MU: (indistinguishable) I was a heavy Mad Magazine reader, and my first dream was to write for Mad. I wanted to be one of "the usual gang of idiots..." mentioned in the byline, because it sounded like a great job. I drew cartoons in school notebooks and showed them to friends. Then, one night at about age 10 I was flipping channels and happened to stop on PBS, our Public Broadcasting System, and saw "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Â I couldn't believe how fast and funny it was. I actually taped a sign above the TV: "Sunday night, 9:00 O'clock, Monty Python!" Of course, Saturday Night Live and SCTV were also a big influences on me. From then on, I wrote sketches and pitched them to friends, and followed every sketch show. You're a good listener...
When I was 18 I practically took over a cable access channel in Boulder City, Nevada, and wrote and directed a sketch comedy show called "First Take." It was awful, but I learned a lot by making mistakes. I continued putting on live sketch shows with friends, and shooting sketches whenever I could get a camera and scrape together enough money. I finagled a $5,000 arts grant to produce commercial parodies while in college, and I'm still amazed I got money for that. I forged stationary from the University of Nevada Las Vegas and got professional cameras and a 280 Z car on loan, among many things. We discovered that local businesses would donate stuff if we used the word "community" a lot and promised to mention them in credits. We proceeded to do stunts with the car and mounted the cameras to skateboards and bumpers, and many other terribly irresponsible things.
As a complete shock to me and my family, I was awarded a full scholarship to the graduate program at the Greenspun School of Communication, which seemed a perfect way to put off the real world for a while and continue messing around doing sketch comedy. I had to write a Master's thesis as part of the course work, and I was interested in narratology, (the study of narrative), so it seemed a good idea to do a narrative study of sketches. I went to New York and interviewed Al Franken, then head writer for SNL, and Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca from Your Show of Shows when they did a revival show at The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. I also bugged sketch comedy writers from the Golden Age of Television, including Mel Tolken, head writer of Your Show of Shows, and read dozens of really boring books on "comedy theory" and history. My thesis, "The Poetics of Sketch Comedy," took me three years to complete, and it's over 100 pages. At that point I was writing spec sitcom scripts in my spare time and had a couple movie scripts under my belt. I finished college, and was just sitting around spinning my wheels. I credit my good friend, Charles Skladanowski, with literally demanding that I move to Los Angeles with him to make movies. I couldn't think of anything better to do, and really had few viable career options, so I sold an old car I had restored and used the money to move to LA. I had planned to spend 10 years to make something happen, but a little over a year later I managed to stumble into a job writing on Mr. Show. The movie thing hasn't happened yet, but I was far more prepared to write sketch comedy anyway, obviously.
Ugh, I'm really light headed from this cigarette. I don't smoke, and I thought it would make me seem cool, and the babies crying has given me a headache. Bad idea. I think I'm gonna puke...
H: Are you alright?
MU: Please, take your hand off my leg. You're taking advantage of me because I'm vulnerable now.
H: May I remind you that you were pretending this was a phone conversation, so this isn't even logically consistent. You should probably revise the earlier part if you're going to have me make a pass at you.
MU: No, I like it, and I'm going with it. Logical inconsistency is... (gasping) funny. Uhhgh! (throws up) Okay, I feel better now. Â Where were we?
H: ...on my Timberlands! What made you choose writing comedy over performing it?
MU: I guess I had no desire to become famous. I actually enjoyed performing, but there was a point when I made a conscious decision to pursue only writing. As a teenager, all the funny kids in school had what I later learned was a "schtick," a dependable gimmick that consistently gets laughs. I had no schtick, I'd just thought of funny things to say, which was more work, but it was what I did.
I'm actually performing stand up comedy now, and I like doing it. With writing it's all vicarious thrills, but you get an immediate jolt when you get a laugh on stage, and there is nothing comparable. I do absurdist bits and wear a suit when I perform stand up. I'll probably keep doing it.
H: IMDB lists your first writing credit as Mr Show, which is pretty impressive- how did you get involved in that? What was the experience like?
MU: It was a fluke that my first apartment in Los Angeles had a cable sticking out of the wall, and I hooked up my TV and got free HBO. That very night was the premiere of Mr Show. I thought it was great, but four episodes later the cable shut off. Later on, I discovered that I'd seen the initial "experiment" as HBO called it, of four episodes. Over the next year I took a few temp jobs and struggled to make ends meet, and hit many walls trying to sell my screenplays. I started checking out the alternative comedy scene, which was vibrant, original, and very funny. I happened into a place called Pedro's, a neighborhood bar in Los Feliz, and saw a great weekly comedy show that was the precursor to Largo, a legendary comedy show still running in a different location. I met Bob Odenkirk, and David Cross and many of the people involved in Mr. Show, like Paul F. Tompkins, Scott Auckerman, BJ Porter, and Eban Schletter, (who scored the music.) I learned that Mr Show had just wrapped a second season of 10 episodes. When I felt comfortable, I began pitching sketches to Bob and David - probably a dozen in all. I would come home from my terrible day job (answering phones at a hair transplant mill) and write sketches until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. Finally, Bob and David told me to stop sending sketches because they didn't even know if they'd be picked up for a third season. About two months later, I got a phone message from Dakota Films telling me to be at a coffee shop called "The Bourgeois Pig," in Hollywood. I went there and learned I'd be writing for the third season of Mr Show.
The experience was amazing. The writing room was so funny and quick. It was intimidating, but I got with the flow because I'd been writing sketches with friends for years before that. The first few weeks all the writers pitched sketches, and we were sent off to write them. The walls of the offices were made of cork boards, and we put sketch titles onto note cards and pinned them everywhere. Then, after selecting the sketches, we'd all sit together in Bob and David's office and figure out how to connect them into episodes. Some episodes went quickly - a couple hours, and some took days to finish. Interestingly, we had no writer's assistant at Mr. Show, and we all traded off typing sketches ourselves depending on who was closest to the keyboard. By the end of the season Bob and David were out shooting sketches while the rest of the writers sat in the office trying finish the final episodes. It was extremely arduous, because we didn't have a lot of time, and Mr. Show's budget got squeezed after HBO took the cost of Tenacious D shorts directly out of our budget, which came as a terrible surprise. So, it was something of a pressure cooker with a considerable amount of yelling and bickering towards the end due to stress and lack of sleep, but I'd never trade it for a million years. I love all those guys, and I feel like we were in combat together.
H: Â You also worked on the Chris Rock Show and MADtv, is there something about sketch writing that you prefer?
MU: I love the pure creativity, the brevity, and the fact that you can do practically anything as long as it's funny. I've always been fascinated with sketch comedy, which is probably why I wrote a Master's thesis on it. It's a unique form of storytelling, and one of the conclusions of my thesis was that sketches probably predated most other dramatic forms. The plays of Aristophanes and Plautus were complex advanced forms of storytelling, and it's quite likely that earlier forms were more slight and simple, like sketches. We know that there were open air markets in ancient Greece, where puppet shows, juggling, and public speaking took place, so it's not much of a stretch to think that comedic actors performed funny bits for passersby. If you were buying a gourd at the market and you saw a couple actors yelling and slapping each other amusingly, you might stop and chuckle at it, and if someone got kicked in the nuts you might even throw a shekel in their bucket for such brilliant comedy, wouldn't you?
H: I suppose. What are you implying with all this market metaphor?
MU: Oh, c'mon, cheapskate, throw them a shekel!
H:Â Now I'm cheap?! How did the idea for Alt.Reality come about, and what's it like when something you wrote a little while ago gets picked up now?
MU: I went to the Jim Henson Company for a general meeting, and their Creative Director, Alison Smith, took me to a room filled with 66 puppets stuffed into clear bags. She said they wanted to do a web show that makes fun of TV reality shows. I thought that sounded really cool, and I had always wanted to work with Henson, fulfilling a lifelong dream since Sesame Street, my first must-see television comedy at age 4. I thought about it and came up with the title, "Alt-reality," and pitched a bunch of reality show premises. We shot the entire project over 4 days in a giant green screen cyclorama. Since there was very little budget, I devised a process that avoided building sets, and composited foreground and background elements that were created in photoshop, and multiplied puppets for crowd scenes, etc. It was a brief production and an extensive time-consuming post production that heaped all the work onto one lonely editor, which ended up being me. It took a forever to research the images, and then change colors, shapes and perspective to avoid copyright infringement issues. It took nearly a year for me to finish the project, and then it sat for over two years. Apparently, one of the companies involved, Realplayer I think, went through a regime change and the project just sat there. Finally, most of the episodes were released on the web a few months ago. It was nice to see them after spending so much time working on them. Right after I finished it all I could see were the mistakes, but after a couple years break I could actually sit back and enjoy it.
H: Powerloafing was an online series, do you think the internet has had a positive or negative effect on the state of comedy?
MU: Mostly positive. While it's cluttered the landscape with a lot of hopelessly amateur stuff, it has also given many talented people a chance to get their work seen by the public unobstructed by networks or executives. Organizing a shoot was a drag before the internet, and it's improved nearly every aspect of the production process. Now you can send revised scripts, upload rough edits and get instant feedback without anyone even getting putting on their shoes. While I'm glad the crap I did when I was a teenager didn't make it on the web, I'm so glad we have it now. Therefore, I wholeheartedly vote to not abolish the internet.
H: Who are some of your comedic inspirations?
MU: Wow, that's hard to narrow down, but I'll give it a shot. Off the top of my head, and in no particular order: Mad Magazine, Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, Carol Burnett, SCTV, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Bob Newart, Jonathan Winters, Flip Wilson, Steve Martin, Peter Sellers, Redd Foxx, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Blake Edwards, George Carlin, Albert Brooks, S. J. Perelman, Stephen Leacock, Robert Benchley, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis Carroll, Bill Cosby, Charlie Chaplan, Buster Keaton, Danny Kaye, Keith Waterhouse, Warner Brothers Cartoons, Moliere, Steven Wright, Firesign Theater, Jerry Lewis, Lucille Ball, Mae West, The Coen Brothers, Frank Oz, Terry Gilliam, Joseph Heller, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Frank Tashlin, Larry David, Don Knotts, Tim Conway, Harold Ramis, Dr. Seuss... Whew! I've surely left out many people. These are folks who inspired me as a youngster, but I'm still being inspired every day.
H: Â What can you tell us about your upcoming pilot?
MU: I like the word "upcoming," because it implies that it will get made, which I certainly hope is the case. Â At this point it only exists on paper, but it has gotten me meetings and some notice already. It's called "Eddy Tripp," and it's a bit of a departure for me, in that the characters are realistic and the situations somewhat grounded, which gives license for absurd departures. I'm very proud of it, and I can't convey to you how much I want to get it made into a series. I have an actor attached as the lead, who has already been in some undeniably great comedies, notably: "Freaks and Geeks," and "Party Down," and he is amazing. We're going to be pitching it together over the next few months around town. Fingers crossed.
H: Â Do you prefer writing your own things, or writing as part of a staff for a pre-existing show?
MU: I like both. I like doing a job, working on a team, and not having to be in charge. You can focus on the funny stuff and raid the refrigerator without having to deal with the million production and personnel considerations coming at you when you're running a project. It's challenging to figure out a vision that is not your own. It expands your own capabilities and makes you aware of different perspectives on what is funny. Every job I've had, and every co-writer I've worked with has taught me something.
Conversely, it's great to be the architect of own vision. When your sole purpose is cracking yourself up without any mediation or compromise it's a free and wonderful feeling. That's why I've done so many projects with my own money, like Powerloafing. Powerloafing ended up being a great show that I did entirely on my own with friends. I eventually sold it and made my money back, and I take pride in saying that I spent my own money on a high-risk internet entertainment project and didn't lose my ass.
H: Do you have any upcoming shows you'd like to promote? We've been talking without ridiculousness for some time now... I like it.
MU: Yes, the show I eventually sell and get on the air, whatever that ends up being. Â I'll have to get back to you on that - soon, I hope.
Okay, so, how did I do? Don't worry, I can take it. I appreciate any feedback, both good and bad that you may have.
H: Well, I think the conceit of our interaction is not pulled off very well. It's tonally inconsistent, in addition to the logical flaw that I pointed out earlier. You also threw up and left a puddle of vomit without cleaning it up, and it's starting to smell. Further, I've noticed comma splices and run-on sentences, which should be embarrassing for a professional writer like yourself. The fact that I had to correct them for me essentially renders you an infant. Finally, you come off a bit long-winded and pretentious in places, if you don't mind my saying.
MU: Well, fuck you. If I wanted your opinion I would have asked for it.
H: Â I'm afraid you did ask for my opinion.
MU: Oh, right, point taken. Seriously though, speak for yourself.
H: But, since you are putting these words in my mouth I can't really do that, can I? These criticisms must reflect, in some way, your own insecurities about your writing, and if you're completely honest with yourself you'd have to agree with me, wouldn't you?
MU: You are blowing my mind.
