Poking A Dead Frog Part 5

And that's all you can hope for: to lose track of time and to get into a zone to produce writing that you're happy with. So I'd recommend that to all young writers. Just write. Lose yourself. And when you look up, maybe you'll be somewhere you always wanted to be.

PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE.

MEGAN AMRAM.

Writer, Parks and Recreation; Author, Science . . . for Her!

Even though comedy writing is inherently goofing around with really funny people for ten to seventeen hours a day, it's also very disciplined. And I am only just starting to figure out how to do it. It's something you need to exercise. Try to write material-try to write good material-as often as you can. You also need to consume a lot of comedy so that you can figure out what makes something good.

What's also important is to make sure that you actually like writing. I've always wanted to grow up and move to Hollywood-since I was a kid I've always had a vague idea that that's what I wanted to do. But I didn't know until a few years ago that I actually enjoyed the art of writing. There are a lot of people my age who are trying to get their foot in the door, who want to be famous, or who want a cool job. But if you don't enjoy the act of actually sitting down and writing for hours a day, it's probably not the correct choice for you.

I started Twitter because one of my friends did it. I thought, Okay, if I tweet one joke a day to myself and my college friends, this will make me better at writing, and I will have some jokes saved for a pilot or whatever I want to do. I didn't know anyone who worked in the industry, but as it happens, there are some people who are really into trolling Twitter for new talent. I think some of the a.s.sistants at Family Guy saw me first. That could be patient zero of my Twitter spread. a.s.sistants to a.s.sistants. Basically, kids right out of college who were helping out the writers and producers. A lot of them have gone on to other jobs now, and I'm still friends with them. So the contagion started that way. They started following and retweeting me, and I was getting some real comedy people as followers. And then [comedian and writer] Rob Delaney became a supporter, and he already had his huge following [more than 930,000]. Once Rob found me, a few months after I started tweeting, that's when it really hit me: "Oh, my G.o.d, this guy is using this for a specific purpose that's very exciting and new, and maybe I could get a piece of that pie, too."

I kept tweeting for a few months. I was really working hard at the idea of writing jokes. And then, in maybe one of the greatest things that's happened to me, I had this meeting with writer and comic Jordan Rubin, who had e-mailed me. He told me, "I have a thing that I'm working on. I might want you as a writer." He was head writer for the Oscars. He said, "Do you want to write for The Academy Awards?" That was my first job. Just an insane amount of luck, which I am forever grateful for.

Then I was hired on Parks and Rec. I had never written for a sitcom like this. I was hired as a staff writer, so I was brought on as a funny person who knew how to write and someone who had potential to be a good TV writer. Mike [Schur], the head of Parks and Rec, was a fan of mine from Twitter and from my blog. So it was pretty incredible. I still can't really believe that they hired an Internet weirdo. [Laughs] I think Mike felt, Well, we can always teach her how to write for this show.

I started writing with the single goal to make myself a better writer and then, later, to get a job. And I did; I got my dream job. I still love Twitter because it really is a fun way to connect with people, and it feels amazing to have a ton of people [more than 370,000] follow me just by virtue of them thinking I'm funny. That's the most pure, wonderful validation of one's career, basically. But that being said, if I'm at work sitting in a writers' room, I'm definitely not thinking about Twitter. I'm trying to think about my show and trying to do the best job that I can. So I don't tweet an insane amount, and I tweet less than I used to. My number-one responsibility is my job, and my number-two responsibility is my Twitter.

If I had to give any closing piece of advice, it would be to make sure you like what you're doing, to put yourself out there, in terms of your work. Also, just be a human being. Be nice to people and don't be crazy, which sounds very general, but that's appreciated professionally. You can be a nice, energetic, funny person, but still not alienate anyone.

Sampling of Tweets from Megan Amram I'm giving up spell check for Lant This is a pretty s.h.i.tty flash mob. It's in my living room, only my family showed up, and they're just telling me to stop drinking Such a double standard that when a guy sleeps with a ton of people he's "cool," but when I do I'm "lying"

Face down, a.s.s up, that's the way I want my open casket funeral They call me the t.i.tanic because I once went down on a bunch of Irish peasants After my ex and I broke up, I was in a really bad place (Florida)

PEG LYNCH.

"The big events in one's life occur only now and then, but there are smaller events that are familiar to every family. It's these daily incidents that make up the private lives of Ethel and Albert." So began every episode of Ethel and Albert, a hugely popular radio (and then television) series that ran for most of the 1940s and 1950s, on multiple stations both small and national.

Almost half a century before Jerry Seinfeld became famous for his "show about nothing," Margaret Frances "Peg" Lynch was already exploring the comedic possibilities of life's minutiae. Ethel and Albert followed the everyday lives of a young married couple, the Arbuckles, living in the fictional small town of Sandy Harbor-no state was ever mentioned. Only the two lead characters were ever heard-at least until 1946, when their baby Suzy was "born"-and they mostly stayed in their house, discussing the most trivial of subjects. In one episode, Ethel challenges Albert's a.s.sertion that he could go the entire day by just using his peripheral vision. In another, Albert misses a dinner party because of a six-cent shortage in the company's books, and Ethel asks, rather logically, why Albert couldn't have just paid the six cents out of his own pocket to make it home in time.

Many shows were inspired by Lynch's own experiences, both as a single woman and, later, as a wife. As she told the Miami News in 1955, she "once lost a beau because we argued over which side of the street a Chicago department store was on." This simple premise was later the inspiration for an entire episode of Ethel and Albert.

"What I loved about her humor was that she dealt in the realm of real domestic life, not the goofier stuff you found on similar shows like My Favorite Husband and Burns and Allen," says Gerald Nachman, radio historian and writer. Lynch's work "was a very different, more mature kind of comedy writing that didn't depend on jokes but on character and situation, before situation comedy was even a term."

After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1937, with a major in English and acting, Lynch was hired as a copywriter by local radio station KATE in Albert Lea, Minnesota. For a monthly salary of sixty-five dollars she penned scripts for commercials, radio plays, and a weekly farm news program. She soon came up with the Ethel and Albert characters and convinced the station to produce three-minute episodes as fillers between regular programming. As the show grew in popularity, first in Minnesota and then for another station in Maryland, it was expanded to fifteen minutes.

In 1944, Lynch moved to New York City, where she began writing regular episodes of Ethel and Albert for the Blue Network, which would later become the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Not only did the national network hire her to write all the shows-a rare vote of confidence for a relatively unknown writer-they also asked Lynch to play the lead. In the fifties, Ethel and Albert moved to TV, first as a ten-minute segment on The Kate Smith Hour in 1952, and then in 1953 as its own half-hour program on the NBC network. Over the next several years, it moved between all three major television networks, from NBC (19531954) to CBS (summer 1955) to ABC (19551956).

Ethel and Albert officially ended its TV run on July 6, 1956. But in 1957, Lynch revisited the Arbuckles for a CBS radio show called The Couple Next Door. Lynch reprised her now cla.s.sic role, but because CBS wanted new character names (and because Peg refused), Ethel and Albert were never named for this series, and they only referred to each other as "dear." Margaret Hamilton (better known as the Wicked Witch of the West from 1939's The Wizard of Oz) was the third adult to join the Ethel and Albert cast, as Aunt Eva. The series lasted for three years.

Peg lives with her husband of sixty-five years, Odd Knut Rnning, in Becket, Ma.s.sachusetts. At the age of ninety-six, she continues to write comedy.

Let's start with where you were born.

I'm originally from a little town called Ka.s.son, near Rochester, Minnesota. It was only a town of about fifteen thousand people, located very close to the Mayo Clinic. I was without a father. My dad died during the [1918] flu pandemic, when I was only two. My mother worked full-time as head orthopedic nurse at the Mayo Clinic. Her boss was Dr. Charlie Mayo, who had cofounded the Mayo Clinic [in 1889].

Dr. Charlie-that's what we called him. He sort of brought me up; he kept an eye on me. My mother once brought me to see him because I wasn't eating. And he made a joke: "Maybe she doesn't like the food." My mother ignored it, and she said, "But look at her! She's mad all the time! Look at her fists! They're always clenched." So Dr. Charlie said, "Margaret"-which is what they called me then-"Margaret, doors are going to open for you when you grow up. Be sure that you walk through them." And that was a good lesson. I'd like to think that I have.

How did you first get involved with radio?

In school, I had a cla.s.smate who told me that his father just bought the First National Bank Building in Rochester. Located in the same building was a radio station that had the call letters KROC. I perked right up. "Oh, really?" I asked. This was in 1931; I was fourteen. I had wanted to write ever since I was eight years old. I said, "Gee, can I work at the station?" And my friend said, "Sure, ask my dad."

I went down to the building, all by myself, and I asked my friend's father, "Can I work at your radio station?" You have to remember that when radio first started, stations were built by the wealthiest merchants in town. These merchants had money, but they didn't know a d.a.m.n thing about radio. I said, "You gotta get some sponsors." And he said, "Well, what's that? We don't sell things over here at the network."

So I said, "I'll show you. Let's try the shoe store first." I knew the owner was a good friend of his. I walked on over to the store and I said to the owner, "Listen. You're going to sell shoes on the radio. And you're going to need a slogan." I said, "I'll be back tomorrow with a slogan for you." Overnight, I made one up: "Don't spend your life two feet away from happiness." He loved it.

I then went to the fancy grocery store in town-it was called the Vegetable Man. The doctors' wives bought all their groceries there. I told the manager of the grocery that he needed to advertise on the radio. He loved the idea, and he wanted to be a sponsor, too. But we couldn't decide what the slogan should be. He said, "You work at the hospital sometimes with your mother, right? Why don't you introduce celebrities on the air, and we can sponsor the interviews?" I said, "That's a marvelous idea!" The town was small, but we had a thousand new people a day going through the clinic, and there were oftentimes celebrities. It didn't bother me to talk to them. I never experienced that awestruck feeling that I think has sort of ruined the country. Celebrities aren't really celebrities, you know; they're just people. One of the first interviews I got was with [movie actor] Bill Powell. Do you remember [his 1934 film] The Thin Man? No, you're too young to remember The Thin Man.

Well, Bill Powell was a patient at the Mayo Clinic, and he was adorable. He was so sweet. Beforehand, I talked to Dr. Charlie, and he said, "Don't discuss their ailments. You don't want to get into that. It's their private thing; don't do that. Always be nice and make sure a patient has his dignity. His backside is always waving in the breeze, so make sure he has his dignity."

I disagreed with him. When people are sick, they'll discuss anything. You see them sitting in the lobby, and you know d.a.m.n well they don't know each other, yet they're talking about each other's bowel habits. So I told Dr. Charlie that the patients would be willing to talk about anything-and I was right. The interviews for the radio were great.

Another person I interviewed-who was the baseball player who retired before his time? Gary Cooper played him in a movie.

Lou Gehrig?!

Yes, I interviewed Lou Gehrig on the morning he received his results [for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis]. I think he already knew what it was, though.

Do you remember what he said to you?

I don't. I do remember him being very sweet and nice. Most of the time the patients would want to talk about where they lived and about their family. They were sentimental, you know.

That's incredible. You perhaps conducted one of the final interviews with Lou Gehrig.

I never even thought about such a thing. I expect I did. But it didn't mean much at the time. I wasn't interested in baseball.

There were others. Have you heard of Knute Rockne [the Notre Dame football coach from 1918 to 1930]? Well, my very first interview was him. He was at the clinic, and he was staying at a hotel in town. I can remember ringing the doorbell at his hotel on the seventh floor. And he came to the door and I was terrified. He looked down at me and he said, "Well, look what we have here! You come right in, honey." And what I remember is not the interview, but the very fact that he lifted me up to him and asked, "What would you like for breakfast, Margaret?" And I said, "Well, sir, I've already had breakfast." And he said, "How about a waffle? Maybe you could eat a waffle?" And I said, "Well, maybe I could." I spent the morning there. I was just numb, but thrilled that he picked up a telephone and ordered breakfast. I'd never heard of such a thing as ordering breakfast. And then the table came up with food on it! I was more impressed with that than with Knute Rockne and football!

Ernest Hemingway was also there, but I never interviewed him. He was there for erectile dysfunction. I'm just joking.

But it was very, very hard, too, because I worked in the hospital to earn some extra money. I was in tears every night that I worked at the clinic. A writer should never be around sick people, because you only end up getting all of their diseases, as you well know. And I told mother, "I simply can't stay here, Mother. I've got to get out." I cried all the time. It was so terrible to hear patients say, "I'm going to visit my daughter in New Mexico" and "I'm going to visit my son," and you knew d.a.m.n well they were going to be dead before then because you had just seen their tests that read "Inoperable Cancer of the Stomach" or something like that. I just couldn't take it any longer.

Where did you work after your first radio job at KROC?

I landed a job at KATE, in Albert Lea, Minnesota, about sixty miles southwest of Rochester. This was in 1937, just after I graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in English and acting. I did everything. I wrote commercials. I worked on a thirty-minute woman's show-it was a daily-and a show about theater that was on once a week for thirty minutes. I'd also write plays and sketches, and I'd give the news, a lot of it about farming. I worked there for a number of years, earning sixty-five dollars a month.

Did you find your university degrees helpful after you graduated?

Literally, I learned nothing at university. Nothing. I always taught myself. I was a big reader when I was young. I completed War and Peace when I was ten. I can remember a neighbor saying, "Margaret, why are you always going out to the hammock? What do you do there?" Reading was my favorite thing to do. Whenever I could get away with it, I would go out and lie in the hammock with my dog, eating a green apple, and I would read. I still read. I would hate to die for a lot of reasons. But mostly because of all the books I haven't yet read.

When did you create Ethel and Albert?

I began Ethel and Albert in the late thirties. It started as three- or four-minute filler. Actually, the show was first called He and She. I thought it was something I'd only be doing that week. The show eventually ran every day, for fifteen minutes. And then the station asked for a second show per day, different from the first. Two new shows a day. But I loved it. I was just bored writing copy for the station. It was a great way to sell products, to have a husband and wife in a domestic setting each week. You know, something happens every day to couples that might not seem funny as it's happening. Later, though, at dinner, it can be hilarious.

The show had a very naturalistic tone to it, in terms of both plot and dialogue. It still sounds very modern.

It's the little things in life that've always interested me. How people in relationships talk to one another. What they say when they really mean something else.

The jokes, too, are much more natural-sounding on Ethel and Albert than on the other radio comedies of the time. On The Abbott and Costello Show, Costello might say, "You have a cold. How can you keep the germs from spreading?" And Abbott would reply: "I'll make 'em wear a girdle." Whereas on Ethel and Albert, the joke would be entirely based on a situation: Albert heads off to work while still wearing his old Boy Scout hat that he had put on as a joke and had forgotten about.

When I started, I didn't write well. I tried too hard to be funny. I was trying too hard to write a Gracie Allen type of character [the not-so-bright comedic foil to George Burns]. But it hit me eventually that I don't have to try to be funny, for G.o.d's sakes. Life is funny!

I never considered what I wrote for Ethel and Albert to be jokes. I didn't write gag lines. All of the humor was based on everyday situations. The comedy came from character traits that we can all recognize and find funny.

For instance, I remember once eating dinner at a well-known restaurant in New York, and the waiter was too busy with the table of twelve next to ours to bother with us. I went home and immediately wrote a script about that. I called the restaurant's manager and said, "If you want to know what level of service your restaurant gives, you can listen to Ethel and Albert two weeks from tonight on the radio." So two weeks came and he had to go sit out in his car, because he didn't have a radio in his office-I later learned this from someone who knew him. And he called me up after the show aired, and he said, "I apologize. Come back here and have a free meal." And I thanked him very kindly and said, "I didn't do it for that. I'm too busy to come around, but thank you very much." But that's how I got my ideas. From all over, at any time. Psychologically, it was useful. The show gave me a marvelous sense of freedom.

So, you never felt you wrote "joke" jokes?

No. I think I was certainly capable of doing that. I remember one joke I wrote that went: "How can you put your foot down if you haven't got a leg to stand on?" But what I tended to write were funny situations tied to character.

I wanted it all to sound real. A few things bothered me about radio. I thought the sound effects were not realistic. The only sound effects I liked were the phone ringing, the doorbell, or just clatter. I hated footsteps. Always footsteps. Didn't any of the characters on these radio shows ever walk in rooms with rugs in them? The footsteps weren't realistic, you know? And I'm a very realistic person.

That's how I ended up playing Ethel. We auditioned a lot of actresses, but they weren't natural-sounding. They were too slow. They were too dramatic. They sounded too much like they were on the radio. Why couldn't they just read the way they talked? Why couldn't they talk like normal people in everyday settings?

Can you see the influence that your show had on subsequent radio and TV sitcoms? I've seen Ethel and Albert called the very first sitcom.

I've heard from various people over the years that the conversational style in Ethel and Albert is similar to a show I've never seen. Siegfield? Zigfeld? Feigold? Something like that?

Seinfeld?

Yeah, well, you know. I don't have time to watch all these shows. But I think that show, too, was about the little things that happen in our lives. I realized when I first started that there were a lot of ideas all around me. I didn't have to knock myself out trying to come up with funny situations. They were already there to be discovered.

Yes, but even if a show is based on real life and realistic situations, you still have to write the scripts.

I did, and I had to produce a lot of material over the years. I had to come up with an idea every day. Every single day.

Over the years, how many scripts did you write for Ethel and Albert?

More than twenty thousand.

Twenty thousand?! How is that possible?

Well, listen. I wrote for the show for many years, first for radio and then for TV. This was off and on, but mostly daily. And we'd often broadcast two shows a day. They wouldn't ever let me repeat an episode. Can you imagine? But it worked out well. I've always owned the rights to the show and could take it wherever I wanted. And I was also in charge.

Did the show have any writers besides you?

A lot of great writers submitted, but not a single person had a script that would've fit. [Novelist] John Cheever once submitted a script. He was a good writer, but it just didn't fit. People never seemed to believe it was about anything. They all thought I wrote about nothing. No, it was always just me doing the writing. And I've always typed with two fingers, if you can believe it.

I wrote constantly. Every single day, nonstop. One night-and this was when I was living in New York in the fifties-my doorbell rang at three-thirty in the morning. I was up writing. I was always up writing. I said, "Who is it?" And I heard a man say, "Don't open the door, please G.o.d, don't open the door!" And I asked, "What do you mean don't open the door?" And he said, "Don't open the door! I don't have any clothes on!" And I said, "So you're naked?" And he said, "Yes. And you know me, I'm from downstairs." And I said, "You don't sound like you're from downstairs. What is it you need?" And he said, "Could you get me a coat?" And I answered, "What, am I crazy? Opening the door at three-thirty in Gramercy Park? Well, just a minute." And I opened the door a crack and handed a coat to him. I made him walk down to the end of the hall before I opened the door again. He had changed and was walking back to my apartment.

And I recognized him. I had screamed at him six months earlier because he was having a musical jam session in his apartment while I was trying to write. It was so noisy! I couldn't get anything done. So I recognized him, and he began to tell me that he worked for The New Yorker as a cartoonist.

He was a New Yorker cartoonist? What was his name?

I'm not going to tell you. He later became a big seller in The New Yorker, but I'm not going to say things like that. And we sat there in my bay window overlooking Gramercy Park-I lived at 12 Gramercy Park-waiting for the police to arrive with a locksmith. I didn't have a key to the guy's apartment. He told me that he had been taking a shower and had locked himself out of his apartment by mistake. He's sitting there in a raincoat and I'm in a bathrobe, and I said, "Do you like working at The New Yorker?" And he said "Yeah, but if I can't get back in the apartment, I can't work on my cartoons for tomorrow."

I said, "Tomorrow, I have to produce a show, and I haven't even written the script yet. So, thirty-seven million people will eventually be turning on their TV sets to watch and hear what I'm saying, and I haven't even got an idea. And here you are, complaining to me because you can't get into your apartment!"

He laughed and said, "Do you know Jim [James] Thurber? He listens to your show when he works, and so do a lot of the other cartoonists." A few months later a group of New Yorker cartoonists sent me fan letters. So I've got a sc.r.a.pbook full of those.

[Playwright and humorist] George S. Kaufman once said a nice thing about me. He saw a TV episode I had written, and he told a mutual friend that he liked it.

What was the episode about?

I had written a script where Albert returned home just as Ethel was getting herself ready for a Halloween party. There was a pumpkin on the front porch that she had scooped out and put a candle in. And Albert thought it'd be funny if he took out the candle and then put the pumpkin on top of his head and pulled a sheet around himself. He ran in-the silly way that people do to be funny-in order to scare Ethel. And he screamed, "Oooooh!" And she said, "For heaven sakes. Go upstairs and get that thing off! The guests are going to be here at eight o'clock." But he couldn't get the pumpkin off. [Laughs] He couldn't get the thing off his head, and Ethel then had to drive him to the hospital to have a doctor try to surgically remove it. It was very realistic.

I heard from a friend that George Kaufman told her, "I saw the funniest d.a.m.n television show. This writer guy had an idea that comes once in lifetime." He said, "G.o.d, he did it so well. I don't know who wrote it." I ended up meeting Kaufman later, and I told him, "I was the one who wrote it. And that writer guy is a writer dame."

When you created the television version of Ethel and Albert for NBC in 1953, you remained the show's sole writer. Did you find any difference between writing for radio and writing for TV?

Not a bit. Not a bit.

A lot of radio writers had a tough time transitioning from a descriptive medium to an entirely visual medium. Many radio writers would tend to overwrite for television.

When we started our show on radio in 1944, there were about one hundred television sets in all of New York City. Think of it. One hundred. The medium was all radio. But that changed a little by 1950. But it was still so new. I once attended a taping of George Kelly's [1924 play] The Show-Off, down in the RCA building, at one of the studios. It was horrible. The lights were so strong. It was incredibly hot. The men had great sweat stains under their armpits. The temperature was 115.

So, when it came time to shoot our show, I knew we had to shoot it in an air-cooled studio, which we did up in Schenectady [New York]. We nearly froze to death, but it worked. It was all so new and everyone was so nervous. The cameraman twisted up in the coils and fell off his feet. Two people in the control room got up to see what was going on and, in their frenzy, they b.u.mped heads, and one knocked the other one out. And then the one who wasn't knocked out came out of the control room and tripped over the cable. It was total shambles.

I have to say, though, that I was fine. I can't talk for other writers, but the reason I didn't have any trouble with the transition from radio to TV is because I always envisioned exactly where we were going and what we were doing. It was an easy transition. It was nothing.

But it frightened a lot of people. A lot of stage actors couldn't make the transition. It terrified them. Performing live in front of millions, as well as a live crowd. It could ruin their timing.

I want to tell you a story about [Academy Awardwinning British movie actor] Charles Laughton throwing up.

Please.

In 1952, Ethel and Albert was on The Kate Smith Hour as a ten-minute segment. There were other performers on the show. Musicians, actors, jugglers. On this night, Charles was going to read Shakespeare on the show. This was the first time he'd ever been on television, and he was nervous as a cat.

A few minutes before the show went live, the producer ran into the backstage area and asked me, "Can you make a two-minute cut in your sketch?" And I said, "No, I'm not cutting anything out. I can't do that. I wouldn't know where to do it."

He said, "Well, we have to cut the Shakespeare thing," which is what Laughton would be performing. "We have to cut it down." The producer just drew a line down the Shakespeare script. He crossed off some sentences and wrote something else. He said, "Make the cut like that." He then walked out of the room and, as he pa.s.sed Laughton, he said, "Miss Lynch is going to make cuts in your script."