Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers by Mike Sacks
Authors: Mike Sacks
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few people milling about. No one seemed in a great panic. That’s really what fascinated me. Everyone was calm. There was very little noise. 4 He returned to his room to read and then heard from above a shout, “All passengers on deck with lifeboats on.” Beesley went up to the lifeboat deck, and everyone was saying that the men should be on the left side, the port side, and they’ll be picked up there. And Beesley, being no fool, said to himself, “Hmmm, I think my chances are better here on the starboard side.” He wasn’t pushing women aside—I believe this to be true.
He stayed and saw a rescue boat being lowered. The guy operating the boat yelled, “Hey, you. We got room in here. Do you want to jump in?” So Beesley jumped off the rail and into the lifeboat, which floated away. It was one of the first to escape. Beesley later said that everyone in the boat thought they’d have to later slink back in shame when the
Titanic
didn’t sink. And they’d all look like a bunch of cowards. Well, that was a problem they did not have to confront. Beesley later wrote a book about his experiences [
The Loss of the SS Titanic: Its Story and Its Lessons by One of the Survivors
].
Did you ever meet Lawrence Beesley?
No, he was long gone. I spoke to my father a little bit about it and he told me the story of what Lawrence had told him. Lawrence also told my father that when the
Titanic
went down, he saw the boat tip over. He said it broke—not quite in half—and he heard the boilers come loose in their mooring and go out the side of the ship, like a huge locomotive going under. He saw the funnels go down. And this description of the splitting of the ship turned out to be accurate when [in September 1985] they found the pieces on the ocean floor. It had broken exactly where he had said it had broken.
Did you, too, grow up under the Christian Science faith?
No. My father was a Christian Scientist, but he had come from a long line of Protestant Irish who ended up in the South, in Birmingham, Alabama. When they came over from Ireland, Alabama was a pretty prosperous place. My father was born there, and then lived for awhile in Louisville.
You weren’t raised in the South. How did your family eventually end up north?
My father’s mother, my grandmother, was very smart. She was also a very difficult woman who lived to be one hundred. She was evacuated out of Atlanta ahead of Sherman’s army when she was a child, and I think she ultimately came to realize that, at least for the time being, the South had no future. So she packed up the family and moved north. My father eventually ended up in New York City, where I spent a few years, before I was sent off to boarding school at the age of ten, in 1955, first to the Rectory School and then to Taft, both in Connecticut.
Do you think that attending boarding school molded you into the comedy writer you later became?
Oh, completely. I don’t recommend it. But if you want to get a perfect education as a writer, and if you want to have eight years of Latin before you go to college, well then, this is the place to go. Basically all we were taught was how to read and write the English language. We had to write a thousand-word essay every week. At Taft, in the English class, they had an exam called the 2-8-2. You had a little blue book, and the teacher would write a phrase from a Shakespeare play on the board. You had two minutes to think, eight minutes to compose, two minutes to correct, and then you put your pencils down: 2-8-2.
That
is how you train writers.
Often writers have all the time in the world.
Absolutely, and we don’t do shit. Then again, in boarding school, with no girls, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do besides write that thousand-word, stupid-themed essay each week.
I’d assume that Latin later came in handy when you wrote Latin for All Occasions . The book, published in 1990, helpfully provided readers with the Latin translation of hundreds of phrases,
He stayed and saw a rescue boat being lowered. The guy operating the boat yelled, “Hey, you. We got room in here. Do you want to jump in?” So Beesley jumped off the rail and into the lifeboat, which floated away. It was one of the first to escape. Beesley later said that everyone in the boat thought they’d have to later slink back in shame when the
Titanic
didn’t sink. And they’d all look like a bunch of cowards. Well, that was a problem they did not have to confront. Beesley later wrote a book about his experiences [
The Loss of the SS Titanic: Its Story and Its Lessons by One of the Survivors
].
Did you ever meet Lawrence Beesley?
No, he was long gone. I spoke to my father a little bit about it and he told me the story of what Lawrence had told him. Lawrence also told my father that when the
Titanic
went down, he saw the boat tip over. He said it broke—not quite in half—and he heard the boilers come loose in their mooring and go out the side of the ship, like a huge locomotive going under. He saw the funnels go down. And this description of the splitting of the ship turned out to be accurate when [in September 1985] they found the pieces on the ocean floor. It had broken exactly where he had said it had broken.
Did you, too, grow up under the Christian Science faith?
No. My father was a Christian Scientist, but he had come from a long line of Protestant Irish who ended up in the South, in Birmingham, Alabama. When they came over from Ireland, Alabama was a pretty prosperous place. My father was born there, and then lived for awhile in Louisville.
You weren’t raised in the South. How did your family eventually end up north?
My father’s mother, my grandmother, was very smart. She was also a very difficult woman who lived to be one hundred. She was evacuated out of Atlanta ahead of Sherman’s army when she was a child, and I think she ultimately came to realize that, at least for the time being, the South had no future. So she packed up the family and moved north. My father eventually ended up in New York City, where I spent a few years, before I was sent off to boarding school at the age of ten, in 1955, first to the Rectory School and then to Taft, both in Connecticut.
Do you think that attending boarding school molded you into the comedy writer you later became?
Oh, completely. I don’t recommend it. But if you want to get a perfect education as a writer, and if you want to have eight years of Latin before you go to college, well then, this is the place to go. Basically all we were taught was how to read and write the English language. We had to write a thousand-word essay every week. At Taft, in the English class, they had an exam called the 2-8-2. You had a little blue book, and the teacher would write a phrase from a Shakespeare play on the board. You had two minutes to think, eight minutes to compose, two minutes to correct, and then you put your pencils down: 2-8-2.
That
is how you train writers.
Often writers have all the time in the world.
Absolutely, and we don’t do shit. Then again, in boarding school, with no girls, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do besides write that thousand-word, stupid-themed essay each week.
I’d assume that Latin later came in handy when you wrote Latin for All Occasions . The book, published in 1990, helpfully provided readers with the Latin translation of hundreds of phrases,
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