Bill Lawrence Says ‘To Call It a Comedy, You Better Be Joke-Forward’ at Variety’s A Night in the Writers Room
The writers behind some of this year’s hottest comedy series took on Variety’s A Night in the Writers Room: Awards Season Edition to discuss the landscape of laughter on TV.
The panel, moderated by Variety‘s Michael Schneider, kicked off with a debate about whether there is an easily defined line between comedy and drama. Nick Bakay, co-creator of Max’s “Bookie” starring Sebastian Maniscalco, said he “totally disagrees” with the notion that there is no clear separation between the two genres.
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“There’s absolutely a line between comedy and drama. And drama should not enter into comedy, and it has. There’s a lot of shows that are just not particularly funny and they’re getting…” he said, trailing off before naming names.
Later in the conversation, Bakay called out the legal dramedy “Ally McBeal,” which won the Emmy for best comedy in 1999.
“There are no jokes in this!” Bakay said. “Comedy should still involve joke writing once a week.”
Bill Lawrence, the mastermind behind “Scrubs,” “Ted Lasso” and this year’s “Shrinking,” said: “Look, there’s some dramas that are funny, man … I wouldn’t blink twice if ‘Succession’ won [the Emmy for] best comedy — that show was fucking funny. It was so darkly funny, I thought it was hysterical.”
He continued, “But I thought it was hysterical because it had jokes. And I think you can do any type of show that has pathos and drama and emotion and call it a drama if you want. But I think to call it a comedy, you better be joke-forward and arguably have some big, serious laughs — or at least be attempting it in every shot.”
Brian Jordan Alvarez, who created and stars in FX’s “English Teacher,” said the only thing his writers room takes seriously is the “joke density.”
Lawrence said when he was first pitching “Scrubs,” the president of one of the major TV networks said, “I don’t think you can do broad, silly comedy and then switch gears and have people give a crap about whether or not a patient is living or dying.”
Lawrence fired back, “I think you can if you turn the lights down and play an indie song,” which the executive apparently “didn’t find funny at all.”
Jen Statsky of “Hacks” recalled working as a writer for Jimmy Fallon and churning out five pages of jokes per day, “which is so different from what we’re talking about now … sometimes you make a comedy with no jokes.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, “Laid” showrunners Nahnatchka Khan and Sally Bradford McKenna teased their upcoming series, which stars Stephanie Hsu as a woman whose sexual partners all begin mysteriously dying in chronological order of when she slept with them.
“St. Denis Medical” creator Eric Ledgin joked, “You know what? This happened to me.”
“Write what you know,” Khan quipped. “We just try to be relatable at every level.”
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