A Conversation with Pat Hazell—Part 2

Rick Alloway Author

01/28/2021 Added

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Pat Hazell is a former writer for "Seinfeld". During part two of his interview with Rick Alloway, he talks about Johnny Carson, Jerry Seinfeld and the art and craft of comedy writing.

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[00:00:07.450]One of Johnny Carson's greatest attributes
[00:00:10.100]to the people that studied his comedy
[00:00:12.330]because Carson himself was a student of comedy.
[00:00:15.540]And when he was an undergraduate in our college
[00:00:17.660]actually did... I don't know if I've told you this
[00:00:19.390]his undergraduate thesis was an audio recording.
[00:00:22.448]I heard it, it's fantastic.
[00:00:23.808]You heard it right...
[00:00:24.641]Everyone should listen to that.
[00:00:26.979]They should listen to that.
[00:00:27.840]Studied the timing of guys like George Burns
[00:00:29.810]and Jack Benny, and figured out how to use pauses
[00:00:32.440]and which numbers were funnier than other numbers
[00:00:34.850]and stuff like that.
[00:00:36.110]But one of his greatest attributes was
[00:00:37.970]that he was sometimes at his funniest
[00:00:40.420]by his reactions to the jokes that didn't land.
[00:00:43.520]And his ability to react to things,
[00:00:46.400]just as you talked about, when somebody came up
[00:00:48.100]from the audience and it wasn't working out
[00:00:49.640]the way you wanted it to, that the comedy
[00:00:51.810]was a way to bridge past that and move on to the next thing.
[00:00:54.700]And he was a master at that.
[00:00:56.460]I was a student of his, a fan of his, and I took that...
[00:01:01.770]It wasn't a lesson that was told to me
[00:01:03.220]but I was like, "Oh, look at him recover.
[00:01:05.020]Oh, look at that."
[00:01:05.910]And I made the fatal mistake of writing
[00:01:09.210]a bunch of recovery jokes in advance. Okay.
[00:01:13.000]When I went to LA, the first thing,
[00:01:14.680]I had a bunch of jokes that required me
[00:01:16.770]to have a bad joke in order for the recovery joke to work.
[00:01:20.920]I would say to the audience, "You're looking at me
[00:01:22.600]like I'm the last pick at gym class" or something.
[00:01:25.060]And they would laugh at that but they had to not laugh
[00:01:28.210]at the thing before it.
[00:01:29.320]And Jerry Seinfeld was the one that said to me,
[00:01:31.667]"Hey get rid of those.
[00:01:32.860]They're hilarious.
[00:01:33.960]But for everyone that's good,
[00:01:35.290]You have to have a bad joke before it,
[00:01:37.230]and you don't need bad jokes, you're a good writer."
[00:01:40.000]Right.
[00:01:40.833]So I thought that...
[00:01:42.240]And Johnny obviously didn't write those.
[00:01:44.470]He just ad-lipped them when he needed them. Right.
[00:01:47.210]But when I was young, I was like,
[00:01:48.817]"Oh be prepared for stinking."
[00:01:52.310]Al Michael's always talked about,
[00:01:54.030]when people asked him endlessly about his one liner
[00:01:57.450]about , "Do you believe in miracles",
[00:01:59.270]at the end of the hockey game and the Olympics?
[00:02:01.670]And somebody said, "Did you write that?"
[00:02:03.190]And he said, "No, I didn't script that."
[00:02:04.390]He said that "The word that was going through my head
[00:02:05.920]at the time was miraculous.
[00:02:07.630]And it just sort of came out of my mouth."
[00:02:09.570]And he said, "And now I see a lot of sports guys
[00:02:13.010]come into the game with one liners already written
[00:02:16.700]waiting for the occasion to use them when
[00:02:18.850]the brilliance of it is to just let whatever happens happens
[00:02:21.960]and use your creative ability to respond on the fly."
[00:02:26.750]Well, creativity is the core of all of this, right?
[00:02:28.920]If your students are writing, whether it's humor or not.
[00:02:32.000]I think Maya Angelou said that "You can't use up creativity.
[00:02:37.580]The more you use, the more you have."
[00:02:40.170]Right.
[00:02:41.003]And it's in that, that you have to believe
[00:02:44.150]in a bottomless well, right.
[00:02:45.750]Writer's block comes from the person
[00:02:47.360]who thinks they've run out.
[00:02:49.610]And if you have the philosophy that if you're well run dry,
[00:02:53.410]you dig another well, right?
[00:02:55.030]You always have to be working towards an effort
[00:02:58.930]that says "There's more here".
[00:03:01.290]And how you dig into it is a different thing.
[00:03:03.540]Like creating a habit.
[00:03:05.490]Seinfeld had a great ability to extrude comedy
[00:03:10.390]from everyday things, observations we had
[00:03:13.120]by looking at them from different perspectives.
[00:03:15.270]So, sometimes she would look at it from the moon, right.
[00:03:20.120]And say, "What's that little thing down there?"
[00:03:22.150]Right. And explore it.
[00:03:23.340]Sometimes he would be really microscopic
[00:03:25.570]and he would go right into the mechanics
[00:03:28.270]of a thing inside of it.
[00:03:30.360]Or he would personify it.
[00:03:32.240]He'd say, "Well, the doorknob is thinking..."
[00:03:34.110]and then he'd speak as a door knob. Right.
[00:03:36.040]So, having angles of coming out something
[00:03:40.710]is a good way when you're comedy writing
[00:03:42.400]to go, "Oh have I explored everything here?"
[00:03:45.500]He has somewhere online.
[00:03:47.070]A really amazing short that I think he did.
[00:03:50.760]I wanna say he did it for the New York times.
[00:03:52.915]Yeah.
[00:03:53.748]I actually play that in the class.
[00:03:55.140]Oh good, about the pop tarts.
[00:03:56.620]Yep.
[00:03:57.453]But what's so great about it is when he tells the story
[00:04:00.620]you can see he's just elated by the effort and time
[00:04:05.810]he took into finding the words and to describing it.
[00:04:09.580]And that every time he talks about his...
[00:04:12.240]back of his head being blown off,
[00:04:14.210]by the first taste of a pop tart, it is so well crafted
[00:04:19.580]that it's it's beyond poetry or music or whatever.
[00:04:23.120]It's every part of the rhythm of it
[00:04:26.060]leans into making us laugh and relate and so forth.
[00:04:29.620]So, the choice of words is critical,
[00:04:36.490]and I can't remember, at one point
[00:04:38.150]I was asked about picking the right words.
[00:04:43.490]And it's sort of the difference between
[00:04:45.720]catching the gravy train and catching a gravy boat, right?
[00:04:50.730]One is very messy and one is the fast track to somewhere.
[00:04:53.870]But that can happen just by accident and talking, right.
[00:04:58.650]Or by leaving a pause in the wrong place or...
[00:05:01.490]So, if you're gonna be a great comedy writer
[00:05:04.200]you have to give attention to "how do you come into a room?"
[00:05:08.090]Right.
[00:05:08.923]"Does this person walk, or do they amble?"
[00:05:11.160]Right.
[00:05:11.993]That it's going to mean something to the ear.
[00:05:15.790]And even writing... the written word on page
[00:05:20.480]works differently than to hear it out loud.
[00:05:23.290]Right.
[00:05:24.123]So that a reader sometimes needs other words or less words.
[00:05:28.610]And sometimes to hear it... It's the art of subtraction.
[00:05:32.880]It's about not telling them it happened to you.
[00:05:35.670]It's about did this ever... generalizing or whatever.
[00:05:40.100]There's a lot of nuances in comedy.
[00:05:42.580]One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes was
[00:05:46.180]that "The difference..." but I'm paraphrasing.
[00:05:48.287]"The difference between the right word
[00:05:50.260]and almost the right word is the difference
[00:05:52.530]between lightning and a lightning bug."
[00:05:55.603]Yeah. That's a great one.
[00:05:56.770]Yeah, That's just... that's so true.
[00:05:58.870]And I... That short of Seinfeld's where he just...
[00:06:02.080]He talks about how he's writing with his big pens
[00:06:04.800]on a lined pad rather than using a word processor,
[00:06:09.460]it's just how he works and it's how he processes things,
[00:06:12.780]but it's super meticulous and I know he works
[00:06:16.670]sometimes months on a joke before it will ever actually
[00:06:19.680]appear in one of his routines, because he's obsessing about
[00:06:22.490]just getting the right word down and that's fast.
[00:06:26.020]He just put out a new book very recently.
[00:06:29.260]I think it was released yesterday called "Is this anything?"
[00:06:33.880]And it's Jerry's perspective.
[00:06:36.620]And there's tons of material that he wrote
[00:06:39.130]that he may never have used,
[00:06:41.920]but his yellow legal pad was his go-to and he...
[00:06:47.820]There's pictures on the inside, front and back of this book
[00:06:52.530]of all of these yellow pages laid out
[00:06:56.060]all down the street he grew up on that which I believe
[00:07:00.540]appear in one of his Netflix specials or something.
[00:07:03.610]But one of the things I admire about his discipline is that
[00:07:09.010]he would never have to write again.
[00:07:10.640]He's got so much money and so much in the cahan, right
[00:07:14.830]but that's not why he's in it, it's not for money.
[00:07:18.150]It is literally the craft of doing it
[00:07:21.010]and he gets up and he writes every day
[00:07:23.730]and he does it before his day gets stolen
[00:07:27.642]by responsibilities or autograph seekers or...
[00:07:30.160]He considers time being robbed from him
[00:07:33.780]if he doesn't get that taken care of.
[00:07:37.140]And when he does stand ups now you've seen that he's...
[00:07:42.010]I think he retired one entire act some years ago
[00:07:45.830]and it's really hard to give up an hour's worth of material
[00:07:49.050]and start fresh because I think the scariest thing
[00:07:52.320]and the biggest act of courage for any writer
[00:07:54.400]is facing a blank page. Right.
[00:07:56.900]You start again.
[00:07:57.733]So if you're trying to top your last thing you're right back
[00:08:00.650]in that terrible seat of "what do I do now?
[00:08:03.320]What do I write about?"
[00:08:04.960]I would just encourage your students that,
[00:08:08.320]you begin with a premise, right?
[00:08:09.850]You come up with some kind of a theme or thesis or thought,
[00:08:13.610]and not unlike poetry where you have a universal theme
[00:08:16.430]or whatever, you create a argument of some kind.
[00:08:19.867]"Can brothers be friends", whatever.
[00:08:22.270]And then you focus on the comedy fitting in those boundaries
[00:08:26.010]and you write about what you feel about it.
[00:08:28.590]And then you write against it.
[00:08:30.360]You find other points of view,
[00:08:32.260]or you find what we call a mirror,
[00:08:35.090]a character that has a similar thought
[00:08:36.840]or a shadow which is an opposing view
[00:08:39.800]or some other reason that you wouldn't...
[00:08:42.080]And that that's really, really important in storytelling
[00:08:45.820]because it creates a certain amount of tension.
[00:08:47.910]And in comedy, it's the twist, right?
[00:08:50.784]It's the unexpected punchline or dismount,
[00:08:55.290]that is where the tension is resolved.
[00:08:58.200]And there are so many ways that that happens
[00:09:01.680]and people aren't aware of it.
[00:09:03.030]They're going down a path of truth,
[00:09:05.060]something tumbles in there and then the monologist tells you
[00:09:09.470]a perspective that you go, "Oh, why didn't I see that?"
[00:09:11.770]Right?
[00:09:12.603]And you feel a certain that...
[00:09:14.780]I think that spontaneous laughter,
[00:09:17.990]particularly when it comes from an audience
[00:09:19.690]where everyone's having an "uh-huh" at one moment is...
[00:09:24.590]that's the real art of it.

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A Conversation with Pat Hazell—Part 2

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