Patricia Marx

On seeing the world through funny glasses. 

By Rocky Rūb

Illustration by Kathleen Halley-Segal

Patty Marx is a writer and humorist at The New Yorker, Adjunct Associate Professor in the undergraduate creative writing department, and most recently, my inspiration for all things humor. I met Professor Marx in her highly waitlisted class, How to Write Funny, in which I’ve cultivated, sustained, and have now attempted to transcend a parasocial relationship with her. She is a former writer for “Saturday Night Live” and “Rugrats,” and though she is a two time Thurber Prize finalist, and the 2015 recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship, she is most proud of her exclusive Friedrich Medal, which she was awarded by an esteemed judge for her children’s book, Now Everybody Really Hates Me. 

In our conversation, we revisit her early days as the first woman elected to The Harvard Lampoon, discuss how the world of comedy has changed since she was writing at SNL, and  workshop some original excuses to get out of going to things. Though she wouldn’t let me rummage through her Wikipedia search history, we discussed the different kinds of comedy writing she likes and dislikes most, and most importantly, how she stumbled into this career field after leaving a masters program at Cambridge University.

To every senior, or anyone who plans on being a senior and graduating at some point in their life: Let her story fight against your ensuing post-grad blues. Her teaching, assurance, and wit have surely fought against mine.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

…

Patricia Marx: Everything I say is off the record—just kidding.

The Blue and White: When did you know you wanted to be a comedian? And, did you always know you were funny or did someone tell you that?

PM: I knew you were going to say that. And I’m not saying that I’m clairvoyant, just that it’s not very imaginative. So, there are three parts to that and I’ve already forgotten the last one. 

I’m too superficial to be anything but funny or aspiring to be funny. I came from an irreverent family, and I never knew that I was gonna be a comedian. I knew that there weren’t that many other options for me. When I went to college as a freshman, I was “pre” everything, and by the end of four years I had eliminated them. I went to graduate school because that was kicking the ball down the road—or whatever they say—and I came back to the United States one summer and heard that they were taking applications at SNL. And I applied and got the job. I did not deserve it, but I got it. 

B&W: You don’t think so? 

PM: Well, you know, whatever. But I did hear my parents talk about me when they thought I couldn’t hear. And they read my sketches that I submitted, and I heard my mother say to my father, ‘Did you read those sketches? They’re terrible.’ And my father said, ‘Yes, they’re terrible.” Then my mother said, ‘What is she gonna do? She has no graduate degree.’ (I had been at Cambridge University, and returned for the summer to annoy my parents.) And indeed, the sketches were terrible, but I did submit along with those sketches some funny little bits that I’d done when I was not writing my dissertation in England—and some cartoons—and they were pretty funny. 

The reason that I got the interview in the first place was that a friend of mine, who happens to be the funniest person I know, told me that they were taking applicants at SNL. I knew him because we were both in The Harvard Lampoon. So, I don’t think it’s called nepo-baby, but I didn’t deserve it.

I also will say that I was the first girl in the Lampoon, which does not mean that I was the funniest girl that ever went to Radcliffe or Harvard, but it was the early 70’s and unbeknownst to me, history was being made. Things were going coed. Two years before, the Lampoon had voted to accept women, and two years later, I was, in effect, the millionth customer that walked through the door and got the dining room set. 

But I don’t think that answered any of your questions. I just slipped into doing what I do. And I’ve always thought that humor and comedy is much more important than it is. In retrospect, I don’t know what I would’ve done. There’s nothing else I can do. 

B&W: Well, what did you get your degree in? 

PM: I got my undergrad degree in something called Social Studies. You’ve heard of it? 

B&W: Um, I feel like I took a Social Studies class in, like, the seventh grade?

PM: No, no, no. The reason I became a Social Studies major was it was a limited enrollment major, and so I wanted to apply and get accepted to something because I hadn’t done it in a while. It was, in retrospect, useless, but no more than anything else would have been. It consisted of us reading intensely: Marx, Durkheim, Freud, and Max Weber. I kind of remember it because we spent so much time doing that. I didn’t take a single English class. I took a class in the Visual Studies department on Tuesdays and Thursdays for three hours, and during those three hours, we were given toothpicks to put on a piece of poster in a visually acceptable way. And then, weirdly, at 5:05, the teacher said, ‘I think that’s good,’ and blew it down. Those are the kinds of things my parents spent their money on. 

B&W: How did you tell your parents that you wanted to use your Ivy League degree to become a comedian? 

PM: My parents, as all, well, I use the word Jewish loosely, but, militantly atheist Jews at the time, believed that I should be a doctor, marry a doctor, have a doctor. And then, when that didn’t come true, my father tried the old, ‘just go to law school, even though you won’t be a lawyer it’ll be good training for your writing.’ They were indulgent parents. 

When I got a job at SNL, they liked that, they told their friends that, they got it into the conversation no matter what the conversation was. They were ok with that, because their friends were impressed so they figured that it must be impressive. My mother once told me when she read a piece of mine (I believe it was in Time magazine), she said, ‘I read your piece.’ I said, ‘yeah.’ She said, ‘Guess what? I didn’t like it. But if enough people like it, I’ll change my mind.’ That’s what kind of scruples my parents, and then I, have. 

B&W: Yeah, that’s something that I’m trying to gear up for—telling my parents at graduation that I’m gonna try and follow a non-traditional career. I have two sisters, one’s a doctor and the other is a lawyer, so I guess I’m the bonus baby. 

PM: Oh, then somebody had to be the failure! 

B&W: You’ve written so many different types of humor, such as sketch comedy, television, children’s books, novels, political satire, essays. What is your favorite medium for humor writing? 

PM: If I could get paid equally for everything, I’m really good at coming up with one really funny word, and then deleting it. What is my favorite? Whatever I’m doing is my least favorite. I do like writing short–I mean children’s books have about three words in them and they’re easy words. 

In many ways I’m writing the same thing. I’m writing to make sure people don’t walk out of the room or throw the book on the wall. So I’m using the same formulas to entertain and keep people engaged. Somehow I’m always writing about myself. I mean, you could give me, you know, ‘write about the 100 years war’ and it’d be about me. 

But, I don’t know if I have a favorite. I could make a case for not liking anything you could come up with. 

B&W: Just to list some of those big names that’ll impress parents, you’ve worked at SNL, you’ve written for “Rugrats” (Nickelodeon), and now you write for The New Yorker, and have for quite a while. What is the biggest difference—

PM: I’ll tell you something else you have not said. If you wanna talk about impressive, my first children’s book won the Friedrich Medal. 

B&W: Yes! I was going to get to that. What does the Friedrich Medal symbolize to you and what does that honor really mean? 

PM: They say it’s a bigger honor than the Nobel Peace Prize! They say that.

B&W: Yes, I’ve heard that!

PM: And much harder to get to since I give it out only to myself. 

B&W: You are the exclusive winner! 

PM: Yes, and ‘what does it mean?’ I’m just bursting with pride that I got it and that I gave it to myself. First line of my obituary no doubt. Now was that a question or were you just flattering me? 

B&W: These things are always a little bit of both. But what’s the biggest difference between working at SNL, writing in a writers room, or writing at The New Yorker?

PM: Well, my writing room, SNL jobs, I was young. It’s a young person’s thing. And/or, as you get older and you’ve written alone more, you just can’t imagine that someone would make you get up early in the morning—SNL wasn’t early—and get somewhere. 

I got my jobs in the right order. SNL was my first job job, other than bullshit jobs I did to get into college. I was thrilled to be there. It was heady. The lingua franca of those jobs is complaining. So I would pretend to be unhappy, because peer group pressure is the most operative force on me. However, I was thinking, ‘Can we work Sunday, too?’ Because I just loved it. 

Now I write alone. I don’t go to an office. I’m used to that. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I think it’s probably a bad thing as most things are. As someone who works at home, I am always working—I am never working. I do have deadlines, and they keep me straight, sort of. The biggest difference is, are you with a group or are you not with a group? I mean, meetings—you have meetings by yourself, you don’t really have meetings. You can go, “Hey, Patty, what do you think about what Patty said?”

B&W: Speaking of SNL, I wanted to know what your opinions are of coke use at work? 

PM: I’m assuming you mean Diet Coke, which I use a lot. I could care less what other people do. I never understood why we cared what other people did? Unless you're in the administration. 

B&W: And then you’re signing up for people to care.

PM: Yeah. 

B&W: Do you have any favorite SNL sketches that you worked on? 

PM: No.

B&W: Ok, great. I wanted to come back to your time at The Harvard Lampoon. If you could talk a bit about your experience working for a college magazine and how that translates to your future professional work. And then what it’s like being a famous figure as the first woman elected to that magazine. 

PM: You would think I’d have an answer since I’ve been asked it 10 million times. I think on the 10 millionth and second time I’ll have an answer. I was elected to The Harvard Lampoon my freshman year in the fall semester. I was about two feet tall, I looked like Thumbelina, and I was intimidated. I did not open my mouth for four years to speak or eat, but I thought, these are the funniest people I’ve ever been around. 

It taught me that it does rub off on you. If nothing else, it makes you put on funny glasses. You start thinking everything is funny. I don’t know if whatever newspaper you write for is like this, but the Lampoon was a fraternity. I went to college thinking I would never, ever join a sorority. Well, the joke was that I joined a fraternity. It was a club. I don’t want to use a stupid word like my family, but I have lots of friends from the Lampoon, and it was swell. It was just wonderful, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. Writing the magazine was the least of it. I didn’t agonize over it, if I wanted to write a piece, I wrote a piece. I didn’t have the voice in my head like I do now when I write a sentence [saying], ‘Who asked you?’

I will tell you an irrelevant, well, not relevant story. The Lampoon has, I wouldn’t call them bacchanalias, they weren’t bacchanalias ’cause I was the only girl and I could tell you they weren’t. But, you know, they had glorious parties in the Lampoon Castle. The first party I went to was the night of initiation. And I wasn’t drunk because I don’t drink—I’m sounding more and more fun, aren’t I? But as I said, I do what I’m supposed to do and what everyone else was doing, and we’re all dancing on the table. And somehow, I got a clam shell embedded into my toe, and had to go to the infirmary to get it taken out the next morning.

B&W: A clam shell? Why was there a clam shell—

PM: Well, there were clams for dinner, I think you could’ve put that together. 

B&W: Oh, it was dinner and then a party.

PM: Yes, they begat shells that were on the table, and we were, ok. If you need an excuse for getting out of things, no one has used clam shells in my toe. 

B&W: And you can say you're allergic, too.

PM: Yeah! ‘Any food issues?’ Well, I cannot have clam shells stuck in my toes. 

B&W: Okay, cool. Do you think that the news can become too jarring or too serious to write humor about? 

PM: No, I do not. I think that if you have the right point of view, you can make fun of anything. You can always do it tangentially. You don’t make fun of people dying. But you can make fun of peoples’ reactions to dying. You can make fun of what the murderers did the day after. There’s always a way to do it. But you have to be on the right side. Your jokes cannot be from the point of view of the oppressor, it’s gotta be from the oppressed. 

You cannot always hit the topics spot on, but you can be funny obliquely. I don’t think everyone would agree with me there. But I do—I think I’m right. 

B&W: Yeah, as the winner of the Friedrich Medal. And to that, in your experience, how do you find humor informing culture or politics? And vice versa?

PM: I’m not sure I’m smart enough to answer that. So I’m gonna answer another question that might be related. Humor, maybe more than any other genre, is rooted in the culture and the time. Now, if it’s great humor, it’s about more than that, and the shelf life is more than one minute—which is what so much topical humor displays now. 

I think that, certainly, people react to humor, so it does inform the culture. Yeah, it’s part and parcel. It’s completely connected to the news and the culture and that is where, certainly, humor is fed by the culture. Yeah, I would say my answer is, YES!

B&W: Do you think that has changed in the last however many years, or in the last decade? 

PM: I’ll take it farther back than that. When I graduated, that would be 1837, humor was not an industry. I didn’t think I’d get a job in comedy. When I graduated, SNL didn’t exist. There was The New Yorker, but that wasn’t humor per se. But then humor became an industry with National Lampoon, with SNL, with tons of TV shows. So suddenly, people on the Lampoon had agents, there were opportunities, it became law school for comedy writers. That didn’t exist when I was there and it didn’t occur to me that I would get a job doing that. 

Then, in the last whatever, there’s the internet, which makes it easier and harder to be funny. It was much easier to be original when nobody was doing it. It’s hard now. It’s really hard, and it’s hard to come up with something that’s not done. On the other hand, there are more outlets. So, you can choose to see that glass half full or glass half empty—or there are a lot of glasses. I like to be pessimistic if I can.

B&W: To that, obviously teaching “How to Write Funny,” I wanted to ask what your favorite and least favorite things are about teaching Gen Z students who don’t know what quaaludes are?

PM: By far, the worst part is commuting—I hate the logistics. I always have a good time when I teach—if it’s a good class. Each class has a different chemistry so it’s hard to answer in general. I’ve had such a variety of classes at Columbia. I’ve had extremely woke classes, or classes so supportive of each other that they wouldn’t say one critical thing. On the other hand, I’ve had classes where there have been students who have been so determined to impress me with how outrageous they are.

What is the best thing? I like getting to know the students and I like getting to know them as a group, too. There does emerge a personality for the class. And I could probably get fired for the amount of joking around I do, but I love when the class laughs at my jokes. And I fully realize that it’s because I’m the one giving the grade.

B&W: NO, of course not.

PM: I also, well, I can take a little credit but not full credit. But I am very pleased that every year people get better. And I say it’s a little bit because I’m there, but it’s a little not because I’m there, it’s because people do their homework. And it’s very encouraging, it’s nice to see that people are learning something. I like that part about it. 

B&W: On our first day of class, you mentioned that you can’t teach how to be funny, exactly, but rather how to edit and use different writing techniques to make things humorous or funnier. Can you tell me a little bit more about your teaching pedagogy? 

PM: Yes. I do think that, like everything, you become better at ‘writing funny’ by writing. In the same way that if you practice your scales on the piano, you will become better at doing your scales. I don’t know if you're misquoting me, I don’t believe I can make anybody Mark Twain or Shakespeare because, well, I don’t know if it’s inborn or if they were plagiarizing somebody, but you can’t teach somebody that. But, you can make them many notches better. What you're doing is teaching them how to edit themselves; and editing makes a big difference. 

And you can expose them to humor in the same way that being in The Harvard Lampoon made me funnier because I was exposed to funny people. I was learning how to see the world through funny glasses. While I can’t teach one to be great, I can teach how to be better. 

B&W: And one of those editing techniques you’ve taught is to be mindful of avoiding boredom, or making sure that you don’t start to be predictable to your audience or reader. 

PM: You want me to speak to that? 

B&W: Well, maybe just your relationship to boredom in general—perhaps existentially? 

PM: Readers and audience members have limited attention like everybody else. You need to keep their attention. Which requires maneuvering your writing so that you are keeping them engaged. Maybe I have to backtrack, or maybe I'm going forward, I’m not sure which, but I will say that once you know the joke, you don’t laugh at the joke a second time. You might appreciate it? So the trick in writing comedy is not allowing the reader—or the listener or viewer—to anticipate the joke. Because if they get there before you do, then it’s all over.

In order to do that, you have to go faster than their minds. You cannot have extra words; you cannot be ambiguous and force them to stop and figure out what something is, because then you’ve lost them. Your speed has to be a little greater than their speed, so you have to eliminate words that will make them bored or confused. And if you anticipate that they are getting there faster, then you have to veer quickly. Either do something unexpected in the story, or break the fourth wall, or do something surprising in some way. 

Did I say that right? 

B&W: Yeah, that makes sense. Ok I just have a couple more questions. 

PM: What’s the meaning of life? 

B&W: Yeah, I mean, that’s the very last one, obviously. But I wanted to ask about an interview you did in The New York Times, where you said that you like reading the paper online very late at night because it’s like, “being a visitor from the future.” 

PM: What was I talking about? I said that? 

B&W: Yes, and I also read that you love to look things up on Wikipedia. I was wondering what your favorite things to look up are? 

PM: Let me say, if someone published a list of the things I’ve looked up on Wikipedia and otherwise, I’d have to kill myself. The idle curiosity, the stupidity of things I don’t know, the, I don’t think there’s a word for it, but what is revealed about my interest is very embarrassing. 

B&W: No, it’s enlightening.

PM: Yeah, enlightening.