This post is not about
group identity. Although in a certain
way it is. (Nothing like building suspense with some perplexing ambiguity.)
I was invited to participate in a lunch gathering with four
other writers, arranged by a writer I have known for twenty years whose father
I once went to High School with. The
four other included writers, all highly regarded, were unilaterally a
generation my junior.
I had credits
older than a couple of them.
I was delighted to be participating in that lunch. It was wonderful fun. And a welcome respite from dining with people
my own age. Two hour lunch, there wasn't a single mention of doctors or medicine.
(Whereas with my contemporaries, we have to deliberately put
a “time limit” on such conversations or they will dominate the agenda till the
check arrives. And continue on the way out
to the car.)
So here’s what I learned about myself during that lunch.
It may not be true of writers two generations my junior, but with these guys, I could still feel
like we were speaking the same language.
Their opinions, experiences and observations, if not always matching my
own – I at least knew what they were talking about.
As opposed to, say, some of the writers in their 20’s and
30’s speaking ”First Person” in The Daily
Show – The Book that I am currently plowing through who often speak in an
undecipherable dialect most accurately identifiable as… young.
You remember how when you read Shakespeare in high school you
had to look in the “lexicon” to find out what “Odds bodkin” meant? Well similarly, with some of their
generationally-derived modes of expression, I craved the helpful assistance of
external clarification. I thought I knew
English, but I apparently only know
“old English.” (As opposed to “Olde
English” which is even older than mine.)
At our lunch, one writer – the one who had graciously
organized the occasion and had kindly and generously included me – spoke about
working for the past two years or so on series produced and broadcast – if they
still say that – on Amazon, an
experience he attested he thoroughly enjoyed, particularly the comparative – to
network television – lack of “outside interference.”
He wondered, in fact, if, having tasted unlimited creative
independence, he would be able – or even willing – to work for the more constricting
“Major Television Networks” again.
His speculation led me reflexively to an oft repeated – but would
once more really hurt? –
recollection/slash/rant. Piggy-backing
on the writer’s concern about returning to an opposing environment, I rotely
related,
“Bill Cosby used to say, ‘Working on this show will make it
impossible for you to work anywhere else.”
What he meant, I went on to explain, was that writing in the
Cosbyesque patois of “observational comedy” would make it very
difficult to return to the traditional “setup-punchline” formulation of
virtually every other situation comedy on television. (Including the best ones, like Cheers.)
I retold this thirty year-old anecdote, making minimal
effort to disguise which mode of sitcom writing I myself personally preferred.
Having endured this snooty sermon before – as we’d had
numerous similar lunches in the past – a writer at the table – a respected
professional and superior joke writer – reminded me that audiences consistently
enjoyed “joke driven” offerings,
which, in the end, was simply an alternative method of confecting a comedy.
Comedy, his reaction reminded me, came in more than one
package. And so, concomitantly, did
comedy writers.
A short digression (rationalizing my prejudice without
asking for forgiveness.)
Throughout my career, but especially at the beginning when I
was “climbing the ladder”, even though I had garnered demonstrable laughs with
my “observational” approach especially during the enthusiastically received Best of the West pilot, I was regularly
chastised – and concomitantly paid less – because, as was repeatedly thrown
directly into my face,
“You can’t write jokes.”
My detractors were undeniably correct. I could reliably get laughs – which went
curiously unmentioned during contract negotiations – but I could not – or was
at least unable to consistently – write jokes.
Is there any wonder then that I harbored – and frequently verbalized
– an angry hostility towards joke writing?
Well, acknowledges this blogster, in a reflective posture
consistent with advancing longevity…
I was wrong.
Good is good, and bad is bad. And no style has a monopoly on either.
So there.
One last nagging consideration.
It’s a weird thing, a sort of “chicken and egg” proposition.
What comes first, do you think? – one’s
aesthetic preference for a certain style of comedy writing or one’s awareness
that that style of comedy writing is the one you are inherently able to produce?
It seems more than a coincidence – and also shamefully
self-serving – that the style you like most is the style you can naturally deliver. Barring such a coincidence, how exactly does
this happen? Do you do what you
like? Or do you like what you do?
This murky mystery may be ultimately unsolvable. But I’ll tell you what isn’t.
My reaction to good writers whose style differs discernibly from
my own.
Though I may undeniably harbor a preference,
Quoting the great Bang
The Drum Slowly,
“From now on, I rag on nobody.”
If I can possibly recall not
to.
(This conclusion sounds suspiciously familiar to me. I wonder if I have written it before. And have therefore not fully internalized
that lesson.)
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