Hijinks Links: 10 ideas from Mike Judge, David Cross, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Conan O'Brien, and more

A roundup 🟣🆙 of links about comedy, writing, etc.

Here’s a bunch of links I’ve had floating around...

🔗 Mike Judge’s Secret Art of Satire. Question: What advice would Judge give to young animators or comedy writers? Answer:

J. J. Abrams once said to me that, as a writer, what you should want is: if you give people your script, and they’re two pages in, and you say, “Hey, give it back,” they’re going to say, “No. Let me keep reading.” Or if it’s page 60 and they say, “No, I got to keep going.” There are different ways to do that. It could be someone’s got a gun to someone’s head. Or it could just be that it’s really funny, although that won’t always last a hundred pages. But I think that’s a good way to think of it: make every page count. Make every line count.

🔗 David Cross on why he avoids comedy clubs:

“I did the old Comix a few times. The people who worked there were trying for this cool place, but you can’t have a comedy club in the Meatpacking District for tourists and expect it to be the coolest. I haven’t done a set in a comedy club in years. I have zero desire to go to a place where the room is packed with people who are squeezing in a comedy show between going to TGI Friday’s and Times Square or the M&M’s store. I have the luxury of not doing that, so I don’t.”

🔗 “It's NOT that common, it DOESN'T happen to every guy, and it IS a big deal!” 30 perfect TV punchlines (and the stories behind them). Interesting commentary on a great Homer Simpson line:

"To alcohol! The cause of — and solution to — all of life's problems."
— HOMER SIMPSON ON 'THE SIMPSONS' (FOX, 1997)

"It's simultaneously hilarious and a sad truth while being incredibly relatable to all," says writer-producer Mike Scully. "It's a line that hits so many spots with so few words." 

While the show's scribes were wowed by this typically elevated offering from episode writer John Swartzwelder — "To me, the best Swartzwelder lines work as goofy koans about the human condition," says writer-producer George Meyer — they offered one suggestion to maximize its impact. "What amazed us the most was it was kind of buried in the middle of the script," recalls Scully. "It just speaks volumes about what a funny writer John Schwartzwelder is — even he didn't recognize the brilliance of the line he had written!" Scully and Meyer lobbied to relocate the joke to the end of the script. "It had that reverberating, encompassing quality you look for in a closing line," says Meyer. "A walk-off homer that sends the fans home happy."

🔗 The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi on how to approach life: “To the most trivial actions, attach the devotion and mindfulness of a hundred monks. To matters of life and death, attach a sense of humor.”

🔗 Advice on how to be confident from Myq Kaplan.

One way to have confidence is to not care what people think. because if you want to get to a place where you are performing and having people respond positively, you have to go through times when people might not be that way immediately. in order to Get Good, you have to Be Bad.

🔗 Jerry Seinfeld on Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist. Good talk.

Willie Geist chats with the comedy legend about that lengthy career, why he still loves the craft of writing jokes, and his latest residency at the Beacon Theater in New York City.

🔗 Amy Hawthorne, comedy booker extraordinaire, posts a series of tips for comedians - “from the very practical, to the philosophical” - on her Instagram. She’s also posted a Mental Health Resources List so ya can stay well.

🔗 Marc Maron on doing comedy after 9/11:

For me, comedy was a way of processing whatever my sense of truth was and my sense of righteous indignation. I saw comedy as a platform that you worked through things on. For me, the challenge was: How do we make this funny? How do we make this relevant through comedy? It’s sort of our duty to try to disarm this a bit and process it so people can move through their fear and anger to a degree. I didn’t feel like I was entertaining the troops; I felt like, We’ve got to process this collectively, and it’s going to go through me, the way I do it. I felt like it was my social responsibility to get to it. We were living in the sort of body-dust cloud of that event for months, so there was no “too soon.”

🔗 Philip Seymour Hoffman on his acting philosophy: “You allow things to be out of control in a structure…. There’s a story that must be followed, but how to allow for the chaos—the kind of thing that you wish you had control over?”

🔗 David Perell: Imitate, then Innovate. In it, he mentions this Conan O’Brien quote:

“It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It's not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention.”