Poking A Dead Frog Part 7

Will Ferrell doesn't mince words when describing Adam McKay, his longtime friend and comedy collaborator. "He's kind of a dangerous individual," Ferrell says. "He's extremely funny; there's no doubt about it. But he's dangerous. I wouldn't stay in a room with him, one-on-one, for any longer than I had to. There's a criminal tendency there. We have a great working relationship because I don't ask him much about his past. He just frightens me." Ferrell is joking, obviously. But there was a time, years before McKay found Hollywood success directing and co-writing films such as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) and The Other Guys (2010), when he might very well have been the most dangerous man in comedy.

In June of 1995, McKay was making history at Chicago's legendary Second City, in a sketch revue called Piata Full of Bees. It would prove to be one of the most seminal and groundbreaking productions in the theater's history. Set apart by its aggressive approach to political and social satire, Piata tackled such seemingly unfunny subjects as wealth corruption, racism, and the ma.s.sacre of Native Americans. McKay is often given sole credit for masterminding its strong political point of view.

McKay hadn't always aspired to create political satire. The Pennsylvania native grew up idolizing mainstream comics such as Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld. While studying English at Temple University, he performed what he calls "family-friendly" stand-up in local bars and restaurants. But less than a year shy of graduation, he dropped out of school and moved to Chicago to study improvisation, and he soon became one of the most popular (and notorious) performers in the city's vibrant comedy scene. With such pioneering groups as The Family and The Upright Citizens Brigade, he became infamous for interactive theatrics and elaborately staged pranks. During one show, he led an entire audience back to his apartment, where they witnessed a brutal (and entirely staged) murder from his bedroom window. During another show, he staged his own suicide.

Performing storefront improv for free soon led to a gig at the Second City, and within a few months of Piata's premiere, McKay was hired as a writer for Sat.u.r.day Night Live. (He was promoted to head writer after just his first year.) He wasted no time trying to infuse Sat.u.r.day Night Live with a sharper satiric bite, but it wasn't always easy. "We did a commercial parody about a luxury car with an aperture that you could have intercourse with," says Tina Fey, whom McKay hired to the SNL writing staff in 1997. "Adam insisted on calling it the Mercury Mistress. Well, it turned out that Lincoln Mercury had just signed on to advertise at NBC, and obviously they didn't want someone f.u.c.king their car. The commercial only aired once and it will never air again."

While he was never able to make sweeping changes to SNL's content, McKay eventually found small ways to be subversive. During his fifth year, he began writing and directing short films that were hidden in the show's final minutes. The films-which starred such diverse talent as Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, and Ben Stiller-were typically dark and disturbing. In The Pervert, for instance, a group of s.e.xual deviants are disgusted by a fellow pervert's attraction to the Cream of Wheat chef.

In 2001, after six seasons at SNL, McKay left to pursue a career in filmmaking. But Hollywood didn't exactly welcome him with open arms. "It's difficult if you've only ever made short comedy films about Doberman attacks and a brutal 'rape' involving [Eagles guitarist] Glenn Frey," McKay admits. "There was at least one studio that was so horrified they asked me never to contact them again." Despite that studio's reluctance, the 2004 release of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy eventually grossed (for the DreamWorks studio) more than $90 million worldwide and became a cult cla.s.sic on DVD. It was McKay's feature debut as a director and screenwriter, and his first big-screen project with Will Ferrell.

More movies followed-Step Brothers (2008), The Other Guys (2010), and Anchorman: The Legend Continues (2013). McKay and Ferrell also hit Broadway with the 2009 George W. Bushskewering one-man show You're Welcome America, as well as infiltrating the Internet with Funny or Die, the wildly popular, user-generated video website they launched, in 2007, with their production company, Gary Sanchez Productions. Today, McKay is a mainstream juggernaut, one of the few dependable comedy writer/directors with a loyal following, whose name alone is enough to sell tickets. But has all the success softened the edges of this once subversive comedy writer?

Filmmaker David O. Russell, who coexecutive produced the first Anchorman, doesn't think so. "Just spending time with Adam McKay sharpens my rebellious spirit," Russell says. "He's the pure stuff, as far as I'm concerned. We typically go from having a serious political conversation to an insane improvisational digression and back. It cracks me up that anyone would suggest that he's become more traditional. Adam McKay is a cultural gem and he's gonna shine and he's gonna f.u.c.k s.h.i.t up."

Was there a particular comedy movie, or TV show, that influenced you as a child more than others?

It was the [1980] movie Airplane! Everything up to that point had been fairly predictable. Story structures had always been sort of the same in movies. With the comedies until then, you would see setup, a beat, and then a joke. Most had this kind of a structure, but Airplane! changed that.

There's a specific scene in Airplane! that I love. A newspaper spins and it stops with the headline: "Disaster Looms for Airline Pa.s.sengers." And then it spins and stops with the next headline: "Chicago Prepares for Crash Landing." And then it spins again and stops with the final headline: "Boy Trapped in Refrigerator Eats Own Foot."

That was the first time I ever saw anything like that. That joke was just so out of left field, and yet it still made sense. It was one of the first times I ever saw something where I felt, Oh, my G.o.d, you can do whatever you want with this form! Someone's imagination had taken a leap four steps ahead. It was just the utter surprise of it. It was almost wrong or naughty or crazy. It was just so exciting to me. I've talked to other comedy writers who have said the same thing, that they distinctly remember that joke: "Boy trapped in refrigerator eats own foot." I remember my eyes just going wide.

On one level it's pure absurdist comedy. The first couple of beats of the spinning headline are parody, then it becomes a bit of a satire about the media blowing stories out of proportion, and then all of a sudden, it becomes pure absurdism. The premise almost ate itself at that moment-or its own foot.

Your movies tend to contain that very same combination: parody, satire, absurdism.

If you just do parody, it can get pretty boring. You'll just be hitting the old formulas that we've all seen before. We always try to make our movies one-third satire, one-third parody, and one-third original storytelling. We're very conscious of that. We like to use the old tropes to ground the movie in familiarity, and then jump off and go in different directions. At that point-and, really, only at that point-can you then get as sincere as you want. I love getting really sincere off an insane joke or a tail-eating-itself kind of joke, but it has to be grounded first. It's like grounding a live wire. It's the only way good comedy works.

When did you first make the leap from loving comedy to actually devoting your life to it?

I dropped out of Temple University [in 1989] during my senior year. I had a buddy go out to Chicago to perform. He came back and told me about this thing going on out there, long-form improv. I couldn't believe it. At that time, I was only doing stand-up. He said to me, "You go onstage, and whatever you say is what happens. You make up anything you want. If you want to be on Mars, you're on Mars. The only rule is that you can't say 'no' to the other performers. You have to say, 'Yes, and . . .' If another performer starts to go off in another direction, you say 'Yes, and . . .' and then you follow."

I was like, "You gotta be kidding me!" My friend also told me about improv teacher Del Close, this old hipster who was the mastermind behind it all. There were other improv groups, led by other teachers, but they didn't really do long form like Del taught. This is what I was waiting to hear. I called up my parents and said, "I'm leaving college." I had a semester and a half to go. And they were so f.u.c.king p.i.s.sed at me. My mom had just remarried a guy who was a doctor, so they had a little bit of money. She said, "Look, if you stay, we'll buy you a car. We'll pay for you to go to law school." And I was like, "No, no. I'm going."

I literally sold my entire comic book collection that I owned growing up. I had the reboot of Captain America No. 1. I had Iron Man reboot No. 1. I had Captain Marvel No. 1. Yeah, I had a bunch of good ones. I had been smart enough to bag all of them. I had some good comics in great condition. I bought a Chrysler New Yorker with s.h.a.g carpeting, power windows, and an eight-track player-there was already a tape in the player-from an elderly guy who could no longer drive. I then sold my baseball card collection for four hundred dollars, which paid for car insurance. Then my buddy and I put a gag lobster claw over the Chrysler emblem on the front of the car's hood and drove out to Chicago.

When you purchased the car, what tape was already in the eight-track player?

Jethro Tull's Greatest Hits.

Now, why would an elderly man in the 1980s be listening to Jethro Tull?

That's the question that will haunt me for life. My Rosebud question, right there.

When you headed out to Chicago, had you already given up on your stand-up act that you had started in college?

I had given it up. I had been doing stand-up all throughout college, on the weekends, and I just didn't like where my act was headed. It was more original and interesting when I started than what it eventually became. I had to create this bulletproof act that I could perform on the road, lasting about twenty minutes, that could get me through a rough night. In the end, I was doing airplane jokes and girlfriend jokes. I had a couple of original jokes, but I just wasn't that into it.

Hearing about this whole other world and this scene in Chicago sounded so intriguing to me. I was just looking for a change. At that point, I was writing short stories and thought maybe I could be a serious writer. I still had those ambitions. And that's what mostly attracted me to Chicago. It was a great blend of artistic ambitions combined with comedy, with maybe a slight commercial bent. It was a mix of artistic ambitions with straight-up laughs.

It didn't take long to meet, and then work with, Del Close.

How did that come about?

I got into Del's improv cla.s.s and then started an improv group with a few other players. We had a pretty unique style to our group, so other players were attracted to it. It just kept getting more and more interesting. Del began to pay attention to our group, and he sort of adopted us. We invented all these improv forms, including something called "deconstruction."

With deconstruction we would take long scenes and then just break each of these scenes apart: thematically, narratively, symbolically, psychologically. We'd shatter the scenes and then put the pieces back together in different forms. We could revisit the beginning, jump to the end, reimagine each of the characters-anything, really.

We'd also do other types of improv, like "improvised movies." We'd improvise an entire movie in a three-act show. We'd do something called "The Dream." An audience member would tell us what happened to them that day, and we would show them the dream they were going to have that night. In its rawest form, it was a montage of their day. But when done well, we could bend the images and combine them and make it dreamlike. But it was also showing the audience the process: "Look, here are all the cards. We're not putting any of them up our sleeves. Here they are." And then we'd start working off what was given to us.

Is it true that in the mid-nineties, while you were in the Chicago improv scene, you publicly improvised your own suicide?

Yes, that happened. I had an actor's photo, a horrible eight-by-ten glossy, that I inserted into a poster. And the poster read: "On such-and-such-a-date, Adam McKay, 26, will kill himself. This is not a joke." I put up the poster everywhere, and on the a.s.signed location and date, there was a huge turnout. I went to the roof of a five-story building and yelled down to the crowd. We had a CPR dummy dressed exactly as I was dressed, and we threw it off the roof. Someone else was playing the character of the Grim Reaper, and he collected the dummy and hauled it away. Meanwhile, I ran downstairs and "came to life," and we all ended up back in the theater where we finished the show.

Good luck not getting arrested in New York with that stunt.

It was the type of thing you could only get away with in Chicago. [Laughs] Anywhere else, I'd have immediately been hauled away. But it was also the perfect time. Nowadays with the Internet, people would just go, "Oh, it's performance art" or "It's a flash mob" or whatever. But it wasn't commonplace back then. There weren't as many hidden-camera shows. Nowadays, this stuff is so common, you can't truly surprise people.

There was just this freedom. There was just a freedom to try to get away with whatever you felt you could get away with. Del Close encouraged that.

So Del would actually encourage improv that took place on the streets, in front of unsuspecting people?

Oh, my G.o.d, he loved it! You know, when I faked my own suicide, Del was on the street literally screaming, "Jump! Jump!" He had always thought our improv group was pretty good, but once we started doing these kind of stunts-we once even staged a fake street revolution, with audience members. .h.i.tting the streets with lit torches and fake guns-an extra fondness came in. That's when Del really started knowing our names and caring about what we were doing.

Do you think you ever went too far with these stunts?

I might have done things differently if I could do them over again. There was one time when Scott Adsit [the actor who later played Pete Hornberger on 30 Rock] and I and the rest of our group were performing in front of an audience. This was when Bill Clinton was president. Scott came out and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I have some terrible news. President Clinton has just been a.s.sa.s.sinated." Scott's a really good actor and he played it very real. The whole crowd completely believed it. We then wheeled out a television to watch the most up-to-date news coverage. We turned it on and the audience saw NFL bloopers-we had already inserted a VHS tape. One of us yelled, "Wait, don't change it!" The whole cast came out and hunkered down and just started laughing at these football bloopers. The people in the audience slowly began to file out, dazed. That was the end of our show.

And you know, that's the kind of thing you do when you're twenty-five or twenty-six. Now that I'm a forty-four-year-old, I think, You can't do that. What happens if someone starts sobbing? What happens if. . . . There are too many what ifs. But at twenty-six, you're not quite that compa.s.sionate. I'll now b.u.mp into members of the improv group and say, "Can you believe we did that?" But that was part of the process. We were pushing things as far as they could go. And the only reason I accept it now is that there was real satire there: entertainment and silly pop culture trumping real information. But we probably should have popped it. There probably should have been some reveal at the end. Something to clue the audience in to the fact that what they had just seen was staged.

What did you take away from Del's improv teaching that you later applied to writing and directing?

He had two key tenants: one was to always go to your third thought. Sounds really simple, but when you're onstage, your first thought is knee-jerk. Your second thought is usually okay, but not great. Del would make you stay in a scene until you found your third thought, which was a little above and beyond what most other teachers would suggest. Basically, he wanted your third thought for your character choice, your third thought for your premise or your scene, your third thought for your heightened move.

Also, Del would make you do slow improv, and it was actually torturous. I don't know if you know the book Thinking, Fast and Slow [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011]. It relates a lot to comedy, and just the creative process. The author, Daniel Kahneman, is a psychologist who won the [2002] n.o.bel Prize [in Economics]. His specialty is the psychology of decision making. The book is all about how we think: fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is what we do every day. It's intuitive; it's quick. Slow thinking is when you stop, shut out everything, really look into the foundations of the decisions you're making, and then make changes. It's extremely painful and uncomfortable. Kahneman performed all of these tests on slow thinking and found that the heart rate goes up; people begin to sweat. Especially in our fast-moving society, people hate it. But it's the key to everything. The people who are more comfortable in slow thinking are more successful, have higher IQs, earn more money. They're the innovators.

It was exactly what Del Close was doing. He was basically forcing us into slow thinking. Because of that, a lot of students were dropping out of Del's cla.s.ses. There were many people who didn't enjoy working with him. There would be these other improv teachers who would create a sense of, "Everything's cool, everything's free and fun." People would go to those cla.s.ses, and those people never got any better. The ones who hung with Del, you could see tangible changes. He was not there to make you feel comfortable or put a big smile on your face or stroke your esteem. He wanted you to change the way you were thinking, and he wanted to help you achieve that change.

Another lesson was to always play to the top of your intelligence. If you treat the audience like poets and geniuses, that's what they will become. Del never-ever-believed in playing down to the audience, in making cheap jokes. His feeling was, If you're going to make a stupid joke, make it brilliantly stupid. Our group started doing it, and we were like, "Holy s.h.i.t, this actually works!" Audiences are way smarter than people give them credit for. Now, this doesn't mean that you can't do silly stuff. But when you play a kid, don't play a dumb kid. When you play someone drunk, don't play them overtly drunk. If you're drunk, play the character as if he's not acting overtly drunk.

Just very, very honest comedy. Improv is all about taking chances. You're going to fail at first, maybe even fail the first few times. But you don't have to be Oscar Wilde on every take. You can also be Frank Stallone on certain takes.

Let's talk about the films you've made. The characters you and Will have created for your movies-from Ron Burgundy in Anchorman to Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights to Brennan Huff in Step Brothers-are filled with a tremendous self-confidence and bravado, most of it unearned. It's a type of bravado that seems different from the type seen in comedies from the seventies and eighties, in movies like Slap Shot, Risky Business, Stripes, and Ghostbusters, in which the characters actually accomplished something.

Well, I think America has changed so radically from the mid-seventies. I mean, to me, the mid-seventies was a kind of peak in America. It seemed that everything was working well. We withdrew from Vietnam, poverty was at an all-time low, people were properly suspicious of power in the right ways-as opposed to in manipulative ways. Now Americans think their country is number one despite all the numbers that prove to the contrary, and this fascinates me. I just think we let go of the reins in the last twenty, twenty-five years. It's a ridiculous, foolish confidence that America seems to have, for the most part.

Whereas back in the seventies and eighties, you saw this sort of mocking confidence, like in Stripes. You saw characters who had their a.s.ses kicked by higher, corrupt powers. You saw a lot of cynicism toward power and old establishment. You had Caddyshack making fun of country clubs and how ridiculous all that status was. You had Animal House mocking old blue-blood college inst.i.tutions.

Nowadays, I think it's just a totally different game. There are different forces at work. The character of Ricky Bobby and the characters from Step Brothers are all idiots, and yet they have total confidence as they rule their domain. They have no skills, none whatsoever, yet they're completely ent.i.tled. Will and I are endlessly fascinated by this c.o.c.kiness; it's all just completely unearned. It's not connected to any reality whatsoever. It's free-floating. They're not getting anywhere. They're stuck and impotent. I find this to be one of the most fascinating things about America right now.

So the characters in Step Brothers are c.o.c.ky and ent.i.tled, but, at the same time, they don't have the least amount of power, beyond what takes place in their bas.e.m.e.nt?

Exactly. That's what I mean. Two guys who have no life skills, no actual power, but who walk around completely ent.i.tled as if they have all the power. And that's so much of the American character right now. I remember once having an argument with a guy who was telling me that America has the best health-care system in the world. I said, "Well, based on what metric? Why are you saying that?" And he said, "Because we do." So I threw numbers out at him: life expectancy, infant mortality, time allowed in the hospital. America is ranked twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh in all those categories. And he said, "Yeah, but that doesn't matter because America's special, so we don't apply to those numbers." And I asked, "But how can you say we're number one?" And he said, "Are you saying I'm stupid?" That kind of conversation just says everything to me. "We're number one, and I don't care what anyone else says, or what reality says. We're number one!" And that's America in the last thirty years, really.

Does that tie into the Refusal-to-Grow-Up syndrome that a lot of your characters suffer from? Their insistence on remaining stunted? To continue to perform bong hits in their parents' house long past the age of thirty?

Totally. You never leave the bubble of your a.s.sumptions. You never think, Oh, s.h.i.t, it's a much bigger world than I thought. Oh, I'm wrong! And, Wow, that's a whole new perspective! You just stay in the bubble of your own creation-or advertising's creation, or the media's creation. You just never leave it, and the more you're in it, the more you become invested in defending it, and the more c.o.c.ky you become about it all, and the more you roll your eyes over anything that's to the contrary. That to me is the spiritual force that is behind the American decline. That's exactly what's been happening in the last thirty years. When you stop looking at reality, and you just start walking around like you're the best, you don't evolve. You're stuck in amber. You don't find roads for improvement. It's death, basically.

But it seems that one of the major reasons why your characters are so beloved is because they're stuck and are still doing bong hits in their parents' bas.e.m.e.nts. Are the audience members picking up on the satire, many of whom might still be watching and doing bong hits in their parents' bas.e.m.e.nts?

It's an interesting question. Maybe there is an artful way to be more overt while also keeping the comedy alive. I don't know. It's a tricky next step. Rather than just presenting the problem and laughing at it, we could somehow share how to go about fixing it. I don't know.

I think if you create the characters who confront the CEOs, you're writing [the 2007 George Clooney film] Michael Clayton. There's something a little old-fashioned about that, a character going after the big corporations. It feels like those movies from the seventies, like [1974's] The Parallax View and [1975's] Three Days of the Condor and [1976's] All the President's Men. It no longer feels realistic. It's not where America is right now. To me, it's more . . . I don't know. Everyone attacks this from a different angle. To Will and me, it becomes very, very funny when characters deny that the ship's sinking, even as the water's rising past their knees. Other people can write about characters confronting CEOs. We did do that a little bit in The Other Guys. That was in there. That was the first time we ever did anything like that. We did have the characters go into the belly of the corporate world in a way. But what we found was that our comedy swamped the story line a little bit. We thought it was really obvious, but when people saw that movie, they didn't really pick up on what we were doing.

What do you think they missed?

I remember people were blindsided by what we were saying. I was like, "Did you see the movie? The villain is from The Center for American Capitalism. The whole movie is about how chasing small-time drug crimes is meaningless. The real crimes, like the Bernie Madoff situation, are always taking place behind the scenes." That was the whole premise for the movie. And I was amazed when no one picked up on it. To me it was glaring.

Will Ferrell's character in The Other Guys is interesting. As opposed to the rest of the characters in the film, he did, in fact, have the guts to take on those in power. He was a bit strange, a bit of a nerd, and yet he was in no way meek.

When I was a freshman in college, my mom and her husband got this dog, a pure-breed Border collie. He was really inbred, so specific, so smart-but he was a little crazy. He would chase little movements around on the lawn, digging bizarre little holes. His hearing was incredible. He'd hear things that no other dogs, or people, could hear. The Ferrell character in The Other Guys is like that. He almost had an Asperger's quality to him. I remember learning about this financial a.n.a.lyst [Harry Markopolos] who uncovered, years before anyone else-way back in 2000-the Bernie Madoff crimes. He knew what Madoff was doing was a Ponzi scheme. He went to the SEC and even The Wall Street Journal. Neither did a thing. Meanwhile, Madoff was making comments about this guy, really dismissive comments: "This guy is a joke. Everyone on Wall Street laughs at that guy." Well, guess what? The guy was right, and he had the guts to stand before everyone and say as much.

When you put that type of heroism on the right rail, it's unstoppable. When it's on the wrong rail, it doesn't make sense. I thought, at the time, maybe we should start listening to these guys who aren't the best dressed in the room, who aren't the most charismatic. Maybe we should start focusing on the right answers as opposed to those people who have the best haircuts. And that's how Will's character in The Other Guys came about.

The actor John C. Reilly, who was in Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, has said in interviews that the most subversive people he knows in Hollywood are solely focused on creating comedy. Do you agree with that?

I do. To me one of the most heroic acts of the last fifteen years was Stephen Colbert doing his character right in front of George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner. I mean, it was really amazing. I think in ten years you're going to see a movie about that. That was incredible. At a time when our press just had their tails between their legs, this guy stood up and called out the inanity and insanity, the criminality of what was going on. It was amazing.

There are so many great, bold comedies. Look at the [2006, Mike Judgedirected] movie Idiocracy. It's about a future where everyone is an idiot. If we were living in slightly hipper times that would have been our Dr. Strangelove. Brilliant movie. Just a buck knife down the middle of the tree. Mike Judge went after specific targets, like Starbucks. But it was kind of overlooked, which happens. In the future, according to the movie, Starbucks will be giving out hand jobs. So brave. Maybe audiences just didn't get the satire, but it is brilliant.

Do you think comedy is more effective for change than drama?

I think what's great about comedy is that it's like p.o.r.nography and horror. In the sense that if you're not feeling the tingle that's promised by the genre you know it's bulls.h.i.t. There's no greater truth detector than comedy. You can tell when someone is full of s.h.i.t immediately. Also, comedy tends to travel. If someone laughs at something, they'll laugh at it in South Carolina and they'll laugh about it on the Upper East Side of New York. So I think what's great about horror and comedy is that both travel. If someone's funny, anyone can see it. I've found that just as many Republicans love Anchorman as left wingers. In fact, maybe even slightly more.

I remember [former United States Army] General McChrystal saying Talladega Nights was his favorite movie. It's bizarre. Huge right wingers just love that movie even though the film was inspired by George W. Bush. It just travels really well. That's what's exciting about it, actually. In these crazy times when the truth is sort of hazed out, a movie like that always tends to work really well.

There was a study from a few years ago where it was discovered that Stephen Colbert has a lot of Republican viewers who don't quite understand that he's joking. It's amazing. I've heard people say, "I kind of like him." I'll ask, "You do know he's completely making fun of such and such, right?" And they're like, "Oh, no. He's just a cheeky kind of guy, but he's basically a Republican." I'd think, Oh, my G.o.d, I know Stephen. He's not! He's most definitely not a Republican!

In some ways, this happens with our movies, too, which is okay by me. Our movies are fun, hopefully. They're fun, bright movies, so there's a lot to enjoy on different levels.

Since you began making comedy films more than a decade ago, it seems that the genre has only exploded in popularity.

I saw a guy the other day at a wedding, and I told him my theory on why we've seen this explosion in comedies in the past fifteen years. Number one, America is tacking hard to the right. That sort of extremism always kind of kicks up the need to create comedy. But the second thing is Avid.

What's Avid?

It's a digital movie-editing program that directors use, and it's incredibly helpful. I think Avid is hugely responsible for this boom in comedy. In the past, one would have to shoot the film and edit it, which was a big deal. Now, filmmakers can record the laughs from a test audience at a screening, and we can then cut to the rhythm of those laughs, the rhythm of the audience. We synchronize the laughs with the film. We can really get our timing down to a hundredth of a second. You can decide where you want your story to kick in, where you want a little bit of mood, where you want a hard laugh line. All of this can really be calibrated to these test screenings that we do. It doesn't mean that it becomes mathematical. It still ultimately means that you have to make creative choices, but you can just really get a lot out of it. Sort of like surgery with a laser compared with a regular scalpel.

We're able to download a movie onto the computer and literally do all our edits in minutes. The precision is incredible. You play back the audio of the test screening and get everything timed just right. Like, "This laugh is losing this next line; let's split the difference here." You're able to achieve this rolling energy. You can try experimental edits, and do multiple test screenings, and it's all because you can move so fast with this program. Comedy is the one genre that I think has just really benefited from this more than any other.

This process sounds a lot more useful for comedy writers and directors than reading the suggestion cards from audience members left at test screenings.

Test cards are almost useless to me. I can never get any use out of focus groups or test cards. What works best for me is sitting with an audience, which is the greatest thing. There's nothing better than feeling the energy in the room. That's the best, but the audio we use with Avid is incredibly helpful. I think Jay Roach [the director of Austin Powers, Meet the Parents, The Campaign] was the one who started doing it, although the Marx Brothers, eighty years ago, used to take their scripts out on the road to perform them live. They'd then rewrite the scripts based on the audiences' reactions. We wanted to do this with the script for Anchorman 2, but for whatever reason never got around to it.

What's the worst audience note you ever received for any of your movies?

There's no greater comedy killer than receiving a note that says a character's not likable enough. The second you see someone write that, you know they don't know a thing about comedy. The entire game is to make your character as awful and irresponsible as possible, while still keeping a toe in the pool of his still being a human being. I mean, that's the game. That's the game you're playing. The more despicable your guy can get away with behaving while still remaining on the side of the audience, the funnier it'll be. Seinfeld is the greatest example of that ever.

According to s...o...b..z legend, an audience member left the following note during the previews for 1988's Rain Man: "I was hoping the little guy would snap out of it."

Come on! Oh, that's great! That's fantastic. Kind of typical, unfortunately, although I actually do find some negative notes very encouraging. Or negative reviews. There were some bad reviews I received where I thought, Good. This means the movie's doing what it's supposed to be doing. Roger Ebert said that Step Brothers was symbolic of the end of Western culture.9 I thought, That's exactly the response he should be having. For me, that's just a sound. It's like when a boxer gets punched, they make a certain kind of noise that clues the other boxer as to how much damage is being done. So reading that from Roger Ebert felt like we had accomplished what we had set out to do.

For three seasons, you were the head writer at Sat.u.r.day Night Live, a show that's sometimes been criticized for still adhering to a writing schedule more conducive to the c.o.ked-out seventies than today. Do you feel that SNL's schedule-including all-night writing sessions on Tuesday nights-is helpful or harmful to the comedy-writing process?

I always found it pretty great, actually. Monday you would get your ideas together. On Tuesday, you'd really start in earnest at around one o'clock in the afternoon. You'd then write for fourteen hours straight. Often, you'd end up writing even longer, until nine or ten in the morning. Some of the best material came out of staying up all night when you were half asleep.

But, yeah, the time we spent at Sat.u.r.day Night Live was a very different time from the seventies, with all of that craziness. We would go out and drink, but it was all pretty laid-back. You'd be bopping around to different people's offices. You'd dig in with one group of writers, you'd finish writing the sketch, you'd go visit another group of writers. And I remember just writing crazy amounts. That sense of a deadline is so helpful. It forces pages out of you. So some of the highest volume of writing I've ever done in my life was for that show.

Do you remember any specific sketches or jokes that were created solely because you had been up all night?

What usually came from staying up all night were "ten to one" sketches. Meaning, the last sketch of the show that aired at ten to one in the morning. I remember it was once five in the morning, and Ferrell and I found out that Robert Duvall was going to make a guest appearance. We tried to figure out something to write for him. I said, "I'd like for you to give him a sponge bath," and Ferrell said, "Well, I'd like to sing to him." And I said, "Well, I'd like for you to give him a sponge bath while you sing 'Lay Lady Lay.'" And that was it. We wrote a sketch where Will was a weird hospital orderly who ended up giving Robert Duvall a sponge bath while singing Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay." Four days later it was on the air.

Is the last half hour at SNL viewed with contempt by the writers? Or is it seen as an opportunity to air more interesting material?

I think for a lot of the writers it's the best. That was the place you wanted to be because you had a chance to get away with a crazy sketch. At the same time, some of these stranger sketches would play well enough that it would then go higher in the show. Which was great, because it just meant more people saw it. But no, no writer ever looked down on the last half hour. The only time you ever saw someone upset would be a cast member who might have written a sketch that was supposed to contain a big, fat hit character and it didn't quite play. Lorne would sometimes drop something like that to the very end of the show.

What percentage of SNL sketches, on average, would kill at read-throughs with staff members on Wednesday afternoons but never make it to the air on Sat.u.r.day nights?

Maybe 40 percent to 50 percent. I remember I once wrote a sketch with Ferrell playing a doctor telling a patient that they were going to die. While the doctor was talking to the patient, he was also eating a giant tuna sub. Real messy. The tuna was dripping onto his clothes, dropping to the floor. It just killed in the read-though. But then in the big studio, the audience didn't get into it at all. It was just dead silence the entire time. Actually, that was a pretty common experience.

Were there certain types of sketches that would hit with audiences more than others?

There were many factors at play. A lot of it had to do with the sketch that came before yours. If you were sort of trying to do something small and funny, and the sketch before yours was the Cheerleaders [starring Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri], you'd just get swamped. The audience was looking in one direction with cheerleaders and then suddenly your little sketch would come along and it would just get swallowed whole. That big studio floor could make subtle ideas feel very small, and they could get lost. There were a lot of factors at play.

And, quite often, a sketch would kill in dress rehearsal and would still get cut. I wouldn't understand why.

Even as the head writer you didn't understand why?

Even as the head writer I wouldn't understand why. Will and I once wrote a sequel to our Neil Diamond storyteller sketch. Will played Neil Diamond as if he were on the show VH1 Storytellers. Before each song, "Neil" would explain the songs' origins. "Cracklin' Rosie" was about a hit-and-run. "Cherry, Cherry" was about the time Neil killed a drifter. These were really fun, poppy songs, but they each had these horrific backstories. The first of these Neil Diamond sketches went over really well, so we wrote a sequel with Helen Hunt playing Christina Aguilera singing along with Neil Diamond. It got a ton of laughs the whole way through, and then it got cut. I was really baffled by it. But you know, there's never going to be consistency, really. After you're at SNL for a couple years, you learn not to look for consistency. You kind of take it as it is and move on and try to remember to be super grateful that you're working in New York City on a show where you get to write this crazy stuff. My last two years were definitely the most fun I had on that show, because I wasn't as obsessed with "Why didn't that sketch get in?" Your first couple years, you think everything should be perfect. Once you let that go, it's a really fun show to work on.

You came of age pre-Internet, when a site like Funny or Die wasn't even remotely possible. Do you think your writing and comedy style would have been different if you had grown up connected?

Truthfully, I think it would have been bad for me. I think there's a chance that I would never have left my hometown. The reason I left Philadelphia to begin with was that there was no sketch, no improv, and that's what I really wanted to do. If the Internet had been around, I would have found four or five people who also wanted to do it, and we would've just started shooting videos. Back then you had to head to Chicago. I'm curious if that's changed in Chicago. It was like a migration when we were there. There were people from everywhere. In the Upright Citizens Brigade, we had Matt Besser from Arkansas, Ian Roberts from New Jersey, Rachel Dratch from Ma.s.sachusetts. People were from everywhere.