Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 34

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
MARK WHITNEY
to get to the point where I can
say that in a sentence. You know
what I mean? I had a very unclear
vision early on. I had a clear vision
of what I wanted to do, but I was
completely unclear as to how to
do it.
That was the problem, and this
was very frustrating to me because I’m a guy who has worked
on radio shows, I’ve done a lot of
TV commercials, and I’ve toured
the United States doing seminars for corporate America. I’m
no stranger to being on my feet,
but the business of connecting
my personal story to the universe
really fucked with my mind for
about three years. I just couldn’t
figure it out. Everybody that does
this says, “Well, there’s no road
map.” I want a fucking roadmap!
[laughter] Okay, somebody give
me a roadmap. So you’re just out
there—everybody starts with a
zero sum game and everyone has
the story of how they figured out
how to do what they do. Well, for
me, what I wanted to know how
to do was I wanted to know how
to—comedians disagree on this—
Since George Carlin died, I have
learned by reading about him
and stuff that he has written and
that people have written, I have
learned that his HBO shows that
he performed were one-person
shows. It wasn’t stand-up comedy—he wrote it out in script form,
in Courier New, double space,
and he committed it to memory.

RM: Yup, yup.
MW: He went out and he delivered it the same way every time,
word for word.
RM: Why does that surprise
anyone?
MW: I think the reason it surprises
people is because there’s a whole
contingent of people that perform
stand-up that say you need to be
doing your writing on stage,
RM: Oh yeah, yeah.
MW: If you’re not writing on stage,
then you’re not doing it right, and
what I wanted to do is to be able to
do both. So my one-man show is
now a hybrid. I have the set piece
that is committed to memory,
and I rehearse for every minute of
that show. If I write a new minute,
I rehearse ninety minutes or two
hours to own that new minute—
to really own it.
When I say own it, I mean that I
will be able to deliver it frontwards
and backwards with music playing in my ears at a high volume
and my wife telling me to make
the bed and all these distractions
going on, because the one-man
show in stand-up comedy is very
different from acting. If you and
I are doing an Oscar Madison or
Felix Ungar, we’re performing for
each other; we’re not really performing for the audience. That’s

Story Magazine // Issue 005

why they talk about the fourth
wall. It’s actually a wall between
us and the audience.
RM: Indeed. I’ve directed over
60 plays, and the constant note
that I gave to actors was, “No,
no. Don’t you do it. Make him
do it. Make him do it!”
MW: Perfect, that’s exactly what
I’m saying.
RM: I don’t care what—“make
him do it!” As long as actor A is
trying to make actor B do what
character A wants B to do…
MW: You’re telling them to push
each other, in a sense.
RM: “Make him do it.” And that’s
acting, and you’re right, stand
up is…
MW: So I walk out in the studio theatre there—the show you
watched. I got 250 sets of eyeballs
staring at me. They’re talking to
each other and they’re checking
their pocketbook and she’s going,
“What did he say?” There’s all this
shit going on and I’m trying to do
a show. It’s like, “Can you people
just dummy up and receive the
show, please?”
It’s so difficult to master it at a level
where you can deliver it at a high
level. I want to take it to another
level—I want to be able to leave
my script and be in the room like