Comedy Writing: An Interview with Scotty Meltzer
By Fritz Grobe
May 12, 2006
Scotty Meltzer has degrees in math & computer science from Berkeley, but he chooses to spend his time juggling knives on a six-foot unicycle. He is now one of the country's best comedy writers, and he spoke with us about performing, creating new material, and his upcoming Comedy Writing workshop here at the Barn (June 18 – 23, 2006). Click here to find out how you can register for his workshop.
Fritz Grobe: I learned a lot from your workshop at MotionFest, and I’ve seen you perform at the International Jugglers Festival. You come across as a very natural performer. When did you start performing?
Scotty Meltzer: Thanks - I don’t really think of myself as a natural performer. I started in children’s theater at age nine, in bad musicals done by children. I was comfortable on stage, just bad. When I began street performing at age 18 and working my way through college, I had to unlearn a lot of the cutesy tricks I had learned as a kid. I don’t think I was funny, but I loved when people laughed. I thought I could learn how to do that. I learned as much as I could because I didn’t think I was as naturally talented as jugglers like Edward Jackman and Robert Nelson.
A lot of the naturally talented people would say that comedy couldn’t be learned - you just do it. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but it certainly wouldn’t help me. And if it weren’t for certain friends who influenced me, I would have stolen every joke I ever heard - I’d be on stage and people would be laughing. That seemed okay, particularly with a background in theater where you always do other people’s words. But because the people around me were good, I learned you just couldn’t do that. So I’ve always felt natural on stage, I just sucked.
FG: So is it hard work and lots of thought that has gotten you to where you are now?
SM: For me, yes. I think there are lots of different ways to approach comedy and theater in general. If I had Tom Cruise’s looks, I wouldn’t have had to work so hard on the comedy. I would’ve had to work more on my pecs. If Tom Cruise had my looks, he’d starve to death. That’s from Penn Jillette - a paraphrase of something Penn said about me.
FG: How did you make the decision to start performing full time?
SM: All these transitions have been easy for me. I went to UC Berkeley and started working with John Park as the American Dream Comedy Team. We did shows on the street, at fairs, and so on. John already had a show, so I stepped into something that already had a lot of street performer experience behind it.
After two years, I was paying my way through college, so the decision was easy. I never had to quit a day job. The closest thing was going to college. We had to turn down a couple gigs we would have done otherwise, but once we graduated more gigs started turning up.
The transition was super easy. I lived in San Francisco, which at that time was a dream for street performers. There was no question of when you would leave the street. After Frank Olivier was on the Tonight Show the second time, he still did shows on the street. Any time you were in town, you would do street shows.
Among these street performers, a few people like Frank Miles were asking: what other jokes are there? The very act of thinking about it that way, I don’t know how many comics did that. Because it was being done around me, it became natural to think that way, rather than doing what everyone else was doing.
People like Robert Nelson and Ray Jason, their shows gave you the feeling that you could never do that. I’m pretty sure that if those were the guys I hung out with, I would now be a computer programmer. But the guys I hung out with said you just work. How do you get a show with eight laughs per minute? You start with a show with no laughs and add a joke. Then you add another. When you look at it as building a show bit by bit, you say, “I can do that.” Particularly with someone to help you get there.
FG: You’re now heading up Comedy Industries, doing mostly big corporate work. What led to that transition?
SM: There seems to be a natural progression for comedy jugglers. You can go from the street to fairs, which are just like street shows only paid, then jump to theaters or corporate work.
Your first corporate work, you don’t have to target it. A company has a new product with three parts so they bring in a juggler. The scripts are terrible, always the same, with terrible juggling metaphors. John and I got hired exactly that way, saw the script, and said this is shit. Being prima donnas, we rewrote it and made it something that actually worked. We did a dozen shows for that company, got seen by a dozen more, and it ballooned from there.
About ninety percent of the work that Comedy Industries does is corporate: trade shows, sales meetings, and training sessions with custom scripts about their products.
FG: You seem to consistently work hard and generate a lot of new, customized material. What methods of generating new material will you explore in your workshop at the Barn?
SM: I’ll be teaching several specific methods that I and many others have used, in the absence of brilliance. The best way to write is to be brilliant, but you can’t trust that every day. These are conscious ways to make material better, and along the way it gives you time to be brilliant.
Some of these methods are like training wheels. In reality, I may not use a particular method when I write. Some of them I use all the time. But by sitting down and using each method, you discover what’s possible. For different people, different methods will work better.
The biggest thing we will do is what I did when I started: sit down with people who have experience and get in the habit of working & thinking like a comedy writer.
FG: I know I’ve learned a lot of different methods from your workshop, and several resonate particularly well with me. What method do you use most of all?
SM: All of these different methods came from talking to people who generate a lot of material - the ones who can answer the question: how do you do it? In seeing how other people do it, you can develop your own method.
A lot of the methods like switching, implied meaning, and assumption, I don’t consciously use when I write. I do them automatically now. Assumption is one of the greatest to learn first, and Mike Goudeau, I believe, actually starts with assumption when he writes.
One method that I really use when I write is modeling: while you’re walking down the street, you imagine you’re doing your show. Then you can do anything you want. In particular, you go through your show as someone else: what would Robin Williams do here? What would Buster Keaton do here? Often, your own Robin Williams is funnier than you are. You’re not doing what he does. That’s stealing. But what do you imagine he would do in this situation?
There is a routine that we still do that came directly from the question: what would the Smothers Brothers do if they were jugglers? We weren’t taking any of their jokes, but that’s what we were thinking.
After thinking about what the Smothers Brothers or Michael Davis or Charlie Chaplin would do in all these situations, after ten years, I was able to ask: what would Scotty Meltzer do here?
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Scotty Meltzer will be teaching Comedy Writing at Celebration Barn from June 18 - 23, 2006. The workshop will focus on creating new material and improving existing material for variety acts, physical comedians, and everyone looking for the funny.
To read more about Scotty Meltzer’s Comedy Writing workshop, click here.
To find out how you can register, click here.
To visit Scotty Meltzer's web site, click here.
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