“Frasier” and ”Cheers” are just a few of the shows Dan O’Shannon helped work on through his career. The four-time Emmy winner and Academy Award nominee is currently helping produce laughs as a co-executive producer and writer for ABC’s “Modern Family.” O’Shannon will be at the Hammer Museum tonight to discuss his new book on comedy theory, “What Are You Laughing At?: A Comprehensive Guide to the Comedic Event.” He spoke with the Daily Bruin’s Brittany Taylor about his early days as a writer, his book and “Modern Family.”
Daily Bruin: What is your book about?
Dan O’Shannon: My book is about comedy theory. It’s tricky because a lot of people think that since I write for TV my book is about how to write. The book is about understanding the nature of comedy and there are a lot of competing theories as to what comedy is, and some of them are 100 years old, but they all seem sort of incomplete and unsatisfying. So I set out to create a unifying theory and chart the landscape of comedy by talking about all the variables that come into play when we encounter information and experience it as humorous. It’s a lot of psychology but it’s based on years and years of watching audiences laugh and experimenting with jokes and humor that is joke-based. It incorporates some well-worn notions and creates an entirely new setting for them as well as some new theories. People seem to like it. It’s gotten some good reviews on Amazon by people I don’t even know!
DB: Why did you decide to get into writing and producing?
DO: I grew up loving sitcoms and I wanted to make people laugh and like me. So I worked really hard to try to figure out how to be funny and then spent years of not being funny. By the time I was out of high school, I was funny enough to start doing stand-up and did that for a few years, then wrote some scripts and now here I am.
DB: Who would you say some of your influences are?
DO: My influences are pretty much anyone who is funny in the twentieth century. I love old cartoons and a lot of stand up that I used to listen to. Almost too many influences because I gobbled everything up as a kid. I like people who are subtle and witty and people who are broad and loud. I kind of like everything.
DB: What were the things that helped you gain an understanding for what is good comedy?
DO: It was a gradual process with a lot of trial and error. I imitated people who were funny and I just didn’t do well. I tried to do my own original stand-ups but as a kid you don’t have much credibility. As I started to get older, I started to have a point of view of the world. Then, I started to put things together that people thought were funny. At first, I just wrote funny jokes and one-liners but it was only when I got into script writing that I started thinking about characters and plot and structure.
DB: When would you say your big break was?
DO: When I first came out here, I worked on a show called “It’s a Living” back in 1985. I’d written some samples scripts on a typewriter – that’s how long ago this was – and I got them to a writer who showed them. They hired me as an apprentice writer for $300 a week. That enabled me to really learn how to do script writing and I wrote an episode.
DB: What is your process for writing a script?
DO: The genesis of stories for scripts comes from two places. One is taking things that have happened in real life and tweaking them to work in the format and another is playing the imaginary game of “what if.” So there are a lot of different places stories can come from with a little bit of life and “what if,” then you stir it in a pot. It’s a lot more complicated than that but that is the simplest way to put it.
DB: How did you get involved with “Modern Family”?
DO: I was very lucky to know the two showrunners, Chris Lloyd and Steve Levitan. I’d worked with them before and I have a good relationship with them. So when the show got picked up they asked me if I wanted to be a part of it and I said yes! I was lucky enough to land here.
DB: What is day like writing for “Modern Family”?
DO: It’s a lot of us sitting down in a room trying to think of ideas. Even though it is very hard work, I work with some of the funniest people I know so we spend the whole day laughing. Half of it is really hard and difficult and grueling and the other half is hilarious fun. We basically spend our days in a room writing and rewriting.
DB: Do you have a favorite episode you wrote from “Modern Family”?
DO: That’s a tricky one. The problem with “Modern Family” is every episode has at least three stories going on and we do one after another and all the stories kind of bleed together. So if you asked me what we shot three weeks ago, I have no idea. I can only remember the one I’m working on today. I know there is a Christmas one I’m proud of because it happened to my family. It’s the one where Phil and Claire try to cancel Christmas for their kids because they are trying to punish them and they bluff. That happened in my house when I was a kid so it was nice to write that in and for my parents to see it.
DB: Any advice for people interested in screenwriting?
DO: Advice that I would not have had 20 years ago is: If you love it and you want to do it because it speaks to you, then do it. Don’t do it just because you want to be a billionaire, especially television since there is less money in it every year. Years down the line, only the people that love it will be doing it, because it won’t pay a fortune.
Email Taylor at btaylor1@media.ucla.edu