The Gridiron writers start accumulating ideas for sketches almost as soon as the previous Gridiron show is done, even though a lot of those early ideas get dropped because by the next summer no one remembers what happened a year ago, much less well enough to laugh at it.
So the writers reconvene in early July to discuss what topics, songs and vehicles might work to make fun of recent numbskullery. They try to balance local, state and national politics and popular culture with what is actually funny. They tend to avoid war, hurricanes and earthquakes except for an occasional metaphorical flourish. They do try to make fun of the news industry itself, which turns out to be not too hard.
Topics are assigned, and writers go off to find punch lines for the past year’s straight lines. They bring a sketch or a song back to the group of writers the next week. Everyone leans into to listen critically to a read-through, and then they pick the lines apart, suggesting improvements and offering wording that might work better.
A couple of examples from the 2018 show illustrate. It often happens that a writer finds a good laugh line but structures its order badly. You want the punch at the end of the line, right? In one sketch, two Americans are trying to sneak into Canada, pretending to be Canadians. A suspicious border guard asks them for their citizenship documents. The two Americans hand over some documents. In the original script, the border guard says: “This is a Sam’s Club membership card. And this appears to be a Dixie Stampede ticket stub.” During editing, the writers tweaked the lines to swap the blah parts — “membership card” and “ticket stub” — for the better laugh lines, the names of the two organizations. The final read: “This looks like a member’s card to Sam’s Club. And this is a ticket stub from the Dixie Stampede. Are you two sure you’re Canadian?”
Making that swap allowed the audience to laugh at the end of each line rather than mid-sentence.
In another instance, a 2018 sketch about George Carlin and the Centers for Disease Control focused on seven words that the CDC had really asked researchers not to use in their reports. One of the words was “transgender.” In the original script, Carlin lampooned the banning of “transgender” from scientific reports, saying, “Transgender? Why would you ban an adjective? Unless. Unless you were afraid the word would change over time and become a more acceptable word — like a noun or a verb. That’s right. Transgender is coming for your nouns and verbs. Quick everyone, hide in the men’s and women’s bathrooms.”
That line hews closely to Carlin’s own sensibility of comedy and use of words. The thought of one part of speech becoming another and affecting the ability of people to use those parts of speech mimics the worry that some people express at the thought of a transgender person using a restroom. While that’s funny on paper, expecting a live audience to follow the absurdity on the fly and make the leap to laughter even as the next line is being said seemed too tenuous.
So the line was rewritten to something simpler to understand: “Transgender? Why would you ban transgender when you have the chance to get rid of boofing, P.J., Tobin and Squee?”
As you may recall, those four terms — boofing, P.J., Tobin and Squee — hit the national airwaves just a couple weeks before the 2018 show as a result of the Senate hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, then a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. In this case, the Gridiron writers didn’t have anything about Kavanaugh in the show yet, so the new Carlin line solved two problems in one fell swoop.
Rewriting on deadline is quintessentially a journalism thing, so some jokes do get traded out the week of the show, or maybe even during dress rehearsal, or even during the Saturday evening final performance on the not-so-rare occasions that something catastrophic happens to the Razorback football team early on a Saturday, like a coach running a motorcycle into the ditch.
Too soon? Our apologies. We wanted you to laugh, not cry.