Veteran comedian Chris Elliott has had small turns in big comedies like There's Something About Mary and Groundhog Day, but he's best known for Get A Life and Cabin Boy—two projects that landed with resounding thuds when they were released, but have since won a cult following. The son of straight-man Bob Elliott (half of the radio-comedy duo Bob and Ray), Chris Elliott was one of the first writers on Late Night With David Letterman, and over eight years, he played some of that show's funniest and weirdest characters, including "The Fugitive Guy," "The Guy Under The Seats," and maybe the strangest guy of all, Marlon Brando. Soon, Elliott got the opportunity to be even weirder (and in prime time) when he and fellow Letterman writer Adam Resnick created Get A Life, a TV series about a 30-year-old paperboy. It was equal parts sitcom and surrealist comedy, and it got decent ratings, but its strange turns put Fox off, and the network ended the show after a season and a half.
Resnick and Elliott teamed up again in 1994 to make Cabin Boy, a nautical adventure spoof that features Elliott as an overgrown "Fancy Lad," David Letterman as an "Old Salt," and a giant talking cupcake that spits tobacco. The movie was almost universally panned, and its dismal box-office performance became a running joke on Letterman. Most recently, Elliott has turned author, albeit a comic one, penning the murder-mystery parody The Shroud Of The Thwacker. The A.V. Club recently spoke to Elliott about trying to impress Letterman, the making of Get A Life, the after-effects of Cabin Boy, and the day he refused to sit in a vat of chili.
The A.V. Club: This isn't actually your first book.
Chris Elliott: Well, I'm calling it my first book, because the other one, Daddy's Boy, was this parody of Mommy Dearest that I wrote with my dad. The idea there was that I would write a chapter, and then for legal reasons, he got the right to rebut what I was saying in the alternating chapters. But there wasn't really a story. It was a short little parody, a Father's Day book. [Shroud Of The Thwacker] is actually, believe it or not, as crazy as the story is, a real book. It sort of holds together in my mind, you know? At the end, it kind of comes together, so you sort of feel like you've read a book.
AVC: It definitely seems like a real book.
CE: Yeah. I thought it'd be funny to write a fake history of the murder spree that took place in 1882, and sort of make fun of Patricia Cornwell's books, and her Portrait Of A Killer, the one about Jack the Ripper. But it's more of a book than a parody, that's for sure.
AVC: In Daddy's Boy, though, the pictures tell the story. They're really funny.
CE: [Laughs.] Yeah, the pictures in it are funny. That's right, I remember that. And the cover was really funny, too. For, like, five cents, you can get a copy of the book [on eBay]. But I think I have most of the ones that were ever ordered. It didn't do well, and I think it was partly because of the press tour. It was strange. I mean, it was purely a Father's Day gimmick present. But for some reason, a lot of the press dates were after Father's Day. So it was weird for me to come out and do press. I found myself saying, "This will be a great Father's Day gift a year from now." I don't think that there was a lot of hope for the book anyway, so it was whatever they could get.
AVC: What was it like growing up with a famous comedian as a dad?
CE: I honestly didn't know he was a famous comedian. He could have been a lawyer as far as I was concerned, because his humor is sort of the buttoned-down, Bob Newhart sort of dry wit. It's not bouncing off the walls or anything like that. Although it was fun. We weren't a Hollywood family, we lived in New York City. His friends were more from the literary world, and the dinner parties weren't huge.
AVC: But there were dinner parties.
CE: Yeah, but it was usually Art Buchwald or Dick Cavett who was there. It wasn't a big affair, or anything like that. So I think it was a fairly normal child-rearing. And that was the joke about Daddy's Boy—that I had absolutely nothing to complain about, so I had to find things like wearing gold-toed socks as my big complaint.
AVC: Did your dad help you see comedy as a viable career?
CE: Oh yeah, without a doubt. I guess it was 1969 or '70, he had a Broadway show, and I was like 10 years old, so just going to that as frequently as I did... Before, I would go to his radio shows, but you would never hear people laughing there, so it was different when I heard people laughing at what he was doing. I think that's when it sort of clicked with me that I could take what I had been doing in the classroom and maybe develop it at some point. It was definitely that I wanted to live the life he had.
AVC: How did you get started?
CE: My dad actually got me started at PBS on a show that looked at the news press' performance in the past week. I think it was called Inside Story, or something like that, and I was just hired as a production assistant. But while I was there, there was a writer's strike, so someone who was working at NBC took a job at PBS, and we got to be friends, and they introduced me to Barry Sand, who was putting together Dave [Letterman]'s show. I almost didn't take the job because it was less money than I was making at PBS, believe it or not. And it was my dad that said, "No, no, that's what you have to take, you have to go into that, that's where you want to go." So I took the job, and eventually was made a writer there.
AVC: So you started at Letterman as a PA?
CE: I started, actually, as a runner. There were PAs, and then there was the runner, so I was the slave even to the PAs. I was getting people coffee and screwing up the Xerox machine, stuff like that.
AVC: What was it like on the show in the early days?
CE: You know, as corny as it sounds, it was like My Favorite Year, that movie. I was still living with my parents when I started working there, and I would just walk down to Rockefeller Center and get to be on TV at night and walk home. It was a dream. And it was such a small group of people that you could work your way up, or impress Dave, or get to know Dave, because he was very accessible. Early on, I remember he invited me out to breakfast, and it was just so cool. It was the coolest thing in the world. And once I became slightly known on that show, it was like this whole other thing. To be this 22-year-old and have people go, "That's the guy who comes out from under the seats!"
AVC: When was the first time you were on the air?
CE: The writers were kind of writing me into the show right away. I was on the first show, and actually, that first week, I think, was the first time I actually spoke on the show. Dave always liked me coming on. I think I was sort of geeky, and I was obviously a good foil for him.
AVC: Because he's not geeky at all.
CE: [Laughs.] Exactly. So that had started, and then like a year into the show I was made a writer, and then I just wrote myself into the show as much as I could.
AVC: You also met Adam Resnick on Letterman.
CE: Yeah, and we were immediately buddies. He came as a production assistant maybe a year after I was a writer there, and I think within the year, he was a writer, and we were suddenly working together, doing a lot of stuff together. Despite the fact that he says when he used to watch me at home he thought I'd be a prick, we became friends pretty quickly.
AVC: Did you ever write anything that was rejected horribly?
CE: Plenty of stuff. I mean, you came up with jokes that Dave would say "no" to. Everybody did. But you started to know what was in the ballpark, at least. With me, because I was writing a lot for myself, Dave was pretty open to letting me do whatever I wanted on the show. He started to trust my instincts for what I did, I guess, even though I was just finding my voice myself. I remember one time writing my own death on the show, because I used to kill off these running characters that I did, and I used to make people watch these stupid guys for three weeks and then have a really emotional goodbye to the character. But I remember actually writing my own death on the show, that staff member Chris Elliott had gone, with this sort of corny, funny montage, and Dave thought maybe that was a little too much.
AVC: You like to kill yourself off a lot.
CE: Yeah, I do. I'm always finding ways to kill myself.
AVC: That was one of the staples of Get A Life. How many times did you actually die in that show?
CE: I have no idea. I can't even remember all those shows. There's a lot that I don't even remember doing. Especially that last sort of half-season. We got Brian Doyle-Murray joining the cast, and I remember doing some funny shows, but my main memory of that is being exhausted, and thinking, "Why am I doing this? The show's canceled. Why should I even put effort into this?"
- Comments