David Javerbaum: Writer, Executive Producer, Showrunner
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David Javerbaum spent years as head writer and executive producer of The Daily Show, went on to showrun Disjointed, write four Tony Awards opening ceremonies, collaborate with the late Adam Schlesinger on nearly 50 songs, and create An Act of God and the Tony-nominated Cry-Baby on Broadway, the latter of which has now received over 100 productions in 20 countries. He has also authored five books and is currently developing new plays. Across all of it he has built an ear for what a joke needs, what a room will take, and how structure decides everything the audience thinks is spontaneous. We talked about instinct, architecture, and writing inside voices that aren't your own.
On The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, when a joke crushed in the room but felt a little off, what told you it would or wouldn’t survive on air, and what did you change before it went out?
We would take the script down to rehearsals thinking it was in reasonably good shape but knowing it would change following its reception and how it felt without an audience. Jokes have their own kind of music and when you say one out loud in that context and it doesn't work, it's like playing a chord on a guitar when you hold the string really tight; there's no vibration. It's a pretty common experience among comedy writers for a joke to crush in the room and die on the stage, or vice versa.
The rule was that if we'd had a good day of joke-writing, clip-gathering, graphic-designing, and overall preparation, the only thing we'd have to change after rehearsals were jokes. Jokes, for comedy writers, especially a group of ten of them, are not that difficult. You'd say, "OK, we need a joke in this slot," and we'd come up with a good one quickly enough in the hour or 90 minutes between rehearsal and taping. More important are premises, which are what ground a joke, or in some cases an entire headline or piece of 'reportage': when Dick Cheney shot a friend while hunting, and the friend apologized to him, the premise was that Cheney keeps doing awful things and the people he does them to keep apologizing. That's a solid premise, and if a joke or two within it doesn't work in rehearsal it's no problem to change.
If we'd had a bad day — and we rarely had a perfect one — we would have to spend much of the post-rehearsal period doing wider surgery on the outline of the piece, the quality of the argument we were making (and/or story we were telling), the video clips we were using or not using, and a whole lot of broader issues. This is a structural issue; our format was fake news, and like real news (ideally!) we had to present the facts in an order that made narrative sense, deploying facts and video evidence appropriately and at the right time. Then, after taping, we would almost always trim a few of the weaker jokes for time; it was customary for the taping to run over, sometimes by several minutes.
With @TheTweetOfGod, was there a private test a line had to pass before you posted it, and what usually made you kill one at the last second?
The private test a line had to pass before I posted it was me thinking it was funny, at least impulsively. But that was a judgment that proved wrong on literally thousands of occasions. So as the account's popularity grew I started having quotas, usually of 2-3 minutes, based on past performance. I'd say, "If this doesn't get 100 (I don't remember the exact number) retweets in three minutes, I'm deleting it." And I did. I killed thousands of my babies in less time than a sitcom ad break.
I saw the collection of tweets I was building as an archive and I didn't want audience-disapproved stuff in it. There are areas of writing where you hold fast to your guns regardless of how popular they are, but for me Twitter was never one of them. Twitter was the first comedy format in history that came with a clear, numerical metric. It's not how loud the applause is or what the ratings in the target demo are. It's a clear (albeit rising) number. And I, along with many, many others, found that catnip.
So the answer is, I very rarely killed them at the last second. I killed them about two or three minutes after.
When An Act of God went from a single voice online to a stage with Jim Parsons and Sean Hayes, what changed once there were bodies and breath in the room?
For one thing, the play was based on not only the account but also the book I wrote, The Last Testament: A Memoir by God, which was actually the thing the account spun out of, not the other way around. So using that, the account, the invaluable contributions of the producer Jeffrey Finn (who came up with the 10 Commandment structure), and my abilities, I came up with mostly new material that had a structure and narrative, that wasn't just a series of one-liners (although there were many) but had an overall build, which was God coming to the same conclusion about Himself that anybody reading my account could see I had always come up with: that He was a psychopath.
And then what changed was the elation, the joy, the visceral delight of being in a large room full of people laughing at my jokes and coming fully along for the ride. It's actually a pretty perfect contrast to Twitter. That was six million people I'd never know being lightly amused for a few seconds. The show was a thousand people I'd never know, forming a temporary community gathered together to viscerally share the experience of hearing my words and laughing at them, and hopefully feeling some emotion or insight by the end.
Honestly, the theater part was mentally way healthier, and I'm in the process of trying to re-create it (with other plays) right now.
Co-creating Disjointed with Chuck Lorre, when did you feel the tension between loading up jokes and taking care of the characters, and how did you decide which one won in a scene?
Disjointed was one of the greatest experiences of my life, but soon after the first tapings when Chuck handed me the reins, the learning curve began. Decisions, like the one you ask about, were kind of made collectively; unlike most writers' rooms, I decided we would all sit around and work on every script together from start to finish rather than parceling out initial drafts to individual writers. This may have been a bad idea, but I really enjoyed the communality (although it was somewhat undermined by the presence of a writer who turned out to be more or less insane).
I think we did a reasonable job balancing character and comedy. But it was the first time I ran a show and I was definitely figuring things out. By the end of the first season of 20 episodes I was confident that I knew what I was doing and Season 2 would take off and fly. Alas, Netflix didn't give us that chance. (The flip side of comedy metrics, I suppose.)
But it remains a happy, almost dream-like memory for me, and getting to work with Kathy Bates was one of the coolest things I've ever done.
You’ve written inside strong voices, from The Harvard Lampoon to The Onion to Late Show with David Letterman. When you walk into a room like that, what do you listen for before you pitch anything?
The Harvard Lampoon was 35 years ago. I think I was still covered in amniotic fluid at the time. And there was no specific voice to follow or overarching directive, just a general aesthetic.
Late Show with David Letterman, my first professional job, was a miserable experience where I felt completely ignored, unwanted, unneeded and isolated; when I was there ('98) it felt like Dave actually looked down on writing and just wanted to sit at the desk and riff. At The Onion, which I remain proud of to this day, I conceived of the Our Dumb Century book and wrote the well-known Titanic and Moon Landing headlines, among other things. From the beginning they had their distinctive, mock-monolithic tone, and I loved it and shared it and had no problem writing in it whatsoever. But as it happens, I wasn't in the room for it, because I was writing remotely from NYC. (They did indeed have a room, in Madison.)
As someone with a strong comic instinct and ear, I pick up pretty quickly on the vibe and tone that an institution or show or person (like Jon) is looking for, and as long as that voice is not stupid, I enjoy the challenge of altering my own voice to fit theirs.
David has been in enough rooms to know which ones are worth staying in. The work that lasted wasn't the loudest or the most visible; it was the stuff built on a premise solid enough to survive rehearsal, a bad day, and an audience that didn't know what was coming.
Learn more about David at:
• Website
• IMDb
Afterword:
You didn't ask, but I'd like to answer a question we got all the time that always pissed me off: "How do you know when you've gone too far?" The same way you know, when a friend tells you he's been diagnosed with cancer, not to say, "Ha! You deserve it." We're human beings. We're reasonably well-adjusted, at least by comedy writing standards. There's dozens of us on staff. There's hours between the time of writing and the time of airing for reflection. And Jon Stewart is one of the most fundamentally decent, moral people there is. That's how we know.
