Jo Miller: “A Four-Foot-Tall Fran Lebowitz”

October 15, 2012
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Featured Interview
Screen Time

TW Interview by Lorraine Berry 

How a Reading Addict Became a Comedy Writer

 

Perhaps some of you look back on your days in graduate school as the best times of your life. Imagine: getting paid to study the thing you love! Sure, no tuition and a tiny stipend were not going to make you rich, but you were free!

Yeah? Well, that wasn't my experience, either. I wound up at a certain Ivy League university that made it clear, from day one, that bearbaiting was the main agenda item. My classmates and I were the dogs expected to tear apart ourselves and the bear in order to win approval from jaded faculty members.

Still, I was fortunate. The first person I met there was Jo Miller. And witty, bitingly satirical Jo was the reason I didn't take the usual way out of town: leaping from a bridge into one of our many beautiful gorges.

I'm half kidding about the bridge jump, but not about Jo, who made all the difference to me in grad school. We regaled each other with nicknames for professors and imaginary stories of their lives outside the classroom. Jo had an impressive resume when she arrived: a B.A. in medieval history from Yale, an M.Phil. from Cambridge University in the U.K. While an undergrad at Yale, she was a founding director in 1986 of Just Add Water, the Yale comedy improv group.

With hindsight, it’s no surprise that she’s now a two-time Emmy-winning writer for The Daily Show (TDS), the Comedy Central staple that brings us Jon Stewart four nights a week.

As an up-and-coming comedy writer in New York, Jo did everything from waiting tables to construction management. But her career took off in 2007, when she became a writer/player in the off-Broadway comedy show Wake Up World, created by Lizz Winstead (who cofounded TDS before Jon Stewart took it on). Since 2009, Jo has been a writer for The Daily Show.

This interview, conducted by email last July and August, has been edited for Talking Writing. At the time, Jo was gearing up for TDS's trips to the Republican and Democratic conventions. During our email exchange, we discussed a range of subjects, including the fact that The Daily Show is now a primary source of world news for most U.S. college students.

 

 

 

TW: Have you always known that you wanted to be a writer? Did you write as a kid? Or was it something that became important to you later in life?

JM: I remember forming the intention to become "an author" (whatever that meant) sometime around third grade. This was back when public libraries still (a) had funding and (b) spent it on books, and, as a result, I was well on my way to becoming a sunken-eyed reading addict.

Did I spend long hours making up stories and scribbling adorably in a journal? Fuck, no. That would have cut into my reading time, and, besides, I already experienced writing assignments as painful drudgery (my first blown deadline was also in third grade, as I recall). If you're picturing a four-foot-tall Fran Lebowitz, you're probably not far off.

I did enjoy comedy writing—skits, parodies, comics, stories to amuse my friend Ashley—probably because I didn't realize it was writing. Writing was something they gave you a grade for, not a detention. I still can't believe someone pays me for this.

TW: When you were at Yale, you were a member of an improv troupe. What drew you to improv? Wasn't Yale stressful enough?

JM: Improv was the best thing I did at Yale and is the source of my most enduring friendships. Only a small amount of our time was spent performing for an audience. Twice a week, we got together to practice and work up games, and those rehearsals were the most joyous creative experiences I've ever had. I'd recommend improv to everyone. It's really not as hard as it looks—mainly it involves listening, being generous, and staying in the moment, which are skills we could all stand to cultivate.

The only stressful thing about Yale was trying to scrape together enough money for tuition each term. Unlike a certain other university you and I both attended, Yale doesn't conflate learning with suffering. Or they didn't at the time. Lord knows what they do there now. It seems to involve a lot of singing.

TW: Whose writing had an early influence on you? Who inspires/influences you now?

JM: I grew up watching Saturday Night Live in the 1970s and wanting to work on it. The show in those first years was experimental and, at its best, pushed at taboos in a way you rarely see today. (See the 1975 SNL sketch "Racist Word Association Interview" or the 1977 sketch "Ask President Carter.")

These days, the stuff that really excites me comes from the U.K. Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris, and Armando Iannucci are brilliantly original. Chris Morris is the most fearless satirist I've ever seen. His Brass Eye series [which originally aired in 1997 and again in 2001] took on both the media and the hysteria-prone public with devastating honesty.

TW: I have students who dream of heading to New York to become WRITERS. What advice would you give to them?

JM: Not sure why anyone would need to move to New York to become a writer. Pens work just fine outside the metropolitan area, I'm told. Okay, that sounds snotty, but I'm serious. If you're lucky enough to live someplace other than New York, Los Angeles, or a campus in New England or Iowa, don't be in such a hurry to jettison that advantage. The literary and entertainment worlds desperately need voices and material developed outside the small enclaves where creative people tend to congregate. The next John Kennedy Toole is unlikely to emerge from a Brooklyn coffee house (though the next twenty Dave Eggers wannabes certainly will).

A thousand of your competitors are writing about life in New York. Who's competing with you to write about life in your town? If David Simon had come to New York instead of staying at the Baltimore Sun, we wouldn't have The Wire.

We don't need more Law and Orders. We need more Wires.

Obviously, if you want to make a career writing for television and films, you need to move to Los Angeles at some point, and if you're a playwright, your career will bring you to New York. If you want to write for the Onion, their offices are in Chicago (though they work with freelancers from all over). But these are business decisions that writers make when they've already cultivated a voice and some small body of work. Moving to New York in order to start writing makes little sense, and here's why:

1. New York is fucking expensive.

Unless you're moving here from Tokyo, the cost of living in New York will make your eyes melt. Most of your time and energy will be spent just trying to make ends meet. Chances are you'll be working all day at a job that doesn't involve writing, then coming home exhausted to find that one of your three roommates ate the leftover hummus you were going to have for dinner. If you're able to get paid writing gigs, you'll find they don't bring in enough to cover your expenses. You'll constantly be trying to sell more articles, because you have to, and the leisure time so necessary to creative endeavor won't exist for you. (You could find someone else to support you while you write, of course, but those who take that route seldom develop the discipline to become more than dabblers.)

2. No one is saving you a seat at the Algonquin Round Table.

When Fran Lebowitz moved to New York to become a writer, she fell in quickly with a group of older writers. She would work odd jobs until she had the $100 or so for that month's rent, then quit and spend the rest of her time writing and hanging out with her literary friends and mentors, until Andy Warhol gave her a job as a columnist. That world does not exist anymore. You will not spend your days sleeping and writing notes on the passing scene and your nights trading witticisms with John Hodgman and George Plimpton. George is dead, and John's too busy trying to make a living.

Is the only alternative a lonely exile in the barren hinterlands, cut off from work opportunities and creative peers? Fortunately, no. The Internet means you don't have to be in New York to meet and communicate with other writers. You don't even have to be here to blog; the best Cracked.com piece I've read in a while is by a guy who works in a restaurant in Arkansas. If you want to see the future of publishing, read how "John Dies at the End" came to be a book and then a film.

TW: Is there a short version of how one goes from collecting degrees from two Ivies and Cambridge to writing for The Daily Show? Was there ever, say, a moment, when you thought that perhaps you shouldn't be in the archives?

JM: I think David Milch could give a far more eloquent and instructive answer to this question than I could. He was a Yale professor before writing some of the best television ever produced. If you listen to his interviews or Deadwood DVD commentary tracks, you see that his academic background informs everything he writes. (A question about a scene sometimes elicits a forty-minute lecture on Henry James, but it's fascinating.)

My friends who are successful television writers are, without exception, astonishingly well educated. Some have advanced degrees and others are self-taught, but what they share is a curiosity that drives them to read widely and dig deeply into whatever they're researching. Working with The Daily Show writers is a continuing education for me. My colleagues teach me American history, economic theory, and constitutional law, and, in turn, they come to me whenever a joke requires expertise in religious arcana (it happens more often than you'd think).

I've come to realize that time in the archives is never wasted. It makes you a better writer.

 

Jo Miller World: From SNL to TDS

For more information, check out Episode 14: Girl Writer Jo Miller (The Daily Show), Jo's audio interview with Lizz Winstead and Darbi Worley on The BROADcast, July 13th, 2010.

"Jo Miller at Rally to Restore Sanity, Washington D.C., 2010" © Jo Miller; used by permission

 

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