101 | Comedy Legend Dan O'Shannon On What Makes Our Writing Funny

Dan O'Shannon has worked on some of American television's most iconic shows in history, but for him, every new project is a refreshed exercise in humility and starting again. Dan talks about what makes something funny, how to draw UNIQUE comedic characters, and what it really takes to succeed in our business in writer.

DAN'S BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/What-Are-You-Laughing-Comprehensive/dp/1441162933

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Meg: Hey guys, welcome back to The Screenwriting Life.

Jeff: Lorien is taking a brief hiatus from the show, but she'll be back soon. So, in the meantime, it's just Meg and I, and of course our wonderful guest for today.

Meg: Today on the show, for our guest, we are so lucky to have the longtime TV comedy veteran Dan O'Shannon. Dan is an Emmy-winning, Oscar nominated, writer and producer who has worked on shows such as Newhart, Cheers, Frasier, and Modern Family, where he served as an executive producer. In addition to his extensive television career, he is the author of two books, The Adventures of Mrs. Jesus and What Are You Laughing At?

Jeff: Dan, we're so excited to have you. Thanks for joining us today. 

Dan: Thanks for having me. 

Jeff: And of course, before we dive into the show, we always have our first segment, which is called Adventures in Screenwriting. So Meg, how was your week?

Meg: You know, I had a little boomerang week in terms of that moment working where you find that one scene that you know works because everybody on the call starts throwing in ideas. You, it just goes crack. That's it. That's the scene. It starts generating ideas on its own and it gives you so much hope and energy that you've got this, you've figured this out, you've got this scene it’s gonna work. 

And then you go to the next scene and it's a black hole and you're like, crap, none of this shit. How do we make this work? And then you go back down the rungs and back into the muck to try to make the next scene work. And then you're like, wait a minute, does any of this work? Let's go 30,000 feet. It's kind of the boomerang of how fast can you do this, and yet also do it incredibly well? And this works and that doesn't work. 

But I'm down in it. I'm down in the churn of it all. And enjoying it, though, I really enjoyed it, it was really fun. It was the kind of thing that I ran down to talk to my husband about. I was like, ‘oh my God, I have to tell you about this scene. It’s so great.’ You know, it's so fun. You need that for your climb to keep you going.

Even though I know that whole scene could go out, like, any minute now. That whole scene could just, completely, not be in the movie at all. But that was my week. Little bit of boomerang in the creative chopper, but down in it, liking it. Dan, how was your week?

Dan: My week is, I'm doing something different than I've usually done, or done for the last 40 years, because you know, because I'm not on a sitcom staff and I'm not writing a comedy script or a book, or a cartoon or whatever, I'm doing a documentary. And I'm also editing the documentary. 

So, I'm finding that the writing is happening at the same time that I'm putting it together frame by frame by frame, because I'm also doing all this research on top of it. And, you know, I can only write whatever I can be showing on the screen, or I have to, like, make up things and adjust images to sell what I mean to say. 

And so it's not just me writing and then other people, and I say, ‘hey, I need a penguin and someone brings a penguin,’ which is what I'm used to. But I have to, to literally work with the materials to create this story almost physically, just frame by frame by frame. And I have to answer a lot of questions. Like, if I'm talking about, you know, an old TV show, being a franchise, what is the viewer looking at? I have to literally create everything in the frame. 

It isn't like I've got lots of takes of actors doing the thing, and if you put 'em together, they tell a story. I'm building as I go, and because I'm still new to editing, I'll spend days on effects and just say, it's just, it's too show-off-y. Or it isn't selling the story, or it's just dull, or it doesn't look, you know, and you throw it out and like, like Meg was saying, I might have an effect. That in and of itself is really great and it's the right effect, but it's, you know, it's a great effect, but the wrong effect. It just doesn't work here, or whatever. 

And so, I'm finding it's an entirely new kind of writing. I'm also becoming a cinematographer because, you know, as I'm composing the screen, I need to know what's where and, you know, it's a learning curve. And I'm doing the music for it and writing it and recording it, putting that on, and I'm timing everything out and it's a lot more hands-on than anything I've ever done.

So I stumble a lot, and I make mistakes, and I sometimes get mad because all the credits, you know, it's like college. All the credits I have from what I used don't all just transfer, and I can just do everything. You know, I'm jumping into another pool, and because it's another pool, I sink.  You know, not all the way down. I got some skills. But I have to give myself that security of knowing I can learn on the job.

Meg: I love that. I love that. That somebody as established, and so good at what you do, that you've gone ahead and jumped into another pool. It's so great. I mean, it's so, I know it's hard, but it also must be creatively enlivening too, because you're out on that edge again.

Dan: Yeah. Thanks for saying that. And, although it wasn't my choice to do it, I mean, I got pushed in the pool, as opposed to jumped in. You know, that's one of the things about being in Ohio and nothing against the state of Ohio, the Buckeye state, where we have Panda Express free food and–

Meg: –free Buckeyes on this podcast right now.

Dan: Yes. But I find that the difference between here, and Los Angeles, is that in Los Angeles, if I say I need someone to do this and someone to do that, you got 40-50 people who all can do it brilliantly. Here you don't have as many, and many of those people that you do have will tell you they can do something until you tell 'em what you need. And then they blank out because they don’t know that, you know. 

And so I, it really was one of those things where I was asked to get involved in this thing. And as I started doing stuff, other people weren't sort of coming up and doing their stuff. So I started taking their jobs and I built props. And I, you know, I did everything. Because people were just happy to do things that were either just good enough, or not do it at all.

So I've been forced into it, but creatively and mentally, I think, this was a really good thing to happen to me, even though I would never have chosen to do it. 

Jeff: I love that.

Meg: I love it. Jeff, how was your week?

Jeff: It was good. Similarly to you, Dan, I'm primarily a writer, but I decided to direct my own feature this year. So it's a super micro budget coming of age dramedy, kind of like a millennial big chill. 

And I cut the feature. And I ended up kind of doing a lot, and sometimes it's out of obligation, right? You would maybe rather toss off some of the responsibilities of filmmaking to someone else, but sometimes it's either a feeling of necessity or maybe that kind of buried sense of control-freakness that, you don't want to admit you have, that ends up just taking over and you're like, ‘I'll just do it myself.’

But we're playing festivals right now, and I'm finally confronting the page again. 'Cause I need to be writing. And I had felt a little blocked. And so I took some advice from our friend Matt Lieberman, who just recently wrote the Ryan Reynolds movie Free Guy, and he did a whole episode on kind of the power of high-concept writing and committing to a genre.

You know, I think especially for emerging writers, it could be tempting to, especially in features, write your kind of rambling, highly personal, you know, indie about your grandma's lighthouse. And those can be wonderful, but sometimes the power of genre can really take you far. So I'm kind of writing this, like, heist comedy and I'm just having so much fun. And I, you know, you can have that instinct of like, ‘oh man if I'm writing in a genre, will this feel formulaic, or will I fall into tropes, or will I lose the originality or voice?’

But I'm finding that the signature kind of thing that I think makes me a writer is still showing up. But I have some guide rails, and I have places to go. And there's something really refreshing about having some templates that you can go to or previous works that you love that give you some confines when you're approaching genre.

So I'm just having so much fun. And what's great about committing to something that feels a little more high-concept or within the guide rails or genres, it gives you a place to go. So if you're feeling really stuck, you can refer to a great example of someone who did it before you and at least find the direction that they took. And even if, you know, you're writing a scene that's gonna get scrapped or rewritten, you at least have a next lily pad that you can jump to. So, I'm kind of enjoying writing and it's been a minute since I feel like I've been able to do that.

Dan: That's great. Oh, just hang on one second. Grandma Lake House.

Meg: Well, Dan, I mean, I've never been on a comedy network show. So, I'm so very curious. When he's talking about genre from a feature film point of view, I would think that shows also have their own ticking clock, that you're doing every week. I would think there's guardrails in a television show as well.

Dan: There are, but the thing about guardrails, I think, is that, I always think that there's like, there's three stages of anyone in a creative life. 

The first is, I think of it as an impulse without discipline. You know, I'm going to paint something out of the lines because I can, I'm gonna write something on the piano that nobody's ever heard before, and it's a no kind of chord progression or coherence or, you know, or I'm gonna write something so cool 'cause it's got a little this, and it's just a mess.

And then they, a lot of people, that's as far as they go. And then there are people who learn about the guardrails. And they learn about the rules and they become very facile with those rules. And then eventually you find the guardrail. It's almost like that training wheel. You can take them off and you instinctively know what the guardrails are for the project you're working on.

And I think that’s guardrails are, they are, eventually you come to realize that they're there too, they challenge you to not use them. In a way, it's kinda like, this is the rule. What can you do? How can you violate this rule, and still make it better? How can you know, paint the sky green and paint the grass blue, in such a way that someone could look at it, and it will feel emotionally more like sky and grass than if you followed the rules, you know?

So I'm a big fan of the rules, but I'm also a fan of, like, getting in a boxing room with the rules and seeing what I can still do, you know?

Meg: I love that. I mean, it, in essence though, you are saying you have to know the rules and become facile with them first. 

Dan: Oh, absolutely. 

Meg: Which is where I think a lot of, especially younger emerging writers they think that's trope-y and they think that's cliche and it's not original. And you're like, I know, but you have to know the rules to break them.

Dan: Yeah. 

Meg: Otherwise, you're just doing mud. There's no color at all.

Dan: Yeah. It's true in music, painting, writing, it's all that same progression, you know?

And I think a lot of people, when they first start studying the rules I think one thing that people leave out, when they're studying all their favorite movies or their favorite books, it's like, how do they do it? How do they do it? I'm gonna learn to do what they do and imitate what they do.

Which is fine when you're starting out, but I think that's like only part of what you're studying. Because any art, I think, is an event that happens between the person experiencing it and the material. And I think you have to study that event in a way. It's like one eye should always be on yourself experiencing this thing for the first time. I felt this, and then I felt this and it made my heart and I didn't even realize I was feeling this, and the connect, all that stuff you were feeling with the thing. 

Because your job isn't to recreate that. Your job is to synthesize feelings, and then make them come alive in someone else. 

And all the great art is doing that, but it's easier to understand that and feel it when you're also studying yourself with the thing that's apart from you, you know? But yeah, no, I'm a big believer in learning all those rules. 

Meg: And I would think comedy, you would especially have to always be thinking of the audience and you know, you are trying to elicit an emotional reaction. And comedy isn't just laughs, of course.

Dan: Yeah

Meg: But I would think it's a much more immediate that-made-me-laugh-or-not. So.

Dan: And you go to a lot of comedy writing rooms and someone will pitch something really funny and everyone will just nod and go, that's good. And we put it in. And we've already skipped the part where we laugh at it.

We've already laughed at a million things. We don't even laugh now, it’s just. Yes. That's good. We, and we all know that it's hilarious, but we're busy writing, so it’s yeah, ‘oh, that's fantastic.’ You know, one thing if I'll expound for a second.

Meg: Yeah! Go.

Dan: Is that, like I always say that when you're writing your three entities simultaneously. 

You are yourself, the person who has learned to write and can tap keys and understands what page you're on, and understands that you need it to go here, and that you're the God in this little piece here.

Simultaneously, you're each character that you write. Because they don't know you exist, they do not know you exist. They do not know they're in a comedy. They don't know they're being funny. They believe in the things they believe in, you know. And they have inner children, and they're afraid of this, and they want that, and they'll be duplicitous here, and they've got an inner life that only comes out in little bits of whatever. 

So you have to feel what they feel. If I was writing Modern Family, when I was writing Claire, I can get to all that anxiety and all the stuff that is her character, just write out me. So you can write them truthfully. 

And the third entity you have to be is the viewer or reader who's coming across this for the first time. And isn't aware of you or the process or anything. They're following the story. So that if you write something you had a character already say that viewer says, ‘I already know that.’

Okay, if you skip from this piece of information to that piece of information and you've left out something, 'cause you're busy with other things, you need that viewer to say ‘wait, that doesn't make sense. How did you get from there to there?’

And unless you don't want them to know and they'll have 'em find out later, you have to go, ‘oh yeah, you're right.’ You know? So you have to juggle all these entities in your head while you are right. I have no idea what the point was that got me on that tangent. 

Meg: No, I love it. I love it. It's so true. And that's why you have to get notes, ‘cause that is the entity that is outside of you giving you, ‘I didn't miss this and I didn't get that.’ Because it is sometimes hardest to be that person, because you have no objectivity and you don't even know that you've made that jump that fast. And that they're not emotionally with you, like the drive into act two or whatever it is and features. A hundred percent. I love that.

Dan: I think that there's something that we miss a lot, I think. At least on my end of it. I don't, I can't, I'm very curious. I can't, in Africa, I'm just gonna bother you about what you do.

Meg: We're going to a lab together in Africa. 

Dan: I know, we're going Africa, you know, and, but, there's one thing that I know happens is that when you write a script, you are, you're writing it for a reader. And you know, when we do a sitcom, and you write the script and the executives have notes and this and that because the page doesn't say this or the blah blah blah. 

And so you write, and you basically overwrite, and then in the middle of the week, you have a network run through, where the cast is doing it in front of the network executives. And what I see, it drives me crazy, is that the network executives are all sitting there looking at their scripts and making notes on the scripts. And they're not looking at the actors.

And once you take a script, a written document, and have it be performed on a stage, the episode no longer exists in the script. The episode has now moved onto a stage, and everyone should be watching the stage because actors, by the way they move, the way they have their inflections, their expressions, are conveying information that no longer needs to be on the page.

It's not all dependent on the words anymore, but, because everyone's gotten so used to the script, ‘you've written a spec script, you've written a pilot, we've gone over the pilot, what's your next draft? What are these?’ And they're on notes on the side of the page. They've cemented the piece of work that you're doing onto a page.

And it's very hard for a lot of people who only look at page after page, script after script, to take their heads out of it and understand that the thing that they now have to critique is on a stage in three dimensions with human energy coming at me. You know? 

And so, I think that's one of the problems with sitcoms, is that they're all overwritten, characters are constantly saying what they think, instead of simply being allowed to convey it through acting. You know?

Jeff: Can I ask about this, Dan? 'Cause I couldn't agree more. And Meg, you can hop in here too, 'cause I know you probably have similar experiences working in animation. But often, we know that the draft we're writing will actually be up on its feet differently. 

So, I'm in a very weird phase of the film right now where I'm needing to rewrite, our scripts, even our shooting scripts to reflect what we shot. And I feel like I'm cutting things that really aided the page when it was just a script, but now feel like something is missing on the page because the actor did something. Or we framed a shot a certain way that told the audience something that I'm having trouble communicating purely on the page, but I need to have that as a sample in case someone wants to read it, instead of just watch the movie.

So I dunno, in your experience, like, what would you advise writers who may have this instinct like they are overwriting, but they know that information needs to be there for the experience of actually reading it, versus putting it up on its feet?

Dan: I think it's a necessary evil to write your script that way, because it is going to be read, it's going to be bought on the reader's experience, and the reader needs to see everything spelled out in front of them sometimes. 

Jeff: Right. 

Dan: In a way that you as a writer might find a little bit, cringey, you know. You do it as un-cringingly as possible, of course. And there is some art to it, it is not simply a craft game. But then you, hopefully, you reach a level where, you know, this is the page draft. The script is this page, again, once you get actors, you start to pull from the page, you know, it stops living there, and it moves over to there.

And you might have to have some fights with executives along the way who are glued to the page still and think that reader, that viewers, need to hear every plot point that's happening. You know? But you do your best. Sometimes you'll win fights, and sometimes you lose them, and you go onto the. 

And that's one of the things about tv, it's almost disposable. It's like, you learn your lessons from this episode and you go to that one and you go to the next one. It's, you never ever ever ever ever stop.

Meg: Which sounds good and bad. Animation is exactly the same. You're writing, I'm writing all kinds of dialogue that I hope never ends up in the movie, because I hope I'm really writing it for the animators, and the storyboard artists, and the layout, and the production design, and all kinds of things.

So that they, you know, like, I would love to not say that piece of dialogue. Please. Can we not say that piece of dialogue? But they need to understand what it is we're trying to get to. So that they know what to draw. You know, storyboard artists are the actors, like what to make that and how to make that emotional, what's actually going on here.

And I agree, it is a, it's still an art, so that it, it's not like subtext on top all the way bang, bang, bang. So that they get the subtext, still, from what you're saying. But I agree a hundred percent. A lot of times I wish we could just don't say have to say that, for real. Like, that's just for you guys to know. 

So Emily asked, when you're in the early stages of a new idea, how do you go about finding that kind of, the unique comedic voices of the character, or even just the characters? Like, what is your process? If you were to start creating a new show or what, how do you go, what is your process?

Dan: Well, if I was creating a new show I would think that I would need…well first of all, I would need a reason for it to exist. Because there have been a million TV shows on, there are currently a billion more TV shows on what. What justifies the existence of another show? Just to have my name on something? Just because you want to say you're a writer? It's not enough. Certainly not anymore. With all this rabble and all this production going on. 

What is the reason? What is it you wanna say? You know, and what's that rich idea? I tend to think if you have an idea that's both unique and universal, then you've got something special. 

For example, some years ago I did a sitcom about a woman who in the course of the pilot, she turns 40, and she's been married to a guy for 20 years, and he's a doctor, and they've had a decent time, but it's a 20-year-old marriage, and they don't hate each other, but you know, it’s getting a little stale. 

And she finds herself falling in love with this guy she works for, who's a veterinarian. John Slattery played him, actually. And she finds herself falling in love, and horrified at the fact she's falling in love. But can't stop, sort of, hanging around and mooning after this guy who has no idea, whatever, and it throws her into a crazy place.

And what I think was good about the idea is that it was unique in that it hadn't been the engine of a sitcom before. And two, it was universal because everyone at some point in their life has some issues with monogamy, has some issues of how to keep a relationship fresh. You know, all this stuff that we never deal with, you know, in sitcoms like that. 

So I had something. And I did my 15 episodes and it was on Lifetime, and nobody saw it, and they switched time slots and didn't tell us and all kinds of stuff.

Meg: Now, as you're developing that, obviously it's a comedy, or a dramedy. I don't know how you like to refer to it, but–

Dan: –Oh, it was definitely a studio audience. We had a laugh studio audience.

Meg: Oh, studio audience. So it was a three camera?

Dan: Yeah.

Meg: All right. So how do you know as you're, okay, it's unique and universal, it also has to generate comedy, yes? 

Dan: Oh yeah, oh yeah. 

Meg: So, what is that thinking, like, you know, I mean, you are a pro, so you know that there's comedy in here. But how would you help a more emerging writer know that?

Dan: I think there's comedy in just about everything, if you know where to find it. You know, a lot of it was the anxiety of this poor woman, and driving herself crazy, and overthinking and overtalking, and what's she gonna do? And she loves this guy, but she doesn't love this guy, and she's Catholic, which means, if you think about it, it's just as bad as doing it, and ‘Oh my God, I just did it again.’ You know what? Right there on the table, you know, whatever. 

And she's, you know, spinning out that way. And she’s carrying this big secret and trying to focus on, you know, whatever's going on. I also did a lot of stuff, and this was 1997, and I think I've seen a lot of this kind of stuff since then.

But I did a lot of very psychological episodes, where you saw stuff playing out in the room that was just in her head. So all the different guys that she had liked in her life, I think like spent a day with her, or whatever. And nobody else could see them, but they were all, all of her inner children and also important relationships, and her parents were there and her first boy crush and role models. 

She had Julie Newmar's Catwoman was like one of her role models. And they're all arguing and arguing while she's trying to have dinner and talk to her family and stuff like that. So you can find creative ways to engage the audience and go, ‘oh, this is not just people sitting and talking. This is, we're in her head with her. We're, she's, we're keeping her company in her head. She doesn't know we're here.’

But, so, you, and also I had her working for a veterinarian. So you had animal jokes, so it's like you might think, ‘oh, she's horrible having feelings for someone outside her marriage.’

First of all, she was punishing herself enough that you didn't really have to punish her, and you felt sorry for her. But also she would save animals' lives. And we had a million animal jokes. We had all kinds of animals brought in every week. And we'd do these fun little bits with 'em. And it's like MASH, it's like, you could have a womanizing alcoholic who then saves a million lives and can't sleep at night 'cause of it.

And, you know, it's like you, you sort of, you begin to appreciate this gray thing that happens. But yeah, you can find it in just about anything because…oh, there was a writer named Danny Arnold. He's a comedy writer. He created Barney Miller, and he used to say that character comedy is when you take five characters, and throw a grenade in the room, and they react five different ways. Okay, so chances are one of them is gonna be pretty funny, you know? 

And that's kind of the truth of everything. You know, someone's gonna have a funny attitude about something. And not just that they're funny 'cause they don't really understand what's happening, but maybe funny 'cause it's their way of dealing with something. Like if somebody has a tragedy in their life and all they can do is joke about it, or all they do is they work so hard not to see it and they're in so much denial that you know, you can have fun with that. 

Frasier Crane was a very lonely man, and he was very smart. And I did a whole episode where he goes and sees a therapist because he is just never happy. He can't make relationships work. 

And he's been studying psychology since he was a boy, since he was eight years old, because he wanted to understand people, and he wanted to please his mom, who was a doctor, right? And paradoxically, the more he studied people to, in order to be included, to feel attached, the more they became objects of study. And in a way, apart from him. 

And when you realize that Frasier was a little boy who grew up to be this person, who made fun of everyone at Cheers for hanging around a bar all day, but couldn't leave, because he needed to be there. It's pretty sad, and hilarious.

Meg: Yes. The comedy and pain, yes? And loneliness and the pain of which, so it can be the, like you said, I love that. The funny way they react to the grenade, but also the human way, because of their internal pain, or what they're gonna do. I love that so much.

Dan: It's like Robert Benchley once said, I loved Robert Benchley. He is a great essayist of the early 20th century. I just loved him. And he once said in a piece about going ice skating, about like, watching someone fall down, and all the crazy movements they do in order to not fall down, is much more embarrassing and worse than just actually falling down. The crazy things we do to keep from falling down.

And then he wrote in parentheses, ‘isn't, you know, isn't that like life?’ And yeah, it is, it's all the stuff we do, we do to keep…Frasier is 90% ‘I don't wanna be embarrassed,’ you know? And so, just, right, closing this door of reasonable behavior, so he ends up doing the craziest things in the world, not to be embarrassed, not to be seen in a public, in an embarrassing way.

And he ends up embarrassing himself 10 times worse. And we all relate to that, whether we would do the actual things Frasier did or not. But we all relate to that, 'cause we've all done crazy things. We've all hidden, we don't wanna run into that person, or we, pretend this, but then someone sort of catches it, like peep the lie going over here and, you know, and that's funny.

Meg: You know, I love that so much. Honestly, that helps me with where I am in my own project. Honestly, I'm just so excited. I'm gonna keep that image in my head that, we, how much we do to avoid falling down. It's so great.

Dan: It's, they think it's the falling down that's funny. And you know, it's all the things we do to keep from falling down is a whole nother, you know, cachet of comedy. But you can find the funny without laughing at something that's not funny.

You can have a character that has cancer and you can make it funny without, you know, say, ‘I'm making fun of cancer.’ No, you're not. You're talking about what people go through when they're faced with the biggest possible crisis and knowing they have an expiration date and that it's gonna be painful. 

And it, what does it do? Does it make them even, does it bring out, you know, different parts of their character even more so than would have been otherwise? What would it do, and what would it do to us? You know, I, there's just always comedy there. It, you've gotta find the right characters for it.

You can't just, you know. ‘This happened to a guy, you know, this happened to a girl, this happened to a thing.’ What's your engine? You know, why are you doing this show? Why are you showing me another family on a couch? Make it worth my while. That's what I think.

Meg: Well, I love when you're also talking about not just this guy, you're, you deeply know the psychology of Frasier, and where he came from, and why he is the way he is, and what his mode of operandi is. And to that you, you so deeply know him as a character.

Dan: We didn't use to do that in sitcoms, you know, back, like in the New Heart and Cheers days, we just wrote funny scripts. But somewhere around the end of Cheers on, so that was ‘93, things started to change in writer's rooms, at least the ones I was in.

And we started, it's like the early The Odd Couple from the seventies. Felix was neat and Oscar was messy, and go, you know. And they got a lot of stories out and it was great. I was on a reboot of The Odd Couple a couple years ago, and all we talked about in the writer's room is, why is Felix neat? What is the thing he's like, he doesn't have control. 

You know, and why does Oscar put up with it. And it was all about why, and, you know, I'm not sure that always got us better stories. Maybe it did? Maybe it didn't. But it was certainly a more interesting, more three dimensional way to approach the characters.

Meg: I love all of that so much. Paul asked a very straightforward question, that I'm actually interested in too, which is how do you map out different plot threads when dealing with your A, B, and C storylines? 

Like literally just kind of from a, you know, a nuts and bolts, you've gotta have three storylines, you know, for these new emerging writers. What's your thought on weaving all of those storylines?

Dan: Well, you know, it's so funny because my gut reaction is ‘you just do it.’ And you do it badly for a while. And then you do it well. And you find the shows that did it well and you watch how they did it, you know? And by the way, because you're starting up as a, you're a writer, okay?

You're not at that stage where you have actors doing it. You're putting it on the page. That's okay, live in the page. So what I would suggest is find those episodes of TV that do that really well, and get the scripts for them. Put it, take it off the stage, put it back on the page. 'Cause that's where you live right now. 

And start to feel what it looks like on the page. Go back, and if you can go back a few pages, ‘oh, they did this, they all, she said this, and therefore, and a few pages later, dun da. This is what they did.’ You know, deconstruct it a little bit because you're not making it fully produced. You're making a script.

So go to their script and see what they did. It's the blueprint. Study the blueprint. You know, I think.

Meg: Great advice. Jeff, you had a question? I wanna make sure to get your question in here.

Jeff: Well, you've talked about, we talked both about Multicam and Single Cam, and of course we have writers who are interested in both formats. Personally, I love Multicam tv. I mean some of the greatest and most iconic shows of all time in American television, particularly our Multicam. 

But it does feel to me, and you can tell me if I'm wrong here, Dan, that, like, big Multicam hits are kind of fewer and further between. 

In your opinion, is the Multicam still as relevant as ever, in terms of emerging writers? And, is it relevant to have a great Multicam sample if we're looking to staff, especially as emerging writers?

Dan: That's a good question. My feeling about it is that Multicam can be as good as anything you see on Broadway. It's staged. You're filming a stage play every week. And so you can access all the feelings. You can access, you have access to everything you. And it's powerful. 

You know, when I did, I've done episodes of Frasier and this other show I did, I was talking about, those were Multicam. And what I began to really enjoy was making the audience laugh, but then making the audience like really feel intensely connected, making them cry sometimes, but bringing them back. 

And, you know, it gives a rush to be able to do that. But you're, that's the thing is you're allowed to do that on the stage. And I think people who now make multicam sitcoms, like networks, I think they've just grown up with them and they think they know what the rules are.

And so you have people who are showrunners saying, you know what? We haven't had a joke in a while. Let's put a joke in here. Let's put a joke in here. And you look two lines ago, there was a joke. I'd rather have in a scene like three jokes that are great than fifteen jokes and a few are great and the rest are mediocre, and, or they sound joke-like, and there's a laugh put after it. I freaking hate that. 

Yet there's this lack of security in the people who make them now. A lack of understanding of what makes a great multicam great. And a fear that if the audience doesn't laugh every five seconds then they're not engaged. They do this testing for Multicam’s, well for all shows. And they will bring in people to watch your show and they'll tell 'em, put their hands on a dial and if they're engaged, turn the dial to the left. And if they're less engaged, turn the dial to the right. 

Now I don't know what engaged means, but to the average person, that means, oh, when I'm laughing, I turn it to the right. And when I'm not laughing, I turn it to the left. So what happens? All the punchlines are great. All the setups aren't that interesting. All the stuff where they’re emotional, and if they feel the heightened emotions, like, I'm really involved, yeah, it goes. 

But all the stuff that's setting that up, that makes that possible, seems to all go down, and so they’re learning all the wrong lessons from this, you know? They'll say the punchline's great. Can you make the setup funnier? Yeah. Punchline won't be as funny. 

It's like everyone, you know, loves the hero, but they hate the villain. Could you make the villain less hateable? Yeah, but you won't like the hero so much. When the hero kills him, you know it. 

It's this weird thing. It’s lack of security, lack of respect for the audience, thinking that they'll understand what's happening. And the truth is, if you approach it right, that genre can be an art again. But you need people to just, you know, go to the wall with their vision and say, this is how this is going to be. And you need someone to break through, years now, of this kind of like, you know, a run of the mill network sitcoms that you've seen a million times where all the laughs sound fake, 'cause they all are, you know, it's just, it's very sad. 

Everyone stopped thinking that it could be an art, and started thinking of it as a commodity, and then an easy code to follow. ‘I will simply do this, do-do-do, and I have a sitcom. There you go.’ And it just depresses me, because I believed in that format growing up when I was watching Mary Tyler Moore and I was watching all these other shows and I thought, ‘this is what I want to do.’ And I was lucky enough to do it, and then just watch, watch it crumble at the hands of the custodians of a medium that they do not understand.

Jeff: It’s fascinating in your opinion, it's more that our idea of what a multicam is, has been so reduced, not the actual form, but the, our conception of what makes a great multicam is so small. Because I guess it is true, and I think about all the great moments for Multicam’s I love. It's, you know, it's Ross saying Rachel's name at the altar. Like, of course that's a joke, but it's also a deeply human foible, and like it's, we don't remember jokes. We remember deep emotional gut punches that a stage can give us, I guess.

Dan: Yeah, and to hear an audience genuinely reacting, is also a powerful element of it. It's years of watching either fake audiences or audiences who have been so coked up, you know, by the warmup comedian, that they're all laughing at every single thing that happens because they're all excited to be in Hollywood watching a TV show. And so it's not you know, balanced out, but no it's just terribly unfortunate.

A lot of people, they just thought it was easy. They just thought sitcoms are easy. And as soon as people started saying, sitcoms are easy, you know, and how many times have people walk up to me, like, ‘oh I have an idea for a sitcom,’ or ‘actually I've thought about writing sitcoms,’ you know, and you wanna smack them, you know, but it's because everyone thinks it's so easy, because there's so many bad ones. That's the thing. That's the thing. So many bad ones shouldn't, you shouldn't encourage you to write another bad one. It should inspire you to write a freaking great one. Ah!

Meg: Absolutely. All right, so let's talk about the room. You're in the room. When things are just not going well, it's just not working. Either the ideas aren't coming, or the ideas you have, you've put them together and they're not working. What's your kind of go-to solution, to kind of, stoke the room up creatively?

Dan: It always depends on how much time we have. If we're, if we can't break a story, but we still have a few days, then it's like, you know, sometimes go home early, let's go home at three o'clock. Or let's go take a walk, let's get some ice cream brought in. Whatever. Just to kind of, you know, shake our heads, you know? 

But I will say that there are a lot of times when it is just a room full of people staring at each other and staring at walls. For a long, long, time. And then someone will eventually come up with a breakthrough or, you know, you have to put it down, and because sitcoms are the way they are, you're never working on just one episode all the time. It's like, there's always stuff to do on another episode. 

Okay, let's put this aside and let's do the rewrite on this. You know, and we might get on a roll there that then translates into this. You can always grab onto something else. It's like what I say with a writer's block. People say, ‘I'm writing and then I suffer block and I freak out.’

Half of writer's block is made up of freaking out because you have writer's block. You know, but I also think that because we think of writing as an art, ‘oh, I've got inspiration. I've come up with this wonderful idea and it's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's writing. You know, I'm the guy who comes up with wonderful ideas, 'cause I'm a writer.’

Writing is like 80% craft. And just, ‘I know I need to get the character from here to here and those are the two inspired parts. But I still gotta mechanically get him there to there, and make the audience know what's going on, and not bore people. 

Meg: A hundred percent, so many people don't understand that. They walk up like, ‘I have got an idea for a movie. I just need someone to write it.’ I'm like–

Dan: –I get that one all the time, I get that one all the time. 

Meg: Like that's the whole ball game right there. 

Dan: Yeah.

Meg: Like that is the work.

Dan: Oh, isn't that horrible? So I, my feeling is if I've got writer's block, if I'm in a room anyway, if we seem to hit a wall. Then, you know, forget about trying to aspire to the art part of writing and dedicate yourself for a moment to the craft part.

Go back and look over your pages and go, you know what? This character, you know, doesn't do anything after this page. I can exit them from the scene earlier. Take out a word that doesn't matter. Take out a comma, move in a comma. Just play with the things on the page that have no demand of inspiration towards you.

And you might find, that as you're trimming up your scene and making it look better on the page, that, oh, you know what? Maybe, oh, this thing that he says over here, maybe I'll have him say that later, da, da, da, whatever, you know? But don't freak out if you're not inspired, go back and work on the craft part.

You know, you don’t need to have a brilliant idea to come back and take a word out that you don't need or to take out a speech you don't need, or have someone say something a little more clearly or take out a comma, you know?

Meg: I love it. Nikki asked about inspiration in terms of your inspiration, what sitcoms inspired you when you first started? What's inspiring you now? You know, they're asking because what should they be watching now, but also very interested in what inspired you originally.

Dan: I watched everything that I could originally. And it's a different world. So when I watched everything that I could, we had five channels on tv. And so I watched all the current sitcoms, the ones that were being made, Mary Tyler Moore and MASH and dah dah dah.

I also watched the sitcoms that were being rerun all the time, the ones from the sixties. So I saw everything from Green Acres to Hogan's Heroes to Get Smart. You know, I watched all that as well. The Dick Van Dyke Show, and stuff before that, I Love Lucy and, you know, whatever it was Sergeant Bilko, I guess. Dobie Gillis was a big favorite of mine.

And so all this stuff was poured into my head. That was actually a benefit of the technology at the time. Because we had limited channels, and there was no way to record them, you had to watch what they showed you, or go outside and play, God forbid. Okay. So if they started showing you a black and white movie, you might sit there going okay, blah, blah, blah. And then you find yourself getting sucked into it. By the end you go, that was great! 

But now with a million choices, kids, young people, are gonna keep choosing the state, the things that go to the dessert all the time. I'll watch this cartoon for the 10th time and the 11th time as opposed to sit down and watch something that's in black and white. I don't have to now. And because they don't have to, they don't get that crazy buffet we got coming up. 

When I came up, I watched, because of TV, I watched the movies that my grandparents watched. I watched the early TV that my parents watched, and I watched the current TV. So when I went to Hollywood and I was talking to writers, I could not only talk to them about their work, you know, I could talk to them about the things that inspired them because I had watched it too.

You know, and I had a deep, I keep going back to silent comedy, I had a deep knowledge of it, 'cause I sought it out wherever I could and I filled my head with everything. So there are oftentimes that I will use things in shows that were inspired by bits I saw in silent movies. 

Meg: Yeah. Chaplain and Keaton.

Dan: Yeah.

Meg: Keaton. Yeah.

Dan: And also I will say that I often tell people to absorb everything, and not just comedy. 'Cause if you only know comedy, and then you're gonna write versions of comedy, that I find that sometimes, I mean, I've put in things in, like, different shows that I’ve gotten from like Japanese, you know, movies over here.

And like, there was that I needed an end for an episode of Modern Family. And I remembered one line from a book about the NASA moon landings that I had read 15 years earlier. And it gave me an end to the thing. I hadn't been, I didn't go back to find a comedy moment. It's just that, that one moment just popped into my head.

And so your head's like this wonderful junk drawer ,and fill it with everything. You know? I say that I hear myself rambling, and please forgive me. You are

Meg: You are not rambling at all. I love it.

Dan: Oh, well, I tend to say that, you know, people say, I should write every day. I should write every day. And I to a point I go, ugh. 

But I think that it's more important to be a writer than to write. And being a writer means you are writing all the time, whether you're literally doing it or not, because being, writing is like breathing, you know, and writing is exhaling. And you cannot only exhale or you will die. And you cannot only exhale and inhale at the time.

You can't do both at the same time. So when you're not writing, you're observing, you're gathering, you're soaking in relationships. What's that thing that happened with my girlfriend and me, and what's that thing that happened with my, you know, the, what's happening on TV? What's this drama, this book I'm reading, da da da ta da.

Because then the next time you exhale, you'll have little tiny bits of all of that out, and you'll exhale something so much richer. You know?

Meg: Well, I love that. I love that I had that experience where I just was getting, so, I guess, I was exhaling so much that I finally had to make a commitment to myself that every morning I would read a book that could never be a movie. It could be any book. But it just had to be about filling me up again with images and perspectives and characters. And I just, you had to have it. You have to have it.

Dan: Right. Right. Exactly. You know, I was asked by a student once, she wanted to write comedy and she said, I wanna write comedy. Should I remember all the funny things that me and my friends do? I said, no, remember everything, because chances are very good that in 10 years, all the stuff that's so funny that you and your friends do will just make you roll your eyes. And all the stuff that makes you want to kill yourself today will be hilarious.

Meg: That's awesome.

Jeff: It's brilliant.

Dan: It's all fuel. If you process it right, it's all fuel. You just have to understand that, and then find those little tricks to make it come up. And you want things that are unexpected. You want people to be surprised that they're laughing at a show about a guy who has cancer. Oh my God, I laughed out loud at that. I would never have thought that could be funny. But now I'm understanding human nature in a slightly different way. You have that opportunity every time you write something.

Jeff: I think in that interest, Dan, like I always love watching people with great tastes and kinda like asking what you're watching right now. I mean, and it could be comedy, it could be drama, but I'm just, like, interested in maybe within the last six months, what's really kind of peaked your creative taste.

Dan: You know, it's funny, I have to think about that because. I’m really sour. I don't watch sitcoms anymore. Really. It's been a long time since I've watched them. I will say, by the way I'm just gonna take this chance to say that Inside Out is like the freaking best movie ever made. And I thought that before I knew Meg. 

Meg: Well, I always say, well, there you go. I always say, Pete Doctor's a genius. I'm so proud to have helped him.

Dan: But it's just, I mean, I'm a big psychology nerd, so all that stuff is just like, yes, that's exactly where I live. I mean, I did episodes of Frasier that took place in his head, and I just I, once I start digging, I cannot stop inner child stuff. Oh! I can-inner child. Just get me over there. I have to do it. 

Meg: Are you watching anything or have seen anything or reading anything that is just, you know, that kind of stuff that you've loved? It doesn't have to be a sitcom, it doesn't have to be anything. We're just interested in where your brain's going.

Dan: You know, for the last eight months, it has only been about this documentary. 

Meg: Of course. All the research. 

Dan: Yeah. It's, I truly, people have given me books to read, recommendations of things to watch, and it is all this, all the time. And what's more or less interesting about it is that, it's a very regional documentary. It's a history of the, of kids TV shows in the Cleveland area. In the early days of TV, we had a lot of very colorful hosts and different characters, and they would show cartoons and teach lessons and whatever.

And because we had three channels, everyone watched them, they were like superstars. They’d get mobbed as they walked down the streets back then. And they were also inventing the form as they went. And there's very little recorded about them. And they were so big, and they were so important to so many people. I wanted to create something that was a tribute to them.

And so I have just been scouring for every little scrap of video, every photo I can find, people that remember things da da da da. And so it's funny, I, a lot of, I'm my head, I've just, I've been living in the late 1960s when I was a kid, you know? I'm always fascinated by early tv. 

I'm, I guess I'm a bit of a deconstructionist because, I'm fascinated by early, I like silent movies, you know, early rock and roll, early television, early radio, because that's the point, that the moment of birth of a, of an entire medium of a genre, you had to go from people who didn't exist, it didn't exist, and they made it exist, and they had to think about it. You know, I read a, there's an amazing book about silent movie comedies. Get this book, everybody, it's called The Silent Clowns by Walter Kerr, and it's outta print. But you can find it. 

And he goes back and talks about the evolution of silent movies. He makes so many great points. But one of them is that, when they first started making silent comedy, or they got in their heads, they're gonna make a funny movie, nobody knew if it was possible. Because, until the movie camera, all comedy that was done for audiences was either in a, like, a circus kind of setting or on a stage that was clearly fake.

Nobody was doing comedy in front of actual buildings and cars that would go by and pedestrians, nobody knew if comedy could actually be in the real world. And then they had to really experiment. And you look at the very early comedies where it's all just people falling down or whatever, and then get to this more kind of understanding, motivation and then marrying comedy with other feelings, and then you watch it grow.

And the idea that people had to really figure it out and experiment, to me, is fascinating. How do you go from the blank page to a full page? How do you go from no movies to movies? You know, this kind of music, to rock and roll to dah dah dah? And so I find that I don't just study stuff. I go back and I learn the roots of it.

Meg: I love that. I love that. You and I have the same brain. I love that stuff too. 

Dan: I need it back for a while.

Meg: We think alike. We think alike. 

Dan: Oh, good. 

Meg: So, Tiffany asked a question that I love because it's a daring question to ask, so we're gonna do it, which is, you know, you've had a massively successful career and we can learn so much of course from all that success. But she's also interested in what's your biggest lesson you've gained from less successful projects?

Dan: I think that my less successful projects, I think what I had to learn was about the politics of it. You know, it's never enough to be a good writer. You know, I always say, and anyone who's seen me in a podcast has probably heard me say this. And so, and if you've heard this, Meg, or you, if you've heard it, I apologize. 

But I always say that, there's a misconception that if you can write, you can be a writer. And I always say that to be a writer professionally, you need four things, and being able to write is one of them, and that's the talent and the ability to do it and to evolve with your craft and get better, blah, blah, blah. That's just a fourth of it.

Second, you need ambition in your personality. It has to be in your DNA. You have to be the person who, who moves across the country if necessary, sleeps on a couch, gets three jobs and works on the weekend. You have to be the person that says yes to yourself when a thousand people have said no. You have to be that person. Because if you're not, if you can just be a writer and you're not that, you're competing with several people who are, and you're done.

Third, political savvy because it seems like a solitary thing. Writing, oh, I got my typewriter and a cabin and here I go, no. Sort of, a little bit. But no, you're writing with other people and other people have a say in what you're writing, whether or not they know how to write. And so you know how to have to know how to deal with them.

You have to also let go of your ego. So when someone comes up with a better idea, you grab onto that. The writer always has to come first before your own ego. The quality of the project, always first. You have to know when you're in a writer's room, if you're talking too much, not talking enough. You have to know when to fight for something, when to not fight for something.

Okay. There are times that you're, you have to understand your job is not to do the best TV you can. It's to make your boss happy. And your boss might say, I want the scene where X, Y, and Z happened. And you go, well, I've seen that a million times. What if we do, and you have a genuinely better idea. 

And the boss says no, I want X, Y, and Z. Okay. Your job is not to persuade your boss to be a better writer. Your job is to make your boss happy. 'Cause your boss might recommend you to a show where you can do your stuff. You have to play a long game with your career, you know? 

So you have a talent, ambition, political savvy. and then the fourth is the wild card. That's luck. And we have no control over that. You might have almost none of those other things, but if you're lucky, you'll have a great career. You might have all those other things and the planets just will not line up for you, and you'll see them line up for somebody who doesn't deserve it, which will be a kind of hell that you'll have to live in.

But that's something I've learned over the years. I just thought when I was growing up, if I'm a good writer, I'll have a career, you know? And I had to learn those other things. I had to learn how to develop those eyes. If you're, you have to know how to pitch. You have to know that you're having a discussion with somebody in the room.

You can't just recite, 'cause then they disappear and they feel like they've disappeared. You're in a room with these people selling your passion for something. You know, you have to, I don't know. It's, there's a lot. 

Meg: No, it's very true. I know great writers, I mean, truly amazing writers, who just cannot do the interpersonal politics of it. And it, because it is tricky. Now, I will also say in terms of ambition, I, growing up, would never have thought of myself as an ambitious person, ever. If you had walked up to me when I was 19, 20, even 25, I would've been like, no! I'm not ambitious. But I was like, I also was the kind of person that if you told me no, I would say really? It's no? 

Like, it was just this little spark that I, the more I fueled it with my desire and my want and my authentic admittance that I actually do want that, that little spark starts to come in and service it. So I don't want the emerging writers out there to think, especially a lot of women, ‘well, I'm not ambitious,’ so no no no. You very well might be, but it hasn't been fed that fire, it hasn't been fed with desire and want and permission. And once it is, you're gonna be surprised that you do have that kind of drive. 

So I just want you, everybody give themselves a breath there, if that scares you, because everything he's talking about can be nurtured. Your craft can be nurtured and your ability to write, your ability to be social, maybe right now, it's not something you're great at. It doesn't mean you can't be. You can learn. That's a learning curve. We all went through learning curves. We've all been in rooms where we were like, I should never have said that. I'm getting fired. I mean, I've seen pros who run multiple academy awards socially make huge faux pas. That's just part of it.

It is all chopped up that you can learn. You can learn everything. And, but it's so great to hear that is such a big part of being a professional writer, is all these other skillsets that you do need to learn.

Dan: Right? And you know, something that you said, and this is something again, I say often, so forgive me, you see me before, go read a book for a while. I always think of something called positive and negative fuel, when you're growing up as a creative person. 

And positive fuel is when your teachers, your parents, your family, they say, ‘Hey, you know what? You're great. You're gonna go out there, you're gonna do great things. And even if you don't, we'd be thrilled to have you back 'cause we think you're great.’ That's positive fuel and that could just send you off on a whole lifetime delightful career. 

Then there's negative fuel. That's the kind I got. And that's the kind where your parents and your teachers and people just constantly say, ‘who do you think you are? You're not talented. You think you, you're never gonna make it, what do you, just don't be stupid and focus on the important things.’ 

And a lot of people, they will succumb to that and they will believe that. And then that's their lives and they're in jail, they helped other people build without knowing it. Other people will take all that negativity and turn it into a very potent, but ultimately toxic fuel.

And I always tell the story of the day, I realized I was doing that. I was 17 and I was walking down the street in downtown Cleveland, right over there, with my dad. And someone drove by in a Jaguar and my dad said, those are beautiful cars, but they're very expensive. And I flippantly at 17 said, ‘when I'm rich, I'll buy you one of those.’

And he whirled around at me in the street and stuck his finger in my face. I remember the coat flying up in the snow, coming down a finger in the face. He says, ‘you're never gonna be rich. You're never gonna be anything because you don't focus on the things that are important. You write your little stories. You think you're funny all the time. You're nothing.’ And he keeps walking and I'm following him, and I'm fighting tears. But I'm also thinking, ‘buddy, you just fucked yourself out of a car.’ 

And I felt that little kind of like small furnace and a lot of my life was then I will show them. I will work the three jobs a week, and I will. ‘Cause the people in high school that said I would never make it, the people, the teachers, the, my parents, my family, but girlfriend, all these people expressed all that doubt. But I was gonna show them all. 

And I did, which was wonderful until my forties when I was driving to work going, wait, ‘why am I doing this?’ I showed them and it's like, have I sentenced myself to a lifetime of something I might not even want to do? Nervous breakdown. I did, but I sort of came around and figured it all out. But yeah. So, it's a very toxic…but use it, use that thing where people don't believe in you. 

Meg: Use it to furnish what you truly do want.

Dan: Yes. Yes. 

Meg: Right. Like, I don't think you choose the want based on being contrary to what they say you can't do. But if you truly do want it, then I, totally, I am, I'm totally like you, you fucked yourself out of a car. I love that so much. 

I remember sitting with the Academy in the Academy and we lost the Academy Award, and the very first thought in my head is ‘how long before I'm back here?’ 'Cause I'm trying again. Like I, if you, if I get hit too hard, part of me goes, yeah? Let's see. Like, I don't know, like I, as long as it's towards what you truly want, and I do think in your career many times, you have to stop and say, ‘wait, do I still want this?’ 

Dan: Yes. 

Meg: Like I've been on the track for so long, or I've got kids and I've got families, and like, there's reasons to be on that track that are very valid. But every once in a while you do have to stop, take a break, not work and just say, what do I want? And it's very hard to get off that wheel, and sometimes be like, is this what I want? Is this going the direction I wanna go? Am I feeling fulfilled? Do I want this? I do think that for all our pro writers listening, that is incredibly important to do. That check in.

Dan: I think that's the best advice I've heard in ages. I think, you know, like, like the characters we write, we are evolving, you know, and we do not stand still. At different points in our life, we ask, am I still that person? What's new about me? What do I like now? And you know, that person, you know, has to somehow come up with answers, you know, but I think that you can't take for granted that you're the person when you were 25 and you somehow got cemented into place.You know, that gets people into trouble, I think.

Meg: Absolutely.

Jeff: And Meg, I just wanna say quickly, Meg, some of what I've learned from you is for those toxic people in our life who wanna shut us down, it can be so tempting to kind of approach it the way you did Dan, which is kinda that fuck you, I'm gonna do it anyway.

But what Meg has taught me is instead, let your heart break for that person, that they're projecting their unwanted desires on you. And so approach that person with empathy and compassion and fight for your dream knowing that they locked themself in their own jail for not kind of pursuing their own dream.

So for those of you who are listening, who are probably dealing with some of those toxic naysayers in your life, rather than approaching 'em with that fuck you, which can be so tempting, kind of approach them with compassion and empathy instead, because that person is probably projecting their own resentment for not doing it themselves.

Meg: But I always say if you do it, if you manifest, that naysayer's excuse for not manifesting turns to dust. So they really need you not to do it. They really need to undercut you, and take your power away. 'Cause God forbid you should actually do it, it's a reflection on them. So that's just their own jail that they're in. Don't give it too much energy. I do sometimes need the fuck you energy. I do sometimes.

Dan: I tend to think, I do think, I think it's okay to have the fuck you energy, until you've kind of made it, and then you have the freedom to go. Well, now that I've made, I can be a little magnanimous and go. I'm a little bit low to let go of it, to take out any of the potency at that too early. 

Meg: Yes. It's very potent fuel. I think a little combo platter. It's good. Okay, Dan, we always ask our guests this has been so great. I could just go on for another hour, but we always ask our guests the same three questions at the end of our show. So I will start. What do you love about writing?

Dan: I love that. How much time do I have?

Meg: Much as you want. We're good. We love that. Good, go.

Dan: I'll say one thing I, again, I tell students, and it sounds lame at first, and then I hopefully un-lame it very quickly, is that writing is magic. Lame, I know. But like, the word spell actually comes from the word spell as in magic spell.

Because way back in the day, the idea that an experience could happen and somebody could make marks on a surface, and then get on horseback a hundred miles away, somebody else looks at those marks and knows what happened to you, might know how you felt, might know you, a person you've never seen will, know you, you know you, that was magic then that you could take feelings, freeze them and unfreeze them inside somebody else.

And not just one person, a hundred people, a thousand people, and not just a hundred miles away, a thousand miles away, 5,000 miles away, whatever. And not just the next day. Years later, a hundred years later, a thousand years later, we're still having conversations with people who started them a thousand years ago, you know? 

And that's the thing it's like, it's a gift. When you think of, we're so used to writing things all the time in email and this and that, we don't think of it. But you have the ability to be known and to be seen in a very real way if you do it, even if it's through other characters. We use that character as a proxy and we say, okay, these feelings, you feel those feelings, 'cause they came from me. And we now know each other.

And so we're not alone. And that's a, it's a privilege to be able to do that, to waking up feelings that you choose to wake up in someone else. There's a lot of fun and control to that too, and a very powerful feeling. But it's a doorway into someone else and creating that bridge. And I think that every now and again, I have to remind myself of that opportunity, that comes with this miracle that is writing that we're so used to, we forget it's a miracle.

Jeff: Just so brilliant. So, question two is what pisses you off about writing?

Dan: Ugh, that it's due tomorrow and I'm not finished. I think the same things that inspire me about it kind of piss me off, is that I want the writing to, in my mind, justify its existence. And as I get older and there's just more writing in the world and more writing in the world and more writing in the world, and it's all, some of it's disposable and then some of it's brilliant and that's the cool, brilliant thing. But why am I saying it, that it's already been said? Maybe I'll say it in a new way, I don't know.

But I think the bar that I set drives me crazy and sometimes paralyzes me. I will also say, and this I don't know, I don't mean for this to sound a humble brag. I totally don't, but I have been successful. I’ve worked on terrific shows and I got, you know, nice recognition for it. And now when I write things, I feel like it's gotta live up to that. I feel like, whatever I say, any joke I make, like here in Cleveland, I make a joke about something. And I know that some people, most, a lot of people here don't know that I wrote for TV. I just don't talk about it, it feels like a different life now. 

But the people who do I'll joke around and you know, they're kind of looking at like, ‘oh okay. I'm sure you were really great at Modern Family. I guess someone else was in charge of the jokes,’ and there's this bar that didn't exist there before. And I could just play and I could do things that were this good and this good and I could be, I could write something that was bad for a while and then maybe a year later find some way to make it great or just throw it out.

I had that sort of freedom, but now I'm just so aware of this past that is like this anchor that just holds me down sometimes creatively. And that's my own stuff to deal with. It should not be like that and it's something I'm working through.

Meg: Well, it's so important to remember to play and it's so hard to play when you have the self-consciousness of, of the past now. 

Dan: Yeah. 

Meg: Or the expectation. Absolutely. I totally hear you. 

Jeff: And we talk about it on the show a lot that, like for our emerging writers, one of the big gifts that they have that will eventually be taken away from them is this unmarked career in front of them. And you know what? Like that's, I know it can feel impossible to have the whole mountain ahead of you and you envy that person that's maybe closer to the top of it.

But there's a lot that you have that's a power, a superpower that an emerging writer has that some of those established writers don't have. So I'm glad you acknowledged it, Dan. It's valuable to be reminded of.

Meg: Yeah, absolutely. So the last question is, what have you written that you want to be remembered by? Like, if there was one scene or moment that you've written that we were gonna remember you by, what would it be?

Dan: Well, I suppose there's a couple in TV, that I'm rather proud of. I did come up with the ending of her New Heart where he wakes up with Suzanne. But I also, you know, I wrote one line that got into the ether somehow.

I've written a couple, but there's this one that always kind of confused me, because it's not that funny. But I'm sure you've heard somebody say something awkward and then look around and say, did I say that out loud? I wrote that for an episode of Cheers in like 1990. Oh my God. 

And it didn't exist before then. And it became because in the writer's room you pitch stuff and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and you just go on. But if you pitch something really long and it doesn't work, then you're like err, and I did that, and I looked at the person next to me, I said, ‘did I say that out loud?’

And we all laughed. And then, you know, a year later someone said, let's put Dan's line in there. And then people started doing it on different sitcoms, and then people started doing it in real life. So I'm afraid that's, in a way, no one knows it's me, but in a way that's the thing I'll be remembered for.

I would prefer to be remembered, I wrote a textbook on comedy theory and it took me years and years to write, and it took me a lifetime to kind of work out because I was not a funny child when I decided I was going to start being funny. I was eight years old and I had to literally figure it out day after day, month after month, year after year to the annoyance of everyone around me. 

And I learned a lot. And then when I was on TV shows where you had a, you were, it was a laboratory. You had a live audience there every week. And so you'd tweak this and tweak that, and you'd start to understand how things, what variables were coming into play.

And I started reading about comedy theory and everyone seemed to have it wrong. Everyone always started with the wrong equation. All comedy is X. As soon as you do that, you're dead because you're eliminating other things that could be funny. And then it's like, well, why was that funny? If it's not X, you know, I think comedy is a landscape of variables that may come into play.

And you know, also those variables, they may not work, you know, but you have to just sort of understand that I created sort of a theoretical landscape, and I'm very proud of the book. 'Cause in a way that was, the end of a journey that started when I was eight years old. And it's like, why are people laughing? What is so funny?

Meg: And is that book available on Amazon

Dan: Yeah, it's called What Are You Laughing At? A, a Comprehensive Guide to the Comedic Event. 

Meg: All right, people, we know what we're doing this weekend. 

Dan: It's a slog. Just skimm, just skim and it'll be fun.

Jeff: I'll link that in the description. I think we'll have a lot of audience members who are hungry for that kind of book, so thank you for letting us know about that, Dan, I'll throw in the description down below,

Dan: But understand, it's not like a how to write sitcoms. It really is about, you know, information and the way our brain plays with stuff and how we, you know, blah, blah, blah. So.

Jeff: Amazing. Cool. 

Meg: I would love to read that. Thank you so much, Dan, for coming on. I, again, I could talk to you for hours and hours, which good, since I'm gonna be in a lab in Africa with you. But we're just gonna have a great time.

Jeff: And we've noticed some new folks have hopped over to join the Patreon. Welcome. We're so excited to have you. If you join us, join the Patreon. You're gonna hear a quick guest wrap out actually for some of our thoughts on Dan. Check that in your feed, and we'll have some new workshops announced very soon. We can't wait to meet you.

Meg: And if you haven't already, please check out our Facebook group for additional support and community.

Jeff: And remember, you are not alone. 

Meg: And keep writing.