Episode 409: Paula Poundstone, Ron Friedman, Fabian Nicieza

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• Comedian Paula Poundstone On Life In Quarantine And Hitting The Road Again

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  When comedian Paula Poundstone isn’t making people laugh as a panelist on NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!,” chances are she’s traveling the country generating chuckles, chortles and guffaws live in person.

  But she had to press pause on that.

  Like the rest of us, Poundstone wasn’t traveling because of the coronavirus pandemic. Despite being stuck at home, she used her vivid imagination and spontaneous sense of humor to entertain her fans virtually. Through her website and social media, Poundstone kept the laughs going with funny videos and fan contests.

  Poundstone joined WPR’s “BETA” from her home in Los Angeles to talk about her adventures in quarantine and getting back out on the road.

  “In the beginning, I really thought it was going to be like a couple of weeks,” Poundstone said of the start of the pandemic in 2020. “And then my next calculation was maybe a couple of months. And I remember that was in March.”

  When she realized nobody knew when this was going to be over, she started making comedy videos and putting them on her website to help people get through the pandemic.

  “One of my favorites was a character named Miss Nancy who was doing distance learning,” Poundstone said. “So Miss Nancy, she had a first grade class in Massachusetts, and now she’s talking to them through Zoom.”

  In this sketch, Miss Nancy tells her students that maybe it’s not so bad not having in-person learning. As she points out, not everything about being in person was all that great. For example, the bacteria on the water fountain and the anxiety that students felt standing in front of the bathroom stall because they weren’t sure if someone was in there. Miss Nancy offers a message of hope to her students: “We will all get through this difficult time together. Apart.”

  This occupied Poundstone for bit, but then she came to an unwelcome conclusion.

  “I was banging out those videos for a while, and it was a tremendous amount of work,” Poundstone said. “And then I started to realized, I think it’s going to be even longer than that.”

  Poundstone said she has not changed her approach to creating material for her live appearances. During the pandemic, she received several requests to do shows on Zoom or other online platforms.

  She said the organizations did not know how to make shows on Zoom and other digital platforms work, and she didn’t either.

  “I always said to them, ‘That won’t work.’ And they’d go, ‘Oh, well, so-and-so did it.’ And then I’d go, ‘Get so-and-so because that won’t work,’” she said.

  Poundstone said that she would do characters, interviews and interstitial content in which she would comment on something.

  “But I refuse to stand in my living room and pretend that people in their homes are the same kind of audience as in a theater because it isn’t so,” she said. “Even trying to find what did work in those settings was a battleground.”

  The remote performances were difficult, and like so many people during the coronavirus pandemic, she had to adapt. Again. Instead of standup, Poundstone began doing a game show called “Nobody Asked You” from her living room.

  “I have no desire to learn any kind of technology. None. Zero,” she said. “It doesn’t fascinate me. Doesn’t interest me. It generally doesn’t make my life any easier. So yeah, I’ll be happy for all sorts of reasons when all this is behind us.”

  I would like @cher to perform a song called “If I Ever Zoom Again,” which I will write for her, if she agrees, right here on Twitter, to record it. @cher?

  — Paula Poundstone (@paulapoundstone) July 9, 2021

  And now Poundstone is back on the move, traveling the country.

  She performed at the Overture Center in Madison on October 8th, 2021.

  “What’s not to love about coming to Wisconsin?” she exclaimed when asked what her favorite thing is about visiting the Badger state.

  “Is it just the cheese hats in the airport? Yeah, that’s part of it, sure,” Poundstone said. “It’s very beautiful there. That’s part of what I love about it. And I always love the audiences. I often confess to them too early in the show that I don’t care about football. And so there’s sometimes a temporary breach, a cold patch, if you will, in our relationship, but eventually they warm up to me again.”

• Can You Reverse Engineer Success To Create Your Own?

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  Before he became a king-making comedic filmmaker with his own genre of Hollywood films, comedian Judd Apatow was a kid who obsessed over comedians the way other kids do over popular athletes. When he was 16, Apatow decided to create a show for his high school’s radio station just so he could interview his favorite comedians.

  What Apatow neglected to tell the publicists of these famous comics is that the radio signal for their interview barely made it past the school grounds. Essentially, he was conducting these interviews for an audience of one — himself.

  Apatow was doing what almost all successful people in any field do: reverse engineering success to find their own, says author Ron Friedman.

  “(Apatow) used those interviews to understand how he could break into comedy, what it took to write the right kind of joke, the amount of practice necessary to be successful. And by the time he got out of high school, he said he had built himself a bible for breaking into comedy, and he did it by reverse engineering some of the most successful comedians of his generation,” Friedman told WPR’s “BETA.”

  Friedman is the author of “Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success.” The book outlines a third route to achieving success after innate talent and relentless practice.

  “In fact, there’s a third story, and that third story is reverse engineering, and it simply means finding extraordinary examples in your field and then working backward to figure out how they were created, but also how you can apply those insights to accelerate your success,” says Friedman.

  Take, for instance, how the legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi revolutionized NFL coaching with a well-timed Christmas gift. While working for the New York Giants in the early 1950s, Lombardi was approached by the owner’s son (and future owner), Wellington Mara. Mara had received a state-of-the-art Polaroid camera for Christmas and was showing it off to Lombardi. This new technology sparked an idea for Lombardi.

  “And what they both formulated together was a plan, which was Wellington Mara was going to sit in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium at the time, which is where the Giants played, and shoot photos at the start of every play,” explains Friedman.

  So, Mara would take the instant pictures and stuff them into a weighted sock and drop them from the stands for Lombardi to review with an aerial scope of each play. Friedman states that this is a perfect example of “zooming out” in reverse engineering.

  “That enabled the Giants to pick up on what it was that the defensive formation looked like so that their offense would benefit,” said Friedman. “That approach of zooming out and seeing the bigger picture is relevant to a lot more than football, because it’s also true for all of us when we’re trying to analyze creative works.”

  Now, filming practices and games is commonplace among NFL teams. Peek on the sideline on any given Sunday and you’ll see players flipping through freshly printed photographs or swiping through a tablet. Friedman argues that once you’ve identified what makes something work, you can begin to find out the ingredients of success.

  Sometimes literally.

  Celebrity chef David Chang launched his Momofuku restaurant brand and empire on the back of his famed pork buns. What Chang understood was that he was offering a slightly foreign twist on a very classic concept.

  “It’s got all the elements that are in a BLT. It’s got a fatty meat, it’s got an emphatic crunch, it’s got all of the elements that are inherent in a BLT, except it’s a little bit foreign,” Friedman said. “And so, it’s got that optimal degree of feeling new while also reminding you of the past. And so that’s a recipe that he has taken and applied to other dishes as well, trying to find something that reminds people of their youth, but then disguising it by adding the elements of a foreign cuisine.”

  That balance between originality and creativity is key for finding success. In fact, as Friedman points out, if you follow the conventional wisdom that originality and creativity are the same thing, you’re going to run into trouble.

  “As it turns out, when we’re completely original, that tends to backfire. And it’s because as a species, we tend to be distrustful of the new,” Friedman said. “You want to find successful formulas, which you can do through reverse engineering, and then you want to evolve them ever so slightly to reach your optimal newness.”

  Another tool in reverse engineering is the concept of elevating the overlooked ingredient. Friedman points to “Seinfeld,” one of the most celebrated sitcoms in TV history, as an ideal case study.

  While other sitcoms of the time were focusing on the humor in relationships, careers and fates of their characters, Seinfeld highlighted the small dilemmas in day-to-day life.

  “What ‘Seinfeld’ did was they took an element that is typically buried in the background of most sitcoms, and they elevated it,” Friedman said. “They made those petty aggravations really a central feature of every episode. And there’s a lesson there, which is that sometimes you don’t have to recreate your approach to a formula that is vastly different than what’s already worked. It’s simply a matter of taking something that is typically buried within a formula and elevating it.”

  Freidman argues these methods can apply to your life and career easily, too. His advice is to “become a collector” of examples of works or processes that impact your field or work or life that impress you. Then, hunt for the commonalities between them.

  “You can do this for well-written emails or compelling memos or websites that you found engaging. And then comparing those against ones that didn’t make your collection enables you to spot differences that contribute to greatness,” Friedman said. “That enables you to identify those key ingredients that make works effective. But beyond that, it gives you an opportunity to visit what I call a private museum so that the next time you need to create your own well-written email or a compelling memo, you have something to look at to inspire you and remind you to think big.”

• 'A Story That Gets Revenge': 'Deadpool' Creator's Debut Novel Takes Aim At New Jersey Suburbs Of His Youth

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  “Suburban Dicks” is Fabian Nicieza’s first novel, but his work is already known to millions of readers around the world. He’s the co-creator of Marvel’s “Deadpool” comics and has worked on such titles as “X-Men,” “X-Force,” and “Thunderbolts.”

  For his unillustrated debut, Nicieza leaves the Marvel universe for the New Jersey suburbs of his childhood. The two protagonists are Andrea Stern, a pregnant mother who used to work in law enforcement, and her childhood friend, Kenneth Lee, a disgraced local journalist set out to unravel a murder mystery. As the two investigate, they encounter racial tensions and uncover a conspiracy that dates back decades.

  “The book is set in the town and the area that I’ve lived in since 1988,” Nicieza told WPR’s “BETA.” “We had a neighborhood issue with a gun club that was on the other side of a pond and a pretty solid stretch of woods between the houses and the gun club. The gun club had been there for 50 years and the houses had just been built in the last couple of years.”

  Nicieza and his neighbors attempted to have the town council vote to stop outdoor shooting at the gun club in part because it was a noise issue but more importantly, his home and his neighbors’ homes were occasionally hit by bullets. They wanted to allow the gun club to shoot indoors but to put a stop to the outdoor shooting. Nicieza and his neighbors lost the town council vote 5-4.

  “It really opened my eyes up to a negative aspect of the town at that time, which was that of the townees versus the newbies, you know, all this farmland being turned into housing developments for all these McMansions going up,” Nicieza explained.

  “Having lost that battle at the town council level, I was furious,” he said. “And my only recourse as a writer is to come up with a story that gets revenge. That’s all it was just an incredibly kind of childish response to having lost a battle on a political scale.”

  So he came up with an idea that if something was discovered that cast the gun club in a bad light, they would be forced to close down.

  “The story just sort of rolled through my head and the characters were already formulating themselves in my head back then,” Nicieza explained. “And it really structured itself in my brain as a beginning, middle and end. I kind of knew what my story was and the fact that it took me so long to write it was a good thing because it really evolved beyond the simplicity of ‘I want revenge.’ You know, it evolved into a story about two people that desperately need to reclaim their lives.”

  In “Suburban Dicks,” Nicieza has created an intriguing contrast between the exciting and dramatic murder case and the bland boredom of suburbia.

  “The bland boredom of suburbia for me is more the ability to try to rebel against the status quo norms that we all really willingly accept for our lives, whether they make sense or not,” he said. “Almost the turgid repetitiveness of everything in our lives. I’m a writer, but I’ve been kind of anchored to my place, my suburban existence, my home, my family.”

  Nicieza chose to set his story in the suburbs because that’s what he knows best. He has lived the experience of commuting into Manhattan from the Princeton Junction train station and the drudgery of that playing a part in his day-to-day existence. So he decided to lean into it.

  “And the part of my brain that results in something like ‘Deadpool’ was of a benefit to me, I think, when I was writing this, because I kind of didn’t take any prisoners in my mind,” he explained. “I wasn’t lenient to my subjects.”

  He even had a local reading group look over the manuscript because he wanted to make sure that he was not mocking any specific individual group: “I wanted to make sure that I was trying successfully to be an equal opportunity offender as I put it to them.”

  After reading the book, the 10 members of the group who were from different cultural backgrounds shared their thoughts with him. They all told Nicieza that some parts of the book were a little harsh and a little rough but there wasn’t a single thing that was not accurate.

  “I’m not a huge fan of the human race, but I want to be fair in my judgment of them. So I want to try to hate all of humanity equally, if I can,” he mused.

  Nicieza explores complicated themes about race and gender in his book.

  “I think from the get-go, the DNA of the idea of the book and the DNA of the development of the story was rooted in old townies versus newbies in a suburban setting. And quite frankly, that automatically, implicitly means Caucasian versus new cultural demographics coming in,” he explained.

  He said that as he got deeper into writing and talking about his novel, it caused him to reflect on his own subconscious experiences of having immigrated to the United States from Argentina when he was 4 years old. Being raised in very middle-class suburban environments, he could see the soft, subtle kind of prejudices that he and his parents encountered.

  “It gave me an empathetic perspective to trying to understand the challenges that different cultures face when they come here and the challenges that they have to deal with on a daily basis,” he said.

  “And they are, quite honestly, challenges that white America, for the most part, is completely clueless about and prefers to be clueless about.” Nicieza said. “As we see now in our times quite clearly that there’s a strong desire to ignore reality. And that’s because everybody grew up with reality comfortably hidden away under a blanket.”