Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 65

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
DREW CAREY
subjects. That’s the hardest part. If
you’re going to be a professional
comedy writer, that’s the toughest
thing. I have a writing exercise that
I tell people about if they’re doing
stand-up: Try to write 10 jokes a
day to try to get one good joke,
because that was my percentage—
one out of 10. I’d think of 10 things,
but only one was even kind of funny. So I just write 10 jokes and try
to get one funny joke a day, five
days a week. One funny joke a day,
five days a week. It’s tough to do.
You get about 45 minutes a year
out of it that way for stand-up.
The tough part is coming up with
subjects, because my rule was they
had to be clean enough to do on
network TV, like a talk show, such
as The Tonight Show or Letterman.
They couldn’t be topical, so I didn’t
allow myself to do topical jokes. I
could write topical jokes and dirty
jokes, but I couldn’t include them
in my 10. I had to come up with
10 things that weren’t topical—I
couldn’t talk about the Oscars, I
couldn’t do a joke about the sports
game. I couldn’t do a joke about
what Obama just said. I could, but
I don’t count them in my 10, and
that’s really hard.
RM: Finding universal human…
DC: You run out of things. Like, you
know, the wife, the husband, sex.
Then you get dirty; you can’t do the
sex things. You want to, but you’ve
got to keep it clean enough to do

on TV. Half my time is spent going
through Yellow Pages for different
jobs, going through thesauruses,
dictionaries—any kind of collections of books. I spent a lot of time
just poring through those things.
I had computer programs that
would help, and that would help
make word associations for me so
I wouldn’t do the same old stuff.
In the 60s and 70s, for a while everybody was doing airplane jokes;
everybody had an airplane bit.

DC: All this stuff about giving a
character a flaw and a blind ambition and all that stuff—it makes it
so much easier if you just lay that
groundwork. Then you’re building
your house on brick, and the wolf
will never blow it down.

RM: Yeah.

DC: I was just watching it the other
night. It just happened to be on TV
and I watched the whole episode.
We did a show called Newscasters, and Colin or somebody would
be the anchor, and he would give
himself a funny name but he didn’t
have to do a character, and then
everybody else had to do a character. We would assign them the
character.

DC: Even Cosby had an airplane
bit, but his was really funny.
RM: The little kid on the airplane.
DC: Yeah, “Hope the plane don’t
crash.”
RM: It seems to me that a lot
of people who are struggling
to write comedy do it the other way around. They’ve actually
got what they think is a punchline, but they have no setup for
it and they go looking for setups
to match their punch. That will
drive you crazy.
DC: You can’t do anything with
that. How are you going to have
a punchline unless you know
what you’re throwing a punchline
about?
RM: Exactly.

Story Magazine // Issue 005

RM: And yet, in the great eightyear television series, Whose
Line Is it Anyway? the structure
there was they sort of had to
create the setup.

They didn’t know what they had to
do, but the producers would think
it up. For example, Wayne Brady is
a really good dancer, so we made
him a background dancer in a rap
video. “You’re a female background
dancer in a rap video,” and he was
doing the sports. We know he’s
going to go crazy, and as soon as
we said it, the audience is laughing because they know something
good is going to come out of it.
All that Wayne has to do, then, is
that acting thing where you have to
let go of fear. The fear is the worst