FOT Forum
FOT Community => General Discussion => Topic started by: Matthew_S on June 03, 2008, 03:11:55 PM
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For those interested, Robert Smigel's interview with the AV club includes a couple of tidbits about Andy Breckman's role in writing the TV Funhouse show.
http://www.avclub.com/content/node/80650/print/
The relevant bits:
AVC: Tell me about the DVD. Are there going to be commentaries?
RS: Yes. Dino and myself and Doug Dale, the host of the show, did commentary on all eight episodes. I brought in Andy Breckman for a couple of episodes. He's a really great comedy writer, the guy who created Monk. He worked on the show just sort of when he could at the time, and he came up with the "Stedman" cartoon, which is probably funnier than any cartoon I came up with on SNL.
AVC: I'm partial to the cartoon about the superhero who's always trying to get his alter ego laid.
RS: Oh, "Wonderman"? That was mine. Thank you. I did the voice of that guy, too. Most people go bananas over the "Stedman" cartoon. I actually rejected it at first, because it was too mean for me. I have no problem making fun of people, but there are certain things that make me uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable about drug addiction jokes. Addiction humor sometimes makes me uncomfortable, because I feel sorry for the people it targets. It's something that they can't necessarily help. It's a disease. It's a hard thing for me to laugh at. I don't laugh at handicapped jokes very easily. Things where people can't help it, I get into trouble. In this case, the idea that Oprah was unattractive actually made me uncomfortable. The whole idea that Stedman can't stand to have sex with her made me uncomfortable. But I revisited it a week later, and understood it was far too funny to adhere to that rule.
AVC: Funny excuses an awful lot.
RS: Yeah, without question, that's true. That should be called the Michael Richards rule. That was the cardinal crime. He was trying to be ironic and failing in the worst possible way. His rage underneath, his attempt at irony was so transparent you really were confused at what he was trying to do.
AVC: You talked a little bit about being uncomfortable with jokes about drug addiction. But there was a fair amount of drug humor on TV Funhouse.
RS: But it wasn't making fun of people who were really suffering from a serious addiction, a problem. I actually did break the rule on TV Funhouse. I broke the rule with another Andy Breckman sketch, which was called "Kidder, Downey, and Heche." It was such a strange idea that I thought it was too funny not to do. I can't even remember the premise now. Because all three of them had wandered aimlessly in a drunken or drug-induced stupor into somebody's house, in the cartoon they tried to use this "talent" as a skill and become private investigators. One time Conan wanted me to do the lips of Nick Nolte's mug shot, and [head writer Mike] Sweeney approached me about this and I was like, "Really? I feel so bad for the guy. He's got a problem he's working through. He was caught in this awful state." And we didn't do it, and literally a month later, Steve Martin in his monologue at the Academy Awards, it was a punch line to one of his monologue jokes, and there on the Kodak Stage or the Shrine Auditorium was a gigantic Nick Nolte shot. The whole world laughed at him. So, I guess I was too squeamish or something. People would probably be surprised that I do try to draw the line at certain points. With the Zohan movie, I drew a lot of the lines. There are going to be people on both sides who disagree and they'll think I'm crazy to say things like that. "What do you mean restraint? Are you kidding me, with the Hezbollah Hotline?" Or something like that. But, I don't know, it's not like we were saying these three guys were terrorists. We were kind of making the point that they weren't.
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Great Interview. Smigel is a more engaging and candid interviewee than I imagined.