Peeing in Jars with Boys
My first show as a writer at Saturday Night Live was September 27, 1997. The host was Sylvester Stallone. It was the first time I had ever seen a real movie star up close. Real movie stars do look different from regular people. They are often a little smaller and usually have nicer teeth, shoes, and watches than anyone else in the room. Mr. Stallone smoked a cigar during the host meeting, which was pretty badass. I don't remember what sketch ideas I pitched in that first meeting, but I know that on that first writing night, I completely froze up. I sat at my computer from one P.M. Tuesday afternoon until nine A.M. Wednesday morning and nothing came out. I wasn't used to sitting by myself and writing. I'd been improvising with five other people every night for two years. I ended up submitting an old sketch that I had written as part of my job application.
Needless to say, my sketch didn't get picked for the show, but I was assigned to help "cover" a sketch that Cheri Oteri had written with another writer. Writers are often assigned to help produce sketches that the performers write. I followed Cheri and writer Scott Wainio around through rehearsal, occasionally pitching jokes for the sketch that were (rightfully) ignored. During the dress rehearsal, Lorne gave us the note that he couldn't understand Stallone in the sketch and we should ask him to enunciate more. I stood nervously outside the host's dressing room with Scott Wainio. He had been there a year already, so I figured he'd know what to do. Scott's experience level was evident when he looked at me and shrugged. "You tell him."
My trademark obedience kicked in and I found myself knocking on the door and being ushered in. Judge Dredd himself was on the couch in an undershirt, smoking another cigar. He looked up at me. I muttered, "In the Rita sketch, you were a little hard to understand. Can you just enunciate a little more?" Stallone was unfazed. "Youcannunnastanme? Youneeme nanaunciate maw? Okay." He couldn't have been more easygoing about it. My guess is that this was not the first time in his career he had been given that note. I went back outside and manually released my butt cheeks. Over the years I came to realize that the movie star hosts of the show were just people who wanted to do a good job and (with the exception of a very small handful of d-bags) were eager for any guidance. Who were the d-bags, you ask? I couldn't possibly tell you. But if you want to figure it out, here's a clue: The letters from their names are sprinkled randomly through this chapter.
The only other thing I remember about the Sylvester Stallone show was that they did a Rocky-themed monologue and they needed someone to play Rocky's wife, Adrian. Cheri really wanted the part-she was little, she was from Philly, she could do a good imitation of Talia Shire-but instead, somebody thought it would be funnier to put Chris Kattan in a dress. I remember thinking that was kind of bullshit.
I wasn't privy to the decision-making process at the time; it was my first week, after all. When I reminded producer Steve Higgins of it recently, he (understandably) couldn't remember whose idea it was, and thought that it might have even been Sylvester Stallone's. No offense to Kattan, whom I love, or Sylvester Stallone, but I think Cheri would have been funnier as Adrian. Now, an anecdote about somebody at the show being frustrated and feeling cheated is hardly worth mentioning. It happens to everyone, male or female, at some point every week. Saturday Night Live runs on a combustion engine of ambition and disappointment.
But I tell this specific tale of Cheri being passed over for Kattan-in-drag because it illustrates how things were the first week I was there. By the time I left nine years later, that would never have happened. Nobody would have thought for a second that a dude in drag would be funnier than Amy, Maya, or Kristen. The women in the cast took over the show in that decade, and I had the pleasure of being there to witness it.A FAQ (Freaking Always-asked Question)
People often ask me about the difference between male and female comedians. Do men and women find different things funny? I usually attempt an answer that is so diplomatic and boring that the person will just walk away. Something like "There's a tremendous amount of overlap in what men and women think is funny. And I hate to generalize, but I would say at the far ends of the spectrum, men may prefer visceral, absurd elements like sharks and robots, while women are more drawn to character-based jokes and verbal idiosyncrasies...." Have you walked away yet?
Here's the truth. There is an actual difference between male and female comedy writers, and I'm going to reveal it now. The men urinate in cups. And sometimes jars. One of the first times I walked into my old boss Steve Higgins's office, he was eating an apple and smoking a cigarette at the same time.(When I started at SNL, you could still smoke in an office building. I might not be young.) I had only been there a few weeks, and Steve had been very encouraging and supportive. I forget what we were talking about, but I went to get a reference book off a high shelf in Steve's office. I reached to move the paper cup that was in front of it, and Higgins jumped up. "Don't touch that. Hang on." He grabbed the cup and a couple others like it around the office and took them out of the room to dump them.
"Oh yeah, that's pee in those cups," my friend Paula later informed me. I could not believe it. I had come from The Second City, which was by no means clean-it would not be unheard-of to see a rat giving birth in an overstuffed ashtray, for example. But I had never heard of anyone peeing in a cup except at a doctor's office. Maybe you'd do it on a road trip if it was too far between rest stops. I had definitely never heard of anyone peeing in a cup and leaving it in their own office on a bookshelf to evaporate and be absorbed back into their body through the pores on their face.
I told another male coworker about what I had seen. Was it not the grossest thing he had ever heard? He answered matter-of-factly that he occasionally did it, too. Not all the time. He said it was just something guys did when they were too lazy to go to the bathroom. The bathroom, I should point out, was about as far away as you are from this book. I started to feel like I was from space.
I called Jeff back in Chicago. "You grew up way out in the country with a bunch of brothers. Did you ever pee in cups and, like, leave them around?" Jeff was incredulous. "What? No! That's disgusting."One thousand points for Jeff.
Once I was aware of this practice, I started noticing the cups in other places. In the Weekend Update offices-which were like the smarter-but-meaner older brother of the regular writers'offices-there weren't any cups. There was a jar.* It was a jar of piss with a lid on it, and judging by its consistency, I suspect they sometimes spat into the piss. Or that one of them was terribly ill. You could see it when you came in the door, backlit by the afternoon sun, and at first it seemed to me like a little test. If you saw the piss jar and dared to ignore it and continue into the room, you were welcomed.Welcomed is too strong a word. You were... one of the guys? Nope, you know what? The more I think about it, I'm just projecting. It couldn't have been a test, because they really didn't give a fuck whether you came in the room or not.
And no, not all of the men whizzed in cups. But four or five of them out of twenty did, so the men have to own that one. Anytime there's a bad female stand-up somewhere, some dickhead Interblogger will deduce that "women aren't funny." Using that same math, I can state: Male comedy writers piss in cups.
Also, they like to pretend to rape each other. It's... Don't worry about it. It's harmless, actually.
So, to sum up my room-clearing generalizations, men are in comedy to break rules. Conversely, the women I know in comedy are all good daughters, good citizens, mild-mannered college graduates.Maybe we women gravitate toward comedy because it is a socially acceptable way to break rules and a release from our daily life. Have you left me for the cheese tray yet?Kotex Classic
This is the story of my proudest moment as one of the head writers of SNL.
At the beginning of each season, the staff would write commercial parodies-the fake commercials you have enjoyed over the past thirty-five years, such as Schmitt's Gay and Colon Blow. I wish I wrote either of those, but I didn't. (I did write Mom Jeans, Annuale, and Excedrin for Racial Tension Headaches, if that helps.)
Each writer would submit two or three scripts, and the producers and head writers picked which commercials would be shot. We tried to choose carefully because unlike the live sketches, these commercials were shot on film (in the days before HD video) and could cost up to $100,000. It was a big deal to get your commercial parody made because they were permanent. They could repeat forever.Once again, this was in the days before YouTube, so reruns were meaningful, and profitable.
In a normal SNL show week, every sketch is read aloud by the cast at a "table read" in front of the whole staff. The room is packed with all the writers, designers, stage managers, musicians, etc., so you have a nice big audience. Everyone can hear where there are laughs and everyone has a sense of which sketches could work. The commercial parodies didn't get that treatment, and choosing which ones to produce always brought out the worst in everyone.
I would read the packet of forty scripts and pick the ones I liked. Dennis McNicholas, the other head writer, would pick the ones he liked. Not surprisingly, we each strongly preferred the ones our friends wrote. (There was an unspoken rule that you never pushed for your own piece, ever.) Then we would each privately corner the producers-Steve Higgins and Tim Herlihy-and try to get them to agree with us. Higgins, Herlihy, Dennis, and I would continue this square dance of selling one another out for a week or so, only to find that Jim Signorelli, the colorful, long-standing director of these taped pieces, had started making whatever parody he liked without asking anyone, usually because it had high production values or a visual style he felt like shooting. It's a miracle anything ever got done.
There was one parody script that I really fought for. It was back when "classic" was a big advertising trend. Coke Classic. Reebok Classic. The very very funny Paula Pell had written a script called Kotex Classic. It was as if Kotex were trying to revive nostalgia for those old 1960s maxi pads that hooked to a belt. It featured the women in the cast enjoying fun "modern gal" activities while giant sanitary napkins poked out of their low-rise jeans. It seemed to me like an excellent parody of nostalgia-based marketing while also being a little shocking and silly, which is great for an SNLcommercial. I kept bringing it up in meetings only to be told that it would be "too difficult to produce."Paula and I weren't sure what that meant, so we kept pressing. Finally, Steve Higgins and Jim Signorelli sat down with us and asked us to explain. "How would we see it? Is it a thing that comes up the front?Would we have to zoom in on it? Wouldn't the girls have to take their pants off? Would we see blood?"
And this was what Oprah would call an Aha Moment for me. (Trademark Oprah Winfrey; please send a check for eighty-nine cents to Harpo Industries for having read that.) They didn't know what a maxi pad belt was. It was the moment I realized that there was no "institutionalized sexism" at that place. Sometimes they just literally didn't know what we were talking about. Just as I was not familiar with the completely normal custom of pissing in jars, they had never been handed a fifteen-year-old Kotex product by the school nurse. But they trusted me and Paula, so I'm proud to say we made her commercial and the commercial worked.
Two things were reassuring about this. One, that we were heard. Because Paula was such a goddamn hit factory-she wrote the Cheerleaders, among many other things-they were willing to trust us.
And, more important, for all those years that I was sure that boys could tell when I had a loaf-of-bread-size maxi pad going up the back of my pants, they actually had no idea.
I Don't Care If You Like It
(One in a series of love letters to Amy Poehler)
Amy Poehler was new to SNL and we were all crowded into the seventeenth-floor writers' room, waiting for the Wednesday read-through to start. There were always a lot of noisy "comedy bits" going on in that room. Amy was in the middle of some such nonsense with Seth Meyers across the table, and she did something vulgar as a joke. I can't remember what it was exactly, except it was dirty and loud and "unladylike."
Jimmy Fallon, who was arguably the star of the show at the time, turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, "Stop that! It's not cute! I don't like it."
Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. "I don't fucking care if you like it." Jimmy was visibly startled. Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit. (I should make it clear that Jimmy and Amy are very good friends and there was never any real beef between them. Insert penis joke here.)
With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear that she wasn't there to be cute. She wasn't there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys' scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you like it.
I was so happy. Weirdly, I remember thinking, "My friend is here! My friend is here!" Even though things had been going great for me at the show, with Amy there, I felt less alone.
I think of this whenever someone says to me, "Jerry Lewis says women aren't funny," or"Christopher Hitchens says women aren't funny," or "Rick Fenderman says women aren't funny.... Do you have anything to say to that?"
Yes. We don't fucking care if you like it.
I don't say it out loud, of course, because Jerry Lewis is a great philanthropist, Hitchens is very sick, and the third guy I made up.
Unless one of these men is my boss, which none of them is, it's irrelevant. My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don't like something, it is empirically not good. I don't like Chinese food, but I don't write articles trying to prove it doesn't exist.
So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: "Is this person in between me and what I want to do?" If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you're in charge, don't hire the people who were jerky to you.
If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece "Over! Under! Through!" (If you're under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of "over," "under," and "through" by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don't show it anymore because someone has since realized that's nuts.)
If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you're lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground-like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that.
Again, don't waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go "Over! Under!Through!" and opinions will change organically when you're the boss. Or they won't. Who cares?
Do your thing and don't care if they like it.
Amazing, Gorgeous, Not Like That
People sometimes ask me, "What's it like to do photo shoots for magazines?" "Do you enjoy that kind of thing?" Let me be completely honest here. Publicity and press junkets are just part of the job. Your work is what you really care about because your work is your craft and your craft is your art and photo shoots are THE FUNNEST!
In case you ever find yourself at a magazine cover shoot (and you might, because Snooki and I have, so anything can happen!), let me tell you what to expect.
It's usually in some cool space called White or Smash House or Jinx Studios. Sometimes it's at an amazing hotel. Wherever it is, it's nicer than where you had your wedding. You take a freight elevator up to a beautiful loft where there is a coffee bar at which everything is free. Free, I say!
I suggest you show up freshly scrubbed with damp hair. Not only is this a courtesy to your hair and makeup team but also it helps to set the bar low. Show up looking like an uncooked chicken leg and they can't help but be pleased with the transformation once they get all their makeup on you. I think this is what Jesse Jackson calls the "subtle genius of lowered expectations," but I may be misquoting.
You'll be introduced to the stylist and shown racks and racks of clothes. She has been given your sizes ahead of time and has chosen to ignore them. All the shoes will be too big and all the pants and skirts will be a 5T. The stylists like to figure out a few looks before hair and makeup begins, so you will try on twenty or thirty things. Somebody will put up a makeshift wall by holding a full-length mirror next to an open loft window, and you will strip down naked. You must not look in that mirror at your doughy legs and flat feet, for today is about dreams and illusions, and unfiltered natural daylight is the enemy of dreams.