Bill Lawrence says shows have to have jokes to be called comedies
The writers behind some of this year’s most popular comedy series got to work Variety A Night in the Writers Room: Awards Season Edition to discuss the landscape of laughter on TV.
The panel, moderated by Variety‘s Michael Schneider, opened with a debate about whether there is an easily defined boundary between comedy and drama. Nick Bakay, co-creator of Max’s “Bookie” starring Sebastian Maniscalco, said he “strongly disagrees” with the idea that there is no clear separation between the two genres.
“There is definitely a line between comedy and drama. And drama shouldn’t become comedy, and that’s true. There are a lot of shows that just aren’t particularly funny and they become…” he said as he walked away before naming names.
Later in the conversation, Bakay shouted out the legal drama “Ally McBeal,” which won the Emmy for Best Comedy in 1999.
“There are no jokes in this!” Bakay said. “Comedy still has to involve writing jokes once a week.”
Bill Lawrence, the mastermind behind this year’s “Scrubs,” “Ted Lasso” and “Shrinking,” said, “Look, there’s some funny dramas out there, man… I wouldn’t blink twice if ‘Succession would win [the Emmy for] best comedy – that show was damn funny. It was so darkly funny, I thought it was hysterical.
He continued, “But I thought it was hysterical because there were jokes in it. And I think you can do any type of show that has pathos, drama and emotion and call it a drama if you want. But I guess if you’re going to call it a comedy, you better make jokes and have some serious laughs – or at least try to do it on every take.
Brian Jordan Alvarez, who created and stars in FX’s “English Teacher,” said the only thing his writers’ room takes seriously is “joke density.”
When he first hosted “Scrubs,” Lawrence, the president of one of the major TV networks, said, “I don’t think you can make a broad, silly comedy and then switch gears and have people care about it whether or not a TV patient lives or dies.”
Lawrence fired back, “I guess you can if you turn out the lights and play an indie song,” which the director apparently “didn’t find funny at all.”
Jen Statsky of “Hacks” recalled working as a writer for Jimmy Fallon, producing five pages of jokes a day, “which is so different from what we’re talking about now…sometimes you make a comedy without jokes.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, “Laid” showrunners Nahnatchka Khan and Sally Bradford McKenna teased their upcoming series, which stars Stephanie Hsu as a woman whose sexual partners all begin mysteriously dying in chronological order of when she slept with them .
“St. Denis Medical creator Eric Ledgin joked, “You know what? This happened to me.”
“Write what you know,” Khan joked. “We just try to be recognizable at every level.”
