by Guy Branum
I should have responded. I should have talked shit at him or criticized him behind his back. If I’d played the game, perhaps Chelsea would have understood me better. My strategy was to keep my head down, do my job well, and try to get one of my other projects off the ground. It didn’t work.
Chelsea came to me and said she was going to be hosting the MTV Video Music Awards. She wanted me and this other guy to write for her. I told her I was working on another project that was due, and I was sorry, but I couldn’t do it. She walked out of the room and didn’t speak to me for a month.
It was bad. I was worried about how much my new, glamorous life depended on her good graces. She’d given me so much, and so much could be taken away just as easily. I worked harder on getting something else, another job, selling a show. I needed something stable in case she really stopped liking me.
And the dude, that unnamed writer, he redoubled his efforts. Heather dutifully reported all the stuff he said when I was out of earshot. It was mostly about how disloyal I was. I was. I was scared of the emotional complexity of the workplace, and I was trying to figure out an exit strategy. That’s pretty disloyal.
We all ended up writing the VMAs together, and they were quite bad. In the end, Chelsea seemed to spend more time focused on how she’d look in her dress than how funny the monologue would be. Being a female celebrity is a mindfuck I will never understand, and Chelsea, nearing the peak of her success, was tormented by the constant scrutiny of her appearance. It was hard to watch, although not as hard to watch as those VMAs.
As a reward, Chelsea took us all to Mexico, and it seemed like things were healed. She and I were talking again. Maybe we’d learned a lesson about working with each other.
Of course, we hadn’t. A month later, MTV wanted to buy a TV show I’d created. Chelsea had previously optioned the script, but the option had lapsed. Now my managers were going to be the producers, and they assured me that if I stayed with Chelsea, she’d insist on being a producer, too, and that would ruin everything.8 They told me it was time for me to quit Chelsea Lately.
I was freaked out. I called my agent for advice. He said I shouldn’t do anything rash, then our connection cut out as I went under an overpass. I didn’t call him back. I figured if I didn’t do anything rash, it wouldn’t be a big deal.
I didn’t do anything rash. Instead, I did something stupid. The Sunday of that weekend was Halloween, which you will remember I consider a gay High Holiday. The following day, we were supposed to be at work early to accommodate one of Chelsea’s movie shoots.9 When I came home on Halloween night, drunk and dressed as Suzanne Sugarbaker from Designing Women, my press-on nail accidentally hit the wrong button on my alarm clock. That meant my alarm didn’t go off at six. That meant I woke up in makeup and a dress ten minutes before I was supposed to be at work. That meant when I finally made it to work, Chelsea was pissed.
She had already been pissed. See, at that point in time, Chelsea and I were repped by the same agency, and when my agent had gotten off the phone with me, the first thing he’d done was tell his boss’s boss, who was Chelsea’s agent, that I was considering leaving. Chelsea and Tom, the showrunner, were having none of it. This lateness was but the last in a line of treacheries I’d committed. When I showed up, Tom told me to just leave and come back the next day.
I left, chilled. I wrote an apology to Chelsea, then wondered if it was the right thing to do, then didn’t send it. The next day I returned to the office and quietly did one responsible day of work. Chelsea was gone shooting a movie, so I stayed at my desk, avoiding eye contact. At the end of the day, Tom called me into his office. He told me to take the week off and come back able to say that Chelsea Lately was my singular priority. No more screenwriting work, no more meetings, no more auditions. Chelsea Lately and nothing else. I couldn’t. The show was great and had given me so much money and popularity, I didn’t know how I’d live without it. That scared me. I got scared that if I stayed at the show, I’d be too happy to push myself to do something more substantial. Mostly, I was mad that Tom and Chelsea didn’t respect my actual contribution to the jokes on the show. I did my job and I did it well; if they wanted something else out of an employee, it shouldn’t be me.
I simmered on these questions for a few days, and the issue I couldn’t let go of was that I was good at my job. I wrote more good jokes every day than most of the people in that office. I did my work quickly and responsibly. That didn’t matter to Tom and Chelsea, and at a workplace where that didn’t matter, I’d never really feel safe. On Wednesday of that week, Tom and I talked on the phone. I told him it was probably time for me to leave. I immediately regretted it.
Chelsea didn’t like this. We were a family, and families fight, but families stick together. She emailed me and told me she was going to talk to me and figure it out. I was terrified, all of this stuff terrified me, but I felt like maybe the situation could be healed. Maybe there was professional respect that would shine through. She was in Vancouver shooting This Means War. She told me she would call me on Saturday.
That particular Saturday was the weekend before my birthday, and my friends and I had scheduled to go to Palm Springs to celebrate. I spent the entire morning by the pool at the Ace Hotel, sick to my stomach and not drinking so I could be clearheaded for the telephone call that was supposed to unfuck my life. Fifteen minutes before it was supposed to happen, I scurried away to my darkened room and waited for the call. And waited. And waited. Eventually, Chelsea’s assistant called to tell me she was going to dinner with Reese Witherspoon and she’d talk to me the following morning.
The upset stomach stayed. And the fear. The hope and the doubt. The following morning, while my friends were at breakfast, I sat in my car, waiting, waiting. This time it was a text, or an email, or a call. Another hour. We sat by the pool, they drank, I waited. It got late, and we drove back to Los Angeles. My weekend and birthday consumed.
Finally, she called. It was night, I’d dropped off my friends and was sitting in my car on Santa Monica Boulevard. She wanted an apology. She wouldn’t say it, but that was all she wanted, it was clear. She wanted to berate me and for me to fall prostrate and beg forgiveness. All she wanted was theater. It wasn’t that much, and I had fucked up in a number of ways, but I didn’t apologize. Maybe I couldn’t. After two days of waiting and fearing and not being her priority, after months of her weighing that asshole writer’s backstabbing as more valuable than the jokes I contributed to her show, I was done. I just remember I kept saying, “It’s probably for the best if I go.”
Joan
What followed were the roughest eighteen months of my life. I couldn’t find work, my agents (who were Chelsea’s agents, to remind you) dropped me, and my managers were semi-aware they’d fucked up. No one related to Chelsea Lately would work with me; few would talk with me.
I had savings, I had a tour of college shows booked, but that was it. My managers represented mostly scripted TV writers, so they never knew when late-night shows were hiring. They just kept sending me on endless development meetings where I’d get homework to create a show, then get notes, then more notes, then more notes, then finally get to pitch it, then finally have it not sell.
I was running out of money. A friend recommended me for a job as a “producer” for Punk’d at Ashton Kutcher’s production company. It was a terrible job, it paid terribly, and it wasn’t writing, it was figuring out creative ways to demolish the cars of supporting cast members of the Twilight franchise.
I was really regretting not just apologizing to Chelsea.
Then I got the following DM on Twitter: “Sweetheart, not sure how superbusy you are/aren’t, but any interest in writing bitchy jokes for Joan Rivers? I need to hire a couple damaged souls for the upcoming awards specials. Interested?”
It was from Tony Tripoli, a gay comic I’d performed with a couple of times but didn’t know well. The message was like water to a parched man in the desert. I’d gone a full year without writing j
okes professionally, and I needed it, bad. A few emails later, Tony was explaining to me that I’d be coming to Melissa Rivers’s house in Malibu to watch the Golden Globes with Joan Rivers. It wasn’t just a job. It was my childhood dream.
Of course, I showed up slightly late. As this had been one of the key issues in ruining my relationship with Chelsea, I was torturing myself about how Joan might react to this. I hadn’t calculated the long drive to Malibu, or the fact that there would be traffic in Beverly Hills because the Golden Globes were happening there, so I arrived a few minutes after red-carpet arrivals had begun. No one cared. A maid greeted me and took me to the TV room where Joan Rivers sat in a house dress with her grandson, Cooper; Tony, the head writer of Fashion Police; and the legendary drag queen Jackie Beat. It turned out to be Jackie’s first day writing for Fashion Police. I was a huge fan of Jackie’s, but I was so busy trying to rationalize how I was in the same room with Joan that I didn’t have time to be intimidated by Jackie.
Joan gestured to a huge array of deli sandwiches and told Jackie and me to help ourselves. I figured I’d wait until everyone else showed up to eat a sandwich, failing to realize that everyone had shown up. Joan had simply purchased three dozen sandwiches to feed the six of us (Melissa was also there, in a tennis dress).
So it was intimidating, it was awe-inspiring. It was what I’d dreamed of since watching Joan guest-host The Tonight Show in the 1980s. My job, however, was to be funny. Tony was at a laptop, and we were supposed to be coming up with material for the show. The rest of the writers were watching the awards at the E! offices, but Joan always had a few writers in her living room with her because their riffs could get hers going.
I didn’t make jokes in that room in spite of being intimidated. I didn’t fight through the fear. I made jokes because I was intimidated. I was so scared and so awestruck that I had to do something to prove my worth. I made jokes, I laughed at Joan’s and Tony’s and Jackie’s, and pretty soon I felt like I was watching an awards show and ridiculing celebrities with my mom.
Afterward, Tony, Jackie, and I drove back to the E! building to join the other writers. Joan was getting a few hours’ rest. We wrote all night, then at four thirty the following morning, Joan arrived for us to pitch jokes to her. What I’m saying is I saw 2012 Joan Rivers with no makeup. It is an image I shall not soon forget.
That’s me being catty. Here’s me being reverent: A seventy-eight-year-old woman working on three hours’ sleep sat for two hours, processing and evaluating jokes about celebrities most people haven’t heard of. She was pitiless and exacting in narrowing the jokes down to the ones she thought were strongest, then she was whisked off to hair and makeup. After sixteen hours of continuous work, the writers were exhausted but sipped coffee because we still had to go to the taping at ten.
I watched, anxious. Would one of my jokes make it on? Would I prove my worth? At Chelsea, I’d never counted how many jokes I got on—I’d known I did good work—but here, after a year in the wilderness, I needed it. I wanted it. And it came. She used one,10 then another,11 then another.12 At one point, Giuliana Rancic made a comment about Heidi Klum’s Native American–inspired outfit that perfectly set up one of the jokes I’d written, one that Joan hadn’t picked to go on teleprompter for the show. She effortlessly recalled the joke and lobbed it out to beautiful effect. “It’s interesting that Heidi Klum is dressed as a Native American because I’ve always had reservations about her career.” It was exciting to think that doing something you love could keep you that intellectually spry into your late seventies.
Fashion Police was a part-time job. I had to do it while I was still working at Punk’d. At one point I had to sneak away from a prank we were playing on Drake to print out jokes so I could drive to Joan’s house immediately after filming. It was a lot of work without much pay, but getting to write actual jokes meant a lot to me, as did learning from Joan. I was driving from Drake to Joan Rivers. Life wasn’t so bad.
Here’s the biggest lesson I learned from Joan Rivers. Our writers’ meetings weren’t pitch meetings like we had at Chelsea; they weren’t everyone riffing jokes together. We all wrote jokes on our own, then read them to Joan, who decided which she wanted to use. At one meeting, I had a joke that referenced kombucha. Everyone at the table laughed, including Joan. Tony then took Joan to the makeup room and, when he returned, told us that as soon as they’d left the room, Joan had taken his arm and asked what kombucha was. She then had him explain it thoroughly, and how it worked in the context of the joke.13 Other people would have dismissed it, said, “I don’t get it,” and moved along. That’s not what Joan did; she learned. If a joke got a good laugh, she wanted to know why and to be able to use that power.
She also did some terrible things. Joan was obsessed with having the best, strongest writers she could get (for cheap). Every week, you didn’t know whether you’d be coming back to Fashion Police. You had to be asked back every time. It was like a mechanical bull. A lot of people got thrown off after a week. Some would last four to six weeks, then meet their fate. A few, like me and Jackie, managed to stay on the bull long enough to be able to take it for granted.
Eventually, I got a real job, writing for Awkward. on MTV. After I left Fashion Police, the Writers Guild of America tried to unionize the show and get decent wages and conditions for the writers. Joan was scared of that: Unionization would have meant going from twelve or so part-time writers to five or six full-time writers like on Chelsea. Joan wanted to feel like she was getting the best that a roomful of people had to offer; she just didn’t consider whether those people were making enough money to pay rent. I was sad that a show which had been such a lovely lifeline for me had turned into something sad and ugly. However, it made sense: Joan Rivers had to fight tooth and nail for everything she achieved, and she didn’t know when to stop fighting. Eliza Skinner, an astounding comic and writer who worked with me on the show and was one of the leaders of the strike, put it best: “Joan Rivers is a bag of knives. Why are we surprised that she’s cutting us now?”
Also, I once wrote a joke that Joan Rivers thought was too mean to tell, and I’m really proud of that.14
An Interlude
I started this chapter with the expectation of making it primarily about the experience of writing for women, of sharing women’s voices, along with telling the story of why I left Chelsea Lately. People often want to know that. I planned to exclude my time writing for Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell and Billy on the Street, but that’s foolish. That’s me, as a gay man, treating situations as more engaging because they are female. Yes, Mindy, Chelsea, and Joan are fabulous divas, but let us take a moment to consider the time I spent working for men.
The most distinctive aspect of working on Totally Biased was that it talked about race a lot. Kamau loves diversity, and he always wanted a writers’ room with lots of voices, and he did a great job of putting those voices on the show. But most of the show was Kamau talking about the stuff he was interested in, and sometimes that meant movies or tax hikes, and sometimes it meant racial slurs I have no business having opinions about.
One day Aparna Nancherla, one of the other writers, and I were assigned to write a bit about the use of a certain racial slur in Django Unchained. Working from notes of what Kamau wanted to say, I was typing it up. Aparna looked over my shoulder and said, “You can’t just keep typing ‘N*.’ This has to go into the teleprompter.” I told her I wasn’t comfortable typing the word, and maybe she, a person of color, should do it. Aparna said, “Guy, I don’t think me doing your job for you will make it less racist.” That is why I love Aparna.
Working on Totally Biased was tough fun. Everyone was really excited about making comedy that came from a different perspective than most people were used to. But joking about politics, race, and gender can be hard. A white guy is going to make mistakes, and I am a white guy. When I inevitably ended up saying stupid stuff, people just told me I was wrong, I dusted myself off, and I kept pitching.
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br /> If Totally Biased was a lesson in learning to deal with a diverse group of writers tackling big problems, Billy on the Street was the opposite. It was a writers’ room I was too similar to, tackling issues that were deliciously small. It presented its own problems.
The Billy on the Street writers’ room is a think tank of queens (or, in some years, twink tank). Five to seven men and women with authoritative knowledge of all popular culture and the critical skills necessary to shade giants. I have never felt more understood by a writer’s room, I’ve never felt more delighted by what a writer’s room produced, I’ve never felt more redundant. Frankly, I was used to being the only gay in the room, and sitting in a room with younger, prettier ones (your Johns Early, your Joels Kim Booster, your sundry Virtels) who were just as funny as I was made me wonder what I was offering.
Billy Eichner, however, is one of the best creative managers I’ve ever dealt with. When he liked our material, he laughed, and he told us why it was great. When he rejected our material, he laughed even more. He always let us know he wished we could do something that mean or ridiculous or absurdist or frivolous. When I didn’t know what I was bringing to the room at Billy, he did, and he reminded me regularly and generously.
I know, I wish I had more bitchy dish on these people, too.
Mindy
In the process of swinging from job to job, you sometimes have to swing to crap. In 2015, I’d been in New York working on Billy on the Street, and my landlord had figured out I was subletting and evicted me. Work on a season of Billy only lasted six months or so, so I was back in L.A. with no apartment, working a very shitty job at the VMAs. I mean, it’s not the shittiest—I got to watch Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber run through their dress rehearsals. But we weren’t writing jokes for the host; we were just writing stupid, bland, boring host copy. Look, I’m thankful for any job, but more thankful for some than others.
