Latest / How To Talk To Humans / Writing Is Rewriting: What Seinfeld, Leno & Great Comics Teach Us About Communication
Transcript
- 0:00Larry Wilson: Hi, this is Larry Wilson and this is How to Talk to Humans.
- 0:04Larry Wilson: This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills.
- 0:10Larry Wilson: Are you looking to get a better job?
- 0:12Larry Wilson: Are you looking to find a relationship?
- 0:15Larry Wilson: Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far?
- 0:22Larry Wilson: I can show you so easily how to change that.
- 0:25Larry Wilson: Now, I can only do it with humans.
- 0:27Larry Wilson: If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies extraterrestrial, this is not the show for you.
- 0:33Larry Wilson: But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned for 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world.
- 0:47Larry Wilson: And their secrets are unbelievable.
- 0:51Larry Wilson: What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success.
- 1:05Larry Wilson: Obviously, tastes change, people change, ideas change.
- 1:09Larry Wilson: The first thought that came to mind in 1963, I want to say 63, Mel Brooks wrote this movie, wrote and directed this movie called The Producers, that was then later made into a successful Broadway show by Mel Brooks rewriting.
- 1:29Larry Wilson: And to everyone's surprise, it became a gigantic hit on Broadway and was remade as a film.
- 1:36Larry Wilson: But when it came out in 1990, if I'm right, about 63, had to be the early 60s.
- 1:41Larry Wilson: The story is very simple.
- 1:43Larry Wilson: A con man who poses, presents himself as a Broadway impresario, as a big producer of Broadway shows, tricks wealthy widows into financing Broadway shows that he knows won't be successful.
- 2:00Larry Wilson: So he will never have to present the accounting to them.
- 2:04Larry Wilson: He oversells, in other words, instead of selling 100% of the show, he sells six, seven, eight hundred percent of the show.
- 2:12Larry Wilson: If the show was successful, he wouldn't be able to repay the investors.
- 2:16Larry Wilson: But he knows he purposely creates shows that are so horrible, they always are going to fail.
- 2:22Larry Wilson: And Broadway shows, for a lot of times, even great shows, cost millions of dollars.
- 2:28Larry Wilson: And if they aren't a hit right out of the box, you may not get to let it hang around long enough to find its audience.
- 2:35Larry Wilson: That's that's the basic premise of the show.
- 2:38Larry Wilson: And he employs a very milked, nervous, anxious accountant played by Gene Wilder in the first screen appearance I've ever seen.
- 2:49Larry Wilson: And it's a brilliant, hilarious performance.
- 2:53Larry Wilson: And Zero Mastel is the producer Max Bialli stock.
- 2:59Larry Wilson: And anyway, the thing that was so supposed to be so offensive in this is you don't realize until midway through the film he's got this, he's got a bunch of investors, he's got to make a show that was guaranteed to fail.
- 3:15Larry Wilson: And so he's found this show called Springtime for Hitler.
- 3:22Larry Wilson: Now, 1963 is less than 20 years after the close of World War II.
- 3:30Larry Wilson: The idea of Nazi Germany and Hitler was not really a laughing matter, was not a subject that people would turn to for comedy.
- 3:42Larry Wilson: And I think that's why Brooks thought, oh, this would be so outrageous.
- 3:46Larry Wilson: Now, the film is hilarious.
- 3:49Larry Wilson: I mean, just hilarious when we see parts of the film when he has Hitler in a chorus line of girls singing uh springtime for Hitler and Germany, winter for Poland and France.
- 4:04Larry Wilson: It seems very gentle nowadays, but less than 20 years after World War II, I think it maybe really touched the raw nerve of the people, but it was very successful and went on and on.
- 4:17Larry Wilson: I only say this because some of the stuff that Jesselnik says seems very, very abrasive, very in poor taste, but funny.
- 4:31Larry Wilson: And that's their job.
- 4:34Larry Wilson: And you've also heard me talk in these uh I'll I'll just say it.
- 4:39SPEAKER_00: The uh the full title of the show that he was producing in the musical was Springtime for Hitler, a gay romp with Adolf and Ava at Birchstick's Garden.
- 4:50Larry Wilson: That's right.
- 4:51Larry Wilson: I mean, everything about it was just, you know, over the top.
- 4:55Larry Wilson: But but what I was saying is that uh about Jezelnik, he's really talking about Gallows humor.
- 5:02Larry Wilson: He's he's presenting stuff that's so horrible that you have to laugh, or it really will break you.
- 5:09Larry Wilson: Now, I tell you this because I was watching one of his specials recently, Anthony Jesselnik, and uh my wife and son were watching with him.
- 5:19Larry Wilson: Now, my son is is practically a grown man.
- 5:23Larry Wilson: In another month, he'll be 21 years old.
- 5:26Larry Wilson: And of course, he grew up around me, so he's very interested in language, he's very interested in writing.
- 5:37Larry Wilson: And what do Anthony Jeselnik and Jimmy Carr have in common?
- 5:44Larry Wilson: They're both very prolific writers.
- 5:48Larry Wilson: I don't care what anyone says.
- 5:49Larry Wilson: And this is again what I was saying before.
- 5:51Larry Wilson: I don't need some Harvard clinical study to prove to me that I'm right.
- 5:56Larry Wilson: I can see certain things from my life's experience.
- 6:01Larry Wilson: I can tell that Jimmy Carr sits down every day and writes jokes.
- 6:08Larry Wilson: I don't know for how long, I don't know if he does it for a half hour, for an hour, for four hours.
- 6:13Larry Wilson: When I first met Jerry Seinfeld, it was at a club in San Francisco.
- 6:18Larry Wilson: It was so uh low budget that we couldn't, they couldn't afford to give us our own hotel rooms, so we shared a hotel room.
- 6:25Larry Wilson: So I saw Jerry every single day.
- 6:30Larry Wilson: When I woke up, he'd already been up, gone running, had breakfast, showered, and had been writing for hours.
- 6:38Larry Wilson: And then we'd grab lunch, and I'd want to go off and fool around.
- 6:42Larry Wilson: He'd want to come back and write some more.
- 6:45Larry Wilson: It was immediately apparent this guy was going to be a gigantic star.
- 6:51Larry Wilson: I could tell, because he took it so seriously, much more seriously than me.
- 6:56Larry Wilson: And he was writing, writing, writing.
- 6:59Larry Wilson: I can tell Jimmy Carr is writing, writing, writing all the time.
- 7:06Larry Wilson: I can tell Anthony Jesselnik.
- 7:09Larry Wilson: He might not like me to say this, I don't know, but I can tell he's writing all.
- 7:15Larry Wilson: Now, he did make a reference in some special of his I saw.
- 7:19Larry Wilson: He talks about being asked to be involved in a roast for Mike Tyson.
- 7:24Larry Wilson: And he talks about immediately sitting down and writing 150 Mike Tyson insult jokes.
- 7:33Larry Wilson: I have a feeling he's sitting down every day and writing jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes.
- 7:40Larry Wilson: I haven't seen Jazzelnik do crowd work as much as Jimmy Carr does.
- 7:46Larry Wilson: Uh Jimmy Carr almost looks like it may become a cottage industry for him, where he doesn't have to present any prepared material at all.
- 7:55Larry Wilson: He can just come out on the stage and say, Good evening.
- 7:58Larry Wilson: What would you like to talk about?
- 8:00Larry Wilson: And he'll be able to carry the next two hours effortlessly.
- 8:05Larry Wilson: But I'm watching this Jezelnik special with my wife and my son, and Jezelnik tells a joke, and I'll try to repeat the joke.
- 8:16Larry Wilson: I'm going to bowdlerize it here.
- 8:19Larry Wilson: That is to make it appropriate for all audiences, sort of.
- 8:26Larry Wilson: And I hope I can do it justice.
- 8:28Larry Wilson: I don't know if I will.
- 8:29Larry Wilson: Uh please, if Jeselnik ever sees this, please forgive me if I do a bad job of this.
- 8:36Larry Wilson: But he says, you know, the one thing that makes me angry is when people want to talk about sex.
- 8:44Larry Wilson: He said, a friend of mine came to me and said, Anthony, I have trouble with premature ejaculation.
- 8:53Larry Wilson: And I said to him, Why don't you talk about baseball?
- 9:00Larry Wilson: And my friend said, Anthony, don't you mean I should think about baseball?
- 9:07Larry Wilson: And I said, I don't care what you think about, just don't talk about your premature ejaculation.
- 9:16Larry Wilson: In my mind, I thought, Wow, that's almost a perfect joke.
- 9:24Larry Wilson: It's so succinct.
- 9:27Larry Wilson: It just uses the bare amount of words that you need to get this point across.
- 9:35Larry Wilson: And then my son turned and looked at me and said, That was almost a perfect joke.
- 9:42Larry Wilson: And I thought, I couldn't be prouder of my son.
- 9:47Larry Wilson: He saw the same thing I saw.
- 9:50Larry Wilson: We don't look at a performer like that and think, oh, this is a real story, something.
- 9:57Larry Wilson: We see somebody sitting by themselves in front of the computer, or maybe with paper and pencil, I don't know.
- 10:03Larry Wilson: Writing, writing, writing, writing, writing a joke, then coming back, rewriting, rewriting, getting rid of words.
- 10:11Larry Wilson: I mean, I just thought that joke was so brilliantly crafted.
- 10:17Larry Wilson: And you know, when I talk about getting rid of words, I should wrap this up by telling you when I first started working in clubs, there was a headliner who, just by chance, I frequently got paired with.
- 10:30Larry Wilson: I was sort of a feature act in front of him.
- 10:33Larry Wilson: And that was Jay Leno.
- 10:36Larry Wilson: And besides just being a lovely guy, being just the nicest, down-to-earth kind of guy, I know that Jay was always working on material.
- 10:47Larry Wilson: And the most amazing thing with Jay that I've never forgotten, we would work at these clubs where we would come in on a Tuesday or Wednesday and work through Saturday or Sunday every night.
- 11:01Larry Wilson: And after I worked with him a few times, I saw that the first night he would have some new jokes that he was doing.
- 11:11Larry Wilson: And they would get big laughs.
- 11:13Larry Wilson: But the second night, he'd found a way to cut some extraneous words out of the joke and would get a bigger laugh.
- 11:23Larry Wilson: And then the next night, even less words, bigger laugh.
- 11:28Larry Wilson: By the time he got to Saturday night, it was just the meat of the joke.
- 11:34Larry Wilson: He'd he'd gotten rid of everything that was padding or fat.
- 11:41Larry Wilson: It was just the meat of the joke.
- 11:44Larry Wilson: And it would be like boom, boom, boom.
- 11:48Larry Wilson: And on Saturday night, it would get the biggest reaction it got all week.
- 11:53Larry Wilson: I saw him do this again and again and again.
- 11:57Larry Wilson: What does this remind us all?
- 12:01Larry Wilson: Writing is rewriting.
- 12:06Larry Wilson: Nobody comes out with the first draft perfect.
- 12:10Larry Wilson: It doesn't happen.
- 12:12Larry Wilson: Anybody who tells you they do, trying to sell you something.
- 12:17Larry Wilson: Real great stuff you see has been polished and polished and polished.
- 12:25Larry Wilson: That's how you get the brilliance of a gemstone.
- 12:29Larry Wilson: So with that in mind, I thank all of you for being here.
- 12:35Larry Wilson: And as usual, if you have any questions, any ideas, any thoughts, please don't hesitate to you can always contact me, Larry, at WilsonMethod.com.
- 12:47Larry Wilson: This has been Larry Wilson.
- 12:49Larry Wilson: I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful.
- 12:56Larry Wilson: If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com.
- 13:01Larry Wilson: There's a ton of stuff there.
- 13:03Larry Wilson: That if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human.
- 13:09Larry Wilson: Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one.
- 13:18Larry Wilson: I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey.
- 13:24Larry Wilson: And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to You.