Dan Mazer

(Excerpt from Dan Mazer interview)

First of all, thanks for doing this.

Before we begin, let me just ask you: How has it been going so far? Has it been fun to interview humor writers? Are they nice? Or are they humorless in person?

It’s been miserable. Just a hellish experience.

You’re joking… I assume. But do you know what I find with most comedy writers, or at least the ones I know? I think a lot of them genuinely might have some form of Asperger’s. Most of the comedy writers I know are complete disasters—socially. You put them in the room, and it’s just a car crash. It’s horrible.

What other similarities have you noticed among comedy writers?

They have the same type of childhood. Not necessarily unhappy childhoods so much as lonely ones. I think humor writers have either unbelievably tumultuous upbringings, which forces them to go into their own heads and develop and hone their humor and their own unique points of view, or they have just the dullest childhoods, which also forces them to go into their own heads and create their own universes.

I have a friend who writes sitcoms in L.A. When he was growing up, his mother basically did not want to deal with him. He was a nuisance to her. So to minimize this nuisance she told him that all children went to bed at 5:30 in the afternoon. Until the age of eleven, he went to bed at 5:30, because he thought that’s what all kids did. He would sleep for fourteen hours.

That wasn’t my experience. My childhood was very mundane and suburban; you know, perfectly nice and absolutely no trauma. There was no horror, almost to a fault…