Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 29

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
MARK WHITNEY
ROBERT MCKEE: Mark, it is a
real pleasure to have an opportunity to interview you. I’ve
seen, of course, your marvelous
one-man show, Fool for a Client, and it is, for the most part,
autobiographical, although it
builds and builds into something quite universal. But my
first question is one of medium. When people have compelling life stories that went
through great experiences,
some often, of course, write a
book about this or they want
to write a screenplay to dramatize it. They might even write a
play. But very few people ever
choose to get up on their feet
and do a one-man show venting about their life and all the
great implications in it. How
did you choose that particular
medium of expression?
MARK WHITNEY: Well it was an
evolutionary process. I’ve always
wanted to be a comedian and I
kind of got into stand-up comedy—sort of the Rodney Dangerfield model. Rodney started doing
a little bit of stand-up in his early twenties, but then he stopped,
and he raised a family as an aluminum siding salesman [laughter]. When his kids were grown,
he went back into stand-up, but
he really didn’t start stand-up seriously until he was about forty. I
started really devoting myself to
it when I was about 45, and I’m a
guy that’s been on my feet in a lot

of different situations.
RM: Well, you used to sell vacuum cleaners.
MW: Right, exactly. That’s where I
did my first one-man show—right
there in a living room. I was familiar with being on my feet from
acting in plays as a high school
student and at the local colleges in
the area, and I’ve always enjoyed
being on my feet having a conversation with people. I talk, they
laugh; I talk, they cry. It’s a conversation. What I really wanted to
do was stand-up comedy, and I
grew up listening to—not listening—memorizing George Carlin.
RM: Yes, yes of course—the
greatest.
MW: The best. And my mom is
a product of a union between an
O’Neill and a Mahoney, so there’s
that whole Irish Catholic thing
there. But when I started getting
serious about doing it, I didn’t
understand what was involved—
it was like this whole separate art
form.
RM: Yep. It is. It is.
MW: So many people who do
stand-up comedy tell the story of
how they just got up on stage and
they just sucked, and I was just like
that. My friend Curtis Mathew,
who runs the San Francisco Comedy College (a great guy, who you

Story Magazine // Issue 005

would really like), he talks about
how I think this is probably true
with a lot of different art forms, but
particularly with stand-up comedy. He said that it always starts
below the waist, then it moves to
the heart and then to the head.
When you get good at it, it moves
to the head and you really start
using your brain. When I started
to get good at joke writing and
joke performing and joke talent, I
quickly got bored with it.
I got really bored with just rattling
off the same ol’ jokes over and
over again that were disconnected. When I got into the business,
I threw myself into trying to learn
everything I could about the business—not just the creative side
but also the business side. Once
people learn how to do standup comedy, how do they become working comedians? How
do they become paid comedians? So I ended up at the HBO
Comedy Festival in Aspen. I think
it was 2006. It’s the biggest industry showcase there is. Everybody’s
there and their producers, the
producers of that festival, scan the
universe looking for people that
perform one-person shows. So
they had a handful of them there.
They had a girl that pretended to
be the daughter of George Bush
who did half an hour. Then they
had this guy who came out and
I was sitting there. He comes out
and he sits down at a table, and
he’s the most unassuming guy I’ve