“And then it’s a laser disc machine who is gradually becoming aware of his obsolescence. “So, in New Teeth, an illiterate pirate starts off the tale,” he continues. “Those are the characters that I try to write about.” “From Homer Simpson to WALL-E, I love characters that are wildly misinformed, naive, confused,” Rich explains. I always feel like it’s just more fun to have a spaceship land or have an animal talk or set something on fire.”īut if the characters he writes have one thing in common, it’s their fundamental lack of knowledge about the world around them. “I basically forgot everything that I had learned and was just like, let’s go for it, who cares? Screw it!” he says. Rich slowly figured out how to scale back his comedic vision during his four years at SNL, but by the time he got the opportunity to create his own scripted series based on his writing- Man Seeking Woman and then Miracle Workers-he decided to go for broke. They’ve been doing SNL for months and you just walk right in fresh.” He still returns to SNL every time his old writing partner John Mulaney hosts the show. Which of these do you think have the best shot of getting on TV?” Meyers would reply, “Well, certainly not these eight, but maybe this ninth one.” He recalls going to then-head writer Seth Meyers and saying, “Here’s a bunch of premises. I never felt like, ‘Oh, I’m so young, you’re not going to listen to me.’ Because the way it works is, the sketches go up in front of people and they have no idea who wrote it and then they’re picked or not based on the audience reaction.” He says he never worried about the “politics” of whether Lorne Michaels liked him “because Lorne doesn’t know who you are when you’re a first-year writer, he’s worried about much bigger things.”Īt SNL, he would constantly be pitching ideas that were way too elaborate to work within the confines of a live television show. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary.It’s been just about 14 years since Rich joined the writing staff at SNL straight out of college, an experience he now says was “definitely scary” but also “thrilling.” Once you’re there, he says, “It’s really meritocratic. If only the rest of the stories had been as clever. Arguably the best entry is “The Big Nap,” which is like The Big Sleep told from a two-year-old’s point of view. “Beauty and the Beast” feels like an extended commercial break for Disney, and “Case Study,” a riff on The Elephant Man, gets silly, but not in a good way. Rich can wring a laugh from irony, as in “Laserdisc,” about a man who treasures his collection of films on the outdated format (“John would utter a phrase so erotic it was essentially physically irresistible: ‘You know, I actually have that on LaserDisc’ ”), but the stories tend to be one note. In “Chip,” an office robot becomes obsolete after complaints about “his” “inability to socialize.” Less successful stories include the toothless satire “Revolution,” in which the privileged 14-year-old narrator thinks his valet is “grateful for the condescension” the narrator pays him in the form of requiring his presence at all times, even while using the bathroom. The author makes the most of this conceit in the amusing “Screwball,” about Babe Ruth’s lack of understanding of the world outside baseball. Rich’s uneven humor collection (after Hits and Misses) features a series of clueless narrators trying to grapple with life while everyone else deals with it just fine.
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