Bob Odenkirk

(Excerpt from Bob Odenkirk interview)

How early did your interest in comedy begin?

Very early. I got into comedy when I was a little kid. I would goof around with my brothers and sisters at the dinner table. My brother Bill and I would imitate the people we met in the course of a day, while the rest of my family ate dinner and laughed. Bill now writes for The Simpsons. Then, in junior high, I would write and perform sketches for school projects. I would do these sketches in various classrooms, and not just in my classes—the school would let me go around and do them in other rooms too.

So, that’s really where it all started, but I never thought about writing and performing comedy for a living until I went to college, at Marquette University and then at Southern Illinois University. I wrote radio shows at both schools for three years—live performances and sketches every week. My friends and I performed them in the studio with no audience.

But it was a really long and slow process for me to ever think that I could do this sort of thing for a living. I just didn’t know anything at all about show business, or how one gets a job in it. It wasn’t a legitimate field. There was nothing real about it.

I take it that you or your family didn’t know many people in the showbiz world?

No one. This was Naperville, Illinois. My parents didn’t even watch movies. My mom’s probably seen fewer than one hundred movies in her entire life. Show business was just not a thing that was talked about in my house.

It’s actually a shame, because my father was a really funny guy, and he could have been a happier person earning a living as a comedy writer. He could have done it, I think. Instead, he made business forms for major corporations and hospitals and other companies, which you can now make on your computer in a second, but back in those days you had to hire somebody to design them for you. I think he was very unhappy—which, of course, is one of the reasons I am in comedy.

Who were your comedy influences?

My strongest influence was Monty Python. After that comes the Credibility Gap and Bob & Ray. Also, SCTV and Steve Martin’s first album, Let’s Get Small [1977].

What was it about the radio personalities Bob & Ray that you liked? Were they even on the air when you were growing up? They were very popular in the late forties, fifties, and sixties.

They were doing a lot of commercials, and I think I only heard them on records. My friend had a copy he’d somehow found. I loved their little individual sketches. Like the one about the guy who swam across the country by buying a semi truck with a pool on it and swimming the length of the truck, back and forth, back and forth, as the truck creeps along the highway. Brilliant, loopy stuff.

What in particular did you like so much about Monty Python?

I loved Python. People always tell me that they can see Mr. Show being similar to Python. In particular, with the way the sketches flowed into each other. But to me the primary attribute of Python was that it had something on its mind and, at the same time, was laugh-out-loud funny. Python actually made you laugh. It wasn’t just intellectually funny or clever.

You also had different actors, with very different sensibilities, that blended very well. Once you got to know the show, you could tell who did what, like a John Cleese-–Graham Chapman sketch versus a Terry Jones–Michael Palin sketch. You could even see how each of the sketches was different. But that’s only after you got to know the show really well.

Mr. Show was similar. We had different actors, but it came together well. We had a shared sensibility. We worked really hard to make every sketch as good as it could possibly be. I think that’s what happened with Python too. Everything had to be approved by the whole group. The quality was very, very high.

How difficult was it to create the Python-esque segues for Mr. Show, in which each sketch would be seamlessly linked to the next?

A lot of people comment on Mr. Show sketches interlinking, but I think that’s one aspect of the show that’s overrated. I’m glad we did it that way. It made all of the shows hang together. Sometimes it was a very clever trick. But sometimes those segues were not very clever. Our rule was that transitions had to work on their own merit, but they also had to somehow comment on the next sketch. That was very hard to do, and we just couldn’t do it all the time. When we were really stuck for a transition, we would do something simple, like pan to a poster with a few words that summarized the next sketch—and then we just panned back.

One of the things we experimented with in the second season was abandoning this idea of thematically tying together the show.

Why would you abandon that idea? Wasn’t that one of the aspects that made Mr. Show unique?

It became too difficult to pull off. We thought that it would be a neat thing to do, and it turned out to be a drag. And besides, we soon learned that the best Mr. Show episodes were the ones that contained scenes that were vastly different in subject matter and comic sensibility. One scene might be physically comic, and the next more verbal. It was really fun to jump between things that were as different as they could be in presentation and also in subject matter. In the end, you didn’t really need to have those strict segues between sketches.

What would you look for in a sketch idea? Did a sketch have to meet certain criteria with the writers?

We would ask ourselves about every sketch, “Is it funny? Really, truly funny? Or do we just think it’s funny because we really want it to be funny?” That doesn’t sound very scientific, but I think there’s an important truth there. We took this very seriously. It was very, very important to us.

Second: What is this sketch about? That was a little challenging sometimes, because we’d have an idea that seemed funny, but the sketch didn’t really have anything to say.

Does every sketch need to say something?

No, but it’s nice to know the underlying meaning. If you have a sketch that’s a bunch of taglines that are stupid and funny, that can just be a list of funny jokes. But if you can think of a unifying point of view for them—something you are clearly commenting on while you’re listing a bunch of funny taglines—that’s even better…