From improv to real job, no laughing matter

The New Garde This is the second in a series of articles examining life after Yale for recent graduates working in the arts.

With few exceptions, the students, graduates, and teachers most prominent in the comedy scene believe that the campus humor scene has never truly blossomed. Remembering Yale in the late '80s, Cohen said, "There were a lot of improv groups, but that was really the only visible form of comedy. We had no defining institution." Current students tend to agree. "Publications, sketch shows, and performances make interesting and valiant efforts, Exit Player David Malbin, SY '01, said, "but nothing truly successful and productive."

For some, the stasis Malbin described is part of a larger impasse in contemporary humor. Mike Gerber, DC '91, is currently working on a history of comedy since the '70s for St. Martin's Press. He said that comedy is "a business and, just like widget-making, joke-making requires standardization." The dynamics of popular culture mean that innovation occurs outside the mainstream. Yale graduates, Gerber suggested, aren't about to become a beacon of light, either. Until innovation starts to pay well, he said, "most people—and particularly Ivy Leaguers—will go for the cash in Hollywood and produce more mindless crap."

Mediocrity, seeking Kenny

As convincing as Gerber's argument may seem, there doesn't appear to be much support for it at Yale. "We don't need highbrow humor," Viola Question and Fifth Humor member Bill Marino, TC '00, said. "South Park is 10 times more experimental than anything that goes on here at Yale and people eat it up." He cited HBO's The Sopranos and Fox's Malcolm in the Middle as other examples of mass-market innovation.

SARAH ENGLAND/YH

So maybe we can't explain Yale's comedy scene through what's on TV. Then again, nobody seems sure who or what at Yale is to blame for this mediocrity. There seems to be no reason why Yale shouldn't have the "defining institution" of which Cohen spoke. "It's not like we're any less funny than any other college students," quipped Andrew Reich, TC '90, also a supervising producer of Friends. Author Mark O'Donnell,who teaches Trumbull's college seminar in comedy writing, implied that part of the fault lies with an English department's reluctance to treat comedy with the respect accorded so-called "serious writing." O'Donnell found the department highly skeptical of his course. One instructor told him, "If you were teaching about the history of comedy or the theory of comedy, I could understand giving credit for it, but I cannot understand giving credit for writing comedy."

Another common explanation is Yale's lack of a prominent humor publication. After the Yale Record's 1970 demise, the University saw a succession of replacements rise and fall. The latest contender in this series, a revived version of the Record, shows promise but hasn't proven itself yet. Editor Ian Dallas, SM '00, noted that in the past two years it has drawn more writers and gained visibility through better writing and stunts like this fall's human petting zoo outside Commons. Even after such progress, many people found the magazine inconsistent and uninteresting. Though the Record appears to have a lot of potential, right now it's impossible to tell whether it will live up to that promise, let alone mature into a major presence on campus. It may be a long time before Yale has anything like the Harvard Lampoon, which casts a long shadow over both Harvard and Hollywood.

Trumbull Grad meets the gaseous weiner

In the absence of dependable and well-known outlets for written comedy, Yale's four improvisational comedy troupes have become the most prominent part of the humor scene. While they lack the Lampoon's entertainment industry connections and cachet, they've produced a number of graduates who have gone on to careers in television and film. As would be expected, many of these performers stuck with comedy after Yale. In addition to Reich and Cohen, Roy Jenkins, TC '84, writes for Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and Phil Lamar, ES '88, is a writer and cast member of Mad TV.

Of these graduates, Reich and Cohen have achieved the most commercial success. Best friends, roommates, and members of the Exit Players, they were accomplished performers with a great deal of interest in writing. After graduating, Reich became a literary agent and Cohen attended law school. Within three years, both decided that they wanted to write. For Cohen, the decision was dramatic—"I graduated on a Friday and headed for L.A. on Monday." He joined Reich, whose job had brought him to California, and they wrote a trial script for The Simpsons.

After a stint with another short-lived sitcom, they got in touch with writers they knew who were working for Friends, and managed to land a script assignment. They joined the staff for the show's fourth season. Cohen and Reich have found their time with NBC extremely rewarding. "I'm very lucky," Cohen said. "The show's popularity gives us a lot of freedom with which to play." Despite the limitations of sitcom writing, the genre's specific form, and the need to focus most of the plot's attention on six characters, he described his job as "amazingly creative." While extremely enthusiastic about his work, Reich seemed more conscious of the sitcom's boundaries. "This is a conservative time in comedy— we try to keep our material fresh, but the show isn't into innovation," he said. We just want to have a solid, funny show."

Both writers found that their work has highlighted the limitations and advantages of Yale's comedy scene. Trying to arrange an interview with Gracie Films, the company that produces The Simpsons, Reich first experienced the drawbacks of not having worked for a recognized college humor magazine. His agent told him, only half joking, "I can't set you up for a meeting because you didn't go to Harvard." While networks look to the Lampoon for writers, Yale doesn't have an institution with a similar reputation. Despite its disadvantages, Cohen felt this situation fostered openness because "there were no anointed funny people." Still, he believes that a connection to something like the Lampoon would have helped during his first months in Hollywood. As much experience as Cohen gained from the Exit Players, the name didn't break down any doors. Like most television writers, he succeeded through luck, patience, and work.

Yalies vs. Harvard mafia: cutthroat competition

For every Reich or Cohen, there are several equally ambitious writers who never get beyond submitting scripts or working on successions of short-lived sitcoms fraught with bad acting and lousy time slots. It's this side of the comedy business that Marino discovered while interning for Late Night with Conan O'Brien and Dr. Katz last semester. "Working at Conan killed my interest in being a professional comedy writer," Marino said. He saw a world where the risk of failure is high and the chance of success is low and long in coming. The writers on Conan had "four or five years of $400 a week incomes before making decent money." In a drastically oversupplied market, competition is fierce. "For every Yalie, there's a kid at Oberlin and three at NYU," Marino explained. "People at Yale are led to believe that they produce something unique, but they really don't." If money were no object, the career question would be simple, though. "Making people laugh is 100 percent fulfilling," he said.

That same love of comedy draws other Yale students to writing. Dallas already has a spot on The Onion, right now the most successful humor publication in America, and plans to pursue film writing. Exit Player Boomie Aglietti, DC '00, is looking into standup and is "definitely attracted to publishing pieces in intelligent magazines." He explained, "Plugging oneself into a defined format, like sitcoms or late night TV, doesn't appeal to me. Not responding to norms, creating my own style, and having complete independence is more difficult but more rewarding." Exit Player David Schuchinski, ES '00, is planning to concentrate on writing. "I just don't care if I'm less successful than my classmates because I'd rather be happy with what I'm doing," he said.

Schuchinski's words encapsulate the attitude of many of the students most committed to comedy writing. Yale has probably never completely lacked people willing to jump into the entertainment industry, and that will likely never change. Perhaps someday there will be the Yale version of the Lampoon that everybody keeps on mentioning. Until then,Yale may never have anything like the Harvard humor mafia that produces the Simpsons. Yale's comedy scene may do reasonably well and produce a fair number of successful graduates, but it's doubtful that it will ever flourish without some sort of unifying institution.

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