The forthcoming book “Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers,” by the humor writer and journalist Mike Sacks, includes interviews, advice, and “ultraspecific comedic knowledge” from several dozen comedians, filmmakers, and writers, including Mel Brooks, Amy Poehler, Roz Chast, and one of contemporary fiction’s funniest writers, George Saunders. In the conversation below, Saunders talks to Sacks about his family’s sense of humor, the connection between satire and compassion, his early comedy influences, and how he came to embrace the funny side of his writing.
In the past, you’ve talked about growing up in South Chicago, and that, as a child, you felt total freedom. But how do you think South Chicago affected you as a writer?
I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns. They were just merciless in terms of grammar and syntax and spelling, which was incredibly helpful later. They gave us the tools we could later use to build our taste. They forced us to become little language fiends—almost like, say, a great chef might force his kids to become food fiends. That taught us basic discernment. Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you’ve done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I’m always being edited by my inner nun. So in some ways this is good—it makes for good revision. But it can also be killing—you’re never satisfied.
How about as far as humor? Is it tied in any specific way to Chicago? I think I got the idea that the high-serious and the funny were not separate. The idea that something could be gross and heartfelt at the same time. Some of the funniest things in South Chicago were also the most deeply true—these sort of over-the-line, rude utterances that were right on the money and undeniable. Their truth had rendered them inappropriate; they were not classically shaped, not polite, and they responded to the urgency of the moment.
In Chicago, people often told these odd little Zen parables, ostensibly for laughs, or to mock somebody out, but behind which I always felt were deeper questions looming—like who we are, and what the hell are we doing here, how should we love, what should we value, how are we to understand this veil of tears?
Do any specific anecdotes come to mind?
My whole childhood we lived next door to this family I’ll call the Smiths. We didn’t know them very well at all. At one point, Mrs. Smith’s mother, who was in her nineties, passed away. My dad went to the wake, where this exchange occurred:
Dad: “So sorry for your loss.”
Mrs. Smith: “Yes, it’s very hard.”
Dad: “Well, on the bright side, I suppose you must be grateful that she had such a long and healthy life.”
Mrs. Smith (mournful, dead-serious): “Yeah. This is the sickest she’s ever been.”
My dad came home just energized from this. I loved his reaction. My family was such a big influence on me. There was a real respect for language. It was understood as a source of power. Everyone was funny in a different flavor. You could make anything right—diffuse any tension, explain any mistake—with a joke. A joke or a funny voice was a way of saying: All is well. We’ll live. We still love you.
Can you talk a bit about your mother and father?
My father was from Chicago and my mother was from Amarillo, Texas. They met at a dance when my father was stationed down in Texas, in the Air Force. They were nineteen when they married, and had me when they were twenty-one. My dad is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, but he didn’t go to college right out of high school. He got out of the Air Force and moved back to Chicago and he did a bunch of different things—he was a collection agent for State Farm Insurance and then ended up as a salesman for a coal company. This was when there were still a lot of buildings being heated by coal. For awhile he was selling directly to landlords, and apparently sneaking into basements to do reconnaissance on the type of coal they were getting from other companies. But then he gradually worked his way up, and when I was in grade school he became vice-president of the company. Around that time he had a falling-out with his boss and quit. He bought a couple of now defunct fast-food franchise restaurants called Chicken Unlimited, and that’s what he did while I was in high school. Well, that’s what we all did: worked in the restaurant. My mother and sisters worked the counter; I drove the delivery truck; my uncle managed one of the stores.
The main beauty of that job was getting to go in there day after day and see this parade of American characters. For many of those people, our restaurant was the closest thing to family they had: lonely, lonely, lonely. It would have been impossible for me, before that job, to imagine how filled America is with lonely, isolated people.
Many of the characters in your stories, whether they are good or bad, young or old, tend to be quite lonely.
What I remember about all this is that particular gloating teen delight that there were such crazies in the world and that I wasn’t one of them. But also the way this got complicated by coming to know them, by seeing them in these sad private moments, in our restaurant, sitting at one of our plastic booths all alone. The other kids and I were actually pretty good and gentle to them when the chance arose. But, of course, among ourselves, it was all posturing and harshness and war stories about what “the wackos” had done that day. Makes me sad to think of it at this thirty-year distance.
Do you remember any customers in particular?
Oh, sure. There was a woman we rather brutally called, but not to her face, “The Wacko.” She’d come in around four in the afternoon and chain-smoke and chain-drink Pepsis hour after hour. She used to wear a ratty imitation fur coat and talk to herself. She lived in a complex behind the restaurant. Almost the minute she got home, she’d call for delivery: a pack of cigarettes from the machine we had in the store and a large Pepsi. She’d sometimes order three or four times a night. I was the delivery guy, so I’d go over—I made seventy-five cents a delivery—and she’d be in this furnitureless apartment, shaking and talking to herself. And she wasn’t all that old either. She later slit her wrists and jumped in the Chicago River—only to be pulled out by some passing hero.
Then there was a guy whose claim to fame was twofold: He’d try to pick up girls by wearing his old security guard uniform and harassing them at the mall, and it was his “old” security guard costume because he’d gotten fired from his job as a security guard after being caught doing what he described as “allegedly masturbating against the curb of a Fotomat.” I didn’t even know what that meant, exactly. In his defense, he always claimed innocence. But the charge seemed pretty … specific.
And then there was “Gagger”—for some reason he didn’t even get an article in his name. He was an old man dying of emphysema, who would come in and sometimes literally cough himself unconscious in a back booth. He had no family and so we were it for him, more or less.
You’ve talked in the past about how important compassion is when it comes to writing. That writing, in your opinion, is an exercise in compassion. You strike me as someone who is not only a compassionate writer, but also a compassionate person.
Yes, but people think of compassion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he’s about to cry. And I don’t think that’s it. I think of it more as a quality of openness that comes with being in a state of unusual attentiveness.
Yes, but with other writers, I don’t always sense compassion when it comes to humor or satire. I’m not sure if they don’t have full control of their toolbox or if they’re just not compassionate. Can satire work if the writer isn’t a compassionate person?
Sure. I think a harsh truth can be compassionate, in the sense that it speeds us along from falseness to truth. So, if a friend is wearing something ridiculous, you can say, “You look like an idiot,” and maybe that will save him. I think we wouldn’t want to assume that compassion is always gentle.
I think this quality you’re talking about in my work might be more about fairness than compassion. By which I mean one’s willingness to stake out a position (Kevin sucks!) and have a lot of fun with that, and then run around the table and assert another position (Although Kevin does care for his sick grandmother) and then do it again (But yuck, Kevin masturbates while thinking about whales!) and another (And yet Kevin once saved a man’s life).
I sometimes think of this as “on the other hand” thinking— just that constant undercutting of whatever (too) stable a position you find yourself occupying.
You once said that satire is a way of saying, “I love this culture.”
It’s hard to be sufficiently involved in satirizing something you don’t like. That’s just sneering. Satire is, I think, a sort of bait-and-switch. You decide to satirize something, so you gaze at it hard enough and long enough to be able to say something true and funny and maybe angry or critical—but you first had to gaze at it for a long time. I mean, gazing is a form of love, right?
Right, but gazing is also a form of fear, too, I’d think. As well as staring at something beautiful, one can also stare at someone, or something, different from the norm, such as a freak at a sideshow.
In either case, it’s attention. You are paying attention to the thing, spending your time on it, which is a form of … something. Love? Respect? You’re honoring the thing with your attention and allowing it to act upon you, to change you. In terms of writing, if you are writing and rewriting a paragraph or section that concerns a person, you are allowing your initial, often simplistic or agenda-satisfying notion of that person to be softened or complicated—you have to, for technical reasons. If you don’t, the reader will anticipate where you’re going and be pissed or bummed when you go there.
So I think it’s the attention that matters. You are paying attention to this fictive creature via paying attention to the words that have caused him to—sort of—exist. It’s a kind of double-attention-paying. And the more attention you pay, the more you’re going to eliminate the lameness in what you’re doing. Even if your idea is to pillory someone, doing this double-attention thing is going to force you to pillory him at a higher level, more honestly.
You seem to be the opposite of many writers who deal in satire, such as Mark Twain, whose work became darker and darker as he aged. For instance, in his uncompleted book “The Mysterious Stranger,” Twain questions whether or not God exists. With your work, however, there seems to be more and more evidence of lightness.
Yes, so far. But Twain was older then and had gone through some really dark shit—he went bankrupt, lost an infant son, outlived two of his daughters and his wife.
But, of course, some things are just dispositional. I think I’ve always been a fairly happy person, just in terms of my physiology. Also, I think you have to keep growing aesthetically in whatever way feels essential. You can feel in Twain that when he went toward that darkness he was, in some ways, going against his own early grain. He was facing facts, in a sense, being more honest, striving for his truth. At the moment, I’m trying to resist any kind of knee-jerk darkness that might have to do with some feeling of wanting to remain “edgy,” if you see what I mean. At this point, “more light” feels like “more honesty.” But, you know, we’ll see. One of the perils of any sort of interview is that the thing you are so passionately saying might turn out to be all wet, once you actually start working again.
Another thing I love about Twain is the way his clear-sightedness expresses itself in exact language. Also, to be as funny and loose as he is in “Huck Finn” but also dense enough with his language that it evokes a rich physical world—that is very hard, I think. He hits a lot of different modalities in that book. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s tragic, some of the language presages Faulkner, but also presages Nathanael West.
If Mark Twain were around today, do you think he’d have a difficult time finding an agent and getting published? In today’s publishing world, humor and comic novels aren’t always “marketable.”
He’d still be a superstar. I mean that in two ways: I think his work is still great, so great that no one could deny it, so that, if you could erase all cultural memory of “Huck Finn” and then send it out fresh it would still be a sensation. Second, let’s say there was never any Twain to begin with and he was then born in 1957 or something—I think he would adjust to and imbibe this contemporary life of ours and do something unimaginable and great.
Who were your comedy influences?
I was a big fan of Steve Martin’s. It was absolutely new at the time, the early- to mid-seventies. We’d never seen or heard anything like it. Now I can see that what made his work so radical was that it was so self-aware, so postmodern: he was making comedy about the conventions of making comedy. But then it just felt … limitless, and honest. In those days so many comics were completely conventional. You’d see them on “The Tonight Show,” and they felt old-fashioned and sort of dead. I mean, George Carlin was around, and Richard Pryor—both geniuses—but I felt they were kind of outliers. They were radical and angry, whereas Martin presented himself as a sort of mainstream comic who tore the whole thing down from inside, very sweetly. He wasn’t really rejecting anything; he was accepting of everything, with the force of his charm and his will. I also picked up from him something that reminded me of the way some of my uncles were funny—that whole comic riff of pretending to be clueless, exaggerating that quality and not flinching. I loved that.
Who else?
I loved Monty Python for the wordplay—this sense that you didn’t have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and nerdiness and self-doubt, and that could be funny.
I liked the Marx Brothers for the irreverence, the way they tore everything down. That’s where humor enters the domain of the philosophical and starts to say: “What seems obvious isn’t; what you think will sustain you won’t; what you trust will fail you; what you think is permanent is fading; your mind will go, your body will rot, all that you love will be cast to the wind.”
I loved Dr. Seuss. The funny thing was, we never had his books in the house. My mother claims this is because my father confused Dr. Seuss with Dr. Spock, and considered Dr. Spock a Communist. My father denies this. And honestly, it doesn’t sound like him—the guy who gave me Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” to read when I was in seventh grade, along with Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” But who knows? Anyway, we didn’t have the Seuss books, but a neighbor did, and I remember whenever we would go over there I would sneak into the kid’s room and read all the contraband Seuss.
I loved the simplicity. Very elemental and profound. Also completely weird. You can’t trace any predecessor or agenda in those books. Just sui generis. I loved the level of detail—I used to sort of linger on the pages, especially the more panoramic ones.
Somehow I group Seuss with Samuel Beckett and Raymond Carver and Charles Schulz and the Picasso of those famous vanishing bull lithographs: less is more, if the heart is in the right place.
You once mentioned that you had a stylistic breakthrough by writing Dr. Seussian-type poems. What was the breakthrough? Where and when did it occur?
It happened in a conference room at the engineering company I was working for in the mid-nineties. I was supposed to be taking notes on the call but not much was happening. So I just started writing these goofy little rhyming poems and illustrating them. I liked them enough to bring them home, and later that night my wife read them and … liked them. I’d just come out of the experience of having written a seven-hundred-page novel that didn’t work and it was mind-blowing to see that she was getting more pleasure and edification out of these ten poems I’d written off the top of my head than from this whole big book.
So that helped me turn the corner on accepting humor into my work. Humor and a whole bunch of other things I’d been denying for some reason: speed, pop culture, irreverence.
Did it take awhile to come to terms with the fact that you were a funny writer? There’s a feeling with many writers that if you’re not Hemingway-serious you’re not as important as you could be. That you’re not living up to your full literary potential.
I did have that feeling, yes, in a big way. I spent about seven years trying to keep humor out of my work, but finally had this catastrophic break, where I almost instantaneously rejected my rejection of humor. That was the beginning of my first book. It was sort of powerful: I just realized that I’d been keeping all the good parts of myself out of the fight—all the humor and irreverence and my extensive body of pop-culture knowledge and fart jokes, and the rest of it. But I’d also been afraid to embrace, for example, a certain high-speed manic quality I have in person and in my thought patterns. So it was like throwing a switch when I finally got desperate enough.
What I’ve come to realize is that, for me, the serious and the comic are one and the same. I don’t see humor as some sort of shrunken or deficient cousin of “real” writing. Being funny is about as deep and truthful as I can be. When I am really feeling life and being truthful, the resulting prose is comic. The world is comic. It’s not always funny but it is always comic. Comic, for me, means that there is always a shortfall between what we think of ourselves and what we are. Life is too hard and complicated for a person to live above it, and the moments when this is underscored are comic. But, of course, they are also deep. Maybe the most clearly we ever see reality is when it boots us in the ass.
Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Group (USA) LLC. Copyright © 2014 by Michael Sacks.
Photograph by Tim Knox/eyevine/Redux.
