Michael Palin"s ma.s.sive stutter attack in A Fish Called Wanda: a tour de force. Everyone doing exactly what they do best at the same time.
Dwight Schrute capturing a bat in a trash bag around Meredith"s head on The Office: a moment of tiny, hilarious violence.
Kristen Wiig"s Bjork impression on Sat.u.r.day Night Live: so recognizable and instantly funny while being completely over the top. Makes me wish Bjork were in the news more, just so I could see more of this impression.
How I Write
I LIVE IN a Spanish-style house in an area of Los Angeles near The Grove. The Grove is an outdoor shopping extravaganza with a fountain that shoots jets of water synchronized to Kool & the Gang songs. People love to hate on The Grove, but it"s insanely popular. It"s the mall equivalent of the Kardashian family. So, that"s my neighborhood, and I have a cute little house in it. I really love it.
I bought my house during the famous writers" strike of 2007. You of course remember the strike because it was over the hot-b.u.t.ton and nationally polarizing issue of percentage of Internet residuals accrued from online media in perpetuity. Doesn"t thinking about it now just make your blood boil?! Obviously, no one outside of a small group of professional writers really gets what was going on there, but the point is I had a lot of time to do nothing but not work and hemorrhage my savings. When I wasn"t Norma Rae-ing it up on the picket line, I spent the rest of my time decorating my house to look like something out of Architectural Digest-a kind of Santa Barbara meets artsy old lady vibe. I think I did only an adequate job, but I did manage to avoid some typical L.A.-house pitfalls: I"m proud to say I don"t have a single vintage poster of some old-timey French product, or a statue of Buddha.
But what I"m most proud of is my beautiful office:
I built it and decorated it, and then I promptly never used it. It"s important to me to have a museum-quality office, so when people or potential biographers come over they think that"s where I write.
No, where I really write is here:
As you can see, when I write, I like to look like I"m recovering from tuberculosis. I sit in bed, my laptop resting on a blanket or a Notre Dame sweatshirt on my lap. I got the sweatshirt when I was there doing stand-up in 2006. (Where I bombed, by the way. Those kids hated me and my long, matronly rants against low-rise jeans. I did a three-college comedy tour with my Office costar Craig Robinson, who is hilarious, and a pro at performing at colleges. He plays the piano in his act, incorporating medleys of hit pop songs and then does a rendition of an original song he wrote called "Take Your Panties Off." I don"t need to tell you that it"s very funny and all the college kids wished he"d partnered up with a different Office cast member.)
The blanket/sweatshirt keeps the laptop from getting too hot and radiating my ovaries, which everyone knows makes your children come out with ADD. I almost always write alone in my house. I never have music on, because I can"t concentrate with Nelly Furtado remixes thumping, and, unfortunately, I have only dance music on my iPod, which is how I got to be such a great dancer.
The main reason I enjoy working on a writing staff is because of the social nature of the job. To put it kindly, I am a very talkative, social person. To put it less kindly, I"m a flibbertigibbet, which is what my frenemy Rainn Wilson calls me. It"s always been incredibly challenging for me to put pen to page, because writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos (see every successful writer ever except Judy Blume). I also have a nice office at work, but I use it primarily as a messy closet.
The Internet also makes it extraordinarily difficult for me to focus. One small break to look up exactly how almond milk is made, and four hours later I"m reading about the Donner Party and texting all my friends: DID YOU GUYS KNOW ABOUT THE DONNER PARTY AND HOW MESSED UP THAT WAS? TEXT ME BACK SO WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT!
My high school newspaper interviewed me a few years ago and wanted a photo of me writing, so I had my coworker Dan Goor take this of me looking polished and writerly at my work desk. It is so fraudulent it makes me laugh.
I"ve found my productive-writing-to-s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g-around ratio to be one to seven. So, for every eight-hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done. The other seven hours are preparing for writing: pacing around the house, collapsing cardboard boxes for recycling, reading the DVD extras pamphlet from the BBC Pride & Prejudice, getting snacks lined up for writing, and YouTubing toddlers who learned the "Single Ladies" dance. I know. Isn"t that horrible? So, basically, writing this piece took me the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Enjoy it accordingly.
The Day I Stopped Eating Cupcakes
VERY RECENTLY I was out on script for The Office for a week. "Out on script" refers to when writers are sent off on their own to write a first draft of an episode of the show.
It is an amazing time, basically paid and sanctioned hooky. This means that instead of showering, dressing, and coming into work every day, I"m allowed to laze around my house in a giant T-shirt and no pants, or go shopping, or attend trendy cardio cla.s.ses with my fun unemployed friends. Obviously this is the best time ever.*
This time when I was on script, I stopped by my favorite cupcake place, which I will call Sunshine Cupcakes. (Sunshine Cupcakes, while a ridiculous name, is actually a restrained parody of cupcake bakery names. You have no idea. In Los Angeles, cupcake bakeries are as pervasive as Starbucks. They are the product of a city with an abundance of trophy wives, because trophy wives are the financial engines of cutesy commerce that makes Los Angeles like no other American city: toe jewelry, doork.n.o.b cozies, vegan dog food, you get it. If I am sounding mean, I should tell you how envious and admiring I am of these trophy wives. I"d marry a partner at William Morris Endeavor and start a cat pedicure parlor m"self if I were so lucky.)
So, yeah, on my fourth consecutive visit to Sunshine Cupcakes, I was paying for my cupcake when the female manager (cupcake ap.r.o.n, Far Side gla.s.ses, streak of pink hair: the universal whimsical bakery lady uniform, as far as I can tell) approached me.
FAR SIDE: You"ve come here a lot this week.
ME (mouthful of a generous sample): Yeah, I love this place, man.
FAR SIDE: We know you"re on Twitter. (Leaning in conspiratorially) And if you"re willing to tweet about loving Sunshine Cupcakes, this cupcake (gesturing to the one I was buying) is free.
I did not know it was possible to be triple offended. First of all, Manager Woman, if you notice that a thirty-two-year-old woman is coming to your cupcake bakery every day for a week, keep that information to yourself. I don"t need to be reminded of how poor my food choices are on a regular basis. Second, how cheap and/or poor do you think I am? A cupcake costs two bucks! You think I"m miserly enough to think, like, Oh goody, I can save those two bucks for some other tiny purchase later today! And third, even if I were to buy into this weird bribey situation where I endorse your product, you think the cost of it would be one measly cupcake? The implications of this offer were far worse than anything she meant to propose, obviously, but I hate her forever nonetheless.
This is why I never eat cupcakes anymore. The connotations are too disturbing. Lucky for me, the mighty doughnut is making a comeback. No one better ruin doughnuts for me, or I will be so p.i.s.sed.
*The other best time ever is lying on my back eating licorice, watching hours of a serialized s.e.x-crime drama-oh, don"t get all offended. It"s an actual genre now; I didn"t invent it-with my head resting on the sternum of an unwilling loved one.
Somewhere in Hollywood Someone Is Pitching This Movie
A FEW YEARS ago I sat down for a meeting with some executives at a movie studio that I will call Thinkscope Visioncloud. Thinkscope Visioncloud had put out some of my favorite movies and they wanted to hear some of my ideas, so I was naturally very excited. All television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. We long for the glitziness of the movie world. I"ll put it this way: at the Oscars, the most famous person in the room is like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys, the big exciting celebrity is Kelsey Grammer, or maybe Helen Hunt if she decided to play Emily d.i.c.kinson or something in an HBO miniseries. Look, Frasier Crane is awesome, but you get what I"m trying to say. It"s sn.o.bby and grossly aspirational, but it"s true. So, I left work at The Office early one afternoon with a "See ya, suckers!" att.i.tude and headed to my destiny.
The junior executive"s office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room in a fifty-mile radius of The Office studio. The stuffed chair I was sitting on was expensive leather and looked like the one a judge would sit on in his private chamber on a TV show. I was so nervous the sweat from the back of my legs was making me stick to it. Oh yeah, I was wearing shorts to this meeting. What? For a television writer, this was a cla.s.sy business casual outfit. After I finished sharing one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs.
EXEC: Yeah, we"re really trying to focus in on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.
For the rest of the meeting we talked in earnest about if there was any potential in a movie called Yahtzee! I made some polite suggestions and left.
I am always surprised by what movie studios think people will want to see. I"m even more surprised how correct they are a lot of the time. The following movies are my best guess as to what may soon be coming to a theater near you:
Bananagrams 3D
Apples to Apples 4D (audiences are pummeled with apples at the end of the movie)
Crest Whitestrips