It's not like journalists don't talk dirty. We, for no good reason, gave a guy as boring as W. Mark Felt the nickname Deep Throat.
Still, when I landed my first sitcom writing job last August on a new show, "Crumbs," I was shocked that the conversations in the writers' room were dominated by racist jokes and meditations on incestuous necrophilia. I learned a host of new phrases for the two female writers' labia.
Most shocking was when, on the first day, we started making jokes about Marco Pennette's brother. Because not only is Marco right there in the room, but his brother is dead.
Marco, the executive producer, based "Crumbs" on his real life. In addition to being closeted until he was in his 20s, and having his parents go through one of the ugliest divorces I've ever heard of, Marco had an older brother who drowned in a lake. Yeah, I would have thought ABC would have made it a one-hour drama, not a sitcom.
Because the dead brother is a key plot point in the series, I figured the topic would occasionally cast a pall on the room. I was wrong.
On the first day, as we were discussing the characters, we discovered just how eerily close Marco's life is to the movie "Ordinary People." That's when someone made a joke suggesting Marco was lying and just stole his idea for "Crumbs" from "Ordinary People." Then someone suggested that Marco's dead brother stole the idea of drowning from "Ordinary People."
I was wrestling with my discomfort about these jokes for a couple of weeks. Until Marco presented us with a new, horrifying idea.
What did we think of him hiring his mother as our receptionist?
Hiring your mother, I'm guessing, is never a good idea. But this was particularly bad. Marco's mom would be working on a show in which Jane Curtin played her as a pill-popping maniac who tried to run over her husband. In an office where many of the workers spend their day making fun of her dead son.
Marco was smart enough to realize these problems and assured us that if things got weird, he would simply fire his own mother.
I told him it was a great idea.
It was. Sure, Florie had to endure actresses coming in to audition for guest roles and talking to her about how insane the Jane Curtin character was.
And Jane Curtin had to deal with the woman she was lampooning coming to all the rehearsals and tapings.
But it was worth it for us. Florie told us how Marco's brother, not the dead one but the chef, is actually much funnier than he is.
Now, with six months of labia jokes behind me, I realize why Marco dealt with this so well. Even if he didn't write about his family and hire his mom, it would have all come out in the room. We would have made fun of his brother anyway.
Sitcom writing, it turns out, is done almost completely by committee. All nine of us sit at a big conference table with two computers on either side, where writers' assistants type up our ideas for plots and snippets of dialogue. This actual task of writing is considered so foreign to the job of a sitcom writer that the Writers Guild ensures that we get an extra $20,000 for each script we write. Not even the Mafia has created union jobs with such cushy rules.
Writing as a group is weirdly intimate. I'm around these people for 10 hours a day, three meals a day, plus coffee and Slurpee runs, with no breaks. All we do is reveal deeply personal things and gain weight. I have gained 10 pounds, mostly because of the wipe-board on the office refrigerator, where we can write down any food we can possibly think of, and it magically appears. I have since tried this trick at home. Though the food didn't appear, within just one day the wipe-board did magically disappear.
So a sitcom staff becomes like a therapy group. Only instead of supporting each other and crying, we make ruthless fun of each other and eat. That's because it's hard to cry when you're making that much money.
After we wrap up the show at the end of the month, with all that's been said, I'm assuming there's no way any of these people are going to be calling me.
Especially Florie. And I liked her the best.
