Dick Cavett on comedy writing

Dick Cavett, the former gag-writer, TV host, and gold-medal pommel horse state gymnastics champion of Nebraska, has been writing about comedy in his New York Times blog. He makes a great point about comedy writing: the more of it you do, the better you get. Which is why writers who write in the tragic mode often find themselves stuck there. Even if they wanted to write comedy, they haven't built up the muscles. But here's Dick, in his own words:

"Talking about comedy writing last time, I omitted an interesting phenomenon thereto: the fact that the gag-writer’s brain often works independently of his conscious mind. Sometimes alarmingly so. Because the topical joke-writer’s livelihood depends on his ability to crank out — if the show is on daily — good, current stuff, fast and for immediate use. And after a great deal of this, there’s something that develops and takes on a life of its own.

The late Steve Allen noted that the more comedy you write, the more you can write. It happened to me. Thrown instantly into the front lines, as I was, of daily writing for Jack Paar on “The Tonight Show” — a task nothing at Yale prepares you for — it seemed that each day of the week got a bit easier. Monday hardest, Friday a breeze. Friday’s jokes seemed to write themselves. Rust set in on the weekend and again, Monday wasn’t easy."

Cavett goes on to describe the problem of having an unstoppable joke-generator running in your head at times of national tragedy. A friend of his was writing  jokes for Bob Hope on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He tells Cavett:

“There I was, stunned, driving to Bob’s house in Toluca Lake as usual, but with tears running down my face, and those unbidden jokes kept vomiting out of me. My joke-writing muscles were in tip-top shape and, to mix a metaphor, I couldn’t halt the machinery.”

 The whole piece is very interesting if you're into the psychology of writing comedy, as is Cavett's previous posting "A Life In Rim Shots", which tries to answer the question, "What does it take to be a comedy writer?"

Like many other theorists before him, Cavett ultimately has to throw up his hands:

"The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I’m not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject. The crux of the mystery is, when exactly does the ad-lib artist become aware of the spontaneous joke he has just spouted. In the case of a comic genius like Groucho, I’m convinced that the process in the speaker’s head that results in funny words spoken is somehow preconscious. Sitting next to him, I saw him be both delighted and . . . this is important . . . surprised by what he had just heard himself say. He was as much the audience to the joke as the rest of us who heard it."

Well worth a read. These guys were the poor bloody infantry of comedy, banging out hour after hour of topical jokes for the TV stars, night after night, in the age of live TV. Probably nobody in history has had to come up with more jokes than these guys. Their brains should be dissected. (After they're dead.)