Larry Wilmore

(Excerpt from Larry Wilmore interview)

I once heard you interviewed on the radio, and you described the exact moment you decided to devote your life to comedy. I found this interesting, because exact moments don’t happen too frequently in life.

The anecdote sounded like it was made up, but it’s not. I was a senior in high school. My parents had already divorced, and I was living with my mother. The situation was difficult and became even more difficult: There was a rainstorm one night, and our roof caved in. I remember turning to one of my two brothers, Marc, and saying, “I don’t want to end up in this type of situation. I just can’t.”

I decided to dedicate myself to comedy. I really had nothing to lose. Comedy made me the happiest. I became a stand-up comedian a few years later, and my brother Marc followed in my footsteps. He also became a stand-up comic, and is now a writer for The Simpsons.

I didn’t voice all of this in that exact moment, but I did want to take control of my life—I definitely didn’t want to be a victim of my circumstance. I felt like my mother was very unhappy and her situation was unfortunate, and I knew that I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me.

After that roof caved in, I had clarity in terms of not being afraid of going after my dream. I had no fear. I already had nothing—it’s not like I could achieve that twice.

What were your career plans before you experienced that humor epiphany?

I was very much into science when I was young, and I wanted to become an astronaut. But when I eventually attended college, I became a theater major. I was always working on a play, either acting or helping produce it. This was at Cal Poly.

Is Cal Poly known for its theater program?

Actually, no. It’s a school better known for its agricultural and engineering programs. So it didn’t really make sense that I would go there to study acting, but the school was close to Hollywood, and I could sneak into the movie-studio lots and have lunch and soak in the atmosphere. I never graduated.

A lot of humor writers from the older generation never graduated college, either. Now it seems like a prerequisite—if not for the educational experience, then for the contacts.

I guess I’m old-school in that sense. Most of my contemporaries are Ivy League grads. I’m more of the leave-the-home-and-join-the-circus type of showbiz person.

I taught myself comedy, mostly just writing and then performing stand-up in front of any type of crowd I could find. I learned to write because I needed an act. I didn’t graduate from Harvard and immediately snag a writing job for a television show.

I’m amazed when a 21-year-old graduates from Harvard and immediately thinks he should be creating a TV show. That just astounds me. The level of hubris that’s involved! What do you know about life—let alone about writing?

As a producer, I always try to hire writers who have experience in the real world. There was a young writer on The PJs who was very talented. But every time he’d pitch a joke he’d say, “Oh, you know, The Simpsons once did a similar joke” on such-and-such an episode.

I came very close to yelling at him. Instead, I said, “Stop pitching me what somebody else has already done. I’m not interested in that. Tell me what your grandfather did for a living. What did he act like?” I told him to write about behavior. Stop with the fucking ironic distance. Let David Letterman have that for himself.

Even Letterman had real-world experience.

Absolutely—and there’s a lot of humanity in his humor.

I think this self-referential attitude is very limiting, and I think it’s one of the reasons why comedy has fallen out of favor—too many writers aren’t writing about anything that anyone cares about. It’s all pop-culture references.

Television drama is almost Shakespearean compared with the comedies. I’ll watch dramas more often than I watch comedies, because nobody’s writing about real-world situations in comedy. It’s infuriating to me.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to hang out with Carl Reiner. We talked about The Dick Van Dyke Show, especially that first season [1961–1962]. He told me that every Monday morning, the writers would ask one another, “What happened to you this weekend? What did your wife tell you this weekend?” That’s how the writing session began.

My friend Phil Rosenthal, the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, ran his writing room the exact same way. That’s how he’d start his writing sessions: “Tell me what happened to you.”

And that makes a difference with the writing?

Oh, sure. It’s not, “They once did a similar joke on Friends.” Well, I don’t want to know what they once did on Friends. Stop telling me that. You’re referencing a reference. It’s a Xerox of a Xerox…