The new kings of comedy? Yale writers step up

This is what I have been telling my brother, high school senior Simon Rich, ?? '06. For months he has been debating between applying early to either Yale or Harvard, and finally concluded that he would make the decision based on which school would offer him the greater opportunities in the humor field. He is, after all, an aspiring comedy writer, having founded a comedy journal at his high school, interned at a fancy-pants late-night talk show, and written his own funny play. But as he may find out, the life of a comic celebrity at Yale and beyond is a reward worthy of great suffering, but the suffering, sadly, can be very great indeed.

NEOPHYTES IN YALE'S COMEDY WRITING world are often intimidated by their legendary forerunners, and understandably so. For many and prosperous are the men who have preceded them. But how to begin? Adam Wells, CC '02, president of the Fifth Humour sketch comedy group, acknowledges how difficult it is to break onto the scene. "Write a sketch, an article, whatever," he advises. "Give it to the group that wants to use it. Then, if it's not good, start another one. If you keep at it, you'll get a good one." Of course Wells cunningly neglects to mention that the only way to become an actual member of a sketch comedy group is to audition. For not everyone, it seems, is cut out for the Humour.

As a freshman, David Fabricant, MC '04, experienced their rejection first-hand: "I found that the existing comedy organizations disliked the uninhibited comedic style I had developed in high school," he told me. "For example, I was asked to do a little improv at my Fifth Humour audition, so I pulled down my pants, wrote all over my body with a Sharpie, and screamed about how I couldn't get laid. They asked me to stop and, needless to say, didn't give me a callback." Of course, for the determined comedy writer (and is there really any other kind?), Fabricant has created a new option: Suite 13, a sketch comedy group he founded last year. "We've developed our own style thats sets us apart—way apart—from any other comedy group at Yale. One thing that makes us unique is our willingness to take on any subject matter; we perform sketches with titles like `Wild World of Porn' and `A Master's Tea with Gonorrhea Jack.'" "A fresh, young group on the rise," proclaims Wells. "The leader of the group, David Fabricant, has some great ideas and balls."

AH, BUT ONCE YOU FINALLY EARN YOUR SPOT among Yale's elite, I would say to my brother, how sweet the rewards. After all, being a comedy writer at Yale may in fact be the closest thing we have to rock stardom. The comic celebrity flitters about Yale's social world without a care, welcoming the praise of many, but the intimacy of only a select few. Jeff Miller, MC '03, member of the Fifth Humour and co-creator of the "Western Canon" series, says this: "[The life of a campus-famous comedy writing star is] mostly like everyone else's life, except that when you make a bad joke, you feel like maybe you won't ever be able to make any money." But there are still the groupies, right? "Who are you joking?" a discomfited Lee Tyler, SM '03, editor-in-chief of the Yale Record, asked. "Comedy people don't get women unless they're rich. Everyone knows that. Why else would I be fucked up enough to focus a large chunk of my time writing joke articles?"

Here we encounter one of the several advantages that the comedy writer has over the comic actor: he can let his mellifluous language mask his pained soul— a soul marked by the years of sorrow and rage that unfailingly create the true comedy writer. Fabricant, for instance, has mixed his writing with acting, and has paid dearly. "When humor-impaired people see me onstage jumping around and yelling about how I like to murder 12-year-old girls and stash them in crawl spaces, they think, `Wow, he really is a perverted misanthrope,' and avoid me thereafter," he lamented. "Women seem to have an especial dislike of my style of humor. I'm sad to say that I was actually more successful with girls in high school than I am at Yale. Ladies, please hear this: if you're looking for a squirrelly comedian guy, I'm available. Also, my tongue is long and dexterous."

Still, it does seem that Yale theater draws far more of the comic writing talent than the publications do. This year, in fact, has seen the arrival of the ambitious four-part series, "The Western Canon," a marriage not only between comic writing and performance, but with academic discourse. Each installation of the show will be written by a different one of the four members, all of whom act in each. "The `Western Canon' series," said Bradley Bazzle, CC '02, author of the first installation, "is the comedy of seriousness. Do you laugh when someone dies? It's a new kind of comedy, and not everybody likes it." Says Wells, who will write the third part, `Exploration,' "Many disagreed with the thesis of the first installation—God wants gold—but we're sticking to it."

And what about the Rumpus? Sadly, neither their peers, nor they themselves, seem to consider them a real comedy-writing force. As Tyler says, "The Rumpus is a tabloid. The Record is a humor magazine. That speaks worlds on the differences between the two. If the question is, `Do I think highly of the comedy writing in the Rumpus?', my answer would be no." The Rumpus, for their part, did not wish to respond.

STILL, EVEN THE TOP OF THE YALE HUMOR-WRITING world must ultimately face the trials of the real (comedy) world. They will need to match themselves against those established members of the comedy industry who have toured the national humor circuits and risen above, who then speak their honey-sweet words through the lips of your favorite television stars. One such great is Michael Gerber, DC '91, in his time editor of the Record and the Herald (twice), and now president of the Record's alumni group. He has written for a wide number of magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Playboy, and writes for Saturday Night Live, along with "scads of Harvard Lampoon guys." This, the Lampoon's influence, is one of the great struggles a Yale comedy writer must face after the cakewalk of his undergraduate years. Gerber posed a frightening scenario: "Say, for example, a producer at SNL is looking at person A and person B. Both have submitted good packets, are nice. But one is a Lampoon guy—if things don't work out, the producer can always say, `Well, gosh, how could I know? He was from the Lampoon.' So having a credential like that not only helps you, it protects the ass of the person hiring. This should never be underestimated!"

Miller, though wary of the pitfalls of a career in comedy writing, downplays the power of the Lampoon. "I don't think anything can set you up well for writing comedy professionally except a basic discomfort in society. But I suppose that in that sense, Yale may be the perfect setup for a comedy writing career."

Besides, the Record, after almost 30 years of dormancy and downright mediocrity following the departure of Garry Trudeau, DC '70, seems finally to be gaining on the Lampoon. Ian Dallas, SM '00, a contributer to The Onion and SNL's Weekend Update, boasts, "I actually got all my jobs through the Record." And though the Lampoon seems to have a stranglehold on the nation's top comedy writing positions, he predicts that for Yale, and not just for the Record, things will be quite different in 10 years—that is, once this generation of comedy writers takes over. That's too bad for my brother. He just sent in the Harvard application.

Graphic by George Weinberg.

Back to A&E...