Chris Juricich wrote me an e-mail with the subject line "Do you think you're funny?" and followed it with this…
I don't mean that as a challenging statement; merely a general question. As a writer, one isn't always necessarily called on to write humor per se, and at your young, tender age of 18, had you any general preferences as to what kind of writing you wanted to do?
Were you initially enamored of becoming a comic book writer/scripter (wouldn't surprise me given your "roots") but as it would "seem" that a lot of your writing for TV ended up being for variety shows, animation shows where gags were somewhat requisite. Did you have that self-confidence to believe "I can write comedy?" I am curious!
It didn't work exactly like that. I decided around the age or six (maybe seven) that I wanted to be a writer. At the time, my skills for reading and writing were way more developed than my skills at anything else and that pointed me in the direction. I don't recall ever seriously angling for any other profession, though there was a time when I aimed to be more of a writer-artist than I have been. I more or less abandoned drawing in the eighties as I became more proficient at computers.
But for a long time, I wasn't sure what I wanted to be a writer of. I always loved the idea of writing comic books but various things I read about the business made me feel that (a) I couldn't succeed in that line of work unless I moved to New York which I didn't want to do, and (b) the business didn't treat people all that well. It's a long, long story but I kind of stumbled into comic book writing because of an unexpected chain of events starting with the fact that Jack Kirby moved to Southern California the year I graduated high school.
I guess I thought I could write comedy but it was not with a huge amount of confidence. I knew I'd written and said things in fanzines or at school that had made people laugh but I also knew that that didn't mean I could write comedy on a professional level. I guess my attitude was, more or less, "Well, I'll try to do it and see how it goes." And it worked out.
One thing that I learned early-on was that it really doesn't matter if you think a joke is funny. What matters is what the audience thinks and even if you become the greatest comedy writer who ever lived, you will still write a lot of stuff that doesn't get the reaction you think it will.
There's a reason Neil Simon did heavy rewrites on most of his plays after they were first seen by audiences. When I hear a comedy writer say, "I always know what's funny," I think, "If Neil Simon didn't, neither do you." Overconfidence is dangerous in this profession.
