* * *
From: Sarah Silverman
Date: February 26, 2009 4:59:39 PM PST
Subject: FROM SARAH, DAN, ROB AND HEIDI.
Lauren Doug and Gary,
We are going around and around, fighting over cuts, and it's awful. We love this show too much to do it this way. We'd rather end it now having done 22 perfect shows we are so proud of than grind out shows we don't believe in only to be hidden with no promotion 14 months after we last aired. We have to like ourselves enough to believe we will work again, and this isn't what we have to settle for. It's not about the money, if it was we would have never been here. It's the quality. Thank you so much for all your effort. I know you guys did all you could to get us what you did. We just can't make it work. We can't make a boot out of a sandal.
So sadly, Sarah, Dan, Rob and Heidi
* * *
It was over.
The next day, Comedy Central asked us if we could do the show if they added a little more to the budget, but we still didn't think it was enough to do it without significantly compromising quality. We could have made a television show with the money they were offering, but it wouldn't look anything like the one we had been making. We sent another e-mail:
* * *
From: Sarah Silverman
Sent: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 4:39 pm
Subject: FROM US AGAIN...
Lauren, Doug and Gary,
There's no need to repeat what was said in our last e-mail, but it all still stands. We know you are strapped. But if you really want to know what it would take for us to have any desire to come back, it would be if we had the same budget as last year. No more, just the same. We are assuming this will be a no go, and we're prepared for that, but that's what it would take to make it worth it. After seven months of waiting to be picked up and then the evisceration of our budget, we have totally lost our boners for doing this show and are more excited about the thought of what could be next for us. It's just not enticing to change the show from this wonderful thing to a sketchy looking stage show. Television series that completely retool midstream never, ever work, unless they bring in Ted McGinley, which was the next inevitable step for us.
Assuming we are moving on, we will do so with all the great memories and pride of having done an amazing show.
Thank you so much for everything.
Love, Sarah Rob Dan and Heidi
* * *
The next day we were informed that Lauren Corrao (the West Coast president of the network at that time) had supposedly come up with a plan to save the show. She had worked out a deal with LOGO, the gay-oriented network within the MTV Networks group of cable channels, to subsidize the rest of the money needed for our production costs in exchange for the right to broadcast our first reruns. That meant we were pretty much looking at the budget we'd had for the previous season. It was still a net reduction with the various expense increases, but it was manageable.
Within a few weeks we were back in the writers' room, laughing our heads off, more excited than ever about the show. The gays had saved us.
* * *
I Literally Work with a Bunch of Dicks. By That, I Mean That There Are Actual Penises Everywhere I Look. Seriously.
* * *
Kevin Nealon once spent an hour hanging out in the TSSP writers' room. As he was leaving, he turned to me.
"This group reminds me of a real Harvard crew," referring to the Harvard Lampoon-bred writers that populate SNL and 30 Rock and Frasier and such. I was so proud.
"Really??"
He looked at me as if I was completely insane. "No."
All of the foregoing drama about the show's near demise might have suggested that what we were fighting to save was a precious, delicate cultural treasure, crafted by some historic gathering of extraordinary wits and talents, not seen since the Algonquin Round Table. But as Kevin will tell you, that is not the case. The TSSP writers are sick, depraved fucks, and I don't say that with bravado. I don't think being a sick, depraved fuck is necessarily the path to comedy immortality. I just happen to love these particular sick fucks, and I love the fact that our cramped little writers' room is a sanctuary, a place where you are not only safe, but encouraged, to completely indulge your primal instincts. In that way, it's like the opposite of most jobs.
This unprofessional behavior was established on day one when writer (and recurring cast member) Chris Romano's penis made its first appearance. Chris is a small, sweet, lean, frenetic, baby-faced monkey of a man. He has no social filter, no sense of physical, medical, or economic danger, and a thick New Hampshire accent. (Shockingly, he's from Nashua, the next town over from where I grew up, though we didn't meet until Rob and Dan Harmon brought him and his writing partner, Eric Falconer, onto the show.) Chris rubs his crotch on everything, animate and inanimate, his bosses included, regardless of whether they're in the mood for it. He is the funniest person I have ever met in my entire life, and it just so happens that one of the main ways he expresses himself is by taking his penis out of his pants. For Chris, it's an especially bold move, because his penis, to put it delicately, does not have an imposing presence; it's really more the promise of a penis. I don't claim that this habit of his is witty or original, but every time he pulls out his cock, it strikes me as hilarious. If for no other reason than that he seems to get so much pleasure from it. And to be fair, Chris does it as cleverly as anyone possibly could. For example, he'll walk into the room with his penis poking through a hole in the center of a paper napkin, and gleefully declare in his New Hampshire brogue, "My dick just ate lob-stah."
The fact that I laugh at this kind of thing has consequences, of course. It explicitly encourages such behavior, signaling not just that it's acceptable, but actually preferable. Because the truth about all this phallic mischief is that it slows down the writing process. In fact, slowing down the writing process is the whole point. Figuring out how to structure a satisfying story is a gigantic headache, and often not much fun. The gratification only comes many months later when the episodes finally air, whereas pulling down your pants is immediately rewarding.
One thing about writers: We tend to be lazy as shit, but become very motivated in pursuit of a joke. Case in point, the morning we were to move into our new offices, Chris Romano and his writing partner, Eric Falconer, woke up extra early. They broke into Rob's sparkling new office, and with the teamwork that made them such stars in our writers' room, Falconer took a gigantic shit in Rob's toilet. I don't know what he did with the toilet paper, because there was none present in the bowl. This is called "love of your craft." Needless to say, the bowel movement was not flushed. Instead, Romano placed on it a hand-made flag made from toothpick and napkin, on which was written, simply, "I know what you did last summer."
Romano let me draw a swastika on his forehead, and I let him rape executive producer-writer-creator-director Rob Schrab.
I asked Dan if he wanted to join the "Pen 15" club. He did.
Every season we end up spending the first two or three weeks of writing in my apartment before we can find office space.
The costs of doing business this way go beyond mere distraction. One of them, especially over a period of years, is a complete loss of perspective. Example: At the end of the writing phase for season three, Harris Wittels took a job writing for NBC's Parks and Recreation. It was an enormous step up in income, and a chance to work for a major network, and with the amazing and adorable Amy Poehler. We were all so excited for him. To mark his first day of work, we ordered a huge bouquet of corny balloons and made a gigantic collage of all the photos we had of him with his penis out, and had the whole thing delivered to his new studio offices. It was our way of saying We're rooting for you, pal--and to let his new colleagues know a little bit about their newly hired collaborator. Harris, however, intercepted the collage and stashed it in his office before anyone could see it.
A few weeks later, I called Harris to see how it was going. Afterward, I joined Rob Schrab and Dan Sterling in a
meeting and gave them the scandalous report:
"Harris says he's having a great time at Parks and Rec, but he said he feels like if he farted or took out his penis he'd be fired."
Dan looked at me and asked me to really think about what I just said. "Is there any job, other than this one, in which that would not be the case?"
He was right, of course. I had totally forgotten that we all turned into fucking animals in that room.
On a conference call with the network, I started scratching Dan's head, which puts him in a semitrance. I was able to write this, take a picture of it with my phone, and e-mail it to him without his noticing. Watching him open this e-mail was one of my prouder moments.
Dan is smart and uses big words like "balaclava" and "buttressed," and he is tortured by us for it, as illustrated by this new cereal created by Rob Schrab.
Writer Chelsea Peretti left her hair clip in the writers' room. We took this picture and e-mailed it to her (down the hall in her office) with the subject heading, "Did you leave this in the writers' room?" Note: This is writer Harris Wittels's penis. I wouldn't want him to go uncredited here. (His parents are so proud right now!!)
There might have been a microscopic trace of resentment in Dan's query. He's the one who suffers most from the relentless childishness and perversion. As head writer, it's his job to keep the discussion in the room going, and to deliver outlines and scripts on schedule. The joy on my face when the writers pull down their pants or faux-rape each other is matched in intensity by the heartbreak on Dan's. It's hard to be the killjoy, the guy whose job it is to stop the laughter, and nowhere is this truer than in a room full of comedy writers.
I should mention that among this handful of writers there were two women, equally as nuts. There was Chelsea Peretti, who took a pregnancy test on her first day of work and shared the pee-drenched result with us as it materialized. And, of course, there was I, who remained at all times a perfect lady, with the possible exception of once peeing (just a tiny bit) on the rug in Dan's office, and one time exposing just the very tippy-top of my pubes.
Dan has a nearly permanent look of agony on his face, relies heavily on sleeping pills, and, in the four years we've worked together, has lost almost all of his hair. The fact that he's the "mature" one, cast as the bad cop on the staff, is especially ironic because he is arguably the most disturbed one among us. Dan reads the New York Times and effortlessly spouts words like "perspicacious," but when it comes to putting farts and doody into the scripts, he has less restraint, less reverence for "Make It a Treat," than anyone on the staff. As much as he's the one who has to keep us on track and maintain our focus, my favorite part of Dan is that he is by far the hardest laugher of all of us. There is no better way to nurture comedy than watching tears of laughter run down your boss's face, and he offers that in abundance.
After the first season of TSSP, it wasn't clear when or if we'd be picked up for another season. So when Dan was offered a job running The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, he took it. A couple of months later, I called him in New York and asked how it was going. The job was very exciting, he said, but I heard something wistful in his voice. In what seemed to be a lament, he added, "No one farts here." But pretty soon, TSSP did get renewed for a second season. Dan moved back to L.A. and got a face full of what he'd been missing.
After fifteen years of making my living in stand-up, The Sarah Silverman Program has been a lesson in collaboration. Rob, Dan, and I live by the mantra "Whoever is most passionate." If I was mentoring someone, that's the Shandling-esque advice I would proffer: Find people you really respect and trust, and then at each decision, heed the most passionate voice. I love that because it eliminates nearly all struggle. And when you're doing a show that's mostly about farts, penises, and vaginas, there should be as little struggle as possible.
THE SECOND-MOST-IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE: LOVE
At the time that this book is being written, I am single. If you've ever heard that song by Beyonce, "Single Ladies," I am one of the people she's singing about. I have to be, because she sings, "All the single ladies." If she didn't mean to include me in that, then she really needs to choose her words more carefully.
I was recently dating a man, but it's over. His name was Ronald, and he seemed like a serious candidate, but he said that he couldn't get past his allergy to my cat. I insisted that I didn't have a cat, but he refused to believe me. He held that the cat's name was Dorothy, and that it was a French Short-Whiskered Nectarine Hunter. This infuriated me. I would never name my cat Dorothy, nor would I name it anything else, unless it actually existed, which it doesn't. Also, I looked at the Cat Fanciers' Association official registry of pedigreed cats, and there's no such thing as a French Short-Whiskered Nectarine Hunter.
Still, I felt that Ronald and I had something special, something worth fighting for. I went to see him and explained that I'd taken Dorothy to an animal shelter, and that they had immediately euthanized her. I added that they took serious sadistic pleasure in it, and that the process of her execution was long enough and painful enough that Dorothy was no doubt forced to reflect on the anguish she'd caused in her life. I told Ronald that I watched the cremation of Dorothy's corpse until the final bits of her bone turned to ash, just to make sure there was no chance of my man ever being sickened by that animal again.
And while none of that was true, I did take steps in real life to make sure Ronald felt attended to in the relationship, allergy-wise. I had actually taken a new apartment, burned all of my clothes and bought all new ones, and traded in my old mattress for one of those spaceship-y foam ones. He was impressed with my efforts, but he still hesitated. He said that he suddenly realized it wasn't his cat allergy that bothered him about me. I asked if he was sure. He said he was, and he pointed to an enormous, morbidly obese Himalayan that lounged on his couch. It was so coated in dander flakes that it reminded me of the sugar-dusted fruit tarts at the cafe near the apartment I had lived in until 10:00 a.m. I was angry and hungry. All this time, he had a cat! I was also fairly sexed-up, and this fact just made me angrier. Here I was with this very immediate bodily need, and our relationship was in such a state that it would take us forever to ramp up into sex. All the fighting and crying and negotiating and manipulating that we'd have to go through before we could make an organic segue to intercourse--it could have taken hours.
I was beginning to suspect he wasn't being honest with me about his reasons for wanting to end our relationship. Can you imagine a guy actually behaving like this? I did not get into the romance business to have some guy avoid saying hurtful things to me. I'm sorry to sound cruel, but his behavior was exactly like Adolf Hitler's. I left Ronald's apartment, went home, and simultaneously dined, cried, and masturbated. In the midst of doing that, I also laughed. And then I thought, What the hell do I need a man for anyway? Everything that I enjoy, I seem to be able to do with two hands, a fork, and an iPhone.*
But that kind of thinking is hackneyed and glib. And there is one thing that I really, really like to have company for. Watching TV. I'm not particularly needy in relationships, I actually demand a fair amount of space. But I really like to be in bed with another human being and watch TV. That's as intimate and reassuring and tender as it gets for me. I find dating exhausting and uninteresting, and I really would like to skip over the hours of conversation that you need just to get up to speed on each other's lives, and the stories I've told a million times. I just want to get to the watching TV in bed. If you're on a date with me, you can be certain that this is what I'm evaluating you for--how good is it going to be, cuddling with you in bed and watching Damages? I'm also looking to see if you have clean teeth. For me, anything less than very clean teeth is fucking disgusting.
Here's what I would like to do: I would like to get into bed with a DVD of Damages and have a line of men cue up at my door. I would station a dental hygienist at the front of the line who would examine the men's teeth. Upon passing inspection, she (I've never met a male hygienist, a
nd neither have you) would send them back to my bedroom, one at time, in intervals of ten minutes, during which I would cuddle with them and watch Damages. Leaving nothing to chance, using some sort of medical telemetry, I would have a clinician take basic readings of my heart rate and brain waves, and create a comparison chart to illustrate which candidate was the most soothing presence for me. After reviewing all the data from what will now be known in diagnostic manuals throughout the world as the Silverman-Damages-Nuzzle-Test, I will make my selection. And, of course, soon thereafter, we will make love in a similar fashion to mentally diseased animals on a meth binge.
JEW
I don't remember if I mentioned this to you before, but I am Jewish. If my publisher had a sense of decency, they would have printed that disclaimer prominently on the book cover. Otherwise, how would you necessarily know? I mean I can't think of anything about me that really says "Jew!!" I even once spent a few weeks in Fjardabyggd, Iceland, and blended in with the Nordic Gentile population seamlessly--although there was an incident in which an intoxicated Icelandic shepherd mistook my thick black hair for a scouring pad and tried to use it to scrub off the fermented shark meat he had earlier vomited onto the antlers of his reindeer. But you know how Icelandic shepherds can be--they're big-picture guys. They can't make much sense of what's right in front of their faces.