A chat with Bob Eckstein and Lenore Skenazy about the oversaturation and the changes occurring in the comedy scene, the significance playfulness has in creativity and how their experiences living in New York have shaped their careers.
This discussion is excerpted from The Funny Times Podcast, which explores the history of humor — and the relationships and stories our paper has cultivated over the past 40 years in print.
Bob Eckstein and Lenore Skenazy, long-time contributors of Funny Times, are also the authors behind Inspired by Cats: Writers and their Mews(es) and Free Range Kids respectively. Here are some excerpts from their discussion with Funny Times editor Mia Beach:
The Changes in Comedy
Bob Eckstein: Back then, it was very important that everything be crafted at its ultimate quality. Unfortunately, it’s an open mic now. Everyone’s on the stage, and there’s no one in the audience. Now the dynamics of humor have changed to [be relatable], not necessarily to be funny…As a result, humor is seldom outlandish and out of the box because it needs to be tangible to its audience. I think the comedy environment has been really watered down.
Lenore Skenazy: The open mic part is absolutely resonating. Anybody can put anything on social media and then you hope that it goes viral or at least that everybody or all your friends like it. Humor almost becomes self-referential and sort of self-deprecatory because that’s the easiest way to get people to like you.
Bob Eckstein: You try to win over everyone. In the beginning you have to first earn the trust of a reader or a viewer, so they’re along for the ride. This is also why so many people have the courage to do the humor themselves. The people have this confidence that everyone can do it, just do it. But I’m not one of those who feels like I could play guard for the New York Knicks. I’m from a generation where the dad would say “You’re not gonna amount to shit.”
The Value of Playfulness in a Surveillance Based Culture
Lenore Skenazy: Playfulness is improv, and the way adults play it a lot of times is just joking around in a conversation. If you haven’t gotten used to that, or if you think, “What if I say something wrong, I’m going to be considered a horrible person, or canceled”, there’s a chilling effect.
I was interviewing a couple of high school students today and I was asking them “Do you mind being tracked?” because everybody’s being tracked. One of them said that when she was in 5th grade, she had said some things in a text to a friend. Her mother had seen them and said, “You’re mad at your sister? Don’t be mad at your sister, I can’t believe you’re complaining about your sister.”
Since then, 7 years later, she has been censoring herself all the time because she got used to what it felt like to be under surveillance.
I start wondering, what is happening to all of us when either you’re putting something online and you’re worried that somebody’s gonna dislike it, call you out or screenshot you. It’s almost like growing up in a society of surveillance.
Bob Eckstein: When you’re working creatively as an adult, you don’t want to be judgmental. Thomas Edison did not come up with the light bulb without first being playful, and making mistakes, and not worrying about being judged. The same is true with Albert Einstein. They came up with great discoveries because they were willing to explore avenues that were going to lead to dead ends.
It happens every time when I’m doing a cartoon that I’m gonna come up with. I have to be willing to not be so judgmental, and allow my brain not only to be playful, but also to let the idea marinate overnight. There are ideas that I do in which I sleep on the idea and come back to it and I’ll say to myself that “I now have a solution.” This is because our mind’s working subconsciously and actually working on something when we don’t even know it.
Finding Inspiration on the Streets of New York
Lenore Skenazy: For years I was a reporter at the New York Daily News. What shaped me is I would go around from neighborhood to neighborhood, and set myself a challenge: Don’t get back on the subway until you’ve found a story. I would always find something.
There’s always 8 million stories in the naked city, and I would go and find them. That made me trust the city, because my view of it was shaped by reality, shaped by meeting regular people all over the city, all the time, many of whom became friends and would give me other stories. I recognize that New York looks like this teeming mass of danger and crime, but for me, this was a city filled with so many striving, interesting, kind people.
Bob Eckstein: I’ve been writing op-eds for the last few years about the importance of newspapers and why it’s related to the cause of division in this country. Our country’s getting all its source and news source from two things: either a major TV channel, like Fox News or CNN, or they’re getting it from my newsletter, The Bob, which I know is a very significant part of this country.
But for a lot of people, not having a local paper has a loss of community. Now, it does exist in some capacity in other ways. There are small local papers, but not as many. And so I feel like the paper you [Lenore Skenazy] worked for, the New York Daily News, exemplified that local community, that importance. It filled a void that’s missing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This conversation is an excerpt from The Funny Times Podcast, a series celebrating the 40th anniversary of Funny Times. Listen to the full episode:
