascinated by anything.4
5. When you can tell your show is about to be canceled, start stealing office supplies. Everyone else is losing their job, too, so they won’t notice.
I learned to be a functional, competent little writer at G4. My last job there was as head writer of X-Play, a video game review show that had sketches in it. The hosts, Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb, were funny, kind, and knew more about video games than nearly anyone on the staff. The fanboys of G4, who would grow up to become the trolls who gave us Gamergate, cut their teeth challenging the “real gamer” status of Adam and Morgan. This was ridiculous. I was the one who knew nothing about video games. They were, if anything, the last line of editorial defense against my ignorance. If I’d gotten something wrong, I knew that in the read-through. Adam or Morgan would just say “That’s not right.” It extended beyond just video games. In once script I wrote a line that began “Gravity is strong . . .” Morgan just said, “No it isn’t, it’s the weakest of the four fundamental forces.” That’s the kind of TV hosts I was working with there: ones who’d lovingly school you on anything from Disgaea to modern feminism to physics. It was quiz bowl as a workplace. It was pretty great.
I worked on that show for two years, and I might have stayed longer if it hadn’t become clear that I was no longer welcome on-camera.
See, the whole time I was at G4, I was doing bit parts in sketches. It was fun and meant I occasionally got recognized by nerds on the street. Over time, the nice bosses who’d hired me went away and were replaced by men in their fifties desperately trying to pander to men in their early twenties. They wanted boobs and dudes wearing leather wrist cuffs. To them, having a bald fat gay guy on-camera seemed somewhat at odds with G4’s purpose. I stopped getting cast in stuff. I felt a little shallow for being mad that I wasn’t getting to be on-camera, but fundamentally, I felt like the executives didn’t trust me anymore. I’d guided the show’s voice for two relatively successful years, but now they seemed to think my instincts weren’t “male” enough for the
show.
That’s when I learned the importance of workplace whining.
G4 was part of Comcast, which meant that for the last few years, we shared offices with E! Entertainment Television. That meant that the guy whose desk was directly opposite mine was a very thin, very attractive, very catty gay guy, Jesse. On my first day in the office, I laughed loudly, as I do, and Jesse leaned into the cubicle next to his and stage-whispered to the muscular accountant next to him, “If I have to listen to that laugh every day, I’m going to hang myself.”
We were soon the dearest of frenemies.
So I was DM-bitching to Jesse about the growing lack of respect I was feeling from the G4 higher-ups. Normally, Jesse would tell me to stop complaining so he could go back to talking about the hot guy he’d almost-fucked in Laguna Beach the previous weekend, but this time he just asked, “Would you want another job?”
I said yes. He gave me writing packet guidelines for one of the shows that his boss oversaw, Chelsea Lately. The deadline was the next day, and I stayed up all night writing it. I submitted, and a week later, I had the job.
Oh, and to answer your question, Olivia Munn smells like expensive hair products and the Nietzschean Will to Power.
Chelsea
Chelsea Lately paid me roughly three times what I’d made at G4. That’s important. For you to properly understand the fear echoing in my brain from the moment I got that job, you really have to get that fact. In the most fundamental of ways, I didn’t think I deserved it.
Even at my interview, I was, to some extent, apologizing for my inadequacy. I referenced one of the jokes in my packet and said it was a pretty obvious joke. Sue Murphy, the senior writer on the show and a comic I’d admired for years, leaned in and said, “Yes, it’s obvious, but someone in the room has to say it.” That’s what being a comedy writer is: someone who says all the jokes, then figures out which ones are actually funny.
At G4, we’d written everything on our own. We’d have read-throughs, and maybe do a bit of group punch-up here or there, but our work was primarily done alone at a desk. That’s not how a late-night show works. At Chelsea Lately, we went into a room at nine every morning, we brought up all the important pop culture news from the night before, and we did our best to say all the jokes, then figure out which ones are funny before eleven a.m. There was nowhere to hide.
The first day, I went into the writers’ room at nine sharp. No one else was there. When someone finally did enter—my office-mate, Heather McDonald—she told me I couldn’t sit where I was sitting. Everyone had an assigned seat, so I had to sit where the writer I was replacing sat. Since then, any time I’ve started work on a show, I discreetly ask one of the experienced writers where I should sit. They always have a clear answer.
The writers filed in, then Chelsea. This was back when she was somewhat famous, before she became extremely famous in 2010, then settled back down to quite famous around 2016. She was bright and enthusiastic and personable. By the time we went into the writers’ room, she’d already been up for three or four hours, working out and engaging in the innumerable wellness and restorative rituals of Los Angeles ladies, so she always arrived in workout clothes, slightly sweaty. She was usually chomping on a breakfast that would be unidentifiable to a midwesterner: a box of arugula, eighteen ounces of lean turkey, a beet and turmeric juice. Since it was my first day, she opened up with a brief interrogation. “Where are you from?” “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” “When were you last penetrated?” It was polite hazing that did the work of making me uncomfortable so I could settle in and get comfortable. After a few more, she shoved her arugula aside and we got to the business of jokes.
Pitching in a room is like Double Dutch: You have to see the rhythm of how it’s working, then jump in at exactly the right time so you’re not interrupting or getting interrupted. I had pitched jokes, yes, but this was my first time in the room of a daily show. My best friend, Ryan,5 had reminded me that on your first day at a job, you’re allowed to just observe and learn.
Here’s the thing, though: You can’t be scared of pitching. You can be cautious, you can self-censor to ensure quality. However, if you’re keeping quiet, you’re fundamentally assuming that if they hear the joke you really want to pitch, they’re not going to like it. I have totally seen people try to be quiet and stay under the radar and not offend. In the long run, it will not work, and on a late-night show, or a cable show with a small staff, it’s impossible. They hire people to make jokes. Give them your best, and if they don’t like your best, the show’s not a good fit for you. Or the profession isn’t.
Finally, on that first day, I reached the moment when I had a joke that was too good to not add. I tossed it in. I learned the rhythm. I became part of the show. I started feeling like I’d earned that money.6
It was fun to be writing for a woman’s voice. Getting to pitch jokes about my pussy or my period was a change. Plus, it was a show with a woman in charge, with a writing staff that was half women. From eyebrow threading to unwanted sexual attention from your dad’s male friends, women’s experiences weren’t novelties, they were the backbone of the show.
My voice wasn’t perfect for the show, though. In my first weeks, a couple of my jokes that Chelsea attempted to use fell flat. In each case, the joke relied on a specific word order. She doesn’t work like that; she can never be certain to deliver a phrase exactly the way it was written. I adapted: I stopped pitching jokes that hinged on word order and followed her comedic lead. Chelsea’s jokes are about perspective. She doesn’t need funny phrasing, she needs an opinion. If you can help her find that, she’ll figure out how to make it funny.
Chelsea was astoundingly kind and generous along the way. She was always giving women handbags or shoes, periodically pulling money from her purse to shove at someone. One day a few weeks into my tenure, she stalked through the office, asking people if they were under thirty. If they said yes, she handed them a hundred-dollar bill. She always got us extravagant birthday presents, and since she could never figure out how to shop for me, mine was usually just five hundred dollars. We could say it’s because she could never really understand me, that I was too dorky or complex for her to grasp. Really, it was like your grandma giving you a check for your birthday—it may be impersonal, but it’s way better than the aunt who buys you a sweatshirt that doesn’t fit.
She wasn’t just financially generous—she was a level of emotionally aware that I’ve never experienced in a male boss. The best example happened when I’d been working there almost a year. A newer writer, Jen Kirkman, had been hired after I was, and one day when we were trying to figure out new female comics to have on the roundtable, Jen said with polite self-confidence, “I’d like to do it.” I felt silly. I wanted to do the roundtable so badly, but I’d been scared to say anything. The people at work barely knew that I did stand-up. I was mad at myself for not having Jen’s basic level of professional self-confidence.
That evening, I emailed Chelsea personally and said that while I wasn’t a female comic, I would appreciate a chance to do the roundtable. She was polite but dismissed the request.
A few months later, we were at the morning meeting. It was that magical time before the work had started and when everyone was drinking coffee and talking about what they did the night before. Jen mentioned that she was going to be doing her first late-night set on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. My heart immediately sank as I was once again reminded that people who pursued their stand-up careers more aggressively than I—like Jen—got opportunities. I was mad at myself for being lazy. That was a moment, a flash in the eyes, before I put on a responsible smile and told Jen how proud and impressed I was.
Later, when we went back to our offices to write up the jokes that had been pitched,7 I asked my office-mate, Heather, if she’d noticed me being glum when Jen revealed her news. Heather assured me that it was all in my head and no one had noticed.
Two hours later, Chelsea Handler was in my office
, asking me if I was ready to do the roundtable.
That’s the kind of person she is. She notices people, and she cares.
I got a lot out of the show. Once I was on the roundtable, I started to become famous; managers wanted to represent me, then agents. I started opening for Chelsea, and then the comedians from the roundtable started touring together. It was the biggest, longest, best opportunity I’ve had in my career. Most importantly, Chelsea did everything humanly possible to get me laid as much as possible. Three years at that show changed my life.
And there were bad things. All the bags and shoes and money and trips meant we were in a constant state of competition. When I first got there, the key issue was that there were only seven seats in the private jet that Chelsea took on her quasi-monthly trips to Mexico, so everyone was jockeying to be one of her six favorite people in time to get asked along on the trip. My strategy was just to ignore it and do my job, but Chelsea didn’t want that. She came from a large family, and she liked the push and pull of sibling squabbles. She wanted us to be fighting for her love, though not too hard.
It got worse as the rewards got bigger. Opening for her stand-up tour could net one of us twelve thousand dollars in a weekend. Spots on the roundtable fueled our solo touring and facilitated getting other jobs. We became buzzy—each of us had a manager in our ear telling us how we were going to be the breakout star of the show—and we were all, in our way, clamoring for more.
Things got bad when one of the other writers decided I was a threat to his position. He was very close to Chelsea and had reduced his workload on the show to half-time so he could act as one of the executives of her production company. And I suspect he didn’t like the idea that she trusted and respected my taste, so he did a lot of talking about how full of myself and irresponsible I was. Some of it was true: I was working on a lot of outside projects, and I was periodically a few minutes late to work. He mentioned that a lot.
