Romantic Comedy, page 5
“For sure, this is my dream job,” I said. “Even with the baked-in sexism, even when I’ve barely slept. I just can’t imagine a job where I laugh more, or the people are more talented and hard-working. And to get paid to make fun of stuff that deserves to be made fun of and have this huge platform—what more could a misanthrope from Missouri wish for?”
He laughed. “Are you a misanthrope from Missouri?”
“Yes and yes.”
“I feel that way about my music—like, This counts as a job? Sometimes I get scared that someone is going to tell me the jig is up. I fooled everyone for a couple decades, but now they’ve realized I’m a fraud.”
“What’s the fraudulent part? That you don’t really know how to play guitar?”
He laughed.
“That could be a sketch, actually,” I said. “With you just sort of wiggling your fingers on the strings.”
“Actually,” he repeated. “See? You do say it a lot. But no, the fraudulence is being rewarded for something I’d gladly do for free. You’d have to be super, super entitled to experience that and never second-guess yourself or at least be amazed by your luck.”
“The thing I worry about is overstaying my welcome,” I said. “There’s supposedly a TNO curse where if you stay too long, you get stale here and you miss the boat on the next stage of your career. It only applies to writers and cast members, though. A lot of the producers and wardrobe and makeup people have been around forever.”
“What’s the boat you’d miss by not leaving? Like, what’s your next act?”
“I’m going to write non-condescending, ragingly feminist screenplays for romantic comedies.”
He glanced at me. “What makes a romantic comedy non-condescending and ragingly feminist? Besides an Indigo Girls soundtrack.”
“Mostly the quality of the writing. And related to that, the character development. When one of those movies doesn’t work, it’s usually because it’s horribly written and/or the script hasn’t done the work of convincing you the couple is attracted to each other, so then you don’t care if obstacles get in their way and keep them apart. Another of my pet peeves is that the female characters used to all be sort of cutesy, like having flour on their nose after they baked cookies and not knowing it. And now they’re all a mess, like waking up really hungover and getting fired. I want to create characters who aren’t flawless but also aren’t ridiculous or incompetent at life.” After a second, I added, “Wow, was that two rants in a row? I swear I’m actually not a total asshole.”
“You actually don’t seem like a total asshole.”
“I think I’ll leave at the end of next season, thirteen months from now.” Oddly, I hadn’t told this to anyone else yet, including Viv, Henrietta, or my agent. “And then I will have been here exactly ten years. But who knows if I’ll really be able to cut the cord?”
“I’m glad you’re here now, tonight.” Noah pointed at my computer screen. “To save me from myself.” After a pause, he said, “I have to ask—” and he leaned forward and tapped the piece of paper with the two lists of words.
“The first column is words the network censor has allowed in sketches,” I said. “The second column is words the network censor said were offensive and had to be changed. It’s almost like there’s a double standard for terms related to men’s sexuality and terms related to women’s, huh?”
“That’s crazy. Even pink? And wet?”
Hearing Noah say pink and wet together—I felt an unprecedented sympathy for the censor, who, as it happened, was currently a woman in her fifties named Janice. Aloud, I said, “It’s all contextual, of course. Obviously, you can have somebody say ‘That’s a nice pink sweater.’ The problem with the standards rules is that they aren’t even rules. It’s just at the discretion of one person.”
“Do you think getting censored has ever forced you to find a workaround that’s better than what you originally had?”
“For sure,” I said. “But I still don’t like the hypocrisy.”
After a companionable silence, he said, “If I never sang ‘Making Love in July’ again, I’d be okay with that. I wrote it when I was eighteen, and I’m grateful, if it’s possible to feel grateful to a song, because it opened so many doors for me. But the chord repetitions are simplistic and, yeah, it is kind of cheesy. The reason I still perform it isn’t for my own enjoyment.” We made eye contact, and he said, “Obviously, we live in a world where fans have ways to be very vocal when they think they’ve been shortchanged.”
So this was behind all his questions about my favorite musicians—he felt defensive about the Cheesemonger idea I’d pitched. His declaration that sketches worked better when the host was making fun of himself notwithstanding, perhaps he was as vain and touchy as anyone else.
“I haven’t written the Cheesemonger sketch yet,” I said. “My instinct is that it could be fun, but you’re under no obligation to do it if you think it’s dumb or insulting or you just don’t want to.”
“I have to see how it turns out, right?”
I tried to think of a gracious way to convey that if it was likely he’d push to cut the sketch, I’d prefer not to spend any of the next ten hours writing it.
“Random question,” he said, “but are there any male singer-songwriters you like?”
“Oh, sure. Jason Isbell. Neil Young. And you, of course.”
“Of course. Which would you say are your three favorites of my songs?” In this moment, surprisingly enough, he didn’t sound vain. If I hadn’t known better, hadn’t known that charming people was part of his job description and that he dated twenty-two-year-old models, I might even have thought he was flirting.
“It’s hard to choose,” I said. “Something I really admire is the level of quality you’ve operated at for so long.”
“Nice try. Just three.”
“Okay, well—” I held up my right fist then extended my thumb. “One, ‘Making Love in July.’ Then, hmm—” Frantically, I searched in my mind. He was ubiquitous enough that even though I didn’t like his music, I surely knew at least three of his song titles, but it was difficult to summon them on command. Then a title came from nowhere, and, releasing my index finger, I exclaimed, “ ‘Best Laid Plans!’ ” What had he said was the name of his song with Amy Ray on backup? Or had I already revealed my ignorance? I then recalled a collaboration he’d done with the mononymic pop singer Françoise. “Oh, and ‘Sepia.’ ” I wasn’t sure if “Sepia” counted more as Noah’s song or Françoise’s, but I did sort of like it. Plus, I was now triumphantly holding up three fingers.
“It’s an amazing coincidence,” he said, “given what a fan you are, because those are my three most popular songs. In fact, those are probably the songs that someone who’s never really listened to my music would be familiar with. Wouldn’t it be wild if you wrote an entire sketch about how cheesy my music is, but you’d barely ever listened to it?”
“If by wild you mean egregiously irresponsible, then yes,” I said. “But since I’m the president of the Manhattan chapter of your fan club, that suggestion is deeply wounding.”
He was grinning and shaking his head, and I was grinning, too, and I said, “You know how I said I’m not a big asshole? Maybe I am a big asshole.”
“Impossible.”
“When the fan club meets, it’s in a church basement and we hang a life-sized poster of you on the wall and gaze at it.”
“Oh, really?” he said, and he then did something very confusing. He turned toward me, cupped my chin with his hand, and looked intently into my eyes. “Like this?” he said. “Is this what you do?”
Was the gesture brotherly? Or flirtatious? Or just strange?
It seemed he was wondering the same because he quickly dropped his hand and said, “Sorry. I feel like it’s weird I just did that.”
Because of how surprised I was, I overcompensated. In a merry voice, I said, “Around here, you have to try much harder to be weird. If you peed in a pickle jar and left it on my desk, that would be a start. Anyway, seriously, you’ll meet with Nigel and Elliot and the producers after the table read, and I’m sure they’ll let you have the final say on the Cheesemonger sketch.”
“No, I trust the process,” he said. “I’ve always been under the impression that when—” But I didn’t learn what he’d always been under the impression about because this was the moment we were interrupted. Autumn DiCanio, who was head of TNO’s talent department, appeared in the doorway, along with one of her assistants. Most of Autumn’s assistants were pretty, long-haired blondes just out of college—this also described Autumn herself, except she was forty—and because I had trouble telling the assistants apart, I wasn’t sure of this one’s name.
“Noah!” Autumn said warmly. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you! How’re you doing?”
It occurred to me for the first time that it was rather odd this revision had just happened in my office, that Noah had found his way to me solo. Hosts were regularly in the office during the wee hours, especially as the week went on, but they were almost always chaperoned by Autumn or a member of her staff, or writers visited the host in his or her eighth-floor dressing room, supplicant-style.
“I’m good,” Noah said. “Sally’s been helping me with my sketch.”
“Fantastic,” Autumn said. “Sally’s one of our very best. We have a car downstairs to take you to the hotel whenever you’re ready, unless you guys are still working?” For my first few years at TNO, I’d instinctively disliked and distrusted Autumn because of her upbeat, briskly corporate energy. However, I’d realized over time that she was highly organized and competent in a way that was hard not to respect. And she had great taste. In addition to booking and then babysitting the hosts and musical guests, she scouted for new cast members, whom Nigel rejected or hired. As with Bob O’Leary, the public didn’t know Autumn existed, but she’d discovered many of comedy’s household names.
Noah turned and looked at me—I was farther inside the office, farther from Autumn—and he said, “I guess we’re wrapping up?”
“I’ll email the revision back to you.”
“Sally, just email it to me and cc Madison, and we’ll take care of the rest,” Autumn said, and I could tell that she was trying to protect Noah from sharing his email address with a writer; she didn’t know he already had. She added, “Noah, we’ll make sure your sketch is in the pile for the table read. That’ll be at three, and the car will come for you at 11 a.m. for the photo shoot and promo videos, so hopefully you get to have a relaxing morning.”
Noah had turned back in Autumn’s direction but once again looked at me. “Do you need a ride home?”
Was he joking? I said, “Oh, I stay here on Tuesdays,” and Autumn laughed and said, “I’ll bet Sally’s night is just beginning.”
Noah stood then and said, “Thanks again. I really appreciate it.”
“I’m here to help,” I said, and I suddenly felt cringingly awkward. I had no idea if the awkwardness had originated with me, or with the arrival of Autumn and the assistant, whose name I was now 87 percent certain was Madison, or with the fact that Noah had recently grabbed my face. Both Autumn and maybe-Madison wore very tight black jeans, angular black shirts, and pointy black boots. I was abruptly conscious that I was wearing gray sweatpants, a black sweatshirt, light green running socks, and no shoes. Noah was somewhere in the middle of their style and my slovenliness, in jeans, sneakers, and a long-sleeved brown T-shirt with a refrigerator on it.
Before the three of them left, Noah waved from the doorway. “See you at the table read,” he said.
Wednesday, 4:43 a.m.
When Danny returned, he looked exhausted but gave off a happy energy. Before I could ask, he said, “All’s well in Bellyville.”
“Glad to hear it.” Since my editing session with Noah, I’d spent two and a half hours working on the Cheesemonger sketch. After he’d left, I’d felt churned up, presumably from his celebrity aura, and I hadn’t tried to go back to sleep. I currently had four pages of the sketch, which weren’t very good, and the overstimulation that had gripped me at 2 a.m. was long gone. I reached for the pages of the Danny Horst Rule sketch sitting on my desk and held them out to Danny. “Will you help me with your dialogue?”
“Man, Sally, have some self-respect.”
“I’m trying to turn in three separate sketches,” I said.
“That’s on you. Do you think it would be weird if Belly and I break a glass at our wedding? She suggested it.”
“Do you want to?”
He shrugged. Though he rarely mentioned it, a widely known part of Danny’s origin story was that he’d grown up in an Orthodox Jewish enclave in New Jersey. As the oldest boy of seven siblings, he’d attended a yeshiva through high school and had been expected to become a rabbi like his dad. But he’d secretly watched comedians on cable from the age of twelve on, and he’d left his community after his first year at a rabbinical college, when he moved into a homeless shelter for young adults that, by coincidence, was about a mile from the TNO studio. Seven years later, Danny was still estranged from all of his family except a brother, which he joked was a reasonable price to pay for getting to eat fried shrimp. And he was far from the only person at TNO who’d endured misfortune; tragedy, of course, often begat comedy.
Danny had taken the pages from me, and he read them so quickly that if I didn’t know him, I’d have thought he was skimming. “This is brutal,” he said. “In an awesome way.” He took a pen off his desk and began filling in the spaces I’d left blank. When he’d finished, he said, “It’s definitely better if I’m the second cop who comes in, not the first.”
“Because it increases the tension of when will you appear?”
He nodded.
“I wonder if Noah would be willing to be the first cop instead of the guy on the date,” I said. “But he was so negative about the sketch in the pitch meeting that I don’t even want to ask.”
“Yeah, that was a real slap-down from him in Nigel’s office.”
I thought of telling Danny about my recent encounter with Noah, but how would I tell it? I wasn’t sure. Instead, I said, “Thanks for noticing.”
Danny smirked as he handed back the pages. He said, “Chuckles, everyone noticed.”
Wednesday, 2:57 p.m.
In the interlude between turning in my sketches and the table read, I took a cab home, fell asleep for an hour, woke, showered, and walked to the Seventy-ninth Street subway station. As I stood on the platform waiting, I read the texts that had come in during my nap, which included two from my college roommate, Denise, the pediatrician, who lived in Austin. Responding to my question about if Viv’s ophthalmologist could ask her out, Denise had written:
Doctor should not ask her out. But I don’t know specific laws or rules. I know it is different with psychologist/psychiatrist where it might be unethical.
Then: Is this for a sketch or real life?
Real life, I typed back. Can my friend ask the dr out?
From Henrietta, to both Viv and me, there was a photo of a bag of coffee-flavored potato chips, along with a text: Did we know these exist?
When I reached the seventeenth floor of 66, Henrietta and Viv were sitting on the couch of my office, and Danny was at his desk. Viv tilted the potato chip bag in my direction, and I took one, which looked like a regular potato chip topped with a dusting of cinnamon. I bit off a tiny amount as Danny said, “It’s not the worst thing ever.”
I swallowed. “Or is it?”
Danny reached out and took a few more, stuffed them in his mouth, and said while chewing, “They’re wrong but weirdly compelling.”
Henrietta said, “Like Log Cabin Republicans.”
“Or that monkey in Japan who was caught trying to fuck a deer,” Viv added.
As we all walked down the hall to the conference room, I said to Viv, “My college roommate said Dr. Eyeballs isn’t supposed to ask you out, but I asked if you can ask him. I’m waiting to hear.”
Viv grimaced. “Yeah, I don’t really do that.”
“What’s it like to be so beautiful you never have to make the first move?”
She laughed. “Advantageous yet burdensome. Also, in my case, complicated by America’s ongoing misogynoir.”
The conference room was full as we entered, with most seats taken around the pushed-together tables in the center, as well as around the perimeter of the room. There were even more staff members at read-throughs than at pitch meetings, including from hair and makeup, wardrobe, set design, and the music department. Spread over the tables were scripts of the sketches and, because we’d be there for three hours, bottled waters and scattered platters of sandwiches, salad, cut-up fruit, chips (presumably not coffee-flavored), and cookies. Whether you considered this meal breakfast, lunch, or dinner depended on how late you’d been up the night before.
Danny, Viv, and Henrietta all took seats at the table that had been saved for them. I took a second-perimeter seat, my back to the windows that overlooked muffled honking traffic and muffled frolicking tourists seventeen stories below. Noah Brewster was in the middle of the tables’ south side, to the left of Nigel, who always narrated the stage directions in all the sketches. The worse the sketch was being received, the faster he read.
It happened that I was about twenty feet from Noah but directly in front of him, and when we made eye contact, he smiled and I felt a wild surge inside me, though I wasn’t sure if it was panic, excitement, or something else. He was painfully handsome, yes, but I had already known that. I reflexively looked away, as if we were strangers who’d accidentally locked eyes on the subway. Then I realized that looking away had been rude and odd, because we weren’t subway strangers. We were, if only for this week, colleagues, and part of my job was to make him comfortable. I quickly looked back, saw that his smile had been replaced with a more quizzical expression, and forced a smile of my own. When I did, he raised a hand and waved. Then a cast member named Bailey, TNO’s first nonbinary performer, leaned in from Noah’s left and said something, and Noah turned toward them and replied, and they both laughed.
