YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Schur

lines on the record: 146
first: 2022-01-19
most recent: 2022-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Teaching moment that you recall while being at the office? This is a real how much time you got kind of a deal because I could tell you time as you'd like.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All that grist for the mill, that was unknown to me. And it was what Greg was so good at sort of imparting was this is the stuff you have to care about now. It's not about making a funny joke and then getting out and, you know, letting the audience clap and then like throw to the musical guest so they can perform a song. Like that's just not that's the old, that's SNL. This is not SNL. This is an entirely new animal.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Teaching us was this is not about being funny. Jokes are easy. If you get a bunch of funny people in a room and you say, hey, this is a scene where Michael Scott is leading a diversity seminar and he doesn't have any idea how to run a diversity seminar, you get eight comedy writers in a room. They'll come up with a bunch of funny jokes. What's important is why is he doing that? What is the like character trait that's led him to be the kind of person who thinks he has the ability to run a diversities training seminar when he definitely doesn't? What are the circumstances under which he would try to pull this off in front of documentary cameras that are there documenting his every move? Why is he looking at the camera here? What's going on in Jim's life that he's in love with this receptionist named Pam and she won't? And she's engaged to this guy named Roy who he hates. How does that fit in? Like all of those.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And crafted dollhouses with like miniature furniture in them that all need to be properly sanded and painted and placed in these really specific ways. And you have to keep coming back to them. And you're building them this dollhouse slowly, piece by piece, brick by brick over the course of a decade when it works, right? So all of that stuff was new, all of the whole idea of saying, how do you pace out a character growth over multiple episodes multiple seasons? How do you establish interesting relationships and dynamics that you can go back to over and over again? What are the deep veins that when you're mining the ore, like how can you tap into the deepest possible veins so that there's the most material there? All of that stuff was brand new and completely unknown to me. And by the way, to most people who were on the writing staff. And so that was what he was teaching us.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Long form TV writing is a completely different animal. The thing that SNL can teach you potentially that is relevant is just how to be funny, like what's funny, what are funny ways of observing the world or things you've noticed about people or ways to write jokes, craft language, that sort of thing. But long-form TV writing is you're establishing characters and you're slow cooking them over hopefully. In the office's case, 200 episodes. These are not tissues anymore. These are like carefully.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The deal is so sketches are single ideas, single comedic premises executed as quickly as possible, and then you have one big joke at the end and you get out. That's all it is, right? It's an observation about the world or a comedic premise that you introduce to the audience, develop as quickly as you can, milk it for all it's worth, and then it's a tissue you throw it in the garbage. You pluck it out of the box, you blow your nose, and you throw it in the garbage and it's over, and you don't have to worry about anything else. You don't have to worry about what happens to these characters tomorrow, who cares? Tomorrow's Sunday, there's no show, right?”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was approaching it from a completely different angle than I would have ever imagined anyone would approach it. And I was right. You did, and that's why it worked.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the email, which my agent still sends back to me every once in a while as a reminder of like the beginning of this journey, I believe I said something like, I don't know if this show's going to work, but if it doesn't work, it won't be because of that guy. The reason won't be that the guy in charge doesn't know what he's doing. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But there's no one that gives it a better chance of working than Greg Daniels. And I had that instinct after that one meeting. I just kind of knew from the way he was talking about it and approaching it that if there was a Hail Mary's chance of this actually succeeding, that he was the quarterback who was going to throw the ball. So it really was based on, I don't know that I was immediately like, oh, wait, I was wrong. This is a great idea to adapt the office. I don't think I got that far, but I definitely felt like.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Identical meetings. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom with 50 different people in every level of Hollywood. That meeting was special and interesting and weird and captivating. And I left that meeting and I sent my agent an email and it said, I don't know if that guy's going to offer me a job. But if he does, I'm going to take it because I think he's going to teach me how to write. I just get the sense that he's like a professor. And he knows how to do this. He sees the matrix code behind stories. And I think he could teach me how to write. So he offered me the job and I took it. And that's exactly what happened. He taught me that absolutely in a collegiate professorial kind of a way how to write stories, what makes them good, what makes them bad, what makes character work good or bad, plot and motivation and character, all this stuff that you need. He taught a class. He taught a PhD level class. And I soaked it all up. And it's the greatest stroke of good fortune.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instead of like going to a place and having the hang, then go in here in 50 minutes, and then you leave. He and I talked for about two and a half hours. He was immediately much more kind of specific and also much more interested in going in depth about many more things than anybody else had been. He wanted to know all about how I wrote my script, why I did certain things within the script. He wanted to know about my wife had written for another show called coupling that was an adaptation of a British sitcom that hadn't worked. He asked me a million questions about it. Why did I think it didn't work? What was it about the adaptation that fell short? At one point in the middle of the meeting, he said, I have a bad back. Would you mind if I lay down on the floor? I said, no, go ahead. And so he just lay down on the floor in front of me. And the whole thing was just after 50.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An existing show, but the guy who was the most interested in me was Greg Daniels, who was adapting the office from the British version to the American version. So I loved the office, the British office. It was my, I found it to be maybe the greatest comedy that had ever been made. I thought it was a work of pure genius and I thought that the idea of adapting it for America was incredibly stupid and foolhardy and would never work in a million years. Nonetheless, I took the meeting with Greg and he...”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you write samples, you write, I wrote a curb your enthusiasm, spec script, I think that was it actually at the time. If those people like your samples, they'll send them to the people who have new shows coming on the air or the existing shows looking for writers. And you'll go on 100 more meetings with those people. Well, I'm so-and-so. I created it. I wrote this pilot called Welcome to Happy. And it's a sitcom about six people who are friends and they live in Chicago. And you watch their pilot and then they go, I really loved your script. And you say, thank you so much. Your pilot's so good. And then you chat amiably for exactly 50 minutes. And then you get back in your car and you drive across town to some other person. And it's this kind of like endless just treadmill of meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings. Out of that giant morass of meetings, there were a couple people who really liked my sample and had an opening. A couple of them were new shows. One of them was”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you drive somewhere else and you go to another waiting room, and now you're meeting with the senior vice president of comedy at 20th Century Fox. And you're like, wait, these are different places? Yes, one of them is a network and one of them is a studio. And you go into a room and the person says, would you like a water or a dyed coke? And you chat amiably with this new person for 50 minutes. And it just keeps going and going and going. And so”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you chat amiably for 50 minutes almost to the minute you're 50 minutes long. And then you leave and you get back in your car.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had to leave. And so all of these things kind of lined up. My feeling like I had sort of gone as far as I could go or that I wanted to go really my then girlfriend now, wife living 3,000 miles away, the end of my 20s, like all of those things kind of coalesced. And I just decided, okay, this is going to be my last year. Halfway through that year, I went to LA for the first time professionally and started meeting executives and taking these general meetings, which are all identical. You're having like, it's really crazy making. Like you have six identical meetings a day. You go into a room and you're meeting with the vice president of comedy at Fox and the assistant says, would you like anything to drink or water, diet coke? And you say, no, thank you. And you go in and you meet the senior vice president of comedy at Fox.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last five decades never ends. It just goes on forever. So the situation is you're working in New York, you make a very good living, you have a really cool job that anyone that you meet when they find out what you do wants to talk to you and hang out with you. And it could never end. You could just kind of do it forever. And so I had this, I basically gave my 20s to that show. I started when I just turned 22 and I worked there until I was 29. And I left in part because I realized that if I didn't achieve escape velocity, I might just stay there forever. And that's not the worst thing in the world. You only work like half the year because you have all these weeks off and make a good living. And I bought an apartment in Manhattan when I was 25. It's kind of an amazing life, but I just had this sense that if I wanted to do more creatively,”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't really choose it. It kind of chose me because I was dating a woman who is now my wife who had moved to LA years before and we had been long distanced. And it had gotten to the point where it was sort of like, well, if this is going to work, either I have to move to LA or she had to move to New York and it made a lot more sense for me to move to LA because that's where all the jobs were. So I had been at SNL for At the time I'd made the choice. I had been there for about five and a half years. And I had this realization, which was SNL is a little bit of a, I guess you call it like a golden handcuffs kind of a situation because normally when you work on a TV show, even in the best of times, you're hyper aware of the fact that this is going to end. At some point, the show will end and you will need to find a new job. SNL, unique among television shows.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I am, or that anybody is really. So I'll never say never, but it would be even tougher to do it now than it would have been then.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, of course, we're 20 years past the date when he was imagining it. And so, in order to do it, and in order to honor the book properly, you would sort of have to do your own version of what he did, which is look at the world now and project forward from here. And you also would have to be as good at that as he was, which is saying something, because among other things in that book, he basically predicted FaceTime and video messaging, literally what you and I are doing right now. There's a whole section in the book about that. The president of the United States is a celebrity who is obsessed with germs and is kind of a moron who doesn't really understand the way anything works, but it doesn't matter because he's really popular. He called his shots and a lot of them kind of came true. And you'd have to be as good a sort of fictional futurist as he was in order to do a good job. And I don't know.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I won't say that I would never consider it again because if you ask me what my favorite book is, it's probably the answer. Like that's probably my favorite book I've ever read. There's a problem with adapting it now, which is that the book was, so it came out in 96. He wrote it, you know, over the, call it eight years prior. And the book imagines a very near future. It's almost a little black mirror-y, if you've seen that show, where he's imagining it takes place in, so it came out in 96 and it basically takes place from like 2000 to 2008 or so. He's projecting forward and extrapolating into what he saw going on in society and imagining the kind of slightly warped, slightly funhouse mirror version of what the world is going to be like.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, well, I don't want to do anything that would ever make any of you feel uncomfortable or make you feel ill at ease. So I just sort of backed away. I let the option lapse. And that was sort of the end of my involvement. But there was a brief moment in time back in 2000, I'm going to say 2008, 9, 10, somewhere around there where I was like, I think I'm going to spend the next four years of my life trying to adapt this enormous ridiculous book into a eight-hour miniseries. It would have been a very, there's the sliding doors thing where like that could have been the way my professional career went.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is a sort of like mayor of Eastown, was like this, like a sort of six or seven hour miniseries that has a very high budget and stuff like that. That didn't really exist back then. But I tried to convince people that it would be a really good book to adapt into something like that. I had optioned the rights to it. I had sort of gone to his estate and made my case as like a guy who could be trusted with this book, which is so important to people in my generation. And they had given me the rights to it and I sort of tried to get people interested in it. And it was sort of taking off a little bit. And it looked like it might happen. And then for a number of reasons, it just kind of didn't happen. Among them that the people who control his estate became just kind of generally wary of Hollywood for a number of reasons and kind of didn't really want there to be a lot of adaptations of his material.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my own personal life, that I didn't more aggressively pursue. I mean, he had a million correspondents, I think. When you read stories about him, you'll often read a lot of people have the story of like, I wrote him a letter out of nowhere, and he wrote me back and we corresponded for five years. It was a thing he did. So I don't think I'm special in any way. But I really do regret not sort of trying to rekindle our little epistolary friendship when I moved out to California. So long story, only slightly longer. At some point, I had the thought that it would be really interesting riding challenge to adapt infinite jest into not a movie, because that's impossible and not an ongoing TV show because that's also impossible, but some kind of limited series. And this is years ago now. This is probably 12 years ago at the time, a thing that's very commonplace now.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If my house is burning down and I have only time to grab five objects from my house, that's one of the ones I'm grabbing. So that began a correspondence between the two of us. He was an excellent corresponder. He wrote letters to hundreds and hundreds of people. Frequently, when you would get a letter from him, it was like a half of a piece of paper that he had just torn off from like a jagged edge and he would just scribble a note and say like checking in, seeing how you're doing or whatever. He was at Illinois State teaching English and we corresponded for a while and I tried to get him to come to SNL to see the show because he was obsessed with television and I thought it would be really fun for him, but he was too shy and he never made it. He eventually moved to California and taught at Pomona and we sort of lost touch. And I kept it thinking in my head because I moved to California like, oh, I should reach out to him now that I'm out here and I never did. And then tragically, his mental health problems caught up to him and he committed suicide. And it's one of those sort of great tragedies.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was very surreal, and he was like, Look, he had gone to Amherst and he knew about, he knew what the lampoon was. He was at Amherst in the early 80s. And he said, it sounds really fun to come there, but like I'm very sort of like press shy. And, you know, I don't want a whole big hullabaloo. And I was like, listen, man, we're just making this up. Like, we just want to have you come hang out with us. If you want to come hang out with us, we don't have to do any kind of public ceremony or whatever. Just come and hang. We'll show you the building. I think you'll really dig it. So he did his reading. We brought him back to the castle and we just had a big dinner with him with the whole staff. And by then, a bunch of people on the staff had read the book and really loved it. And we just hung out with him. And he was great. And we had an amazing conversation. I have a picture on my wall. I'm staring at it right now of me lighting a cigarette for him, which is like...”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I titled, I think Novelist of the Millennium or something. And I'm just a college junior and I called his agent and said, hey, I'm going to level with you. Like we're making this up. We're just completely making this up, this award. But it's a really cool building and it's a fun group of people. And he's going to be in town. And if If he wants to come, we would love to host him for a dinner. So I was working on my thesis about a week later. My phone rang and I picked it up and said, hello. And the person said, hey, this is Dave Wallace. Is this Mike Shore? And it was just Wallace calling me on the phone. And he wanted to know. So my heart is pounding.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or whatever. It's like the most famous people of the world, and they all come. So the lampoon would do a parody of that. And they would say, our man of the year is Randy Macho Man Savage. And we would have Randy Macho Man Savage come and give him a big fancy dinner and present him with a giant trophy and whatever.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or Billy Bud, or something, but I just kind of want to write about this. And to his credit, he was like, sure, go ahead. It's your thesis. You write about what you want. So I ended up spending an entire year then writing about the book and thinking about it in terms of like how it fit into the postmodernism canon. And around, I can't remember now, maybe October of the following year, Wallace came, he was on a tour and he announced that he was coming, or maybe it was that spring, I think it was that spring, he announced a book tour and he was coming to the Brattle Theater, which was in Cambridge. So I was president of the lampoon at the time. And one of the things a lampoon does is it gives out awards to people. And it's always sort of a joke. The hasty pudding is the old famous 18th century social club at Harvard, and they give out a man and woman of the year award. And it's always, you know, literally like Tom Hanks and Julia Rob.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, February of 1996, I am at the end of my junior year in college and Infinite Jess comes out. And my friend Rebecca says to me, hey, have you heard about this book? Everybody really likes this book? We should go buy it. We went to the Harvard bookstore and we both bought a copy of the book. I read the book. I started reading it that night and I didn't stop until I was done. It really, something about it just altered my brain chemistry and changed the way that I thought about literature and writing and the world. It's one of those things. Everybody has a story like this about some piece of literature, right? It just did click. I heard an audible click in my brain as I was reading it. And I was looking for a senior thesis topic for my senior year. And I went to my advisor and I said, this book literally just came out this month. And I know that you want what I'm supposed to do is pick like a DH Lawrence novel or a Henry James novel or some other.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there are other ways you can learn those lessons. SNL is just a particularly blunt Force trauma way to do it. It's very like it's a very intense kind of like sledgehammer to the head over and over again that kind of drills this idea into you.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Joke here. It doesn't work. Cut this, cut this. It's a very rare star of a TV show who will say, cut my material. That's not the typical attitude for number one on the call sheet star of the show, guy on the poster. Usually those people are like, wait, I want more. I want more. Put me in this more. Put my face on TV more. People who went through SNL judge comedy and material based on only like, is this good? Is it funny? Does it work? Is it fast? Is it quick? Is it enjoyable? That's a wonderful trait in a producer slash actor. Amy Puller is the same exact way. So everybody who goes through this system has this sense of like it's not about me. It's about the end product. And if the end product is made better by removing me or removing scenes I'm in or lines that I have or jokes that I have, then remove them. We all win if this thing is better.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the level of success you have with any individual sketch is a little bit up to whether or not it's based on whether or not you are tough enough on your own material. So that's a great lesson. That's a really, really wonderful lesson for a writer of any kind to learn. Another thing it teaches you, and by the way, I should note, if you meet and work with anyone who went through the SNL gauntlet of fire, everybody has that same sort of attitude toward their own material. When you're talking about an actor like Andy Sandberg, so my friend Dan Gorn had created Brooklyn I-9, Andy Sandberg, we got Andy Sandberg to star in it. Andy Sandberg is a very, was a very well-known and beloved comedian and was pretty famous on his own right, thanks to his own work. And yet, when we would show him cuts of Brooklyn episodes in the early days, he would go like, I'm bad in this scene, cut me out of this, cut this, cut my.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, on your streaming service of choice, and you can find a lot of shows and movies where you think to yourself, that was about 25 minutes too long. I liked it. It was good, but man, why was that so long? And the answer is almost always like they just didn't get tough enough on their own material. So, SNL is just ruthless about that. SNL is like Lauren Michaels has many aphorisms that he likes to dole out to you as you sit at his feet and he dispenses his wisdom. But one of the things he has been saying for, I think, about 50 years is this show doesn't go on because it's ready. The show goes on because it's 1130 on Saturday night. And that ethos is, it sort of permeates everything and it reinforces this idea that you work on it and work on it and work on it until it's done. And then you're done.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's almost no joke or piece of writing that I could put into a script that I would think that cannot be cut. Like it just trains you to say anything can be cut. And if it improves what you're doing, then cut it. And I think that's a really hard lesson for some people to learn, especially when depending on where people come from, what their backgrounds are, if you grow up in a system, I mean, creatively grow up in a system that doesn't train you not to be precious with your own material and then you achieve any kind of success, you are almost always way too precious about your material because you have this sort of personal belief that you did this alone. You figured it out. You crack the code and how dare anybody tell me to cut this or cut that or how dare these executives think that this is too long? And as a result, you can look around.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many. I do believe that, by the way. I think that if everyone who worked in Hollywood had to work for one year at SNL, in general things From a creative standpoint, the thing that SNL teaches you is to not be precious with your own material. You generally have about four minutes to do whatever you're going to do, with rare exceptions. You're talking about four minutes. And so you write a sketch and it's five minutes and 38 seconds long. And you go in with a red pen and you just make giant X's underscore. Like cut this, cut this, cut this, this didn't work. Change this. And after doing that every week for, you know, seven years.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really like that about comedy in general. There's not a lot of, you can certainly write jokes that don't work that you still believe in and you can cling to them if you want to, but you also know like no one's ever going to laugh at this. And if you're okay with that, that's fine. You can leave it in your movie or your show, but you at least have the information that you were looking for very quickly.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could either leave it alone, do nothing, and get exactly probably the same reaction that I got the first time, or I can try to fix this. I can cut this joke that didn't work. I can try to write a better punchline. There was an immediacy to it that was weirdly comforting because sometimes you make things in like months and months and months go by and then they sort of float out into the universe. Comedy very frequently, especially comedy for performance, is just It's like a Roman Coliseum, you know, a bunch of people gives you a thumbs up or a thumbs down and then it's up to you to figure out what to do next.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know. Oh, sorry. I was just going to say that that is one of the great things about comedy as a discipline is that, you know, stand-ups will tell you that the reason they like being stand-ups frequently is because there's a vote. You write a joke and you perform it and the audience votes immediately whether or not that joke is funny. And it's not quite as immediate in TV or movies or some other forms of comedy, but there is a sense of you don't know whether you have gotten it right and then you get a reaction from people that's visceral that says you're on the right path or you're not or you're kind of are but you could spruce it up a little bit that's what made Saturday Night Live so great we would do address rehearsal at eight on Saturdays and there would be a live audience and you'd run this sketch and then some jokes would work and some wouldn't and then it would end at 10 and the show goes live at 1130 this thing would occur to you which is”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brevity is the soul of wit. And so if your piece was too long, they would often hack it down and tell you to make it shorter and stuff. You're not talking about 20-page long humorous short stories. These are like short little bursts. These are shouts and murmurs level bursts of humor. I'm sure somewhere in a box, somewhere in my house is my original pieces that I submitted, but at least for my memory, they're long gone.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was, and they kept offering me the free tote bag, if you re upped. And I remember just continuously thinking like, I don't want your damn tote bag, man. Like, leave me alone. So I wrote a piece that was like five or six in a series of letters asking you to re-up. They just got increasingly antagonistic and aggressive. So it was that sort of thing. And that would fit on one page. You know what I mean? Like that's 500 words or 600 words or something”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My dad who thought you're a college man now. You ought to read an intellectual magazine. And then it lapsed, and I started getting these like really angry letters that were like, you know, like, what's the deal? How could you have betrayed us like this? So you legitimately were getting these.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I remembered, they put a page limit on them, you know, because it's prose comedy. It's a kind of comedy writing that isn't done that much anymore. The closest analog that people might be familiar with is something like the shouts and murmurs page in the New Yorker. Like a lot of lampoon people have gone on to write shouts and murmurs pieces for the New Yorker. Prose comedy used to be much more common. Magazines used to have PJ O'Rourke wrote humor for Rolling Stone and People would write humorous pieces for the New Yorker or for any number of different magazines. It doesn't really exist anymore like many things involving print media, but that you only want to remember offhand is I wrote a piece speaking of The New Yorker. The premise was it was like a series of increasingly angry letters being written to you by the New Yorker because you hadn't re-epped your subscription yet because at the time I'd been gifted a subscription as a freshman in college by someone probably”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out, I submitted anonymously to the extent I could. I only wrote my first and second initial. So they didn't know whether I was male or female. They didn't know really who I was at all. And I got admitted, I made it past the first cut and they have a cocktail party for people who make it past the cuts. And I showed up and they were like, oh, you're that guy. Welcome, congratulations. And I was like, wow, they really was anonymous. Like they didn't know who I was. They didn't care. They just were like, are these things funny or are they not funny? So then you did that again. You submit three more pieces. You had got notes. There was another round of cuts. And then there were elections and you just waited in your room for the full day, not having any idea what was going on. And then they would show up and say yes or no. And if the answer is yes, and then you got brought into this week-long semi, not really hazing. It's kind of a parody of like a frat hazing week. But you spend a week like getting.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lampoon is a pure to the extent that it could be was a pure meritocracy. It was there were artists, writers, and there were business people who sold ads. And if you were trying to get on as a business person, it was like, did you sell enough ads? If you did, you got on. If you didn't, you didn't. If you were an artist, you drew a bunch of pieces. You were critiqued and sort of given notes by the other artists on the staff. Then they voted on who their favorite artists were. Same with writing. You wrote three pieces, comedy pieces of the subjects were up to you. You were winnowed down from the total number of people trying to get on to half that and then half again. And then they would bring six to eight people to the election and then vote however many that they wanted, they would vote on this. This was part of the sales pitch, was that it was a meritocracy. So I decided to kind of test that theory because I was skeptical. So I submitted my pieces the first time I tried.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Learned about it from just noticing that it kept popping up when you would see certain movies that you thought were funny or like Doug Kenny wrote Animal House and he was on the lampoon and Jim Downey who was a legendary comedy writer at Letterman, I think he was Letterman's first head writer and wrote so many of your favorite SNL sketches throughout history. He was on the Harvard Lampoon. So when I applied to college that was like on my essay for Harvard was I want to come here because I want to join the lampoon. So when I got there, that was like goal number one for me was joining it. And there's like an audition process you have to write material and then you get the. Pool of people get to winnowed down, and then they accept a few writers.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The lampoon is this very old institution at Harvard. It was founded in 1876, and it is this weird satirical comedy magazine that has just been kind of plugging along for now almost 150 years. And there's a couple interesting things about it. One of them is that the alumni are numerous and very high achieving. William Randolph Hearst was in the lampoon. And so was John Updike. And so was George Plimpton and a million comedy writers from like the 80s to the present who have written for letterman and the Simpsons and SNL and all these shows. Conan O'Brien was the president of the Harvard Lane Poon twice, which is a very rare thing. So it's just this kind of weird little humor outlet that people who were obsessed with comedy kind of learn about at an early age.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT