On Tuesday, I spoke with Barry Marder, long-time friend and collaborator of Jerry Seinfeld and co-writer of Bee Movie,which comes out this weekend. It's Jerry's first big project since the end of his classic sitcom and he's getting all the press, but at Fancast, we like to get perspectives outside the norm. Marder is a professional stand-up comedian, and he worked on Seinfeld, writing a lot of the stand-up segments on the show. He also wrote the popular Letters From a Nut series of books working with Bruce Baum, under the mysterious pseudonym of Ted L. Nancy.
Fancast: So you're one of the four co-writers of Bee Movie.
Barry Marder: There was Jerry and myself and Andy Robin and Spike Fereston.
Fancast: How did that work?
Barry Marder: We all got together initially with Jerry and started from day one, four years ago.
Fancast: How many drafts did the script go through?
Barry Marder: Over 200, surprisingly.
Fancast: What was the process like?
Barry Marder: We sat down, we broke a story, we worked with Jerry in New York in his offices, got DreamWorks to approve the story. Kept writing it and polishing it and fixing it up and looking at drafts and looking at screenings. Four years of putting it through the mill – we were actually writing on this up until a few weeks ago. I think it's a very good movie. I think people will really like this movie.
Fancast: How does Jerry like being a part of it?
Barry Marder: Jerry loves this movie. This was a departure for him. He didn't want to do the same thing, and you've got to give someone credit for at least trying something new. I've been to the last two screenings and it was very well received. You have an audience laughing for an hour and a half now. I'm a comedian, I've opened for Jerry, I've played the Improv for 17 years, and I know what that theater sounds like when it's real laughter. I've been to enough movies where people don't laugh, so this is an hour and a half of solid, clean – no dirty words in this movie – a clean, solid family movie, and people respond to this thing. You will not be bored, I can promise you.
Fancast: You've worked with Jerry for how long now?
Barry Marder: I've known Jerry since probably 1981, just to say hello in the clubs, we would kind of nod to each other. Then in '91, I started working with him on Seinfeld, he and I would put together the stand-up act on "Seinfeld." That's how I got to start working with him. I used to work for Letterman and Leno and sold jokes to those guys.
Fancast: What other comics have you written for?
Barry Marder: I wrote for Dave Letterman, Bill Maher, Jay Leno, Michael Richards, I wrote for Brad Garrett for a while – Jeff Altman a lot, he's brilliant. I stopped writing for these guys years ago, but I had met Jerry because I'd been writing stand-up for a lot of these guys. If somebody was going on The Tonight Show, a lot of times I was flattered to get a call and help somebody knock out a set. When Jerry got his show, he asked me to help him with his stand-up.
Fancast: Is that common for stand-ups, to get help writing their jokes?
Barry Marder: I think most good stand-ups would probably write their own material. On a show like that, Jerry certainly could've done it himself. To me, he's one of the top five stand-up comics I've ever seen. I'd put him up there with George Carlin or Bill Cosby or any of them. This guy can turn it out, but when you do a show like Seinfeld and you've gotta have that joke, that moment, and he's writing that show, I think he just needed somebody. It wasn't the fact that he couldn't come up with it. He just needed to say “okay, we're doing a show about couches, and I don't have time to start thinking of stand-up on couches, so write me a page of stand-up.” He can't do a show, act in a show, direct a show, produce a show, write a show – this was just something that he laid off on me.
Fancast: Could you give a top five stand-ups of all time?
Barry Marder: Having opened for this guy on the road, from '92 until a year ago when I opened for him at Caesar's in Vegas at that Celine Dion room... being a professional stand-up myself, to do an hour on stage is real tough thing. It's harder than anyone can even imagine. Holding an audience's attention for two-thirds of a movie by yourself. There's no music, nothing to fall back on. It's gotta be fresh and new. An hour on stage is an incredible feat. So a comic like Jerry, who turned over an hour and did a whole new hour, and killed with that hour, and here I'm still trying to get twenty minutes. I've seen a lot of brilliant stand-ups kill for 45 minutes, but it's the same act. It's not that they don't want to try something different, but it's tough.
For me, the top five stand-ups I've ever seen have gotta be George Carlin, who's stunningly brilliant in the amount of material this man has, Jackie Mason, who's just tremendous, Bill Cosby, who can go out and do it. I'd put Jerry up there. Even a guy like Jonathan Winters, I don't think he can do an hour, twenty minutes, that's it. Robert Klein is up there. Somebody who can go up there and be clever and clean and funny for that length of time.
Fancast: Do you have anything against blue work?
Barry Marder: No, I just think there's a time and place for everything. To me, a comedian that works clean, there's nothing nicer than to walk in that theater – the places I play with Jerry are usually 2500, 3000 seaters, usually THE theater in the town, in mid-sized towns like Dayton or Mobile or Huntsville, Alabama, and you want to respect that town. The people come out, they dress up, there's no drinks in there. There's nothing more satisfying than to entertain them clean. For me, when you're blue, it substitutes the joke. Anybody can go up there and curse and get people to laugh. That's just my thinking. I enjoy comedians who are blue – Louis C.K. is brilliant, he's blue, hilariously funny. I enjoy that, but just for me, I work clean, Jerry works clean, and you walk out of there proud of what you did. Of course, we curse in the car on the way home. Total filth is coming out of us.
Fancast: How about your favorite comedy movies of all time?
Barry Marder: I loved Airplane! Borat to me was hilarious. I like that Jack Lemmon/Billy Wilder stuff. The Apartment, Fortune Cookie. I like a clever movie. I saw a really funny movie that Jeff Goldblum did called Pittsburgh, it was like a Christopher Guest movie – he really makes me laugh, those Guffman things and For Your Consideration. But this Goldblum movie, Pittsburgh, he went back to his old home town to do a production of The Music Man, and the local theater guy going “You're just not Henry Hill to me.” It was really funny. Another movie I laughed at big the other night was Hot Fuzz. That was weird and funny, it's gotta be weird and funny to me. I've got my 20-minute rule – I give a movie 20 minutes, and if I can't take it, I turn it off. Hot Fuzz got insane at the end. I loved it.
All time? Borat, Airplane, Blazing Saddles... I like The Producers, the Jack Lemmon stuff with a story and clever lines. I guess that's a top seven now, but you need a couple of alternates for when we go to court on this.
Fancast: How did the name Ted L. Nancy come about?
Barry Marder: I kinda felt when I created these Letters from a Nut books, I wanted to create a character and I thought he should have kind of a funny name. I saw a product called Mr. Coffee, the Joe DiMaggio thing, and I always thought that somebody out there was named Coffee, and Mr. Coffee made me laugh. Somebody's name is Robert Coffee. So I thought of a funny name, so I put Ted L. Nancy together.
I picked the name Ted because at the time, I thought Ted seemed to be a lunatic's name. A palatable lunatic like Ted Kaczynski or Ted Bundy. These guys, while they are lunatics, they seem kind of harmless compared to the normal run-of-the-mill lunatics. Then I thought of a last name, and I always thought of a female name, like Mr. Susan or Mr. Nancy seemed to hit the best, and just Ted Nancy seemed too short for me, so I put Ted L.
Fancast: Any more Letters from a Nut coming out?
Barry Marder: The three books – I worked with another comedian, a funny guy, on this stuff. His name is Bruce Baum. I have moved forward on my own with these. Two new Ted L. Nancy books are coming out through the National Lampoon in the next six months. One is called “Hello, Junk Mail,” I worked with a writer named Phyllis Murphy, and I got illustrations on both books from Alan Marder. What Ted did was create a family of weird foreigners called the Kabobbys of Glendale, and I answered junk mail through them. How would you like financial freedom? Yes, I would like financial freedom. How would you like clean breath? Yes, I would like clean breath. I put together a book of junk mail and intertwined a family newsletter of these Kabobbys.
The other book after that is Ted L. Nancy's “Afternoon Stories.” He would go out as a traveling storyteller to a Renault dealership and tell them to Renault salesmen, or to a Thermos factory and tell a weird story. He'd go there, tell a story and then bring on a strange act, like a ventriloquist with a puppet in a coma, to real people.
Fancast: What are you watching now?
Barry Marder: MAD TV, that's hilarious to me. I do watch 30 Rock, that makes me laugh. I watch The Office. For me, it's got to be some weird reality show. Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares – he comes on and screams at people and throws a salmon across the room, and then yells and gets everyone fired. That's my kind of entertainment. I get comedied out. I like more of the dramas. Madmen on AMC, that '60s show – I like a show when you can smoke for an hour straight. There's no place to smoke anymore – you really have to get arrested and go to an interrogation room to smoke indoors. I don't smoke at all, but there's nothing better than to watch a guy suck that stuff into his lungs, and then hear that whiny tubercular cough.
I watch true crime stuff. If I'm home, it's rare that I'll watch some kind of network thing. It's usually some 48 Hours episode of some lunatic that chopped up his neighbor and put him in a cup. I like people that microwave other people, that'll hold my interest for half an hour. I like anyone in a suit that's being judged. Any kind of alternative lifestyle to me – for a while I was fascinated with the Amish. How can you sit out there all day with what's going on in society – don't you want a cold drink now and then, don't you want to flick a light on? What are you doing to yourself? That was interesting to me. So when I see these true crimes about a guy whose last three relationships are now in suitcases in his garage, you kinda go "okay, guy, where did we go off on different paths?"
I like the Chris Hansen predator show, they need to freshen that show up. I'd have a Last Pedophile Standing – put them all in one room in one house. Or an American Idol thing - 'we've searched the country for the top ten predators. Here we are in San Antonio where ten thousand pedophiles turned out, only one will make the list!' Or maybe a blooper reel when the 50-year-old guy comes to the door and another 50-year-old greets him. “You're twinkletoes69, huh? I think we have a mistake here, but what are you drinking?”
Fancast: What do you remember from your experience making The Whoopee Boys?
Barry Marder: Oh, God. I was working with Paul Rodriguez. In fact, Paul Rodriguez, when he got divorced, he would hang out at my house. He was one of the first comics to hit, that's how I got that job on The Whoopee Boys. He was at Caesar's Tahoe, 82 or 83, and I was playing the Improv there, so I walked through the casino, and saw Chris Albrecht, his agent, the guy that used to run HBO, he was there with Paul. Paul told me to stay in his huge suite, so I lived there for a week, eating all his fruit. I wrote some stand-up for him, so he put me in Whoopee Boys and I had a couple of lines in that. You're the only person to ever mention that movie – it may have shown up with one of my ex-wives to try to get a check out of me in a legal document.
Fancast: I'm proud of that. Last thing, what do you make of the whole Michael Richards thing?
Barry Marder: He's in Bee Movie. I know Michael very well. I'm glad Jerry put him in. I know Michael, Michael's not a racist, I think that was just a guy trying to be funny. I think Michael made a mistake. I know he felt bad. He is definitely a clean, solid guy. I don't believe he has any hatred or bigotry in his heart. It was just a guy up on stage trying to be funny. He's a decent guy and an extremely talented guy. I hope the role in this movie helps him. The world needs to laugh here.
