Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Beginning tonight and continuing each Thursday night through March, CNN will suspend its political coverage during the 10 o’clock hour to air The History of Comedy, which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Interlaced with archive footage and interviews with stand-ups, comedy writers, talk show hosts and departed stars’s children, the eight-episode docuseries is a collaboration between two familiar TV producing duos: Hazy Mills and Herzog & Company.
Will & Grace star Sean Hayes formed Hazy Mills 13 years ago with former Illinois State University classmate Todd Milliner; together, they’ve executive produced Hot in Cleveland, Hollywood Game Night and Grimm, now in its final season on NBC. Each of Hot in Cleveland‘s six seasons on TV Land included a clip show for fans to revisit the antics of an acerbic Rustbelt landlady (Betty White) and her three actress tenants (Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves, Wendie Malick)—lookbacks composed by Herzog & Company (Mark Herzog and Christopher G. Cowen). Herzog & Company are better-known to CNN viewers as the Emmy-nominated producers (with Playtone’s Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman) The Sixties, The Seventies and The Eighties (The Nineties will premiere this summer).
Instead of charting comedy’s course chronologically, the filmmakers pared down their original list of 30 possible themes. Tonight’s episode, “F*cking Funny,” recounts the descent of Lenny Bruce, the free speech advocate who was arrested for obscenity numerous times and died in poverty (owing to his legal bills) age age 40, in 1966. Bruce’s comedic heirs, Redd Fox, George Carlin and Richard Pryor, in turn inspired everyone from Sam Kinison to Andrew Dice Clay and Eddie Murphy. The through line of brutal honesty and bashing censorship remains as pertinent as ever today with comedians including Marc Maron, Sarah Silverman and Ali Wong, who appear in the series.
Executive producers Todd Milliner and Mark Herzog sat down with Decider last night before an advanced screening of “F***cking Funny” at The Bell House in Brooklyn, an event co-sponsored by Vulture and attended by two of their interview subjects, W. Kamau Bell (United Shades of America) and Lewis Black (The Daily Show with Trevor Noah).
DECIDER: First of all, I’ve got to commend you on “Spark of Madness,” the episode examining the frequency of mental illness and substance abuse among comedians. It concludes with Robin Williams’s death, and features candid interviews with Maria Bamford, Richard Lewis and Rachel Bloom.
TODD MILLINER: That’s my favorite.
I thought that was a great theme to explore. Do you guys subscribe to the belief that the funniest people have survived the most terrible things?
TM: Wow.
MARK HERZOG: That’s an interesting question.
I’m thinking of comedians who experiences traumas as children: Stephen Colbert losing his brothers and dad in a plane crash, Jim Carrey living in a van after his father’s job loss, and Tina Fey getting slashed across the face when she was five.
TM: I would worry about saying “the funniest.” But I think that a lot of funny people have.
MH: I would say those people are resilient, right? And therefore found a way to see the humor of it all?
TM: Like I am gay, which isn’t cool now, since, like, November [chuckles]. But when you spend your whole life trying to be something else, which is what I did, I think how I would cope with it was comedy. So, I think Sean and myself have been doing the same thing.
MH: And I grew up in a very large family of 10 children, and the way to get noticed is to be funny. Not that growing up with 10 children was in any way a horrible thing—it was actually a beautiful thing and I love it.
I did feel for you guys a bit at the end of “The Funnier Sex,” when the comedians call you out for making a point to focus specifically on women’s achievements. Patton Oswalt says, “The fact that it’s 2016 and ‘women in comedy’ is still a topic is so embarrassing.”
MH: I want to be fair, though. Every one of our episodes has women in it: all comedians are comedians, so when we talk about blue, we talk about everybody who goes blue. That really was about, I think, the idea that for many, many, many decades, people said, “Women aren’t funny,” which of course is crazy. In SNL [interviews], they talk about how it was tough for women to get big parts because people at SNL in the early days didn’t think women were that funny. And then all the sudden Gilda Radner came around and everybody [there] said, “Well, maybe they are,” which is something we’ve all realized for a long time.
MH: We talk about that SNL flipped.
MH: The funniest comedians [on the show] now are all women.
TM: I mean look at last weekend. Melissa McCarthy—
MH: Killed it. And then Kate McKinnon coming in. [McCarthy as Press Secretary Sean Spicer] was my favorite SNL moment maybe in 10 years.
Meanwhile, Politico reported that President Trump was really bothered that Spicer was played by a woman.
TM: I know.
It should be the biggest compliment in the world: she’s an amazing, Academy Award-nominated, blockbuster star.
TM: Hundred percent. Sometimes I feel like that the South Park guys got it right when they said they were going to step back for a second because the comedy that [the Trump administration] is producing in real life is better than anything they can do [chuckles].
How many people did you interview?
MH: Seventy-five. It is 95 percent comedians. We have some great historians—that’s a weird thing to say in the world of comedy—but people who’ve written books about it: Kliph Nesteroff, Bob Weide, Yael Kohen, Todd Boyd. So we have people who do the big picture and then people who lived it. The majority of the people are generous comedians who gave us their time, and could talk the talk.
How did you get Larry David to participate?
TM: Sean called and asked if he would do it, and I think what we would find is a lot of folks didn’t want to feel like they knew more about comedy than any of their peers. But when we got them in the room and started talking about comedy, we found out that everybody—despite the initial apprehension—had something wonderful to offer, and these interviews went very, very long and Larry David’s especially.
MH: By the way, it’s not in the promo, what he said was, “I tell my children all the time: don’t ask a favor of someone else because they’re going to ask a favor back [Milliner laughs]. I don’t know what favor I asked Sean Hayes of, but for some reason, I have to do this!”
Anyone that you tried to get but couldn’t?
TM: I mean there’s probably 200 people that we tried to get that we didn’t get. It was all scheduling. Nobody said, “No, I don’t want to be part of a history of comedy.”
Did any anecdotally funny things happen when you sat down with these legends? What else don’t we get to see at home?
MH: We never asked any of the comedians that we interviewed to be funny. We wanted them to take a serious look at comedy. And they all did. Sometimes they went off and had fun, but for the most part, we’re not asking them to be funny. And in a weird way I think it was a relief.
TM: I agree. That’s why I think we found some of that funny stuff in the breaks that we used for promos. The funniest moment for me that didn’t wind up in anything was when Penn [Jilette] tried to convince Teller to put his penis into the [clapper] because that’s what CNN want[ed]. And it was a funny two minutes of, “No, no, no, they want you to do that” [laughs].
MH: There was also a great moment with Senator Al Franken. The camera assistant comes in with the [clapper] and says, “Senator Al Franken interview, History of Comedy, take one.” And he goes [laughing], “History of—that’s what you’re calling it?
What realizations did you have about comedy while making this series?
TM: [Comedy]’s been around obviously for ever, but it’s always reminded us that it’s okay to laugh again. My probably biggest moment when I didn’t know when to laugh again was after 9/11. And David Letterman told us it was okay. I think some people will point to this time that we’re in now—[which] can be tragic to some people—and it’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna laugh, and comedy will help us get through whatever in our life we think is kind of insurmountable in the moment.
MH: We have a whole episode called, “The Comedy of Real Life,” where we talk about how soon is too soon [to make jokes]. In it we focus on Gilbert Gottfried doing a roast [of Hugh Hefner] six days after 9/11. He does a whole thing about the crash, and it became infamous. Comedy Central cut it—but we talk about it. And then we talk about Louie CK. It’s interesting you talk about “Spark of Madness,” ‘cause that’s not a very funny hour, right? But it showcases where good comedy comes from.
A year ago, you didn’t know that Trump was going to win. What was the impetus for doing a big comedy retrospective when you guys pitched it?
TM: Sean and I, we’re such doc fans, which you wouldn’t guess based on our IMDB page. But when you think about what we’ve done—we have Grimm and Hot in Cleveland and Hollywood Game Night—we kind of have crossed genre. We’re such huge fans of the CNN docuseries, and we thought, What docuseries makes sense for us to produce? That’s the first question, that’s the litmus test. I think this series could exist anywhere because you can find sadness in our times [laughs] no matter when we launched it. We just ended up releasing it in a place that a lot of people are having a little bit of stress.
MH: I will say CNN—about a year ago when they pulled the trigger—did say, “This is a crazy election. After, we’re going to all want to laugh.” No matter who won.
TM: Because it was such a long election. And how many of those days did you ever think that this is where is would end up?
None at all.
TM: I don’t even think Trump assumed it.
MH: No. We do have a great episode on comedy and politics; it’s the last one, where we go back in time and see how comedians treated politicians with kid gloves really up until about the 60s and the 70s and certainly the 80s.
Anything that you didn’t include in that you wish you could have?
MH: Just the eight episodes that we’re going to do next season.
TM: I’m a big stage fan, so I wish we did kind of an exhaustive, like, Broadway and sketch in Chicago deep dive.
MH: I love comedy teams, which we did not get to focus on. And Steve Morrison, our showrunner, his whole thing was gone too soon. So all the comedians that happened to pass away before they really reached their apex, from Bill Hicks to, you know—
TM: Greg Giraldo.
Interview has been condensed and edited.
The History of Comedy premieres tonight at 10 ET/PT on CNN.
