Laugh Lines: Conversations With Comedians (22 page)

Corey: How did the three of you end up as a team in Second City?

Paul: The rest of the people in the group saw us as crazy, and we were thrown together by default.

Stephen: Second City makes a lot of their money doing industrials. A lot of the work we did was for sales meetings. It’s absolutely soulless work, but it pays pretty well. We wrote something for McDonalds together. It was the first thing we ever sat down and wrote together, and I think it occurred to Dinello first that we might have a profitable writing team going here.

Corey: Is it tough as comedy writers to put something successful together for company work?

Paul: It depends. Sometimes all you have to do is mention the company’s name in a sketch, and it kills.

Stephen: Sometimes you’ll just bash your brains against their brainless skulls.

Paul: The more creative you go, the less they seem to like it.

Stephen: I grew up thinking I was bad. ‘I don’t know if I accept your premise.’ Sometimes it can be as easy as breathing. Seventy-five percent of the time it blows.

Paul: Trying to make it good is hard.

Stephen: If you try to make it funny or good, it’s impossible, but if you just surrender to the fact that you’re going to fail, you might just succeed.

Corey: Where did the concept for ‘Strangers with Candy’ come from?

Paul: Half of it came from Amy. She wanted to do a straight afterschool special, because we all thought those were funny when we were growing up, and her idea was just to do it straight. I accidentally ran across this documentary from the late ’60s about this woman from Long Island. She was 57, and she had spent 30 years being a junkie and a prostitute and in jail, and she was turning her life around and going around to high schools and sort of trying to scare them straight. But she was really sort of a funny, charming character. I showed the tape to Amy and said, ‘This is a character. You could do her monologue verbatim pretty much.’

Then we just decided it would be funny to do an afterschool special but have a character who’s 47 and have this terrible background and decide to start over in high school. So, we just sort of combined the two ideas.

Corey: How did you flesh out the rest of the characters?

Paul: Once we had Amy’s character down, we just tried to see how we could feed that best, and we sort of came up with our own character each from our own high school experience. Stephen had a lot of teachers that were cold and calculating, and we try to capture that, and mine was based on a teacher that would always show up at kids’ parties and try to fit in with students. In his mind, he was like, ‘Hey, I’m one of you guys.’

Corey: Your characters seem to have a relationship beyond just working together in the same school.

Paul: Between Mr. Noblet and Mr. Jellineck, we admire each other professionally, and we don’t know much about each other’s personal life.

Stephen: We’re colleagues.

Paul: As far as you know, we’re colleagues.

Corey: Stephen, you play your character rather straight, as you do on ‘The Daily Show.’ Are we ever going to see a wacky side of you?

Stephen: No, I’m not versatile. I try to play to my strengths, which is lack of versatility.

Paul: How about Mr. Funny Pants?

Stephen: I do have a character named Mr. Silly Pants, which Paul has been trying to keep down for years, and also the ibuprofen guy. It’s the man who takes too much ibuprofen. But, Paul won’t let me; he won’t let me.

Paul: I’ve got to keep Stephen in the straight box.

Stephen: Years ago, I realized people were willing to pay me to play high-status, fairly straight characters, so I’m just trying to feed my family.

Corey: Where do the ideas for ‘Strangers’ episodes come from?

Paul: Usually, we’ll have a nugget of an idea, or we’ll come up with a theme like bullies, and we’ll just sit around and sort of improvise in a room and sort of knock out an outline for it. We will come up with situations and improvise dialogue and then try to structure it, and then we spend a couple of days—or hours—writing it.

Corey: How much of the final episode is scripted and how much is improv?

Paul: I’d say it’s almost all scripted. Certainly what all the other characters say is exactly what’s scripted. Amy usually takes off a bit. You’re never quite sure what’s going to come out of her mouth, but it’s usually brilliant. Her mistakes are usually brilliant.

Corey: Why is there dancing at the end of every episode?

Paul: One of the things that we liked about afterschool specials is that regardless of the problem, everything seems sort of solved in 22 minutes or an hour depending on how long it is. That’s our little take on regardless of what the problem is that week, everything is sort of forgotten, and there’s a big dance party, regardless of what tragedy occurred.

Stephen: It’s our curtain call.

Corey: Most afterschool specials also offered some sort of moral.

Stephen: There’s a real moral to what we offer. What we describe probably isn’t as odd as what really happens in high school. There are no real morals. We try to make our morals so wrong that it’s obvious what the right moral should have been if somebody else has written it. We don’t pretend to offer any moral guidance to anyone. The whole idea of offering moral guidance in 22 minutes of television is false.

Amy Sedaris is certainly holding her own in the Talent Family, a name she and brother, David, the author of bestselling books of essays and short stories, conjured to describe themselves.

And she can occasionally be seen cracking up David Letterman as a guest on his “Late Show.”

Of course, what Amy is most infamously known for (besides her tasty-looking cupcakes) is her role as Jerri Blank, the 47-year-old “user, boozer and loser” high school freshman on the Comedy Central series and movie, “Strangers with Candy.”

Sedaris’ Jerri is moist like a snack cake and always ready to go along for the ride—as long as said ride includes a quick stop for a few bong hits and to throw some eggs at minorities.

Amy, though, is a sweet New York gal, who still bakes cupcakes for charity in the same apartment she has lived in since before becoming one of Letterman’s go-to guests.

Corey: How did you get involved with comedy company Second City?

Amy Sedaris: I was living in North Carolina, waitressing at the Red Lobster and my brother, David, was like, ‘You’ve got to leave North Carolina. You’ve got to leave North Carolina.’ And he was in Chicago, and he goes, ‘There’s this place here called Second City, and it would be perfect for you.’ I went to Chicago and started taking some classes there, and I loved it.

So, I ended up moving and going through the whole program, and then I got in the touring company and then a resident company and that’s where I met Paul Dinello and Steve Colbert and Greg Hollimon (who all worked together on “Strangers with Candy”). First they scared me, because I walked into a room and there were people rolling their heads around, doing stretches, and I thought, ‘That’s my worst nightmare—any kind of touching, massaging, rolling.’ I thought, ‘Oh no,’ but then that was just warm-up exercises. Then it turned into really great stuff, like stuff that you do every day anyway. You just make up stuff on the spot, but you get in front of people and do it. I always did it high school and junior high in the drama department.

Corey: Does comedy come naturally to you?

Amy: Not comedy; I’m a dramatic person. I like drama a lot. I like serious stuff and then I’ll be like, ‘What’s so funny about this?’ I like funny things. I just knew that I liked to do stuff and hear a response whether it’s laughing or crying, and I knew I didn’t have the tools to make someone cry, so I stuck with the laughing.

The three of us, we were touring together; we worked well together, like a relationship. When you find someone you work well together with, you just stick with it, so we’ve stuck with it for 12 years. It’s really comfortable and we can be really honest with each other.

I like the idea of doing drama. I wanted to do something serious. They’re so funny. That movie, ‘Happiness,’ came out, and they were doing what we wanted to do.

Corey: The show is pretty risqué. Does Comedy Central try to censor you?

Amy: They give us a lot of freedom, and if they say, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ we’ll say, ‘Great’ and we’ll come up with something else, and usually it’s better. They let us get away with so much anyway. We don’t do it on purpose. We’re not trying to shock anybody. Our sense of humor, I guess, is a little darker.

Corey: As Jerri, you seem to be willing to let yourself not look like what would be considered typically attractive. Yet, she thinks she’s hot stuff.

Amy: I like plain people who like themselves, and all my characters like themselves. They all think they’re pretty, and I like going against that. Maybe Jerri Blank might look unattractive to some people, but she sure thinks she looks like a million bucks, and I like playing that. And physically, it gives me something more to play with. It’s very hard to play pretty unless it was so pretty, I’m ugly. There are enough people out there who like to play pretty, and that’s great. I just think it’s more interesting to have something to look at like bad teeth or a bad complexion.

Corey: Did you have input on Jerri’s Nike swoop-style hair?

Amy: I wanted the hair of a female golfer. I like women with men’s haircuts. And I also told the wardrobe department that I wanted to look like I own snakes—and that’s all that I gave her. That’s how she came up with her look. And Jerri’s very accessorized—which I don’t do in real life—but since I’ve started doing the character, I find myself doing it more. I’ll wear earrings more and bracelets and belts, and I never used to do that.

Corey: What do you do when you’re not working on the TV show?

Amy: I still work at Marion’s Restaurant once in a while. You have just enough time to run errands. I clean a lot; I do laundry; I bake; I’ll cook. I have a rabbit. I’ll do whatever she needs, like her little area. I read a lot. That’s about it.

Corey: You still wait tables? I bet your customers don’t expect to see someone from TV waiting on them.

Amy: They don’t expect that, but I make more money. That’s the way to increase your tips, get your own TV show. I’m surprised that people are shocked. I’m like, ‘Why not; what else am I gonna do on a Saturday night?’ It’s really hard work. I’m more exhausted after waitressing than I am after being in front of the camera. I feel like I really worked hard for that $150, and I love having cash in my pocket. And I get a free, hot meal, and I can drink whatever I want.

Corey: What were you doing on Saturday night in high school?

Amy: I was still in Girl Scouts my senior year. I was pretty nerdy. I was in Junior Achievements. I worked the prom. I got along, but I was never cliquey.