The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and this is episode 733 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Over the years, we’ve talked about comedy a lot on the show, both for film and television. We’ve discussed jokes with guests like Mike Birbiglia and Patton Oswalt, but we often treat being funny as an inherent trait, like height, rather than a skill you can develop and improve.
Today on the show, I want to talk about a proper comedy education. To do so, I’m excited to welcome on a very special guest. Ali Barthwell is a writer known for her work on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, for which she has five Emmy Awards. She’s also written for Vulture, The A.V. Club, and Cards Against Humanity. She teaches at Second City and Columbia College in Chicago. Her new book, Reality TV for Snobs, is out this summer. Welcome, Ali.
Ali Barthwell: Thanks so much. Hi.
John: I am so excited to be talking with you. Of course, I got to talk with you a lot over the last couple of weeks and months because you were on the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild of America and were an absolute superstar. I want to talk to you about that, but mostly I just wanted to hang out with you more because I miss you.
Ali: Oh, of course. Yes. Oh, I mean, if we could be doing this in a conference room under fluorescent lighting, that would be ideal.
John: That’s the dream.
Ali: I’ll take over Zoom.
John: We actually referenced you in an earlier bonus segment because Drew and I were talking about how, in the negotiating room, like between sessions, you guys were talking to me through sketch comedy writing and terms and things and differences between Chicago styles and other styles. I just love to learn new things about it, so I knew at that moment that I wanted to have you on the show.
Ali: Oh, thank you so much.
John: We’re going to get into that. There’s also some relevant listener questions we’ll try to answer. In our bonus segment for premium members, Ali, I’d like to talk about making a career outside of New York and Los Angeles because you live in Chicago.
Ali: Yes.
John: It is absolutely doable to do, but probably different than other people’s paths would be. I want to talk about that.
Ali: Yes. I think Chicago’s the best city in the world, so very happy to have more people move here and be creative in Chicago.
John: All right. We’ll roll out the welcome wagon for Chicago there in our bonus segment for premium members. First, we have actual news. Ali, this thing that we’ve been working on for months and months and months, the 2026 MBA, the contract we negotiated with our employers for all the writers across the country, was ratified by our members, and so 90.4% of members voted to approve it. That just came through yesterday as we were recording this. Hooray, we did it. We’re done.
Ali: We did it. We did it, Joe.
[laughter]
John: Ali, I want to talk about this was my fifth time on the negotiating committee, but this was your first time. What was your expectation going into it? What did you think it was going to be like? Then we can talk about how it differed from that.
Ali: I think you hear negotiation, and you think, okay, well, we’re all going to be around the table, the studios on the other side, us on this side. We’re going to be wildly handing notes, chiming in, and calling objection. My job at Last Week Tonight is my first job in TV. Like you said, I’m not in New York or LA, so I do sometimes feel outside of all the other happenings in the industry. I did come in being like, “Oh gosh, what will I know? What can I bring to the process?” I think I was surprised at how little I spoke to the AMPDB. If anyone knows me, they also probably be surprised Ali wasn’t flipping a table in front of the studios.
I also learned a ton about the lives of writers, the lifespan of a career, all the different ins and outs. Then, personally, I went through a major health episode. I had leukemia. I had a stem cell transplant. These are all very neutral chill things at this point. Definitely, I call myself a power user of the WGA health plan. I really had an understanding and an expectation of what being someone who relies on that insurance really feels like. That was also an important thing for me to voice in the room and talk about how the healthcare works and literally saves lives.
John: In the months leading up to the negotiation, we would have meetings where we talked through all the issues going into it. We put together our proposals, the blue sky list, and then narrowing it down and how we were going to focus things. With those initial things, members who were in Los Angeles were physically in a room together, but folks from the East and people like you, who was in Chicago, were joining us by Zoom. For the actual negotiation, Ali, you came out to Los Angeles for three weeks?
Ali: It ended up being three weeks, yes.
John: That is a huge commitment for a volunteer. You weren’t paid a cent for this. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. I don’t know if members can appreciate not just how much time, but how much of a life you give up to come out and do this. You were just in a hotel room for three weeks while we were negotiating this.
Ali: I really figured out hotel living, really got my bed set up just how I wanted, all my toiletries in the bathroom. I’ve been in other unions. I was a member of Actors’ Equity because I was an onstage actor. I worked briefly with the Chicago Public Schools, so I was in the teachers’ union. I was working at Columbia. You’re in a union there. I really have an appreciation and understanding of how important unions and collective labor can be, as well as, and I think I told the story when we were in the room, I studied abroad in France for a year in college.
In the second semester, my university went on strike. First, the teachers and then the students. I did not have class for four and a half months because the students were literally occupying the university. I was like, “Okay, if we can get to a point where we are not occupying [laughter] the studios and come to some sort of deal,” I’ve seen all these different ways that unions and labor can touch people’s lives and throw things upside down, but also help people get what they really need. It was an honor and a privilege to be there.
John: Thank you again for all you did. I’m happy that the members voted to approve this and that we are out of this negotiation cycle period for a while. We can focus on the hard work of enforcing the contract, helping members get through the changes to the health plan that are going to be happening, but hopefully get to a better place. You say how unions impact and touch lives. We haven’t addressed this on the podcast at this point because I didn’t want to touch on it before we got this deal closed. I want to address, I usually say the elephant in the room, but in this case, the elephant outside the room, which was the union that was touching our lives, which was the Writers Guild Staff Union here in the West. Ali, when was this first on your radar? When did this first impact you?
Ali: I remember being in meetings with the whole negotiating committee, and there would be a bit of time at the beginning of each meeting with updates of what was going on in the West. On the East, we all had varying degrees of how in tune we were. Then, when the Staff Union went on strike, we were told certain things will and won’t be happening because the people who are in charge of those things or who work with those things are on strike.
Then those little check-ins at the beginning of every negotiating committee meeting became a little more serious, a little more focused, a little more intense. Then, the main thing being on the East, my first interaction, a week before we left to go to LA, I started and some of the other members on the East started to get incessant phone calls from the Staff Union. I answered the first one because I didn’t know what it was, and then they started coming in.
I think at certain days, I was up to 30 or 40 phone calls a day. Then I let my voicemail fill up and it became text messages. Then it was 30 to 50 text messages a day. There was a lot of attempted contact from the Staff Union. We had to have conversations about how to handle talking to them about them, what it would mean to be a union member, and to possibly have a picket line where we were negotiating. What does it personally mean to each person to cross that or not cross that picket line?
There was a lot of logistical planning leading up to the actual time in LA. Then I also think there was an emotional component of what became the intensity of the picket line and everyone’s feelings about the picket line and seeing other people, other staff members from the West, and negotiating committee members from the West, seeing people they knew and worked with on the picket line. I think there was a big logistical component and a big emotional component was also happening.
John: Yes, there definitely was. You’d like to think it was like Severance, where there’s the outside world, the inside world, and once you’re inside, you completely focus on the thing. After a half an hour of decompression, we could just get back to the actual work. I do want to stress, I think the deal we reached was not impacted by what was happening outside at all. It was the same deal that would have happened the other way. What was impacted was our ability to communicate with members.
We couldn’t do the big member meetings we were used to doing as we go into this. Then, as we negotiated the deal and were talking to our members, we had to do that all on Zoom that the East hosted because we didn’t want our members to have to cross the picket line that would have inevitably been there from the staff union. They were picketing outside of the places we were doing our negotiations, and that became, at first, uncomfortable and then scary.
There was a day where it got really scary. That was the one moment it broke through in the press where it looked like it was going to, if not get violent, a person could get hurt. That’s where we had to address how we were going to try to de-escalate and get the other side to de-escalate, too. I’m frustrated on your behalf because you’re not even a West member. This is not your fight at all.
Ali: There was some mixed messaging in those text messages and calls. They couldn’t quite decide if I worked for Ellen or Ellen worked for me. It’s like either way, I think is not actually accurate. If you want me to– I’m very sympathetic. Like I said, I’ve been in unions. I really love being part of a union. It reached a point where I felt, speaking completely, completely personally, I felt like what was happening was not even about the negotiations that we were going into. I wasn’t sure what was happening with what the staff was negotiating for because I’m not a West council member or board member.
John: No, our negotiating committee wasn’t involved in their negotiation at all, except to the degree that they are on the same health plan we are. What we were doing in the room was going to affect how much they were paying for health insurance.
Ali: I had the feeling of, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know what would be helpful. As someone who’s traveling, not in my own bed, also trying to keep things confidential and keep things under wraps, it’s not great for there to be hostility going in and out of the building.
Personally, I was like, I’m going to hit a point where I’m going to start saying something, and that’s not good for anybody’s cause– It’s like, we only have so much bandwidth as human beings. I think everybody’s bandwidth really got stretched in a way that I don’t know if it was better or worse for either side.
John: Last night, I was just remembering through this. I was thinking like, “Oh, you know what I should do?” It’s like, “I have all the phone numbers from all the people who called me 40 times a day.” It’s like, “I should just call them back and tell them a piece of my mind.” I realize that that’s not a productive thing. I thought, if you humor me, I’ll just wrap up this little segment. This is the voicemail I would leave if I were to call them back. This is just me leaving the voicemail.
We should stress they were all the same voicemail, basically. There was a script. This is the script I think I would be inclined to do if I were to call these people individually. “Hey, it’s John August. I’m a WGA member. I am the person you’ve been yelling at for the past six weeks, calling me a scab, calling me a traitor to the labor movement, following me to my car. You left me 40 voicemails and text messages per day.
You made it impossible for me to answer my phone. I want you to understand that from the outset, I thought, yes, of course, the staff of the Writer’s Guild should have a union to address how you’re underpaid. I still do. I want you to understand that what you’ve been doing for the past few months has been incredibly counterproductive, that any goodwill I had has completely evaporated. Instead, you made myself and other negotiating committee members feel physically unsafe. In part because you made a mockery of picketing.
You physically blocked doors and cars. You followed us down the streets. You picketed at our houses. What’s so frustrating to see is that in your public statements, in your press interviews, and your Instagram, you portray yourselves as the victim here. That’s not accurate. You are adults. You made choices, including going on strike, including picketing another union’s contract negotiations. That is genuinely unprecedented, to sandbag another union as they’re negotiating their deal. In the end, it had no impact on our deal. It just made a few weeks incredibly unpleasant.
I don’t know how this is going to end. I genuinely have no insight into your negotiations. I never did. I have to ask, as one union member to another, what is the end game here? Is your aim to actually go back working at the guild, or do you just want to “win?” I worry that you’re in this mindset that the only way out is through, and that is not serving you well. I’d encourage you to find another way, a more productive route, because what you’re doing has not worked, and I’m pretty sure will not work. Thanks.” I will leave it there.
Let’s move on to happier topics.
Ali: Yes. [laughs]
John: We have the Scriptnotes book that is out there in the world. We love that people are buying the Scriptnotes book and enjoying it. We have a dean from the University of Iowa has exciting news from there.
Drew: Dean writes, “Congratulations on the publication of the Scriptnotes book. It’s fabulous. After several years of sharing PDFs of my own lecture notes with students because there simply was no great screenwriting textbook out there, I’m delighted to tell you that your book will now be the official textbook of the new-ish screenwriting workshops at the University of Iowa. My colleague, Rachel Yoder, who’s the author of Nightbitch, first suggested the idea. She loves this book, too. We’ll be using it as the textbook for Cinema 1300 Foundations of Screenwriting beginning next fall.”
John: Oh, that is so exciting. I think there’s going to be some other programs that are doing the same thing. If you are teaching a program, you’re going to be using the book, or if you’re a student who you find out that is the book that you’re using, we’d love to hear it because one of the reasons we wanted to go with a big publisher is they have academic arms who can get it into university bookstores and do that kind of stuff.
It’s exciting to have it out there in the world for people to enjoy, a big orange book that you can see on your shelf.
All right, let us get to our main topic, which is comedy. I’m so excited to dig into this with you because I’ve never taken a comedy class, but you have taken those classes. You’ve taught those classes. Ali, let’s start from the very basics. You have a student who shows up to learn comedy. They’re considered funny by somebody?
Ali: [laughs] Yes.
John: Absolutely. I said in the intro, it’s like height, but you think about a basketball player, and there’s certain fundamentals that are going to be key if you’re going to be a great basketball player, like height and speed. Those are things that cannot be taught. We all understand that a basketball player can be coached and taught and get to be a better basketball player. The same is true for writing and for comedy. This funny person shows up. What are the first things you do? Talk us through those first couple of sessions you might have with somebody, and what a class might even look like.
Ali: Yes, and I think even that person, you’re imagining of like, “Oh, they’re funny in their friend group or their family.” I had a lot of students when I was teaching improv, specifically where they were a lawyer, an executive, or a teacher. They had some job where they had to talk to people, and they had to be able to think quickly and be on their feet. A lot of times, you’d have someone, they were like, “Oh, I started taking this class because my kids got me a gift card, because I’m retired, or my boss paid for it.” Suddenly, they’re a year in taking the final advanced courses and putting on a show.
You really do see a lot of different people. There’s lessons that you can take from improv, which is one of the things I did for a long time at Second City, teaching and directing and performing, and then also from writing. I think one of the really first things is you have to turn off that self-judgment because you’re really trying to create as much as possible. You don’t know exactly what’s going to work, what’s not going to work. You’re going to try things on.
A lot of teachers will tell you, we’re going to get you to try a bunch of different styles of things. A bunch of different exercises. If it works for you can take it and run with it. If it doesn’t work, feel free to drop it or look at it and be like, “Why doesn’t this work for me?” I think turning off that self-judgment. Then I think the other part that is really important, especially when I was teaching improv, when I would teach my improv students, I would say I require two things. You have to be honest, and you have to be present.
Those are really hard things once we get to adulthood. Pretty much probably once we get past puberty. Being present and being honest. That sense of play, that sense of discovery, the sense of honest reaction to what your scene partner’s giving you or what’s being written on the page. Then being present. Again, that taking away that judgment, taking away what I think this is going to be, where I think this is going to go. Really, you can return to a state of play.
I think that is really important. If you take an improv class, your first few classes are getting people into that mindset. Then, depending on where you study, there might be one or two little things of how important is the ensemble, how important is the individual contribution. Then, in writing, you’re teaching people, all right, I’m going to give you a little bit of some story basics. I’m going to give you a little bit of some structure basics, but then we’re going to find ways to play. I’m going to create little sandboxes for you to play in, and we’re just going to experiment.
John: I’m going to break it into two big buckets here. Let’s talk about being present, being honest, and the improv. That’s crucial there because you think of that as being a performer thing, but it’s also true for any creator who’s trying to make moments feel alive in front of you. That’s crucial. Talk us through what you mean by present. It’s listening. It is not trying to get ahead of the moment, and not trying to anticipate too far, not pulling stuff from the past into this.
Ali: I think it really is you don’t want to plan too much. You don’t want to be dictating to your scene partners or to yourself where you think the scene is going to go, and just letting yourself really react in the moment and letting yourself– because I always tell people, I talk to my parents, friends, and they’re like, “Oh my God, I could never do that.” I’m like, “But you did. You were a kid, and you played pretend.” We have to break you out of that adult mindset of, “Oh, it would go really well if I did it this way, or it would go really well if I did it that way, or if I do this, people are going to think of me a certain way.”
You have to break that and be like, “What would a little kid do?” It’s like, they’re going to see something in front of them. They’re probably going to touch it. They’re probably going to pick it up. They’re probably going to shake it. They might even tear it into two parts and eat one. It’s that sort of process of whatever’s in front of me, I’m allowed to interact with, react to. I do an exercise where I have two people stand face-to-face, and I have one person send the other an emotion. However they want, non-verbally, but maybe with sounds, send them an emotion.
Then I have the person mirror the emotion back. Then I send that same emotion and send the opposite back. Then the third one, I go send the emotion and send the appropriate response back. It’s like, if it’s happiness, the opposite might be crying. Do the same, it might be laughing. The appropriate one back might be that person suddenly feels like, “Oh my gosh, they’re laughing at me. I’m going to feel embarrassed at someone laughing in my face.”
It might be like, “Oh, we’re co-conspirators, and we’re laughing together.” It’s teaching you there’s no wrong answer. If it makes sense to you and it was your, again, that honest reaction, don’t judge it, just do it. Then, if we add words to that scene or add character to that scene, we can figure out why you wanted to be embarrassed when someone laughed, or you wanted to laugh with them, that sort of thing.
John: Yes. I’ve never taken an improv class. If I do the introspection for why I’ve never done it, it’s like, I didn’t want to be bad at it. I was afraid of failing. That fear of failure is an embarrassment, are real, palpable thing. I’m sure those are some of the first walls you need to break through in one of these classes. It’s just like, it’s okay. The stakes could not be lower in an improv class.
Ali: Right. I had a class– At Second City, their upper levels are called the conservatory. They had this bit where I would split them into two groups and be like, “Okay, each group come up with a scene,” or each group come up with something. They’d go, “Who won? Who won? Who won?” I said, “If you wanted to win, you should have played lacrosse in high school.” We are comedy nerds doing make-them-ups at 9 AM on a Saturday. Nobody won. [laughter] Nobody won. They were laughing about it, too.
It’s just, we’re playing pretend. We’re goofing. We’re playing pretend. A lot of improv warm-ups and exercises really are meant of, all right, if we all just start making funny faces, we’re all going to be on the same page with each other. If we all start wiggling our arms weird, then we’re going to break down those walls. I say, the beautiful thing about improv is you do it once, and then it’s gone. We can never do that exact same scene again.
If you’re embarrassed, you’re like, “Well, it’ll be over, and I’ll never have to do that exact same scene again.” Sometimes, I think when the writer brain turns on, that frustrating thing of like, “Oh, I had something right there, and now it’s gone.” That’s, I think, a little bit in there is where you get that improv to sketch, which is what The Second City does and what I really liked to do as a performer and then a teacher and a director and all that stuff.
John: Yes. Let’s start making that transition because you’re saying that no one wins in improv. It’s like, “Did we have a good time? Did the play happen? Did we get through to that moment?” I’m sure you can then look at the tape or go back and analyze what things worked, what things didn’t work, but you’re probably focusing on, was everybody present? Was everybody honest? Was everybody playing the game the way you play the game?
Then as you move into sketch, you really are like, “What am I trying to achieve here?” You’re probably coming in there with a character, with a concept where you’re clearly communicating that concept. If things didn’t land, if things didn’t get a laugh, that’s when you can actually start to pick apart. Well, why didn’t that get a laugh, or that thing did get a big laugh? Why did it get a big laugh?
Our instinct is going to be like, oh, well, you can’t analyze comedy. You can’t pick it apart, but of course you can. Just like we can three-phase challenges, we can look at why this scene isn’t working, you can look at a sketch and say, oh, this is not working for this audience in this moment because of X, Y, or Z. Talk us through how you’re getting started getting people thinking about sketches and how you’re improving sketches.
Ali: The first thing in improv that I have to teach you to do is I have to teach you to make a choice. You have to make a choice. You have to say yes. You have to pick up the rock and look what’s underneath it. You have to look at empty space in front of you and be like, “That’s a butterfly.” I have to get you to make a choice. The second thing I want you to do is I want you to make a choice that will serve you a little better, a choice that will make your life a little easier.
If we’re in an office and there’s like, “oh, look at that on the desk,” it’s probably going to make everybody’s lives easier if it’s a paycheck, so now you can see your coworker’s paycheck. It’s going to make your life a little harder if that’s like a tiny man who can speak German to you. We can do it, but it’s going to be a little harder, or we’re doing a different thing now. Then I think that transition from improv to sketch is looking at every– so there’s lots of different ways to do it.
One, like you’re talking about, if we’ve improvised something, we’ve improvised a scene or maybe a form, and now we’re looking at what do I want to see again? Then you run through, okay, what do I want to see more of in this scene? What do I want to see less of? I always say, “What do you want to see more of? What confused you?” I go easy, hard, fun, stupid. How was that? What do we want to see more of? What confused us?
Then you’re looking to pick out, maybe you’re picking a character, maybe you’re picking a whole arc, maybe you’re picking a turn of phrase that we stumbled on, an interesting point of view or a piece of dialogue. Then you’re looking and saying, “What do I want to see again? What choices do I want to make again?” Then go from there.
John: What is the first version of a sketch that you might see as a person teaching this class? You have students who’ve gone off, they’re coming back in with a sketch. Is it a written thing that they’re putting up on their feet? Are they showing you a piece of paper? Have they just worked out with their classmates what they’re going to do? What does it look like when you’re first seeing something?
Ali: It’s all kinds of things. Personally, I love to see, I have an idea, we want to try it. It’s like, “We got together, and she’s going to do this.” I’m like, “Great, don’t tell me anything. Get up there, just start doing it.” I’m going to call time, probably around three and a half, four minutes. Then we’re going to sit down and talk about it. Students can also bring in an outline where they’ve written down, this happens and this happens and this happens.
Or it could be a fully written that they’ve used their office printer at their day job, and they’re bringing it to class, and they hand out copies. The thing that students do, oh, they’ll give me a copy, and everyone’s on their phone. I’m like, “That is terrible. Figure out who in your class has a day job, you can abuse the printer and bring a written sketch.” I think for all of those situations, the next step is what were you trying to do? What were you trying to say? What do we want to see more of?
My personal thing that I really pushed and want to get my students, the thing that motivates a lot of my work is point of view and self-expression. A student will put their scene up if they’re improvising through it the first time or they’re using it from a script. I go, “Cool, what was the point of view?” There’s a lot of different things that you can mean when you say that. I go, “What was your point of view?” I don’t always say it in these words. What were you trying to do? Then I go, great, that’s what you want. Here’s what we can change to make that louder, clearer.
I really am from the school of thought of if you know what you want to say, then we can take your idea and put it anywhere. I think the majority of my training at Second City with social and political satire being the base of that, it’s like most of our scenes in our running order, we want to be saying something about ourselves, the world, the government, relationships. We want to be saying something. I did a lot of work as a teacher to help students be able to say back. I made up all these exercises and a mad lib and all these things to say back to me, what is the thing that you want to do with this scene?
John: Students are coming in, they’re putting up this scene, you’re taking a look at it, and then you’re offering suggestions. What are the common knobs you find yourself adjusting with what they’re doing? Is it about like, “Okay, you have too much here. I didn’t understand.”
Ali: They all have too much.
John: They all have too much.
Ali: They always have too much.
John: Everyone always thinks a joke is funnier if you put more words in it. It never is.
Ali: Yes.
John: One thing I notice in sketches is that you have this blessing in the first few seconds to establish, this is the place, this is the concept. The stuff that would normally be the set, you’re creating that. Thank you for coming into my office. This should only take a few minutes. It’s fine. Great. We’ve done that. If a sketch didn’t have something to establish where we are, what we are, we’re floundering for those first few moments. We don’t know what we’re actually seeing. I’m sure a common complaint is like, I don’t know who this person is. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think of this person at the start. I’m listening, but I’m not fully taking it in because I don’t get why I’m supposed to be engaging with them.
Ali: I’ll see sketches from students, and I’ll tell them, I’ll go, “Okay, you have five pages for your sketch. You have about five minutes.” I go, “We should know who the people are, where are they by the middle of the first page, the most the bottom of the first page.” If we are explaining who, what, where beyond that, either this is like we’re aliens or something, and I really got to get on board for that. Then it’s also like, is this a sketch or is this a short play? Is this like our show bible? How many pages do we need to explain what the aliens are in the sketch show? I want to get to the thing that you want to do in this sketch.
The thing you want to do in the sketch is not explain who everybody is at this dinner party. The thing you want to get to is that somebody brought their girlfriend, and their girlfriend went to the rival college, and now we’re going to all have a freakout because she went to one school and everybody else went to the other. We want to get to the thing that is the most fun. That’s the first thing. Then it’s like, let’s give everyone something to do that everybody can have fun and make sure that everything we’re doing builds up to the point of view that the student wants to get across.
John: That’s right.
Ali: If there’s something in here, it’s like, this isn’t paying into this, we can pull that out. I had a student, they brought me a scene. They were all flamingos. They were doing really amazing flamingo work. Everyone–
John: The physical comedy, the embodiment. We love it
Ali: Embodiment. All their heads were going. They were moving around [onomatopoeia] on the stage and calling out flamingo specifics. At the end, I was like, “Cool, what were we trying to do? What was that scene about?” They were like, “Oh, that was about climate change.” I was like, “What?” [laughter] We didn’t say anything about climate change. [laughs]
John: I think that’s a great opportunity because you see students in front of you who are like, “That thing you’re doing is clever and funny.” The physical comedy that I can visualize it, which is great. What is the thing? What is the actual point of view? Once you’ve established that this thing, it has to go someplace. It has to build to another thing. It could just be a physical thing without words.
Ali: Yes, totally.
John: It’s them fighting over a fish. That could be hilarious, but it has to build. It’s not just an impersonation.
Ali: I remember this from when I was a student at Second City. One of my ensemble members brought me a sketch. He was a robot. It was this very complicated allegory for racism. The guy who was the basketball team owner that said all the nappy-headed hoes or whatever, he owns a basketball team of all robots. I was his human girlfriend. I was like, “What is this?” [laughter] He was like, “Well, there’s all this racism in the news.”
I finally had a meeting with our director/teacher, and I was like, “I’m not going to do this. This is entry-level stuff about racism. This doesn’t have any of my point of view in it. I’m a Black person in America.” Then the teacher was like, “Okay, take it back to this.” She was like, “Bring me the version that you want to do.” He brought back a scene where it was just a silent scene where he was a robot, had no racism in it. It was just like, he just wanted to be a robot, which I’m fine with.
It’s that sort of thing of we have to identify what is the thing that you really want to do in this scene. There’s no wrong answer. Whatever you say, I can turn that dial up. If we just want to be flamingos, then we’re going to think of 10 things flamingos can do on the stage. We’re going to give everybody a flamingo name, and maybe there’s a song we could do. If we want to talk about climate change, then the flamingos have to talk about climate change, or something has to happen about climate change.
John: Absolutely. As an instructor, ultimately, these classes will lead up to some sort of showcase, some sort of performance where everyone has to do those things. It’s your job to then figure out how to order this in a way that makes sense, that’s going to play for an audience. Can you talk about that?
Ali: Oh, yes. Again, that’s another thing. Talking about Second City, when I was there in those student classes, the main objective is everyone has to have one scene where they’re the star. Maybe you have 12 students in a class, we have to have 12 scenes where somebody’s the star. It’s probably about a 50-minute show, maybe a 40-minute show for some of those student showcases. Then you start looking like, “Okay, how do we get everybody in there?” That’s its own process, figuring out, teaching people how to make themselves the stars. That’s its own process.
The other part is you do have to structure and protect things, and there is a little bit of– We call it running order math. You want to open with something where the opener, ideally, you want to see every cast member, you want to hint at the theme of the show if there is one. You’re usually teaching the audience how the show’s going to go, how they’re going to watch the show. Then you’re probably putting in a two-person relationship scene, which is like a specialty of Second City. Not a lot of other sketch comedy theaters really do that two-person, so it’s like a grounded–
John: Give me an example of what that kind of scene would be.
Ali: SNL doesn’t really do them. Key & Peele doesn’t really do them. They look like a scene out of a movie or a TV show. It might be two people that have gone on a first date, and they’re standing outside the door. One person’s really nervous to kiss the other person, so this is like a silly version that you could do. Today, it’d be like, someone’s going to use ChatGPT to help them make the move. They’re talking to each other, and then going and typing in Chat and coming back. It would be that type of scene, a grounded, two-person relatable scene.
John: In Harry Met Sally, the restaurant scene where they’re faking the orgasm scene, would that be? That’s a two-person relationship scene.
Ali: That could be a good two-person relationship scene. The first time they have the conversation, who have you had great sex with? I don’t believe Sheldon. [laughter] That’s where you learn a little bit about each character. You get an insight into who they are. You maybe learn a little something about how the writer thinks about relationships or the theme maybe we’re going to explore. From then on, we’re trying to get variety. We’re trying to move fast.
Then we want to hit a point where we’re going to put the funniest scene in the show about two-thirds of the way down. Then you want to, as quickly as you can, get to the closer from that point. Again, the closer, we’re going to see everybody. We’re going to wrap up any themes. If our opener asks a question, it’ll be answered by the closer. Then in the middle, there’s variety. There’s a song. There’s a silence scene. There’s another relationship scene. There’s a group scene. Someone might have built an improv game. You’re just building variety in between those bookends.
John: Can you talk about blackout and that as a tool?
Ali: Yes. A blackout is a very short scene. Typically, some of the best blackouts are under 20, 30 seconds. 30 seconds is a lot for a blackout. It is one joke executed on stage where the punchline is some sort of reveal or twist. Then the lights blackout immediately afterward. They are used to subvert audience expectations because they expect a full scene. They’ve been watching for a little bit, and they’re like, “Oh, there’s another scene.” Then it ends after maybe three to five lines.
It also changes the pace of the show. They’re easily swapped in and outable, so they could be really good to put in something topical. A blackout, they have two constructions. One is inappropriate response. It would be, you think you know how this scene will go, and someone says something that is unexpected. A classic one at Second City, a guy’s driving his car. A carjacker comes up. He goes, “Get out of the car, get out of the car.” The guy’s like, “Oh my God, don’t hurt me.”
The carjacker gets in the car, and he goes, “Oh shit, it’s a stick shift. [laughter] Get back in the car, get back in the car, get back in the car.” Blackout. We think we know how a carjacking or a carjacking scene would go, and then you blackout.
The second type is called clash of context. Sometimes you hear them called a reframe. We believe we’re looking at one thing, and then that last line reveals it to be something else.
The one that I always talk about when teaching is there are two women, and they’re standing, and they’re popping their gum, and they’re rubbing their hands like this. They’re like, “He’s going to tell me I got to be professional at work. I’m going to take a break when I want to take a break.” Ah, ah, clear. [onomatopoeia] [laughter] He dead. Amazing blackout.
We think from the visual and the way they’re behaving, there are two ladies outside, maybe on a smoke break. Maybe they work at a store or something, and they’re hiding from their boss to file their nails, but they’re charging up a defibrillator, [onomatopoeia] and then they’re dead.
Blackouts typically work the best if they’re one of those things. You see in each situation, it’s a setup, and the setup is that, “Hi, thank you for coming into my office,” but then the reveal is either the clash of contacts, the inappropriate response, and then it gets big laugh, we’re out of it, and we go on to the next thing.
John: It’s a classic joke, but just an embodied joke, really, because the classic joke is, where does the general keep his armies? In his sleevies. Again, you have the wrong context for what the framing is. This is the light, and of course, we could go on for hours about this. I want some practical advice for our listeners who are thinking like, “Okay, well, Ali’s convinced me I probably should take one of these classes.” It’s geographically based, so you should go to wherever’s in your area. A second city in Chicago is, of course, iconic and classic, and there’s classes all the time. Los Angeles has Groundlings and UCB.
There’s other groups that do things. There’s obviously New York and other markets, too. How does a person know that it’s a good one? Do you look up reviews? Do you go to a show? How will you know that these people know what they’re talking about?
Ali: Yes, I would definitely go to a show if they have a professional resident component to be like, “Let me go look at that,” and if that’s fun and making you laugh, they probably know something. They probably know what they’re doing. Talk to people that have taken those classes, and you want to have a sense that they can offer you something, whether it’s a show at the end, but you shouldn’t have to pay to play. If you’re paying to take the class, you probably shouldn’t be paying to do the show at the end of the student workshop or something.
They should probably have some version of something free, a drop-in class, a student jam, a show that maybe at the end of the show, there’s a free improv set or something like that where you can get a look at what’s going on there. I would say those are probably a good bet.
John: Obviously, you’re building skills, but the other potential benefit here is you’re meeting people who are doing the kinds of things you want to do. Especially if you’re new in a city, you’re new in a place, or you’ve been in a city, but you don’t know anybody who works in this space, it’s a chance to meet some people who you might want to hang out with, work with, collaborate with. There’s a reason why they’re very good schools, but also it’s a bunch of really smart people who are all under the same roof who then rose up and did great things together. That’s another good argument for at least giving it a shot. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a comedy person, a comedy writer, it’s a good experience for you.
Ali: Yes. I just know the people that I was going through classes with, that I was watching on stage when I was a student, that I have taught as a teacher, they are making cool things, they’re performing, they’re writing, they’re getting stuff produced and written. The way that you do that networking is you just be a cool person and be a cool friend. If someone needs a skill and you have that skill, go help them out.
If someone wants you to read something for them and you’re both broke students, it’s like read that thing for them because when it comes time, if that person pops off and ends up in a writer’s room somewhere and they get a chance to recommend people for the next season or for the next time they staff up, they’re probably going to remember the person that was helpful and nice and took a genuine interest in them rather than the funniest person in the class. I say you can be 10 out of 10 funny, but if you’re 10 out of 10 asshole, nobody’s going to hire you, but if you’re 7 out of 10 funny and 0 out of 10 asshole, someone’s going to remember that you were really nice to counteract that.
They want to be in a room with you for eight hours a day. They want to be on Slack or Zoom with you for hours at a time. It’s going to be that person that was nice and helpful and helped use their office copier to make programs for their show. [chuckles]
John: Sounds good. All right, let’s answer some listener questions. The first one here I see is from Kate.
Drew: “I am writing my first big broad comedy, and holy hell, if Craig isn’t right, then it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written. A lot in the script is working really well, but in giving it to readers, I’m finding a lot of them turning into logic police when my mission is to have them along for a wild madcap, super heightened ride. My instinct is that the issue is actually very early in the script. While the initial couple of scenes are funny, something about them is signaling to people that this is a grounded world with grounded characters when that actually isn’t the case. I wanted to ask, how do you think about the opening scenes of a comedy? Any tricks, insights, or thoughts on how to use them to teach people how to watch a movie?”
John: Yes, this is the longer version of what we were just talking about.
Ali: Ooh.
John: Yes, those initial scenes are so crucial to get people on board for the kind of movie you’re trying to watch. It’s entirely possible you wrote some great scenes that are queuing people up for not the movie that they’re expecting to see. You got to go back and look at those scenes, or could you lose those first scenes and start later? Which may be the way into this is to get going in the middle of something that’s just a little bit more madcap. Ali, what’s your instinct?
Ali: I would wonder how much of those early scenes are grounded. I know that, okay, there’s information we definitely have to get out, but I would want something fantastical or big and broad to happen even in the middle of those early scenes, a little glimpse of it, a tiny little nugget of the silliness that’s to come. Because if those first scenes are grounded, and then we get into that turn out of the first act and it suddenly becomes silly, we haven’t taught our viewer that the world is silly and it’s going to get sillier. Every scene in that first grounding bit should have a touch of the silly, the fantastical, the broad, so that when that bigger turn happens, we’re in the world.
John: You’re probably not making a spoof. You’re not making an airplane. I think you would have told us if you were making that, but maybe you’re making a fish called Wanda or something that has some bigness to it. You’re going to need to see that piano falling early, the equivalent kind of thing happening there to let us know this is a world in which this kind of thing can happen. Also, I want to say, give it to us on the page. Let us know as a reader, take a look at your voice and your early pages, and are you cueing up the tone of where this is going to go? Because that could be a factor in it, too.
We just had Haley Z Boston on talking about her script for Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. In those initial pages, they’re really beautifully written, but they’re also very clearly setting up big things are going to happen. We know it because she is telling us that these kinds of things are going to happen. She’s giving us a sense like this is what it feels like, and you may just need to be a little bit more explicit on the page there, too. The reader from the jump really gets a sense of this is this kind of movie.
Ali: One more thought.
John: Please.
Ali: If folks are turning into logic police, I would look at what are the reactions of the characters to the wacky things happening. If they are always saying, “Oh my God, what?” or like, “Get out of here, this doesn’t make sense,” if the characters are rejecting the wacky stuff, then your audience is going to probably be trained that some level of that is what needs to happen here. If you think about like a fish out of water sketch, there’s a couple of characters in a fish out of water sketch that are amenable to the fish’s weird behavior. Even if they aren’t familiar with it or they don’t accept it, they’re like, “Okay, this is what this guy is.”
Or maybe they adopt a little bit of it by the end if you’re thinking of like a fish out of water sketch. Look at how many characters and how stridently they are rejecting the funny thing. If their reaction to those silly funny things happening is, “Oh my God, what are you talking about? This doesn’t make sense,”and I think that can probably be really attractive to get a quick hit out of a funny thing, like a reaction of like, “Say what?” but it’s like if everyone’s going say, “What,” the audience is going to start going and say, “What.”
John: Maybe I just have Rachel McAdams on the brain, but I’m thinking both to Game Night and Send Help. Both of those are broad comedies. She’s one of the crucial people in there who is, like in Send Help, her character is broad from the start. Even though we’re in an office environment, we know this is a movie that has the knobs turned up a little bit. Also, in Game Night, from the top, this is heightened. This is not a grounded level approach to things. Those might be a good thing for you to take a look at, Kate.
Hannah in New York writes, “At what point do I stop taking assistant gigs? I have a manager, I have an agent, I have a script with good producers attached, but I’ve not made money as a writer yet. I’m about to go to work as a director’s assistant on a show this summer. I love these jobs, but they take up all my time and energy. I force myself to write on the weekends, but it’s hard. This job will be great connections, working with a production company that did a big movie about a famous plastic doll, but sometimes I wonder if that’s worth it when I have so little time to write. What’s your thoughts?”
John: Ali, what’s your thought?
Ali: I don’t know. Again, this is like an area where I’m a little bit like, “Oh, that was not my path, so I don’t know exactly what the advice.”
John: Ali, what was your path? You went to Wellesley, and then how did you end up in Chicago? What were your jobs? Were you immediately working at Second City?
Ali: Yes. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I was actually a theater kid. I did theater, I did spoken word, I did speech and debate. When I went to college is when I first was like, “I want to do theater, but I don’t want to learn lines. I want to be too busy doing my homework.” I was like, “Oh, I’ll do improv.” You get to a point and you’re like, “Second City’s in the distance for improv.” You look up improv, it’s like Second City. I actually got a scholarship to Second City when I was a senior in college. When I graduated, I went and did classes. I did fellowships at Second City. They had one for students of color. They had this scholarship.
I was able to take classes for free or for much cheaper. There was a period of time where I just was taking a lot of classes, performing, and rehearsing five, six, seven nights a week. I always had a day job. I did not leave nepo baby allegation start today, but I was able to work for my mom. I worked as a temp. I was a bartender. I started teaching with Second City, but I did not quit any day job until I was a touring member of Second City because that’s really hard to have a day job at the same time, like a traditional nine-to-five day job. Also, I was writing recaps for Vulture. I was really in that personal essay boom that time.
I was cobbling together a lot of different things and started teaching, started directing when I stopped touring. I got Last Week Tonight because they reached out to me because they had been given my name when they were looking for people. I did the submission, I did the packet, the second round of the packet, and got hired. It really was doing everything all the time, and then moving into Last Week Tonight. I still did my recaps, essays, I wrote a book, I still go back to Second City and teach. That was my path.
It’s like, until someone really is going to pay you to do it, in my mind, it’s very hard to leave a day job or to leave that constellation of side gigs, and because having somewhere where you can have an output for your material where you’re putting it up or you’re working– Sketch was really useful because you could put something different up every week. It was really easy to get a group of friends together, hire a theater, put some material up constantly. I got my on-camera agent, Ashley Nicole Black, and some other great people in Chicago said, “We all want agents. We’re really good.
We want agents,” and put together a showcase, and everyone wrote five minutes of solo material and put it up. For me, that period of constantly putting material up, trying it, taking all of that while having my recaps, which were an outlet for my work, all of that was going in tandem.
John: I relate to Hannah’s question so much because her experience was sort of my experience too where I was working as an assistant to producers, but at the same time, I landed an agent, I was starting to take meetings. It was hard for me to get my writing done and all this other stuff. It was weird for me to be answering phone calls for other people while also trying to set stuff up herself. I want to underline what Ali is saying. There’s no curse to day jobs. Day jobs are good. They’re keeping you employed. At a certain point, you may want to step back from jobs that are keeping you from writing. Ali had the opportunity.
Her day job was also getting her the experience and exposure and all these things. Hannah, in your case, you’re working as a director’s assistant on a show. That’s great. It looks like it’s not your first time doing this. At a certain point, you may need to say, “I got to focus on my own stuff and take the job that requires less of your mental time and focus so you can really focus on your own stuff.” Some of the most productive times I had writing was I was an intern at Universal, and my job was just so mindless. I was just filing physical files and papers. It’s just like I came home from work. It’s like I didn’t use my brain at all, and I could write at night.
If you can’t get writing done, you may need to pull back. This could be the time to pull back, or you could say, “After this job, this is my last of these. I’m going to spend six months really focused on my writing here.” You won’t know until the next thing happens whether you made the right choice or not is the the bummer here. You’re asking the right questions, at least. Let’s do our One Cool Things. Ali, what do you have for us?
Ali: This is very silly and small. I have a self-inking stamp. It’s a star with a little smiley face like I am a child. When I was writing my book, it was a book that had a lot of sections and segments and sidebars, and I wanted something to keep me motivated and to be like a little reward. It’s a little, let me find a piece of paper and show you. You take your little stamp and it puts a little star-
John: Aww.
Ali: -with a smiley face on the paper.
John: It’s like you’re a teacher, but you’re giving yourself a star.
Ali: I’m giving myself a star. It has a really satisfying, let me see if I can hold it up to the microphone, has a really satisfying click. This was under $10 online. If you are someone that you need a little treat, a little gold star. Also, the visual progress of seeing, I would print out pages that had all the different segments that I had to do for each chapter. As I would get a segment done, I would put a little star next to it.
John: I lover it.
Ali: You can have a little fun with your writing, find a way to make it fun and silly for you. That was my little silly way. [laughs]
John: Fantastic. More importantly, this was helping you write your book Reality TV for Snobs, which we’ll put a link in the show notes too, and everyone should pre-order immediately like we will.
Ali: Yes, thank you.
John: Pre-orders are how books get sold. Pre-orders-
Ali: Very important.
John: -are super, super important, so I cannot wait to read it. I am currently reading Anne Libera’s book Funnier. She is a teacher at Second City. It’s really good. Fundamentally talking about her theory of comedy, having taught comedy for a long time and seeing people from all different schools of comedy coming through there and different ways of doing things from very physical people to the witty folks and very dark people, and how you find a blend and how you get each person to the best version of what they are there to do. I’m really enjoying it.
It feels like the script in this book, but very specifically about crafting comedy, so I’d highly recommend that. As a bonus, we can take a look at Ashley Padilla on Saturday Night Live. She’s one of the breakout people on Saturday Night Live. She’s the cast member-
Ali: So funny.
John: -who’s getting the most screen time there. She’s so funny. Her comic timing and her ability to draw out a moment and just sit in a moment of pain. She has this really neat gift. I’m going to link to an article by Jason Zinoman writing for New York Times about her and going through some of her sketches and just how she’s able to pull out these moments that are just great. This is a very strong cast they have right now with some superstar players, but she just has a different energy that is so fun and so exciting to see because it’s not just she’s a master impressionist or anything else, but she’s just–
Ali: She’s a really good sketch actress.
John: Yes.
Ali: It’s a very specific style of timing and pacing and development of relatable characters and characters that are relatable with a twist. It is such an interesting, really fun thing to see someone who’s a great, great sketch actress, actor on TV. It’s great.
John: It’s great. I don’t have a sense of how much she’s writing because everything on SNL is written by a bunch of people, but it feels like there are sketches that are just so in her zone and in her pocket that it’s great. It’s worth watching every week, but I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article, which has the clips out to some of her sketches from the last two seasons, which are so good. That is our show this week. Descriptions is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matt Gillespie. If you have an outro, you can send it to the link to ask@johnaugust.com.
That is the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books, including many university bookstores, apparently. You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have T-shirts, and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.
Thank you again to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Working in Chicago. You’ll get the full scoop of Chicago. Ali, an absolute pleasure. I’m so excited to get to see you again after these weeks and months leading up to this. An absolute delight. Thank you so much for coming on.
Ali: Thanks so much for having me. This was great.
John: Yay.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Ali.
Ali: Yes.
John: You, of all of the folks on the negotiating committee, were the one in Chicago. It’s important for people to understand that 85% of members in the Writers Guild live in either LA or New York, and then you’re the 15% of members who are Chicago and other parts across the country. That number will probably grow over the years because people are able to move out of the big cities to do their work because more stuff is going remote, but you’ve been there from the start. Talk to us about working on Last Week Tonight, but entirely from Chicago. What is your day like, and how are you interacting with the team if you’re not there in person, or is anybody in person?
Ali: I was hired in July of 2020, so peak pandemic. John was still making the show in the void. He was still recording on his own. We were all in a lot of far-flung places. When they started to talk about opening the office back up, they already had some version of a hybrid workflow because when you’re on an assignment, you don’t have to go into the office. You could work from home even before the pandemic. People had a routine where they would come into the office, have a couple meetings, and then go home at lunch and then be at home for a few days.
A lot of these workflows worked out for some people not being there, but at first, it was like, “Got to make a home office in my one bedroom with my boyfriend and we’re both at home,” and we had to figure that out. I joke, our work is a lot of writing individually. It’s a lot of writing term papers and jokes. The typical image of, oh, a writer’s room where we’re all around a table yelling things out, trying to one-up each other. We don’t really do that. It is a workflow that is really suited to being remote, but it is interesting because most of the people are in New York. There was someone in LA. There’s someone in Texas.
There’s someone in Colorado. There’s a few people in other places on the East Coast. It is a little like you’re constantly hearing about what’s going on in New York or they’re talking about what the weather’s like, or some event that’s happening. You’re a little like, “Okay, guys, Chicago has stuff, too. We have rain today.”
John: Is there still an office? Is there still a place where people go in, and there are a bunch of writers who are in one physical space, or is everybody remote at this point?
Ali: There’s an office. People go in. A lot of what we do is individual and over Zoom anyway. Even if you’re in the office, you’re coming in and out of meeting with different departments or waiting for an assignment to come down, or waiting for something to be handed back to you for you to go off and work.
I try and go into the office, I don’t know, two or three times a year. The writers will all do some of our assignments together. We’ll be like, “Okay, we’ll plan to all be there on this day so we can do this part of our work together.” It’s not an office where it’s like one person has to take notes what everybody’s throwing out. We’re all typing on our individual laptops when we’re in person anyway.
John: That’s great. To the degree you’re allowed to talk about it, you’re saying these are term papers with jokes. What does it all get fed into? What is the central nexus of everything you’re doing that it goes into? I picture the show as being one long bit of text that’s all fed into the thing because he’s at a desk through most of this talking to camera. What is that process? How does that happen?
Ali: The lifespan of an episode of the A story, the main story, is around six weeks-
John: Wow.
Ali: -from beginning. The idea gets pitched to John taping it. Research and footage, we have a research department and a footage department, and they will compile a research memo and a footage document. The research memo, they’ll call experts, and they’ll read books and read different articles and compile that into a big document. Then footage, we’ll find basically any time that topic has been on TV, or in documentary or in C-Span or on and on. Then we will take the footage and research documents. We’ll have meetings like, “What did we find? What’s interesting?” The writers will go off, and they will turn it into an outline.
They’ll say, “Here’s the video clips I would use, the quotes that I would use. Here’s how I would tell the story. Here’s the different chapters,” and then we turn the outlines into John and Tim. They combine it into one outline. “Oh, we like the way Ali found this clip, and this person found this.” Then we take it, we go write the script, go write our draft. That’s where we’re doing the jokes, like what we think John would say. If we’re putting in jokes, where every joke you write, you’re putting in two, three, four. I always write way too many, so I write five or six alts, different versions or different setups or whatever for the joke.
Then all that gets handed in. John and Tim again pick their favorite, and that gets turned into the script, and then we work from that one script for the different rewrite processes that exist.
John: That’s great. Last Week Tonight, unlike The Daily Show, which tends to send a correspondent out to do those things. I don’t want to say it’s traditional, but it’s more what we’re used to. To go out reporting a story and coming back, and then you’re trying to find a funny way to report that. The host is throwing out to the thing, and then coming back to the thing. This is all just, it’s a monologue with a lot of footage and other things that go with it. It’s also different than the SNL Weekend Update kind of thing, which is just like, “We need to have the funny visual that goes with it, but it’s just the host.”
It’s a more complicated thing, and that’s why I can understand why it takes six weeks to do it. It’s honestly like a podcast series would do a similar kind of thing where you need to go out and you need to find and research all this stuff, and figure out, how are we talking about this topic in this show? It’s great, and it’s very specific. Did you know that you could do it? Because they approach you.
Ali: [laughs] Yes.
John: You’re a smart woman, but you’re a smart woman who has done a lot of sketch before this. This is a different kind of writing. How did you get up to speed with it?
Ali: There was a moment, so they said, “Here’s the packet.” They made a little sampler packet for the submission. I was sitting there, and I was like, “Oh my God, how am I going to do this?” Then I had a moment where I went, “Oh, it’s a recap.”
John: Oh, yes, it is, isn’t it?
Ali: I write a lot of those. I was like, “I know how to recap a story from beginning to end. What are the funny things? What little digressions can we take?” It was really like my recaps at Vulture, they’re 1,500, 2,000 more words that I’m writing a week from a two-hour episode of The Bachelor or an episode of Real Housewives or something. I looked at it and I said, “Okay, it’s a recap. I just have to make sure I put in alts for my jokes.” Also, I had worked at Cards Against Humanity. The skill from there that helped was I could find a setup or an idea for a joke, and then find as many alts as possible by just substituting, really doing a fill-in-the-blank.
One of the things in my packet, we talked about something that was tangential, but I included it as the Streisand effect. The more you hide something, the more it shows up, and it came because Barbra Streisand tried to keep her house off Google images or something like that. They said it led to this many Google searches or searches for her house. I said, “Okay, but 50,000 of those were,” and then I had a blank, and I thought, “Who would be the different people trying to see Barbra Streisand’s house?” One was Dionne Warwick trying to case the joint because she’s going to go in and rob Barbra Streisand.
One was Barbra Streisand’s genetically cloned dogs trying to plan an escape route. One was Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s father, I guess he dated Barbra Streisand, trying to get a glimpse of that bastard, James Brolin. It was like I had the setup. I knew what I wanted the joke to be, and then I could just plug in different versions of the result, and so that sort of amalgamation of all these different things and making it look like how they wrote their scripts was how that packet came together.
John: That’s awesome. Born in Chicago, living in Chicago, you want to stay in Chicago?
Ali: I think so. It would have to be a very tremendous opportunity to draw me away. My family’s here. My boyfriend has two of his sisters are here. You can’t beat making WGA minimum on Chicago prices. It’s a little bit of a boost. I really love it. Being able to go, like we were talking about, go back and teach and work with students is also really nice. It’s just good for my brain to kind of like I have all this sketch knowledge and exercises and stuff I’ve made to get them out of my brain, but also to see what people are working on and wanting to help students. My Mom jokes that that’s my volunteer work.
John: Working on Last Week, so they came and found you. Do you have an agent, a manager? Do you have people who are out there like, “This is Ali Barthwell, you need to pay attention to her,” or do you need that for what you’re doing?
Ali: I don’t have an agent or a manager. I remember when I got hired and tweeted about it, my tweet blew up back when Twitter was like, “So am I still a good place?” I had some agents and managers reaching out, and some of it was like, “The way this person is talking about what they think my value is to them,” I was like, “I don’t know if I want–” A few people in the summer of 2020, some agents being like, “I think it’d be really great to have a black woman on my roster of clients.” I don’t think so. Then also part of it was just like, “I don’t know if I want to give up 15%.” [laughs]
John: That’s a real thing.
Ali: I now have a literary agent for my book, so I’m really getting to see what that relationship is like. I always say I never expected to end up in TV. I never knew how it worked to get to be able to do it. I know the kind of work that I like to do, and I think it can be across all genres. Again, like I said, I love satire and expressing myself and helping other people express themselves and using comedy and humor to educate and to expose people to points of view that they maybe wouldn’t have encountered.
I think whatever I do next, I hope to do this job for 10 million years, but whatever I do next or in addition to this, that’s the thing that’s motivating me, and it helps with the barometer of like, “Is this good to do? Is this what I want to do?” and being able to have that internal check for myself.
John: I also love seeing in the background of your shot, the Writers Guild Awards and the Emmys there, which is lovely too.
Ali: Oh, a custom-built California Closets-
John: Stain?
Ali: -bookcase.
John: Absolutely. How often do Chicago Custom Closets have to build for these awards?
Ali: Listen, she did not seem fazed, but I do think it was a fun challenge to really get the dimensions of each box. Then it was I built for what I had and not to grow, so we’re going to have to get creative on how to build out on this, the livid family memo–
John: Yes, you don’t want to crowd them [laughter] Ali, an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you again for your work on the Negotiating Committee. It was just one of the highlights, really many highlights of the Negotiating Committee. We had an effing great group. It was a delight getting to spend some time with you, both then and today. Thanks so much, Ali.
Ali: Thanks so much for having me. Union strong.
John: Union strong.
Ali: Union forever.
John: Forever.
Links:
- Ali Barthwell
- Preorder Ali’s new book, Reality TV for Snobs
- The Second City
- Pre-inked star stamps
- The Padilla Pause: How the Breakout Star of SNL Nails Comic Timing by Jason Zinoman for NYTimes
- Funnier by Anne Libera
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- Outro by Matt Gillespie (send us yours!)
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