The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 640 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, the advice to write what you know has become an empty cliché, yet on this very podcast, we’re often advising writers to think about what’s personal and specific to their experience when crafting their stories. Along that axis, we recently had Celine Song on to talk about the many autobiographical elements of her film Past Lives, which recounts and reframes her experience as a child and as an adult. But it’s one thing to reflect on the past and another to deliberately place yourself in a perilous spot in hopes of getting a story out of it. Today we’ll talk to a writer who did just that and what came of it. We’ll also answer listener questions about talking with managers and talking to yourself. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, how do you set boundaries on material when you’re dating another comedian?
To help us through all that, let’s welcome our guest. Alex Edelman is a stand-up comedian, writer, and producer who has written for shows such as Teenage Bounty Hunters and The Great Indoors. His award-winning special, Just For Us, which has been touring all over the world since 2018, is out now on HBO.
Alex Edelman: Thanks so much for having me. It’s so cool.
John: Unlike many other guests who come on this show, you actually know what this podcast is.
Alex: Yes. When you join the WGA, that’s what happens. Howard Rodman puts a steak knife to your back. He’s like, “Do you listen to Scriptnotes?” I’m like, “Yes, yes, Mr. Rodman, I do, I do. I like it.”
John: People are so intimidated by Howard Rodman, because he has that presence, and so you had to pull out your phone and actually subscribe in your podcast app.
Alex: It’s the last step to getting health care is you have to actually subscribe to the podcast, to Scriptnotes. Look, I’ve always been interested in the craft. It’s such a silly, dumb thing to say. It’s like saying, “I like color.” But I’ve always been interested in the craft of writing. And the more granular, the better. Even the notion of what you were talking about, which is write what you know, I have a whole thing about the advice of write what you know, which I feel so strongly about. I love hearing writers talk about writing. I love conversations about craft. This is me speaking directly to the demographic of which I am most interested, which is also me, so I’m very excited to be here.
John: We both know Mike Birbiglia, but that’s actually not how we met. The true story is you were playing at the Taper here in Los Angeles, and friends had said, “Oh, you should go see it.” At the very last minute, 2:00 in the afternoon, I said, “Oh hey, let’s go see the show. There’s still tickets, a few tickets left.” My husband and I went down. Taped to my seat was a little envelope from you or your manager saying, “Hey, afterwards, come backstage.” I was so impressed that somebody was reading through the last-minute ticket sales and recognized my name. Well done.
Alex: Do you want to know what happened? Whenever I do New York or LA, I read the… I don’t have a manager, so it is me and also my crew. But I have an unfortunate tendency to miss friends and family who come, and then they get offended that I didn’t say hi. Now, I get a seat book about half an hour before the show. I don’t always read it, but if there’s family members coming or if someone I know is coming, but I can’t quite remember who it is, I’ll say to my stage manager, MC or Brian or Kathleen, the three folks I’ve worked with primarily, or Rachel – four folks.
But I think what happened was I had talked about the podcast or I listened to the podcast with one of my stage managers, and they went, “Hey, Alex, your favorite person’s here.” They were like, “John August is here.” I was like, “Oh, I wonder if it’s the same guy.” That was the impetus behind your note. But also, we let some people live their lives. They’ll be like, “Do you want to put a note on so-and-so’s seat?” I’m like, “That guy can just enjoy a quiet evening at the theater,” something like that.
John: You invited James Burrows back my same session. James Burrows, an icon, a legend.
Alex: Oh my god, I love Jim Burrows. I call him Jim because – no, I don’t know him well.
John: Because now you have a close personal connection after meeting him once.
Alex: Close friend. When I was writing on The Great Indoors, he was shooting on the lot Superior Donuts. I was at a garage sale. This will only be interesting to your listenership, and if it’s not, you can cut it out. But I was rummaging through a garage sale somewhere. And I found in this garage sale a Humanitas Prize certificate for an episode of Taxi called Blind Date, which is about Judd’s character in Taxi goes on a blind date, and she is overweight, and he treats her like a human being. That was so revolutionary at the time that it won a Humanitas Prize. I bought it for five bucks. It was literally five bucks. It was a garage sale. I brought it into work. I went down and I asked Bob Daily, who was running Superior Donuts and is a buddy of mine, I said, “Can I show this to Judd and Jim Burrows?” They both signed the Humanitas Prize certificate for me. I’m that much of a nerd.
But yeah, Jim Burrows is a legend. He shaped the face of sitcom comedy in the ’90s, ’80s, 2000s, everything. By the way, when I showed him the certificate, he’s like, “We actually shot that one with three cameras instead of four, and then we decided that three was better,” and walked me through the episode as if it happened last week instead of several decades ago.
John: I love when you meet these titans who have been in the industry forever and they’re still incredibly sharp. It’s none of that like, “Oh,” big stories about things, they can’t put stuff together. Clearly sharp as a pin and is thinking about tomorrow’s work.
Alex: Maybe this is a knock on me actually, but I’m very reverent of all of the older guys and gals and everyone in between. I hosted Norman Lear’s 100th birthday special for ABC. Getting to be in a room with Norman Lear, it’s really something. When Christopher Nolan accepted his Oscar, he said, “We’re 100 years into filmmaking. Think about how special it would be to be 100 years into music or painting.” Comedy is an even younger art form, essentially. Comedy is a very young art form. A lot of the people that built the face of it are still around or they died in my lifetime. I had the good fortune to be around a lot of these people. Mel Brooks is pretty sharp. I never was lucky enough to really have some time with Carl Reiner, but I was told he was very sharp. Norman was sharp as a pin all the way to the end, as far as I know. You’re just lucky to be able to share oxygen with these people.
John: We’ll look forward to another 90 years of your career, but let’s start back at the beginning, because before you did this show, you actually had a long ramp up. I’m curious where you start your story in terms of comedy. What were the first things you were doing in performing? You’ve done stand-up. You’ve written on traditional shows. You’ve done your solo shows. What’s the journey there?
Alex: Where do I consider my career starting? I guess in baseball, which is a really weird place. But I started at the Red Sox. I got a job when I was 13 years old. I wrote the Red Sox kids’ newsletter and just did general writing bits around the ballpark and got into the world that way and then fell in love with sports and then fell in love with comedy.
John: Back to the baseball. You were writing up what happened? Were you actually on the PA? What were you doing?
Alex: I wrote articles. I would stand in the press line and stuff like that or be in the press conferences in the back, scribbling stuff down. But I also worked in the office doing odd jobs and being a little amanuensis to this guy Larry Lucchino and this guy Charles Steinberg. Larry, who was a titan of the game himself, passed away actually last week. He was a really great guy, a really huge figure in the sport. They were amused by this kid who loved sports and loved history and loved writing and was always around.
They always found writing for me to do. I wrote a bunch of press releases. I’d write public address speeches. I wasn’t on the PA, but I was part of pre-game ceremony sometimes. This guy Charles Steinberg, who worked for Larry, had a flair for the creative. He would put together these elaborate pregame ceremonies to celebrate retirements or various other milestones. I was always part of dreaming up those ceremonies and executing them. It was very creative. It was a blast. To be an employee of the Red Sox between 2003 and 2007 when I left – they won two World Series, they ended this 86-year drought without a championship – it was really, really beautiful.
John: You’re doing this, and at what point are you moving from, “Okay, I’m writing stuff. It’s being printed places or being spoken aloud on the PA,” to working on stuff for yourself? What was the transition? Were you going to school for it? What happened next?
Alex: I was an Orthodox Jew, so I was going to yeshiva. I was in a low-key rabbinical school. Then I spent a year in Israel in a seminary there, thinking that maybe that was my thing. But it was stand-up comedy. I had gone to see this show called Comics Come Home that Denis Leary organizes every year, and still organizes it. They do it in a huge arena in Boston. I fell in love with comedy, and I started going to open mics at a pizzeria, at a music place.
John: How old are you when you’re going to open mics?
Alex: I’m 17 or so. It was dilettante-ish. I was writing around. I won a sports writing award here and there. I started fishing around. I got a summer job on the set of The Departed running drinks for the Teamsters. I was finding myself a little bit. But things really kicked into high gear in my last year of college. I spent my last semester of NYU, which was chock full of writing stuff – I had the best professors you could have. I had Zadie Smith. I had Nathan Englander. I had Jonathan Lethem. I had Darin Strauss, who was an English major, Megan O’Rourke, Susan Orlean.
John: Wow.
Alex: I had all-star lineup of professors. I’m extremely privileged in the education department. I am such a disappointment to so many of those people.
John: I want to talk about this. I want to go from open mics to NYU. When you’re at the open mics at the pizza places, what is your material? You’re 17 years old. You have a very interesting background as the Orthodox kid coming into these places. But were you talking about yourself or were you just imitating other comedy you were hearing?
Alex: It was terrible, wasn’t it? It was the worst, most horrible impressions of these Boston comedians. I’m sure you’ve heard this from other people on your podcast, but every time you get a great note… I love notes. I think they’re responsible for my work getting to a certain place. Whenever you get a great note, there’s a part in you that’s always known that it was true. There’s a little bit of you that, as soon as they start giving you the note, you’re like, “Yeah, of course. I knew that but was denying it,” or, “Yeah, of course, I knew that.” In the back of my mind, I was always like, “This isn’t really me.” But I was just trying anything I could to make people laugh. My comedy, there wasn’t much of me in it. But I was trying to get laughs. I had one good joke. I had one good joke that I limped along with.
John: Do you remember it?
Alex: Yeah.
John: Willing to share it?
Alex: The premise was I’d describe the scene from The Godfather where Sonny Corleone pulls up to the tollbooth. I would describe in graphic, long detail, “They’re spraying him full of bullets, and he gets out of the car, and then more bullets, more bullets, and he dies right there on the pavement.” After this long description, I go, “If that’s not the best commercial for E-ZPass I’ve ever seen.” Oh, wow, Drew likes it. Drew likes it, everybody. I was really terrible, but it was that one joke. At one point, I was at an open mic bombing, and a comic from the back of the room went, “Alex, tell your joke.”
John: Wow.
Alex: Which is so devastating and so true. I was just awful, but I was doing my best. Also, I think you need that time in the dark, that sort of incompetence where you’re too incompetent to know that you’re incompetent. It was the perfect time to start stand-up comedy, which is as a teenager.
John: Ira Glass has this speech where he talks about you have taste, but you don’t have talent, and you’re climbing both things at the same time. You probably had some taste, you knew what you liked, but you couldn’t do those things that you liked. You’re imitating. You’re trying to get there, and so you’re telling your one joke.
Alex: But you also don’t know what’s out there. Everything was within my very limited purview. I think I’ve always tried to see as much as I possibly can, because you never know what’s for you. People say write what you know. I guess we’re doing this.
John: We’re doing this. I think we’re into the meat of this now.
Alex: When people say write what you know, a good synthesis of that is what Norman always said, which is, “I’m just another version of you.” He would always say that to people, which is a handy thing to say if you’re doing a Latinx One Day At A Time.
John: Is this Norman Mailer, Mark Normand?
Alex: Norman Lear. Sorry, Norman Lear.
John: Norman Lear. Sorry, there’s too many Normans.
Alex: Sorry. Norman Lear would always say, “I am just another version of you.” He was really, really big on that humanist idea. The idea of write what you know to me always meant if you know humiliation, write humiliation. If you know fear or aspiration or a desire to fit in…
Everyone thinks that my solo show is about antisemitism, but I’ve always been insistent that it’s about the desire to assimilate and the cost of assimilation. No one will understand this more than you. What the story is versus what the show is about can be completely different things.
I didn’t really have exposure to good comedy for a while. I had exposure to some good comedy. Steven Wright would drop in sometimes, or I’d go see Brian Regan, or I once went to see George Carlin at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, although that memory is very fuzzy. I saw lots of comedy. The dominant culture in Boston was extremely regressive and extremely, looking back, kind of boring. There were only a few bright lights that stood out. I was off into it because of those comics.
John: What strikes me about stand-up comedy, unlike traditional writing, is that you have the immediate feedback of are people laughing or not. But you can also just become probably seduced by that laughter and just go back to your one joke, or you can get into these grooves and these ruts, that you’re just doing this one thing that is going to be successful for this thing, for this crowd, but it’s not actually pushing you forward, it’s not pushing your storytelling forward, it’s not getting you anyplace new. Obviously, going to NYU broke you out of some of that, and you’re being challenged by good professors. But when did you have a vision for what you actually wanted to do with your writing and with your comedy?
Alex: Such a perfect question, because the preamble is the thing that I always struggled to explain to people. Sometimes I’d come off stage at the Comedy Cellar, which is where I work on new material, and people will say, “Good set.” And I want to say, “No, it’s not a good set. I went up there wanting to try four or five new things, and I got a little scared after the second new thing didn’t work, so I shut it down and went back to the chestnuts that I know worked.”
If I never wanted to fail on stage again, I could do that. I have enough material. I have probably five hours of material that I know works bagged. I could if I chose to never push myself, never go on stage. Sometimes you go on stage and you come off and people are like, “Tough one.” I’m like, “I wanted to try two new things. I tried eight new things. Four of them worked. One of them did really well, and that’s money in my pocket.” It’s hard to explain that to people.
I really found it when I was in London. I went on stage with material. I don’t remember it, but it couldn’t have been very good. This was 2012. I was studying abroad. It was my last year. I was invited to do this show by this woman, Josie Long, who’s a great, great, great British comedian who now lives in Glasgow but also directs movies and writes short story collections. Truly probably one of my biggest role models. Josie had me on her show, which was called Lost Treasures of the Black Heart. It was at the Black Heart in Camden. You talked about forgotten heroes. It was a themed night. No one had told me it was a themed night, or I had forgotten. I showed up and I just did my normal material. It got laughs.
Josie pulled me aside afterwards in a very gentle way, was like, “Hey, just so you know, I think you’re maybe capable of more than that, than the clubby New York act that you delivered. Maybe you want to go and write something and just come back and try it in front of the friendliest audience you’ll ever be in front of.” I went away and I wrote something, and I came back and did it. I don’t know that it was great, but it certainly was the first time I felt a little more like me on stage.
My career really started in the UK. It was because I saw comedians who were a little bit more of an aspectus for me. I think that you can divide most, not writing, but most written products, film, TV, stand-up, even music, to aesthetic and content. It was the first time I had ever seen an aesthetic that worked for me, which was a long-form, thoughtful thing that the British-type solo shows that you see at the Edinburgh Festival and at the Soho Theater in London, which is a sort of theater that puts on these hour-long or 90-minute solo shows. Of course, with the best things, the aesthetic and the content are married to each other or they inform each other. As soon as I started seeing those aesthetic offerings, those shows, it completely changed who I was as a comedian. It really opened me up.
John: I’m picturing our audience here. We have a lot of people who are aspiring writers who are looking to do stuff down the road. At this point, you’re in London. You’re a senior at NYU. You’re studying abroad. Did you identify primarily as a student studying abroad or a comedian who’s at the start of your career? They’re kind of two different people.
Alex: I don’t think I cared as much about writing as I should’ve, or I don’t think I cared as much about collegiate writing as I should’ve. John Baldessari, who’s a conceptual artist, says that every young artist needs to know that talent is cheap, you have to be possessed what you can’t will, and you have to be in the right place at the right time. I’d always grappled with the first two, but I had this sense in London that I was in the right place at the right time. I hate the word “scene” but there was a scene going on. It was 2012, and these solo shows were having a moment.
I think a month into being there, I was at a bar. Not to be crude on your podcast, but somebody at the bar grabbed my ass really hard. I turned to the woman standing next to me, like, “Hey, will you mind helping me out? This guy’s got a pretty firm grip on my ass.” Not to be like, “And that was,” but that was Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Phoebe and I became really close friends. Phoebe was just working at Fleabag. I went to 12 different previews of Fleabag.
Just being amongst all of these great, genius people who were making the most fulsome versions of stand-up comedy to me was really intoxicating. I was a student of that when I got there. I sat and watched them do it for years before I tried it myself. That was 2012. I didn’t put my first solo show up until summer of 2014. I really took my time, because I really could see that this was the best version of what you could do. What I was doing by comparison was like a printer running out of ink.
I guess if you had to force an answer to the question, I guess I was subconsciously leaning towards it being a career, the comedy thing, instead of being a college student. But if you had asked me then, I don’t think I would’ve given you that answer. It always felt like a pipe dream to me. It still feels like a pipe dream to me. It really does. Being a staffed TV writer, being a professional stand-up, they all feel like impossible dreams still.
John: I do want to get to TV staffing in a sec, but first I want to talk about this format that you’re seeing, so Fleabag and these other solo shows. The difference between a solo show and a stand-up special or one comedian as a headliner, what is the distinction there? Is it because it’s all revolving around one central narrative? How do you distinguish between the two? You see the two things, and there’s a lot of overlap, but they do feel distinct now.
Alex: I always offer this. I try not to say this too much in public. I feel like I’m weirdly gatekeeping this. But if you’re listening to this podcast, then you’re probably my people. I always give this formula whenever I’m asked to teach anything solo show-related, that every solo show has four things, which is who you are, who they are, what happened, what’s changed. I think that’s bazillion-dollar advice.
By the way, I think I saw a tweet from someone. Who’s the guy who writes the Walking Dead? I remember reading a tweet of his years ago. He was like, “Something should happen in your scripts.” He’s like, “I’m reading lots of scripts where not enough happens.” He’s like, “There should be a story, like guy walks into a bar. Someone should do something, and something should happen.” I remember thinking, “That’s really interesting.” I don’t think my four things are informed by that, but I think in a really great solo show, something happens and something changes. One of those things can be way bigger than the others. By the way, those four things can be deeply submerged in your narrative. They don’t need to be the exoskeleton.
But if you think of your show as an essay, a college essay, with your setup and then three things and then a thesis, the setup should be where you start, three things should be something that happens, and your thesis should be summing it all up, seeing what’s changed by the end. The really great solo shows that I’ve admired have had that. Birbiglia’s shows all have that. He doesn’t want a baby in the new one, and then his wife’s like, “Maybe we should get a baby,” and then they have baby. Then that’s what’s changed.
John: Then he’s a dad at the end. I want to get back to your four points though. I get the first one, who you are, because you’re introducing yourself to the audience and who the character is that you’re presenting there. That’s very classic. But what do you mean by who they are? Is it framing the audience?
Alex: They can be different. They can be the world at large. They can be the group of people you want to be a part of. They can be your marriage. They can be the desire that you feel. Sometimes I explain the four things with Walking in Memphis. You know the song by Marc Cohn?
John: Um-hmm.
Alex: It starts with, “Put on my blue suede shoes, boarded a plane, touched down in the land of the Delta Blues in the middle of the pouring rain.” This guy’s off on this journey. Something’s happening. He’s like walking into a bar. Then he has all of these experiences. They are the people of Memphis. What’s happening is he’s immersing himself and trying very hard to become in and amongst this. He goes to Graceland, and he walks down the street, and he goes to Al Green’s church, which is something he really did. Marc Cohn really did that. He’s painting a picture.
Then the last thing he does, which wouldn’t work if it was the first thing, he sings at that café with the lady. It ends with a pretty good joke. She’s like, “Tell me are you a Christian child.” And he says, “Ma’am, I am tonight,” which is really a pretty solid joke for a Jew. Then the last line is, “Put on my blue suede shoes, boarded the plane, touched down in the land of the Delta Blues in the middle of the pouring rain.” That thing is completely transformed by its contact with the they.
The genius of the song is, who he is is Marc Cohn, the they is the people of Memphis, what’s happened is he’s changed by that, and possibly, because of that last verse, they’re changed by that a little bit. This guy walks into this bar, and the woman is like, “Do you want to sing a song?” He sings a song, which in real life was Amazing Grace, the only song he knew that she also knew. Everyone’s changed a little by it. What a beautiful thing that’s happened. That makes it unique.
The you is the person narrating, or your main character. The they is whatever world they’ve gone into. Bonus points if the world that they’ve gone into is one that they’ve used a lot of agency to head towards, because that’ll give you a much better what happened. Then the what’s changed is… Sorry to nerd out on it.
John: It absolutely makes sense. What I’m hearing is obviously we have the classic things setting up who you are. The character goes on a journey. They are transformed throughout the course of the journey. It’s a very much hero’s journey thing.
One thing I think is different about watching your shows and Birbiglia shows and really all the solo shows I’ve seen is that they are dependent on framing who the audience is who’s watching this performer, and there’s a conversation there, but it’s not the classic stand-up conversation, where we’re just waiting for the laughs or we are doing crowd work. It’s a very specific kind of conspiratorial, like, “You’re gonna come with me on this journey.” You’re inviting them to step into this place, which is different than what we would do in a normal stage show or in a screenplay. Obviously, you’re trying to get the audience involved and invested, but they’re also right there. You’re having to engage with them in ways that are very specific and different. I’ve done a Broadway show. Yes, the audience is important. You want them to laugh. You want them to cry and feel things. But they’re not part of the show the way that I think these solo shows need to pull people on stage with you.
Alex: What do you mean in terms of defining the audience? Having to speak directly to the audience as a form of direct address and direct where they are?
John: I’m thinking to your show specifically. We’re in the Taper, and you’re putting up your expectations of who the people are who have bought this ticket. I think you are calling out what this crowd is in Los Angeles, who these people are, and what you’re expecting they’re expecting out of you, is a thing that I noticed in these shows.
Alex: I’m just telling a story. In some ways it’s the rawest form, the most minimalist form of telling a story. The delicacy of that collective experience, the fact that at any point someone could stand up and ruin it makes it really special. That recursiveness is really fun for me.
But also, I wrote something – I can’t remember, one of the umpteen things that I’ve been writing or talking about in order to promote the special. I said that that sort of direct and immediate feedback loop is very rare. It’s like if DiCaprio got to look into the camera and be like, “Hey, this is the part where we hit the iceberg, and people get really sad here.” There’s a really interesting thing where you get to comment immediately on what’s happening.
But also, my favorite thing about the show or the form itself may be people not being sure entirely of the context. Should I be allowed the leeway that people aren’t yelling? My favorite moments are the moments that are very silent, very confusing, or where I tell the audience that I’m only telling you stuff that I think you’ll enjoy, and so the audience gets to wonder what they’re not getting.
I think solo shows can offer audience as a kind of mystique that a lot of other art forms can’t. I think the questions around the context and around whether or not you’re bringing the audience with you and how much is you and how much is them I think are probably one of the most special things about it. But I don’t know that stand-up comedy doesn’t have that too.
I totally understand when people draw a distinction between my show and stand-up comedy, but the truth is my last preview of the show before I brought it to New York City was at Comedy on State in Madison, Wisconsin. I did a comedy club where people bought chicken fingers and had a two-drink minimum and got a check.
I’ve always been really fascinated by people that can blur the line a little bit between genres. I’ve always thought my show was both heavily rooted in stand-up comedy and also absolutely theater. There’s a comic who I think is criminally underappreciated in Christopher Titus who used to do this. Colin Quinn does it. Mike Birbiglia does it. I’ve always liked stand-up and theater, and I’ve always thought a more expansive definition of both services the art forms better.
John: I want to talk a little bit more specifically about your show, your special. What is the short version? How do you describe it to somebody who’s going in, that doesn’t spoil crucial things?
Alex: The short version is about a guy, a Jew, me, who goes to a meeting of White Nationalists in Queens, and he sits there for a little while, and eventually, one of them’s like, “Sorry, but this guy’s a Jew,” and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m a Jew.” That’s roughly what the show is about. This real-life experience was the basis for this show. Of course, along the way, there are tangents into autobiographical stuff that I think is related to the narrative or conversant with the major narrative that has an underlying theme and is full of laughs, because I’m an entertainer first, so the show is like joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. But yeah, is this one narrative with a bunch of tangents, but never tangents on a tangent.
John: We talked at the start about writing what you know, but this is a case where you are deliberately putting yourself in a place, a position that is somewhat perilous with the intention of there’s gonna be material here, there’s gonna be a story to tell. Correct, or is that not fair?
Alex: If I’m being honest, I thought it was slightly too specific to ever become content. I just thought it was a fun story that I would tell my friends. Then I told enough friends that I respect who were like, “You’re doing this as stand-up, right?” I told my friend Danny Jolles, who’s a great writer and comedian. I told Morgan Evans, another great writer and filmmaker, and my friend Chloe. I told a bunch of people, and then eventually Adam Brace, who was my director and a playwright himself. Adam was like, “This is your show.” Adam was the one who stewarded it along.
John: What were they seeing in the stories that you weren’t seeing? What were they pointing out like, “There’s a journey here. There’s material here.”
Alex: I don’t know. Danny and another comic named Nick – Nick said something that made me think maybe it was a show, because I told him a thing, and then he responded with a punchline. I told him a detail from the actual moment, and he responded with a punchline to it. I was like, “That’s really good.” I was like, “That’s a really good joke.” Then I thought, “Oh, I want that punchline.”
I think every joke I ever tell has one reason for it existing, and it’s one moment in the thing. It’s either a funny face that you pull or a funny word that you say or a particularly interesting thought that you can somehow boil down to one line. There’s always a reason. I think Nick pointing that out – Nick Callas, really talented comic – he gave it really good heft. But I think Adam saw a thing that could unfold. Birbiglia, by the way, saw it more.
Birbiglia is the producer of the show in New York. When I told Birbiglia about the solo show, it was already a solo show. But Birbiglia went and saw it and was like, “You can pull out more. This can accordion out to something that’s more interesting, more profound.” I think the smarter people saw folds in that story that might be good, but it was Mike and Adam who saw different aspects to it. Adam saw something that maybe was tangentially geopolitical. Mike saw something that could speak a little to me as a person.
And then little notes from folks along the way. Billy Crystal is the one who suggested we move from a handheld mic to a headset mic. He said there’s theatrical potential in the story. I had lots and lots and lots of help from people who saw things in the story and provoked me, who offered provocations.
John: But because we’re a very process podcast, I want to talk about the process of going from, okay, you’re telling us an incident that you’re talking about with your friends, to, “This is a thing that I’m putting up the first temporary version of the show.” What is the writing process of going from that? At what point did you figure out structure and things? How early did you start showing that to people?
Alex: I had done maybe a joke or two about it in a stand-up set. But it was literally two, three minutes. It got some laughs. Maybe I told it on a storytelling night or something. But very special experience with Adam Brace.
Adam and I met my last semester at NYU. He was a British person. He worked on Fleabag, which his partner at the time, Vicky Jones, co-wrote with Phoebe. He was one of the voices and also was there at all of these early previews and I’m sure gave notes. I don’t know how big or little his contribution was. But he worked on countless great things. We worked on three solo shows together. He was one of my closest friends, if not the closest friend, for 11 years. He passed away right before we starred on Broadway. It’s a shame for him not to see this show finish its run. To say it’s a bummer is a bit of an understatement.
But Adam and I would drink – I don’t drink much, but I do with Adam – at this one table in Soho, at this place called the Soho Hotel. Adam had this notebook. When I was trying to get work together for new material gigs, I would sit down with Adam, and I’d throw everything at him, because I lived in the United States. Adam lived in England. Sometimes it’d be months before we saw each other.
I’d just come out of a room and was trying to get staffed. I wasn’t getting staffed. I had some meetings. It was very multi-cammy. I sat down with Adam and I just threw all this stuff at him. So much stuff. When I started telling him this story, his provocations were great. He was like, “What happened there?” I was like, “This and that.” He was like, “What could happen here? Maybe this speaks to an element of your personality. Maybe that could tie in with this joke. What if you massage this for this joke?” That story came together as a narrative pretty quickly, and then it went on stage probably two nights later. But it was amongst like 20 other things.
John: But when you say it came together and you’re putting it on stage, what are you writing down, and how are you writing it down? Is this just a Word document?
Alex: I’m not even writing. I think I had bullet points. Maybe there’s a sheet of paper somewhere with bullet points. Some people write with Word documents. I do write with Word documents sometimes. Sometimes I write on my phone. Sometimes I write in notebooks. Sometimes I write in various notes. This process for me is always like, if it’s good enough, you remember, and if you’ve got an accountability partner, which I had in Adam, he’ll remember. Adam had a notebook.
This is horrifying to say. Once, we started a run somewhere, and we figured out that the show was running three minutes light. I was like, “Why is it running three minutes light? Is my tempo different?” I looked at him. I was like, “Oh my god, I forgot that joke.” He’s like, “What? Oh my god, the vaccine joke’s not in there.” I was like, “Yeah, I forgot to tell the vaccine joke.” He was like, “The last eight nights, you’ve just missed. You’ve just missed.” By the way, the show’s already been running. The show had run in New York for like a year and a half at that point. I was like, “Don’t tell anybody.” He’s like, “No, no, no, I’m not gonna.” But he was like, “You forgot a chunk of your show.” It wasn’t even the vaccine joke. I think maybe it was the joke about Prince Harry that’s in the special. But I had completely forgotten a thing.
When the show started off Broadway, the PR people were like, “Can we get a transcript for press?” I was like, “There’s no transcript.” They were like, “What do you mean there’s no transcript?” I was like, “I just tell the story with the offshoots.” They were like, “What do you mean you tell the story?” At some point, a review appeared, and Adam sent me a picture of it with something circled. I called someone who worked with me, and I was like, “Do you guys generate the transcript?” They were like, “Yes.” I was like, “Is it out of an audio recording from this date?” They were like, “How did you know?” I was like, “Because I said something one time in that one show, and it showed up in this review.” It’s a thing that has been completely excised from the show. The word choice I didn’t care for.
John: That’s wild.
Alex: I’d never wrote anything down, which isn’t to say there weren’t reams and reams of paper that were important for this, writing down little bits of things or trying to cut extra words out. Sometimes I’ll write down a sentence and try to examine if I can cut one or two words to trim the facts. If you do that cumulatively, you can wind up saving double-digit minutes over the course of 90. That’s super granular.
But I’m very anti writing stuff down, because as soon as you do, it starts to calcify in the brain, and I think it removes your potential for growth, unless you sit down consciously and write again. You need the synthesis of preparing off stage and writing on stage. That time that your brain is alive in the show is really important and valuable. Look. John, you know, and everyone who writes who’s listening knows that there are moments where you’re in the zone and you’re in the flow. When you’re on stage, you are by necessity in the flow. You are stress tested into that tightrope energy. Maybe I could write it down, and I just am operating from a very old data set.
John: As we’re recording this, is there a written script version of Just For Us?
Alex: Yes, but I’d probably take a look at it, because I don’t know that it’s accurate. Shows should be conversing with the moment that they’re in and also an escape from it. We recorded the special in August. Then October 7th happened. Not to get into anything too prickly, but October 7th happened. My show is about assimilation and whiteness and Judaism. I wrote a line to open every show that we did after October 7th, and then Israel as a weighty subject got called back towards the end of the show. It’s not right that it goes in the recorded version of the show, because hopefully there will be at some point a resolution to this horrific conflict, the one that is occurring right now in Gaza, but also the larger one. You’d like your special to be an evergreen one, so you don’t want to date it by putting in something temporal. But at the same time, a live experience is a very different one. You have to give people a live experience.
When we were editing the special, Alex Timbers, the director, and I, we cut out some of the things that happened in the room that night that were just there for the Broadway audience, because doing something for the audience at home is a completely different product.
There is a written version somewhere. In fact, I know there is, because it’s gonna be released as a play at some point. I just heard that someone’s gonna license it to do it, which I’m very interested in seeing. I’m really fascinated in seeing it. Any written version would be obsolete to me the next time I perform it. It’s a really weird, sedulous double bind, I guess.
John: Let’s wrap up by talking about the actual writing you’ve had to do for other folks and where there is actually a script that things have to be shot. In the midst of doing the solo shows along the way, you’ve staffed as a TV writer. Why did you want to do that? What was cool about it? What was challenging about it? Talk to us about you as a TV writer.
Alex: I have learned so much from my showrunners. I have had the best, best, best education, not just at NYU, but I worked on The Great Indoors, which did one season on CBS, so it’s not like it lit the world on fire, but my showrunner, Chris Harris, and my creator, Mike Gibbons. I worked with these great writers, like Liz Feldman, who did Dead to Me, and Tad Quill and Craig Doyle. Everyone on that writing staff has had a very fruitful career as a television writer. I learned so much about story and so much about structure in a way that helped me with my work.
There’s no way I could’ve written my solo show without the sort of guidance that structuring television could’ve provided me. I felt this really keenly during the strike, that if you nourish a TV writer, you’re nourishing a novelist and you’re nourishing a playwright and you’re nourishing a songwriter and you’re nourishing a performer. All of these talents cross over, and all these crafts cross over. I got a pretty good sense of that as soon as I started writing for television, even when it was non-union award show stuff. I was like, “Oh my god, I’m picking up stuff. I’m learning a lot.” I think that learning really helped. And then all the more so getting to work with Jenji Kohan on Teenage Bounty Hunters. We adapted something for Netflix that didn’t go, but we loved and are still trying to do. I’ve worked with the greatest people. I work with truly the most incredible folks.
There’s even a bit in the show, which is something that I do in life now, that I took from Chris Harris, the showrunner, who I think is running Frazier at the moment, actually. Chris would do this thing when another writer said something to him that I know Chris didn’t want to engage with or couldn’t engage with, he would just go, “Can you believe it?” In my show, I’m in this meeting, which happened after I had gotten out of the writers’ room, and someone says something to me, and I don’t know how to answer. I just went, “Can you believe it?” which is something I learned from Chris Harris. Chris is thanked, and the special thanks is, “Chris Harris for a very useful four-word phrase in the show.”
Look, man, you get paid a pretty good amount of money – not enough money, but a pretty good amount of money – to sit in a room with folks who have been professionally curated for how smart and funny they are, you’re gonna pick something up. I loved being in a room. I can’t wait for the chance to do it again. I’ve gotten to organize my own, occasionally, for little things that I’ve written for the BBC, or I was telling you about before this, I do this thing called Saturday Night Seder, which was a thing I put together with Benj Pasek, who’s a songwriter.
John: Yeah, composer, songwriter.
Alex: He did Dear Evan Hansen and La La Land and Greatest Showman in the beginning of the pandemic.
John: They did the song in my movie Aladdin.
Alex: That’s right, that’s right. I remember. Those guys are such, such geniuses. Benj and I were complaining to each other over the phone that we weren’t gonna be able to do anything for Passover, because everyone was locked inside of their homes. It was beginning of quarantine, 2020. Benj was like, “We should do an online version.” I was like, “Let’s put a writers’ room together.” We put together this writers’ room with Sas Goldberg and Michael Mitnick and Josh Harmon and a whole bunch of TV folks. Everyone was just sitting at home. Just even over Zoom, being in that room was so nourishing and fun. We would scream and argue and joke. We wrote all these sketches for Bette Midler and Idina Menzel and Josh Groban, and we raised $3 and a half million for COVID relief. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever gotten to be a part of. It didn’t enrich anyone except for those lucky goddamn nurses who got all that PPE.
John: Totally.
Alex: It didn’t enrich anyone. Those nurses have had it too good for too long. There’s nothing like the collective of a writers’ room, really, under any auspices. It’s just the best thing in the world.
John: I don’t miss almost anything about the pandemic, but I do miss the permission it gave you to do things that were wild and nuts. We had live shows on Zoom. We had Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Ryan Reynolds on for an episode. Those were reaches that we felt possible, because I was on a Zoom with Phoebe and Tina Fey earlier in the pandemic. Everything was possible in a way, and that was exciting.
Alex: I loved it.
John: Before we wrap up the wonder of writers’ rooms, what were your samples that got you The Great Indoors? What were they reading that said, “Oh, that’s who we should get.”
Alex: Oh my gosh. No one’s ever asked me, but I love this. I wrote a sample that I still love so much. It’s a little frustrating to me, because sometimes I will meet people in the wild, and they’re like, “Oh my god, I’ve read Celestials,” which is the name of the sample. They’re like, “What a great sample.” I was always like, “No, I wrote it as a TV show. It’s supposed to get made.”
It’s set in Heaven, but not like dead people Heaven, like Earth doesn’t exist yet Heaven. It’s cubicle farmy and a workspace. Because there’s no established rules to what it is, it’s a little bit surreal. This guy who’s essentially an intern comes up with a pitch for Planet Earth, and he shows it to a bunch of people in the architecture department. They’re all these Scandinavian figures. They’re like, “This is pretty stupid,” except for one guy who’s like, “It’s pretty interesting.” He’s discouraged, and he throws it away. But one of the other interns, who’s really ambitious and doesn’t like him, puts it in God’s suggestion box. God is a 12-year-old girl with an iPhone, because that was the scariest thing I could think of. God gets fixated on one detail, which turns out to be kittens. She’s like, “I love this. Just go do it. It won’t cost too much. Just go do it.” She demotes their boss to work with them and gives them the Scandinavian architect who thought it was a good idea.
It’s basically Genesis. Also, it was about millennial workplace dynamics, because everybody that I knew was in this sort of place in their live where they were just getting out of college or they were three, four years out of college, and they wanted all this responsibility, but they didn’t really know what to do once they got it, and they had no hope of getting it.
I wrote this thing. Thankfully, Chris Harris was like… The Great Indoors is about millennial workplace dynamics. He read it. I came in for the meeting. He went, “You really know this world.” But again, it’s that thing, write what you know. It’s very heightened, but it’s grounded in that, like, I know what it’s like to want more responsibility in a workplace and clearly not be ready for it. That was my sample. Again, no one’s asked me about that in five, six years. But I love it. I’m sure if I read it, I would cringe a little bit. Every so often, someone’s like, “I love Celestials.” I was like, “Oh my god! I can’t believe… ” That was my sample that got me staffed on The Great Indoors. God, they were so patient with me. It’s where I heard Who Jackie for the first time and “can the floor be wet” and all these other writer inside jokes. I love it and miss it so much. That probably was one of the best times of my life. It was fantastic.
John: Nice. We have two listener questions here that are related to this. Drew, can you help us out?
Drew Marquardt: Gordon in LA writes, “My writing partner and I submitted our comedy pilot to our new manager. Pilot’s been through many drafts and received very positive reviews from peers and fellow writers. We were anticipating more positive feedback from our new manager, who we both recently paired with. The feedback call with the manager went about as bad as possible. He totally misunderstood the comedic tone, going so far as to ask whether the pilot was meant to be a drama. Bottom line, he didn’t find it funny. The manager wants us to rewrite the pilot into a more digestible broad comedy, which are more sellable in the current TV market. He has no interest in sending this draft around town. We’d be happy to write a different script as a broad comedy, but the chief question is, if your manager doesn’t find your writing funny, is it time to find a new manager?”
John: Oy.
Alex: It’s a really tough question, isn’t it?
John: Yeah. My first agent, I shared the script for Go with, and he didn’t get it. I moved to a different agency that got it. That’s certainly possible. Alex, I wonder whether Gordon’s script is good or it’s not good. We can’t read it ourselves.
Alex: I’m trying to find the gentlest way to say this. This is from a stand-up comedian’s brain. Comedy should ideally communicate very clearly to as many people as possible. The challenge of threading the needle and making something that reflects who you are and your authentic voice comedically while also resonating with the audience that you’re intending it for, it’s the biggest craft challenge. It feels like for whatever reason, your manager has not been able to get there.
You can put it on your script, or you can put it on the manager, but your WiFi’s not working. Something is broken, and so you should try to figure out what that is. But if you sent in the pages and they’re not getting it from the page, and that’s a pretty good sample of what that is, and if it’s just bad luck of the draw, and out of 100 people, your manager is the one person that that’s not for, you need to figure out why that reason is. Gordon, I’m not saying that it’s your case, but usually the case is a craft failing. I wouldn’t take it as a super four-alarm fire that your manager, quote, “doesn’t get you,” but I’d take a look at the pages and I’d take a look at the manager and see if it’s all, I don’t know, copacetic.
John: I don’t think you should rewrite this thing to make it funnier, because that’s not gonna be satisfying to anybody. If he doesn’t want to send this out, it’s because he doesn’t think it’s gonna help. You have to trust him that he has some sense of whether he could send it to people that would actually respond to it. If you’re gonna write something new that’s a more broadly funny thing, if there’s something you can do that is more clearly broadly funny that actually does work in your voice, I would go for that, but you may also need to look for a different place.
Alex: Also, the one question I’d also ask is if you want to be broadly funny. Not everybody wants that. Everyone’s comedy tone is different.
John: Drew, next question.
Drew: Tom in Warwickshire writes, “I lost my voice this weekend, and whilst trying to remain silent to help myself recover, I became very aware of how often I talk to myself, as in literally talking aloud, not just an inner monologue, albeit in a hush tone. While I know a lot of people talk to themselves, it made me wonder if I’m in part influenced to do this because I’ve seen characters in movies do it. We’ll often see characters vocalize what the audience is thinking, for example, someone following another person whilst trying to remain unseen and saying, ‘Where are you going?’ I’m interested in what you think about this technique and when it’s used to best effect.”
John: Tom we know is British because he says “whilst.” “Whilst” is just such a specific shibboleth word. Alex, do you talk to yourself a lot?
Alex: In the shower, like, “Oh, water is everywhere.” No, I’m just kidding. I think I talk to myself a lot. I more often sing to myself out loud, because I badly want to sing but don’t want anyone else to hear it. When I’m alone is the perfect time to do Baby Shark.
If a character monologues to themselves, I’m like, “What are you doing?” But also, it may be a conceit of film that I’m just comfortable with. But maybe subconsciously I’m like, it’s a little bit cheesy, because when you hang on a lantern on it, I’m like, oh yeah, that is annoying when someone’s like, “Where is he going?”
John: When it’s convenient, it doesn’t feel earned. People do talk to themselves in real life. You do experience it. I’m sure there’s some psychological study where they actually documented what percentage of people do speak out loud to themselves, their inner monologue is expressed outward. Sometimes it can be a compulsion. There was some producer of Matt Damon or Ben Affleck’s who was notorious for, if they were riding down a road, he had to read aloud all the signs he saw. That’s a thing that happens too. I wouldn’t worry about it for Tom. It’s nice that you’re recognizing that that’s a thing you do. But I will say recognize when you do it, when you don’t do it, and if you’re gonna have characters do it, make sure it feels authentic and real.
Alex: A thing that I do that I’m embarrassed to admit, but I will, I will have a side of an argument that I will never actually have in real life.
John: Oh, 100 percent. You gotta rehearse it.
Alex: It’s the first cousin of l’esprit de l’escalier, the spirit of the staircase, the thing that you figure out what you should’ve said when you’re at the top of the stairs in the party instead of the bottom of the stairs getting into the Uber, so the, “You know what? I’ve worked hard for this, and you don’t know.” You’re talking to someone who may or may not even be aware of the fact that you exist, but you’re having a big argument. The thing that I would question in shows is whether or not that advances character or story. I don’t know sometimes.
John: To some degree, it’s doing the function of a song in a musical, that it’s exposing the person’s inner life and what’s actually happening behind their eyes. I don’t see people rehearsing that one half of an argument on film that much, but lord knows I do it constantly. I’ve had so many arguments with folks that have no idea that I was ever actually angry. It’s a thing I’ll talk about in therapy.
It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book by Jordan Mechner. He and I did Prince of Persia together and other shows. He created the video game Prince of Persia, but he’s now actually mostly a writer and an artist. He created this graphic novel that he drew himself as well. The story tells three intersecting timelines of different generations of his family. It’s 1914 with his grandfather in the Austria-Hungarian Empire during World World I, 1938 with his father who was fleeing the Nazis into France and trying to get his family all back together, and then 2015 when Jordan moves to France, the same time that I was there living in Paris, as his marriage is falling apart and he’s trying to get his family to move to this new place. Really brilliantly done. I’m reading it now in English. It was out in French last year. I tried reading it in French, and it was just over my head. But it’s really great. Jordan Mechner, really wonderful storyteller and actually a really good artist now too. We can be very jealous of everything Jordan Mechner does. It’s called Replay-
Alex: What?
John: … by Jordan Mechner. It’s in bookstores everywhere now.
Alex: Seriously? Are you serious? It’s called Replay?
John: Replay.
Alex: I swear to god this is not planned. The thing that I want to suggest is called Replay. It’s a book that I reread recently. It’s so cool. It’s by a guy named Ken Grimwood. It’s a science fiction novel or a speculative fiction novel. It’s about a guy who dies on the fourth page of the book and then wakes up in his dorm room at 18.
John: Oh, love it.
Alex: Then it’s this time loop thing. I don’t think I’m giving too much away to say that he gets to the same age in his second incarnation and then he dies again and he wakes up again. Now he’s stuck in this loop. It asks these more interesting questions about what it means to live your life when you have a chance to do it again and again and again. The book is very entertaining and is very cool and is very fun. I feel a little weird suggesting – I know that people when they come on and they suggest a cool thing, they usually suggest a thing that is contemporary, but I really like the book. I think it’s brimming with ideas. Occasionally, I have brought it up with someone else, and they also like it. It’s one of those books that has a secret fan club. I think it’s really cool. When I reread it, I was kind of riveted. I can’t believe that.
John: They’re both books called Replay.
Alex: I’m just blown away.
John: They get to the replay mechanics in different ways. One is a time loopy kind of thing. One is the generational cycles that you go through in terms of moving and trying to reestablish your family, coupled with video games are meant to be replayed. That’s wild.
Alex: Can I just say for the listenership that is listening, John’s face showed zero surprise, zero, when I said Replay. It was so cool. I was almost really disconcerted by it. I was like, “Did I reach out to tell them that this is my… ” I definitely didn’t. But you were one cool customer when I was like – because that was me, when I’m like, “Huh? What?”
John: What? That’s impossible.
Alex: Replay by Ken Grimwood. Wow, I am gob-smacked by that coincidence. Wow. I’m really, really blown away by that. I have to read Jordan’s book now.
John: This is where Craig would remind us that we’re in a simulation and sometimes there are just blips in the simulation and this is just one of those little things.
Alex: By the way, the Prince of Persia video game is very good.
John: It’s so good. It’s so good. It was a classic. He’s great. The Prince of Persia movie is not so good. But the script Jordan wrote for it originally, before it got changed, was actually terrific. You should read his book and see what a good writer he really is.
Alex: One of my favorite things is to read scripts for movies that seem a little high-concept and don’t quite work. Sometimes you read the script and you’re like, “Oh my god.” Liz Meriwether’s script for a romantic comedy – I think it was with Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman – it was called Friends With Benefits, but the script originally is called Fuckbuddies. The movie still has great moments, but the script is hysterical. The script is laugh out loud. Every moment on the page is so good. Reading scripts for movies that don’t always come together is such a beautiful-
John: A delightful thing. That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ali Clifton. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on dating funny people. Alex Edelman, it is an absolute pleasure to talk with you about your show and all things.
Alex: This is so much fun. This is such a blast for me. I love this podcast, so to be on it is… Sometimes I’ve had chats with other people who listen to this podcast, so I really look forward to hearing from the folks that I know who do. This is so cool.
John: The people who text you to let you know that you’re on Scriptnotes this week.
Alex: I genuinely will get text messages from a bunch of writer friends or people who are aspiring writers, and I love them all. These craft conversations are my absolute favorite thing. I hope I didn’t get too granular for the folks listening. If I did, I apologize.
John: Not even possible.
[Bonus Segment]
John: You are writing about stuff that is happening in your real life. You are performing. You’re on stage. You’re talking about things. You are also sometimes dating people who are in that same space of comedy. Are there issues that come up with like, “Okay, don’t talk about this. Do talk about this,” “I want to talk about this,” you’re talking about the same things? How often does that come up in a conversation?
Alex: I’ve always liked the idea of talking about my relationships and things like that, but it’s never really been a huge part of my stand-up. Maybe it’s because I started stand-up so young that no one actually wanted to hear me talk about dating, that people would rather hear me tell stories from my life that don’t make them think too hard about whether or not they’re additional characters or something like that. I don’t know why.
In the pandemic, I would do this Zoom show called UnCabaret, which in real life is also a beloved storytelling show in Los Angeles, and tell stories about my partner and how dumb I was in front of my partner. They liked that.
But my first partner was a comedian in England who would constantly make jokes about fictional boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend or something. I was always very comfortable with her fictionalizing me. I was very comfortable with her taking real things and spinning them. I like when stand-up comedy has a degree of mystique to it or a degree of embellishment to it. I think that’s where the artistry oftentimes lies.
But with that said, I’ve also dated someone or people who don’t want to be talked about in my stand-up. I’ve been very clear about that from the get-go. I have respected it even when it’s something I really want to say on stage. Obviously, your primary partner is gonna be a huge, huge fountain of material, and especially how you relate to them is gonna be a huge fountain of material. But I always try to err on the side of not embarrassing my partner, especially the ones who have tried to draw a clear boundary there. But something funny happens to both of us, and you’re like, “Who owns it? Who owns it?”
John: That happens with other folks who are writers. I know many two-writer couples, and so there’s issues of who’s gonna do the thing with that stuff. The difference is though if I’m writing a script with other characters and I’m using this moment that happened and I’m putting it in a character’s mouth or creating that situation, there is a distance there. But if you are doing a one-man solo show as Alex Edelman, and you’re talking about this person you’re dating, a very natural sense of, like, oh, that’s the real person.
I feel like I know Mike Birbiglia’s wife, Jen, just because she’s been a presence in all the stuff he’s been doing for the last 10 years. I feel like she’s a live character there on stage, even though I’ve never met her in person. You have to have a conversation clearly with people about the edges of that.
Alex: I’m sure there’s an edge for Jen, and I’m sure there’s an edge for Mike. I think it’s a very scalloped edge. It’s really hard to tell sometimes what people are gonna be upset about or what they’re gonna be thrilled by. But also, Mike figures generously in Jen’s poetry, I imagine. In fact, I know he does, because sometimes he reads it on stage. With two-writer couples, what they should do is… When Michael Green and his wife, Amber, had that samurai attack on their home, they were able to together create Blue Eye Samurai.
John: Absolutely. Together, they were able to make Blue Eye Samurai, and really what a moment that was. But like you, it wasn’t their home. They moved to Japan specifically so that it would happen, and it changed everything.
Alex: Although sometimes, by the way, you get differing perspectives. I’m sure there are many examples of a schismatic marriage, and you wind up with the Nora Ephron side and the Carl Bernstein side. By the way, sometimes you only end up with one side and are tasked with remembering yourself that there’s another.
Also, sometimes people are like – even though I don’t talk about my partners – “How does your family feel about your depictions of them in the show?” It’s like, first of all, they’re mostly fine with it. Second of all, there’s artistic license taken and exaggeration that you should assume for the grace of the people being depicted. You should always assume a curatorial bias.
One of my partners and I, we were living below a five-month-old baby, and I wrote a joke about it. My partner was like, “You know what? That’s happening to me more. You’re on the road mostly. I’m stuck at home. The baby crying and waking you up, it’s happening to me tenfold times over.” I don’t know if she ever did anything with it.
John: Did you agree that you didn’t get to use the joke or that you’d have separate versions of the joke?
Alex: I don’t think we ever came to a consensus on it, but I also don’t think it was a huge argument. But it is definitely a problem. There were other instances of that where I think we did have a conversation. Something happened on a hike, and I was like, “That’s really funny.” It happened to the partner, and the partner was like, “That’s not your story. That’s a thing that happened to me.” I was like, “But I watched it happen, and my take on it is I think the funnier thing.” Of course that was a whole different argument. They were like, “How dare you.” Ultimately, I was like, “Right, you have the story about the hike yourself, and that’ll be your thing.” I genuinely tried to argue, like an idiot. I was like, “Look, that traumatic experience that you went through, I also – because I subjected you to the trauma and made you go on the hike, I should be able to do that.” The chutzpah of that argument I think was really like – I wouldn’t make it now.
John: Let’s say the partner gets the actual story of the incident that happened, but you do own your reaction to what the thing was. Do you feel that’s fair to fictionalize what the inciting incident was, so you can get to the point of how you felt about the thing?
Alex: I think it’s fair to fictionalize everything, so yes. I am very adamant about what’s best for the material is what’s best for the material. Usually it’s the truth. But it’s very interesting to me. I’m not even Jewish, so me going to that meeting is really-
John: Wow, it really was a brave choice.
Alex: Yeah, a brave choice.
John: I think the fact checkers are gonna come after you for that.
Alex: Of course. The funny thing is that I think fictionalizing an inciting incident is always what an audience should kind of assume. Things are streamlined. I think fictionalizing an inciting incident to differentiate from the version that your partner, also a creator, may depict is a really interesting thing to do, and in fact, might be a good creative exercise.
John: I see Alex is jotting down notes as he’s doing this, like, “Save the hike story.”
Alex: But by the way, if the funny thing is the reaction, like I said in the main body of the episode, every joke that I tell has a reason for existing, and the reason is usually off-story. The reason is usually aesthetic-related or craft-related or performance-related.
I had a thing I was excited about. Someone said to me, “I don’t think you should do that. It’s too similar to this Doug Stanhope bit.” I don’t really know Doug Stanhope’s material, but I went, “Okay, what if I found a more circuitous route to delivering that line? Maybe I’d wind up with something better.” And it did.
You can always differentiate the account from your partner’s. I also think that’s really interesting for a couple to do. But again, I have very different comfort levels and boundaries than most people, so sometimes I try to account for how my partner will feel or how an audience member will feel or how someone who may have been in a similar situation at a point in their life will feel.
John: Cool. Alex, thank you again for this conversation.
Alex: Thanks so much for having me, John. I hope I didn’t talk too much.
John: No, it was awesome. Thank you.
Links:
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