"Why Am I A Better Blogger Than I Was A Sitcom Writer?"

Once, at the age of twenty-one, in a moment of illuminating clarity, I heard myself proclaim:

“Nobody does me better than me.”

It was an electrifying insight.  It made me tingle with its veracity.  I remember clearly when I gave birth to it.  It was the summer of 1966.  I was attending the Bertolt Brecht Summer Theater Workshop at UCLA.  I no longer recall exactly how it arose, but it was in the context of my explaining the enthusiastic reception I had received during the previous night’s performance of The Private Life of the Master Race.

“What were you doing out there?” asked a classmate, with a mixture of curiosity, envy and annoyance.

“I was just being myself,” was my response.  After which I added, “Nobody does me better than me.”

(The foregoing is a “recreation of events.”  But it could very easily have been that.  And if not that, close to that.  And if not close to that, it still makes a colorful story, don’t you think?  What I know for certain is that I said it.)

I was never fully “me” in my sitcom writing, or at least not very often.  If I had been, you’d have really seen something.  Because…reprising today’s thematic catch-phrase…

“Nobody does me better than me.”  

(It’s in quotes now.  It’s immortalized.  I expect a call from Bartlett’s at any moment.)

There is a purity in expressing yourself as totally and undilutedly yourself.  People intuit the vibe.  They detect the authenticity.  It’s intoxicating.  Okay, maybe not intoxicating.  I was thinking of pure oxygen; it’s not that.  But it’s a close relative.

There were widely dispersed moments in the scripts I have written where my unadulterated “me-ness” came hurtling to the fore.  I recall one from Phyllis (1975). 

Phyllis Lindstrom (Cloris Leachman), a widow after the passing of her husband Lars, is living temporarily with her former in-laws, Jonathan and Audrey Dexter.  It is late at night and Phyllis is returning from a date with a man who has shown a serious interest in her.  Phyllis tells Audrey, who is still up, that her date had proposed to her.  Audrey, immediately aflutter, shouts, “Jonathan, wonderful news!  Phyllis is getting married!”  Jonathan races out of the bedroom in pajamas and bathrobe, crowing.  “Congratulations, Phyllis!  I could not be happier!”  Phyllis tells them to slow down; she’s not getting married.  At which point, Jonathan, his elation melting into confusion, turns to his wife Audrey, and asks,

“Was this a drill?” 

That was “pure me.” 

Another “me” moment was recently quoted in this blog.  A forlorn character from Taxi, finding himself unexpectedly married, laments,

“I used to think they were all connected: you get married, you have kids, you get old and you die.  Somehow, I believed, if you didn’t get married, you wouldn’t die.”

That’s also “pure me.” 

I will not burden you with the complete compendium of “original me.”  Okay, one last one.  Best of the West (1981).  The series villain, Parker Tillman, perched on a horse with a rope around his neck, is about to be strung up by a lynch mob led by a man named Kincaid.  As a “dying man’s request”, Tillman asks to share a few final words with his slow-thinking henchman, “Frog”, whom he, for the first time ever, refers to as his “best friend.”  Frog approaches Tillman.

FROG:  (DEEPLY MOVED)  I’m your best friend?

TILLMAN:  Frog, listen carefully…

FROG:  I didn’t know I was your best friend.

TILLMAN:  Frog, just…

FROG:  If I’da known, we coulda done more stuff together, palled around, gone –

TILLMAN:  Frog, shut up.

FROG:  That’s how you talk to your best friend?

TILLMAN:  Pay attention.  I want you to go up behind Kincaid, put your gun in his back and say, “If he hangs, you die.”

FROG: (NOT UNDERSTANDING)  If who hangs, who dies?

TILLMAN:  If I hang, he dies.

FROG:  You want me to say, “If I hang, he dies?”

TILLMAN:  No, you say, “If he hangs, you die.”

FROG:  (TERRIFIED)  I die?

Three different styles of comedy – one observational, one philosophical, one verbal tomfoolery.  None of them exactly blows up the sitcomical playbook, but I cannot imagine them emanating from anybody else.

Considering my thirty-year career, there are not a lot of these “pure Earl” moments.  When I wrote for television – as I mentioned yesterday – I was so enmeshed in the suffocating snarl of rules, that, even in the shows I created myself, I was never able to unleash, full throttle, the alive and inimitable “me.” 

The result?  A disappointing trickle of Earlful explosions.  Sporadic high points among mountains of formula and predictability. 

My blog, on the other hand?  “All ‘me’, all the time.”  No myriad of rules interfering with my “me-ness.”  No comedy-challenged higher-ups to answer to.  Blogs may be my ideal medium.  They reward the “me-ness” television didn’t want, and somewhere along the line – possibly at the beginning – I abandoned as a priority.  Not consciously, but still.  “Pure Earl” made guest appearances, but was never a “regular.”

Is blog writing art?  The answer, I would opine, mirrors Woody Allen’s answer to the question, “Is sex dirty?”, the answer being, “Yes, if you do it right.”

I write, I rewrite, I tighten, I focus, I rewrite again.  With blog writing, I’m the network, I’m “Standards and Practices”, the difference being that I perform my evaluative duties employing qualities the real life counterparts invariably lack:  Talent, taste and touch. 

Sometimes I wish I could bust loose in my presentation, but, as with my sitcom-writing experience, I am not clear on what that would entail.  In the end, I may be lacking in imagination, or just congenitally conservative.  In any case, you should not count on a post written in transliterated Hebrew or a spewing out of stream of consciousness meanderings anytime soon.

Even though, of all the writing outlets, blog-writing seems to fit me best of all, I am not saying I am better than everyone, or better than anyone, for that matter.  I am only saying that if you’re partial to the distinct recipe I dish out here, you can stop sampling, and stay right where you are.

Because nobody – and you can takes this to the bank – does me…

Better than me.

"Why Wasn't I Better?"

I have undoubtedly taken various pot shots in this direction along the way, but it is nice to hit it dead center.  Now, when I wonder “Why wasn’t I better?”, I can go one place, and find out.  And that place would be righ’chere. 

(I say “righ’chere to elevate my spirits, which I have to do, because I am writing a blog post entitled, “Why Wasn’t I Better?”) 

No false humility.  (Though I shall retain the illusion of actual humility.)  I won two Emmy Awards, and was nominated for four others.  I won a Writers’ Guild Award (and was nominated for another), a Cable Ace Award (which I was required to pay for), the Humanitas Prize (which, besides the Plexiglas award, paid me money), and the Alan King Academy of Comedy Award, which is shaped like and egg, and I currently cannot find.) 

Proving that somebody, on occasion, thought I was good.  I worked consistently and was never fired, until near the end, when, as a consultant on a show that lasted nine episodes, I was let go after five. 

I was also cut loose – after two seasons – from According To Jim – my last job in television – because, as I recently ungenerously observed, they could be mediocre without me.  (I was subsequently informed that my suggestions often had members of the writing staff rolling their eyes.  I am not sure which hurt my feelings more, that they were rolling their eyes at my suggestions, or that they had the ability to roll their eyes, which I, unfortunately, do not. 

Maybe I could pull off one eye. 

Nope.  I just tried.  Oh, well.

Having had what I imagine are the standard career ups and downs, though with considerably more ups, and acknowledging that I ranked in the higher percentile of the sitcom practitioners of my day, I remain, to this very day, troubled by the concerning question I began with:

“Why Wasn’t I Better?”

A paragraph, to examine what I mean by “better.”  For me, writing involves the pursuit and capturing in words of the most truthful version of the situations and relationships that the writer has selected as their subject matter.  Comedy additionally requires the funniest possible rendering of whatever it is I just said in the previous sentence.

In this context of “truthful writing” – and perhaps others but today isn’t about that – I believe I could have been – and should have been – better. 

Perhaps a lot better.

And in that regard – and in others as well but today isn’t about that –

I have regrets.

If being “better” means writing more truthfully – and that’s pretty much it, isn’t it? – the inevitable next question is,

“Why didn’t I write more truthfully?”

First of all – and it virtually goes without saying but not quite – the truth, in many situations, is not always easy to nail down.  Knowing the truth takes sensitivity, understanding, clarity and insight.  And who has a surfeit of any of those?  Besides that, the truth is often subjective, so who’s truth are we talking about, anyhow?

But setting aside the difficulty of determining the truth – and that is no small “setting aside” – there were (and perhaps still are) fundamental conditions in television sitcom writing sending the truth to the sidelines, where was is relegated to a permanent seat at the end of the bench. 

The primary conditions marginalizing the scriptural search for truth – not to be confused with the Scriptural search for Truth, which believers insist is “All Truth, All the Time” – were the rules we were required to mandatorily adhere to during the course of the scriptwriting process.   

In many ways, writing a sitcom is like writing a Japanese haiku, only longer and funnier.  (Unless some haikus are funny and I’m an ignorant ninny.)  The similarly is that, in both formats, the unbending structural rules are everywhere. 

Sitcom Rules I Was Required To Abide By:

You had to write your script to fit the available (and ever-shortening) episode length.  You had to write in a “joke-structure” format, the punchlines appearing with metronomic regularity. 

A character could not leave a scene without first delivering an exiting joke.  (This paragraph, were it an scene-exiting sitcom character, would be sent back for a “punch-up.”  No, wait.  That’ll work.)

Series “regulars” had to be serviced – in terms of jokes and screen time – equally, the series’ star more equally than the others.  All storylines had to be deliberately structured so that no guest star ever wins out in the end – the series “regulars” must always come out on top.  (I once wrote a script where the guest star prevailed over the star, and the studio audience went “Awwwww.”  Man!  I mean, the star wasn’t even nice!)

Space limitations on the soundstage, plus budgetary considerations, meant that you could only have two standing sets – say, an office and an apartment set – and one “swing set” specific to the story, like a restaurant, or a veterinarian’s Waiting Room (where you could showcase a parade of funny-looking dogs.)  You could, with rare exceptions, not go outside.  (Into the real world, in contrast to the soundstage.)

The show’s tone needed to be consistent, comedic, with perhaps a dollop of drama near the end that they called a “moment”, because it could not be any longer.  The ending had to be not tragic, not bittersweet or even touching, but obligatorily upbeat.  And, again with rare exceptions, after the resolution of the immediate catastrophe, everything had to revert to the way it was at the beginning.  All episodes were hermetically sealed off from their countertparts.  In the following week’s episode, the crisis of the previous week’s episode – or of any other episode in the series – was never mentioned.  

The tastes of the showrunners had to be considered.  If you deviated from their “comfort zone”, they’d rewrite you.  The “studio notes” inevitably deflected you from the deeper, dangerously challenging concerns to a more familiar and comfortable terrain.  And, of course, there was the network, desperate to maximize its viewership by offending no one.  And I literally mean…no one.       

That’s five paragraphs of rules.  I am sure there are more, but your attention span and “I have a life”, albeit a small one, prevent me being comprehensive.  With all those rules we needed to accommodate, is anyone surprised that the truth was frequently marginalized, and often totally forgotten?

“Where’s the heart?  Where’s the humanity?”  Superseded by by “Where’s the jokes?” and “Where’s the ratings?”  I once attended a live comedy concert entitled “Only The Truth Is Funny.”  The title sounds noble, but it is not entirely correct.  More accurately – if less catchily – is, “Only The Funny Truth Is Funny.”  A substantial portion of the truth is not funny.  And in sitcoms, that stuff almost never makes the cut.  (And it can be persuasively argued that it shouldn’t.) 

The funny truth?  It just never got a high priority.  Not when there were promising joke areas to mine.

If you want to be a successful sitcom writer, you do not, as in Pinocchio, always let your conscience be your guide – you always let the rules be your guide.  When you start out, you would hold those rules firmly in your mind.  In time, they were automatic, your encoded conditioning preventing you from thinking any other way.    

I was not better because, eager to please and endure, I allowed myself to become slavishly shackled to the rules.  Other writers (the Charles Brothers on Cheers) were less so, or even less so than that (Larry David on Seinfeld), and they wound up doing remarkable work.

I was pretty good at what they wanted me to do.  But I never found a way to blend the format’s constricting requirements with my innate, and as a consequence more truthfully human, uniqueness. 

I do better with this blog.

Why am I a better blog writer than I was a sitcom writer?

Tune in tomorrow.  (As if there were really any suspense.)

"Troglodyte"

I had to go down to the fourth entry in the dictionary before I got to the definition I wanted. 

Trog-lo-dyte – 4. An extremely old-fashioned or conservative person; a reactionary.

Having made that researchical effort, I will now insist, hopefully persuasively, that “troglodyte” is not what I am.

I can imagine the term “troglodyte” being applied to people who do not believe in evolution, but I do, so, in that context at least, that is demonstrably not me. 

Descended from monkeys?  Fine with me.  I mean, it's not like they're coming to the Seder!

In recent times, however, the word “troglodyte” has enjoyed a renewed currency as a pejorative against people who are deficient in their technological abilities and refuse to make any effort to improve them.

That is me. 

I have only during this past year learned to use the clothes dryer (our housekeeper was vacationing in El Salvador and I had run out of underwear), though (since she’s been back for months and I have been relieved of this responsibility), I have now forgotten how, and when the necessity arises, I will need to be retrained.

Do I refuse to make any effort to improve my high-tech skills? 

I would have to admit that I do.

But not because I am ideologically opposed to new technology – who would be against “faster and easier”?  (With the exception of the electric razor, which continues to suck.)

I refuse to try to improve my high-tech skills, because, at this point, I am so far behind, I see no way in hell of ever catching up.  So I simply throw in the towel, and I permanently opt out.

This decision is hardly without consequence.  The “Embarrassment Factor” is substantial.  A friend who works for the FX Network sends me DVD’s of the Louie show, because she thinks I’ll enjoy them.  And I probably would.  If I were conversant with the method of switching my TV to the “input” you have to switch it to so it stops showing television shows and transmits DVD material instead, and I’m not.

I have not watched any of the Louie DVD’s my friend sent me, though when she asks if I have, I reply with an enthusiastic  “Yes!”, adding, “And I enjoyed them very much.”

My retro-techno situation is hardly a source of pride.  I feel like an adult illiterate, who, when asked to look over a document before signing it, confides weakly, almost secretively,

“Ah caint read.”  (I wish there was a button for “the opposite of italics”, reflecting a softer than normal volume of communication.  Control S – for Shame.)

It’s an unfortunate predicament, becoming increasingly more so with every upgrade and new invention.  But what can I do?

Imagine a First Grader who, say, was in a serious car accident, and, months later, when they finally recover, they return to school, only to find that their classmates are confidently printing and understanding entire words, while they – having been absent when they were taught – have not yet learned the alphabet. 

That’s exactly how it feels to me, minus the car accident.  It is virtually impossible to catch up.  Some of us don’t even try. 

I got technologically frozen somewhere around the transistor radio.  After that, it’s not that I fell behind; it’s that more techno-stuff kept coming, and I remained in one place.    

Now, I stand permanently in the future’s dust.  As the i-Phone 5 comes on the market, I am still using my “flip-phone” – all of whose “apps”, besides calling and listening, I have no idea how to use. 

The monthly bill for my “flip-phone” is eighteen dollars and forty-eight cents.  You probably find that low.  I find it excessively high. 

I would estimate, ninety-seven percent of the time, my “flip-phone” sits plugged in on a table in our front hallway.  Sometimes there’s a message on the little screen, which, through trial and error, I have determined is telling me to stop leaving it plugged in.  And, for God’s sake, use it!    

To me, paying more than two hundred dollars a year for a phone that just sits on a table seems like an enormous waste of money.  I’ve been told that my plan includes twenty-five minutes of phone usage.  Last month, I apparently only used two. 

Eighteen dollars for two-minutes.  It’s like I called “Long Distance” to Reykjavik.

I only have a “flip-phone”, because, in our interconnected era, you are required to have something.  There are occasions, when I am instructed to take my phone along when I leave the house.  That right there explains my two two-minute-per-month phone-usage record.  I almost never leave the house. 

The following is a “Techno-Tally”, representing a partial list of things I, either partially or entirely, do not know how to work (and a couple I do.)  Not all of them are computerized, though, actually, in fact, they may be.  What do I know?

Okay, here we go:

Any device whose name starts with a lower-case “i”? – Can’t use it.

My flip-phone – for calling and receiving calls only.  I get notice of a “Missed Call.”  It stays “missed” forever.

Desktop Computer – I can do “Word”, I can copy the document to my blog, and I can “embed” from Youtube, though not always on the first try.  I may be able to “link”, I’m not sure.  But that’s it.  And I know that desktops can do a lot more than that.

Laptops – Yes, but sometimes, I do something, and it all disappears.  This is frustrating.  You spend three hours writing something, and suddenly, it’s gone and you have no idea how to get it back.  That never happened with a legal pad and a pen!

I know that phones and computers have thousands of “apps”, and I know what “apps” are; they’re applications.  I just don’t know how to get to them.  I would probably enjoy some of those “apps.”  But they are beyond my reach, hiding in the machinery.

I have never texted.  Flip-phones don’t text.  And even if they did, there’s the inevitable issue of finger dexterity.

Fax Machine – pretty much, yes, except I can never recall if the document goes “Face up” or “Face down.”  If I do it wrong, the fax-ee gets blank paper.

TV – Sure.  But don’t ask me to switch the “inputs.”

Land line – I cannot consistently use the “Intercom.”  And sometimes I put someone on “Hold”, and it goes to “Dial-Tone.”

Washer and dryer – I used to know.  Maybe I could know again.

Digital Clock – I dread the semi-annual time changes.  Exception:  On my DVD-clock-radio, there’s a button for that.  I know how to push it.

Stove – Yes.

Microwave – Theoretically, yes.  But no matter how long it’s in there, the food invariably comes out unevenly warmed, except for the microwavable dish, which burns my fingers.

Cuisinart – Please.

Dishwasher – No. 

Coffee Maker – Bean grinding – no; making it from ground coffee – no.

Waffle Iron – Sometimes.

Switching on our hot tub – fifty-fifty.

Electric can opener – No.

My car – Yes, unless it stops working. 

A category I will lump together as “Audio Equipment” – No.

Karaoke Machine – Yes. 

A partial list.  I suppose there’s a class I could take at some community college to upgrade my techno-savvy.  Have You Been Cryogenically Frozen, Or Something? 101. But it would have to be nearby.  My ’92 Lexus has no GPS.  Dr. M’s Prius does. 

But I have no idea how it works.

"Another Office Story"

The following, in fact, chronicles a collection of offices, as will shortly be revealed.

In 1984, I accepted the job as the first Executive Producer of The Cosby Show, which would be produced in New York.  Regular readers are aware that I am no fan of show-running, and am, at least equally if not more so, no fan of living in New York.  However, a viewing of the fourteen-minute presentation which served as The Cosby Show’s pilot had so enthralled me, that I temporarily lost my mind and enthusiastically told them, ‘I’m in!”

I was billeted in Manhattan at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, corner of 47^th Street and Second Avenue, a diagonal block-and-half from the United Nations.  (The apartment complex named after the former U.N. Secretary-General.) 

My lodgings were more than adequate.  Two bedrooms, three bathrooms.  (Upon my late-night arrival, I found my refrigerator fully stocked.  The three bathrooms? – No toilet paper.)

Our “show office” would be a forty-five minute drive away, in Brooklyn, where The Cosby Show would be produced.  The office, such as it was, was located two blocks from the soundstage.  I say “such as it was” because what it was was a converted three-bedroom unit in a standard Brooklyn apartment building.  We were like tenants in a domestic housing facility.  You pushed a button in the lobby, and they “buzzed” you in.

A tiny elevator took us up to our offices.  Each writer occupied what, in the unit’s previous incarnation, had been a bedroom; as Executive Producer, I was dutifully accorded the Master Bedroom.  The office staffs’ desks were set up in the “hall.”  Also, the floors were apparently uneven, so every time I stepped out of my office, I tripped.

Reflective of the property’s Jewish clientele, on Friday afternoons, you could detect the distinctly Shabbatical reminders of chicken soup, tzimis (a carrot and prune side-dish) and kugel.  Elderly ladies, whose slips slipped lower than their colorful housecoats, would invariably get on, smiling knowingly of our purpose and tax bracket, and coyly asking if I would care to meet their attractive, young granddaugher.  Or their “genius” comedy-writing nephew.

On such occasions, I needed to constantly remind myself that I was actually working in big-time show business.

(Note:  As an explanation for this less than luxurious arrangement, The Cosby Show’s bankrollers, Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey were, at the time careful, penny-pinching producers, not the billionaires they would ultimately become.)

Since nobody wanted to trek all the way to Brooklyn on the weekends, or during “hiatus” periods when we were out of production, our employers would arrange for us to work in temporary offices in mid-town Manhattan.  We were a gypsy writing staff, roaming from building to building, rarely inhabiting the same office venue twice.

One weekend, we were taken up to our transient workplace in a massive (compared to its Brooklyn counterpart) freight elevator, by an operator who said he would return to collect us when we were finished. 

“Just press the button, and I’ll be right up.”

We took care of our business, and around seven in the evening, ready to depart, we assembled outside the freight elevator, and pushed the button.  From the distance, we could hear the insistent “BZZZZZZ” of, what we imagined, was a ground-level buzzer. 

We waited.

The guy didn’t show up. 

We re-pressed the button, and again heard the buzz.  (So it was not like it was broken.)

We waited.

The elevator operator still failed to appear. 

A third press of the button yielded similar results.  This was not good.  We were pretty much trapped in the building.  Possibly for the entire weekend.

The floor had an “Emergency Exit”, but if you opened the door, an alarm went off and the Fire Department arrived.  So that option was out.  I do not think the NYFD would take kindly to having braved the traffic-clogged streets of Manhattan to discover, not a fire, but a hapless team of abandoned comedy writers.

I had theater tickets for that night; it did not appear I’d be using them, stranded, as we were, on the upper floor of a building a man had promised to collect us from but had not, because he’d forgotten, or was napping, or – hopefully – had died.  (What, me vindictive?)

My imagination ran rampant.  I saw very clearly the floor’s regular inhabitants returning Monday morning, to discover skeletons standing by the elevator, one of them with their forefinger pressing urgently against the button.  We were definitely doomed.  (As doomed can be.)

The elevator guy finally arrived, and I raced to the theater, barely making the curtain.  An adventure with no consequences, but one I would nonetheless happily have missed.  You know, if you’re a true claustrophobic, you don’t need to be enclosed in a tight space to get frantic?  It could simply by a building you are unable to get out of.

Another temporary work spot was the historical Brill Building, the erstwhile office address of songwriting greats the likes of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Leiber and Stoller and Gerry Goffin and Carole King.  (The Brill Building now houses, in part, Lorne Michaels’ editing empire, Broadway Video.)

I was working on a Saturday.  Alone this time, having a script to complete in two days.  (Normally, it took me a week to ten days.)  The air conditioning was blasting – I was typing in my windbreaker – and, it being Saturday, there were no maintenance people to call to help me out.  As I froze inside, outside, the temperature was nudging towards a hundred. 

I had to do something.  My teeth were chattering, and I was turning into an icicle.  I got up, walked over to this enormous window, and with all my strength, I managed to raise it just a crack, to allow the outside air to mix palliatively with the Antarctica that was my workplace.

Unfortunately, I had inadvertently created a “weather system.”  When the blast furnace breezes from outside met the indoor meat locker chill – and I swear this is true – it actually started raining in my office.  Swear to God!  As I sat at the typewriter, heavy drops were landing on my head.

How did I respond?  I laughed.  I was re-energized.  And I wrote.

I left The Cosby Show after the seventh episode.  I did not leave early; it was the end of my original contract.  But I chose not to renew it, and I went home.  I had burnt myself out, a combination of (mostly self-imposed) stress and overwork. 

Not making excuses, but rather completing the picture, it must be truthfully acknowledged that the working conditions on The Cosby Show were hardly ideal. 

Beginning with the offices.

Still, to this day, almost thirty years later,

I wish I had stayed.
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A special shout-out to the Ohio-born member of our family, whose birthday just coincidentally coincides with the day that will live in infamy in our history.  Not your fault.  If they known what a cool guy you were, I'm sure they would have postponed their attack till the 8th. 

Thanks for your company, Big Guy.  You are a pleasure to have around.  And I think my daughter is fond of you as well.

Happy birthday.  And enjoy.