Paul Feig

(Excerpt from Paul Feig interview)

When I read memoirs, especially those written by humor writers or comedians, I often get the sense that much of it is fictionalized. When faced with a choice between going for the laugh or the truth, those writers usually choose the former. But I didn’t get that feeling with your books.

I’m very much a purist about memoirs and the truth in stories. As far as I’m concerned, a memoir story only gets its power when it’s true. At some point during a story, especially if it’s a funny one, a reader or viewer should be thinking, I can’t believe that happened. I can’t believe he or she did that. But if you’re ever thinking, No, that’s fake, then it just neuters the whole thing.

I mean, look—I can think of a lot of funnier endings for everything that’s ever happened to me in my life, but that’s not the point. Most of the experiences I’ve written about were just awful. They were painful and upsetting and horrible. And yet that’s the great thing about humor. You can take those experiences, and if you recount them in a funny way, and if they’re truthful and real, they will always become funnier.

That sounds like the sensibility of Freaks and Geeks.

Well, exactly. I’ve never considered myself to be a writer who’s great at making up stories and plots. What happens when you make up a story is that you tend to fall into this standard set of A leads to B leads to C. We’re all used to a standard trajectory for television and the movies; there’s a typical route that a writer can go in a story.

When we were doing Freaks and Geeks, we always wanted to avoid that typical route. Real-life experiences are rife with bad decision-making. And bad decision-making is, in a lot of ways, the key to comedy.

I go through such a rigorous process of not making up material in my memoirs that my wife gets mad. She yelled at me when she read my manuscript for the longer version of Superstud—the one that didn’t make the final cut. She told me that I didn’t have to be so honest, that I didn’t have to tell these stories exactly as they happened.

But if I did that, I might as well have written a novel.

Considering the stories you put into Superstud, I shudder to think what was left out.

[Laughs] Well, here’s one story I left out: When I was about nineteen or twenty, I went out on a date with this younger girl who was really cute. We went to this bar, and we were sitting in a booth talking. My date excused herself to go to the bathroom. The booth was close to the bathroom, and I could hear this girl urinating. And it sounded like a fire hose.

We actually wrote that scene into a Freaks and Geeks episode, but we ended up taking it out. It was one of the times when the Sam character was getting close to dating Cindy. They were on a date, and Cindy had to go to the ladies’ room, but it was out of order. So she went into the men’s room, with Sam standing guard outside the door. He heard her urinating, and it really upset him.

Your wife had a problem with that story making its way into Superstud, but not some of the other stories? Such as when you attempted to give yourself a blow job as a twenty-something and nearly broke your neck in the process?

Oh, that she will not talk about! When I first showed her that chapter, she said, “You absolutely cannot publish that! Just don’t!” So I thought, Yeah, maybe she’s right. I called my publisher and told her take it out, but the publisher said, “It’s too late. Sorry. That’s the sample chapter I sent out to all the booksellers.”

What was the reaction from your family and friends after they read that self-gratification scene?

I mean, that’s the risk you take. It was scary for me. Would readers relate to it? Or would I be the only person in history who’s ever done this? That’s the strange thing about being a writer. At first it’s just you and your computer, or you and your pen and paper. And no one is going to read it. You think, I’m just going to be honest. I’m just going to have this confession with myself. And you put it down. And then off the manuscript goes to the publisher, and there’s always that moment when you think, Oh my god! Now it’s out there. But if I think too much the other way, I wouldn’t put out half the stuff that I do.

I grew up in a religious family. My parents never talked about sex, even though this was a time when people were very sexually promiscuous—the seventies. In our house, that was obviously not the case. My father abhorred the whole sixties and seventies sexual freeness. It was not a comfortable topic. And to this day I don’t like talking about sex. But that’s why it’s fun to write about…