Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat:

Steve Skrovan: So I wrote the spec script, and I got it to Larry David because I had known Larry David from New York stand up days and figuring he might buy the idea. Instead, he called me up and said, do you want a job? And I said, yeah. And he hired me and three other comics that he knew to sort of be a think tank. He didn’t want us to write scripts cause he wanted to write the scripts, but to come up with ideas. What became the fourth season of Seinfeld, and that was my first writing job, and that changed the trajectory of my career 180 degrees.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. Story Beat explores how masters of creativity. Develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and Entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Steve Skrovan has worked as a stand up comedian, actor, and tv comedy writer since the early eighties. He’s written for many shows, most notably Seinfeld, Hot in Cleveland, Till Death, Wendell and Vinnie School of Rock, and the entire nine year run of Everybody loves Raymond, a show which he has also adapted internationally in Russia, Israel, and India. He currently writes a sub stack blog called bits and an anthology of humorous stories and essays. Steve is also the co director, writer and producer of An Unreasonable Man, a documentary about the career of legendary consumer advocate and third party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, which was not only an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival, but also made the shortlist for Academy Award consideration in the documentary category. In 2005, Steve co produced the TBS environmental special Earth to America. Additionally, Steve co hosts the weekly radio show Ralph Nader Radio Hour, which runs on Pacifica’s KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles and various other independent radio stations, as well as being available on all podcast platforms. He is also a board member of the nonpartisan public interest organization Public Citizen in Washington, DC. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s a great privilege and pleasure to have the very talented Steve Skrovan join me on story today. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Skrovan: Thank you, Steve, that was a very extensive, bio you gave. I think we can end the show right now.

Steve Cuden: Well, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure having you. Good night.

Steve Skrovan: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Extensive career, which is why you’re on the show, and we would love to hear about it.

Steve Skrovan: Been around a long time.

Steve Cuden: You and me both. So let’s go back in time a little bit then.

Steve Skrovan: Oh, do we have back in time music?

Steve Cuden: And if we had visuals, then it would ripple across the screen. Where did you first start to think about show business comedy? Standing up in front of people telling jokes. When did that start for you?

Steve Skrovan: Well, it literally started on March 9, 1980. But only in retrospect did it make sense, because I’m from a small town outside of Cleveland, Ohio. You’re in Pittsburgh, so I know Pittsburgh well. So only in retrospect does my career make any sense. I was kind of heading this direction sort of intuitively and, how it literally started. Washington. A comedy club opened up in Cleveland, and this is 1980. This is post apocalyptic Cleveland. This is when towns like Cleveland and Pittsburgh were going bankrupt. And it was the rust belt. It was that kind of thing, indeed. And the only thing that was going on was like, there was a strip club and this greek restaurant that these four young guys had turned into a comedy club. And it turned out it was at the, in the beginning of what has been known as the 1980s comedy boom. And I saw an ad in the paper for this place, and I started going down there earlier in the year 1980 as a customer. I really enjoyed it and I enjoyed laughing and noticed, that all the comics were, like, in my age group, and some of them were even younger. people like Dave Couliere and Mike Binder were actually younger than me, but Bob Saget and Gary shandling and people like that were appearing in this club in Cleveland.

Steve Cuden: In Cleveland, yeah.

Steve Skrovan: And I decided, you know, I’m going to give that a try. And I had done through the course of my childhood and young, you know, secondary school, high school and college, I’d done, like, funny kind of public speaking sort of things, but I wasn’t really an actor. I was a jock, I was a football player.

Steve Cuden: Were you a class clown?

Steve Skrovan: I wouldn’t say I was a class clown because I was a good student and I was like captain of the football team. I was more of a Wisenheimer kind of guy.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Steve Skrovan: Rather than the, you know, the classic class clown. I don’t fit the stereotype of the stand up comedian who had to be funny because he was the last person picked on the team. That wasn’t my life.

Steve Cuden: Comedy was not a survival thing for you.

Steve Skrovan: It was not a survival thing for me. It was just something that I enjoyed, making people laugh. And I really got that from my father and my family in general. My mom. My mom was what you need in every, performance, which is an audience. And my brother and I and my father would take turns, you know, trying to make her laugh and make each other laugh. I was raised in an environment where that was encouraged. and I think if our births had been reversed and my father was born in the fifties and I was born in 1930, he would probably have done the same thing. Cause he had the chops. and he was a guy who was always emceeing The Local church carnival or the town festival.

Steve Cuden: He had a comedy gene, and you inherited it.

Steve Skrovan: Well, he had at least a public speaking gene, and he was a funny guy. He could tell a joke. He knew how to tell a joke. He kind of was the guy you wanted at the party. He could fill up a room and I would, you know, as a little kid, watch him just be up there. He wasn’t necessarily doing stand up or anything, but he was emceeing, something and being very relaxed about it.

Steve Cuden: He had an entertaining touch.

Steve Skrovan: He did, he did. And, that side of my family had that, like, his older brother had that also. But I was the one who was fortunate enough to be born when I was born that I could actually put into action, whereas they had to work for a living.

Steve Cuden: Well, you know, you go back prior to the fifties, and I don’t know how people became comedians, though. It would have been vaudeville, clearly, and a little bit of radio. But how did those guys, the bob hopes and the Jack Benny’s and so on?

Steve Skrovan: Well, there was burlesque and there was vaudeville. There’s always a underlying circuit where people cut their teeth and the older generation always says, where do people, where’s the places you can be bad anymore? Well, there’s plenty of places you can be bad. And the younger people know where they are. They’re not the same places you did. They are the places that they do. And so these comedy clubs that are opening up in the late seventies and early eighties, usually it was on the coast, it was new York, la, maybe Boston, San Francisco, metropolitan, Chicago. But then it started going more. That’s why a club opened up at Cleveland. There was one in Detroit. Then the Cleveland comedy club expanded to Pittsburgh, and it became this thing which. My theory of the case of the comedy boom is that it was a demographic issue. You had a huge bulge in the population called the baby boom, particularly, the second half of the baby boom. So you had all of these people sort of getting out of school and coming of age at the same time. And a few of us had to step forward and entertain them. This was a time when they called the boom, because you didn’t have to be a name to have an audience. You just had to put up a sign that there’s comedy, and people would flock to it. And it lasted pretty much about ten years when people started getting married, having kids, staying in, and there wasn’t the same bulge in the population to replace them. But that foundation had been established, and the clubs that were good survived. And there’s yet still a thriving stand, up comedy scene.

Steve Cuden: And in your case, that was your training run. Obviously, there’s no school to go be a comedian. You had to go just do it. Right?

Steve Skrovan: You had to do it. And, you know, and I remember very vividly my first night, which was March 9, 1980, it was amateur night, and they would give, $50 prize to the person who would win by vote of the audience. So the idea was to bring people to the show on a Sunday night. They had the regular show with the professional comedians from Wednesday through Saturday. Sunday night was their, what they called amateur night. Now they call them open mics. And I signed up and I put together some material, about ten minutes of material, of which, only about 15 seconds was remotely funny. And, brought a couple of friends, and I was terrible. But fortunately, everybody else was worse. It was like, really a bad night.

Steve Cuden: Do you know any stand up comedian of any notoriety that wasn’t terrible when they started on their first night? They’re all terrible. Everybody’s terrible.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, some people have the, the problem of doing very well their first time. For whatever reason, the circumstances, the night just came together. Then they spend a lot of years trying to chase that high again. It’s like, I usually analogize everything to sports. It’s like your first time at the plate, you hit a home run, and then you don’t get another hit for your next 50 at Batsheen because you’re still thinking that you’re gonna hit that home run.

Steve Cuden: Exactly.

Steve Skrovan: that happens sometimes, and that can be a problem psychologically for some people to do well the first time.

Steve Cuden: It certainly happens to screenwriters sometimes, too, where they sell something right out of the Gate, and then they can’t sell anything again for a really long time, if ever.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah, because maybe they had one story

Steve Cuden: To tell that’s true.

Steve Skrovan: But you didn’t develop the chops to know how to divine another story to develop another story to take a fragment of an idea and blow that into something larger.

Steve Cuden: Do you still do stand up to this day.

Steve Skrovan: Well, you know what? It’s funny you should mention, I don’t do it like, formally. I just put together a set for my 45th college reunion.

Steve Cuden: Okay.

Steve Skrovan: And I’m the Entertainment for the Saturday night dinner. And that was memorial, day weekend, or the weekend after that, I guess. And about a month or so ago, and I put together I ended up doing close to an hour.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Steve Skrovan: Because I’m always still writing jokes and I’ve got my notebook and my phone, and they asked me in December, would you do it again? I said, sure. So I just started putting together, collecting all the jokes that I had on my phone and tailoring it, obviously, to, it’s all people my age.

Steve Cuden: So how do you know? I mean, obviously you’ve m been doing it a long time, so you have a sense of things Better Than when you first started. But how do you know that you’re about to get up in front of your college classmates and be successful in some way? Can you feel that before you start or you just going at it and seeing what happens?

Steve Skrovan: Well, you’re going at it, see what happens. But the fact that I am very experienced, you know, takes, eliminates a lot of the anxiety and the fact that the audience, I’ve done this before for them, and so they trust me, too. And so they give me the benefit of the doubt, and I’ve actually gotten pretty good at it. And I have to say, I am probably a better stand up comedian now than I was when I was doing it for a living. And it’s simply because now I have so much more to write about than I did when I was 25.

Steve Cuden: Oh, well, certainly. And that’s one of the problems with young students is they don’t really have stories to tell. You have stories to tell.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah, and I didn’t. I have stories to tell now. I didn’t then.

Steve Cuden: Right, that’s what I mean.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah, exactly. And I don’t, you know, I look back at my Act and I go, wow, really? People laughed at this stuff. I mean, how did I get away with this? You know, it was, I feel like I’ve been getting away with it for, you know, 44 years.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that stand up comedy is something that requires a maturation process?

Steve Skrovan: Oh, yeah, yeah. Just like anything else, you know, the more you do it, the more you, you know, you should be learning every set, even some infinitesimal notion should, be a building block for just the experience. You know, we were talking about bombing, you know, in the beginning, just the experience of bombing is important because you walk off that stage still alive, and you realize, oh, well, I survived that. That’s the worst that can happen. And so the next time it happens, it’s not such a big deal. And then, you’re in another situation where it’s not working, and you figure out a way to make it work, and you develop all of these strategies. And, I’ll tell you a story about when I was one of the original acts of the comedy seller in New York. And they would have shows on the weekends at, like, I’d get, like a spot at 02:00 in the morning, right? On a Friday. Of course, you learned in stand up that, you know, certain days of the week are, they each have their different character. And Friday was usually a more raucous kind of evening for people because it’s the end of the work week. People are drinking more, and they’re not.

Steve Cuden: Out on dates, and they can sleep in the next morning, and they can.

Steve Skrovan: Sleep in the next morning. Saturday was much more friendly for comics because it’s like a date night. People are rested, and they’re more alert and more attentive. That’s why Saturday was usually the hottest night, whereas Friday could be hot, but it could also be raucous. And so I would get booked to do a 02:00 in the morning set, and by this time, the audience is fried. And, it’s just this general din in the audience because they’re talk, they’ve no longer listening. And I used to go up on stage and try to shout over them, and they would just get louder because they, they’re trying to talk, and you’re, who’s this guy who’s got this microphone who is interrupting their conversations? And so it just became this arms race where everything would just get louder and louder and nobody was listening to anybody. So I decided in one of those 02:00 sets that I wasn’t going to fight, that I wasn’t going to get loud, I was going to get quiet. And I was just do my Act in a normal tone and just go through it and not depend on the audience reaction necessarily. And it was amazing. What would happen is eventually they would quiet down because they’d hear this little murmur in the back of their conversation. It’s not somebody trying to shout over them. And I sort of figured this out where they came to me, and I did that over and over again when I would get those late night sets where it was like a dull roar when you just walked into the room and people would get up and leave because they’re on their way out. But then you get the people who were really willing to stay and listen to you. And I brought them to me by going quiet.

Steve Cuden: That’s very interesting, because in the theater, that is a. There’s a theory that the quieter you get, the more attentive the audience is. And if you’re too loud, sometimes the audience gets turned off by that volume. So you’re saying that exact same thing happens in stand up comedy?

Steve Skrovan: Yeah, and I think it has to do with, you know, when you’re being loud or you’re performing, you’re putting things out to the audience as opposed to drawing them in. And so by being quiet and being just, you know, if it’s, in a play, living on stage, you have to trust that that’s interesting. Just somebody doing whatever they’re doing on stage and not putting something out. And that was something I had to learn as an actor, which is different than being a stand up, because a standup you are, the onus is on you to be entertaining, of course. So you’re putting stuff out there. And as an actor, I’ll tell you a story about how I was in acting class, and the acting teacher said, steve, come in next week with a song. It could be a very simple song, but I’m just going to have you sing the song acapella in the class. And so I came in with, a Beatles song. Oh, darling, you know, oh, darlin’you, know, this big, you know, emotional song. And so the next week came by. Okay, Steve, go sing your song. And I sang the song like I did my best Paul McCartney version of the song. And he said, okay, that’s very good. And in front of all the other students, too. Okay, now do it like Elvis. Oh, I said, that’s great. I could do Elvis. Hold on. He said, okay, that’s great. Now do it. as Elvis hopping on 1ft. Oh, I’m hopping on 1ft and singing the song. And he’s just having me do all these different things for 45 minutes. I’m singing this song, and I’m getting tired. So finally, at the end of 45 minutes, he says, now just, sit on this little crate and just, you’re in the park and there’s nobody else around and sing the song. And I sat down and I just went, oh, darling, please believe. And I got it. Everybody was tuned in m because I was no longer performing. I was just living on stage. And that was the lesson that I learned as an actor is that your life on stage, you have to trust that that is interesting enough and that you don’t have to enhance it by being out there and doing this and putting an Act and making a face and doing all those things.

Steve Cuden: You are drawing them in.

Steve Skrovan: Yes. But you’re also trusting that you’re interesting because life is interesting, and humans find other humans interesting. And this guy’s folding his socks. How is he folding? You don’t have to sing the song and put it out there to the audience. You can just live on stage. And that was how I learned that lesson as an actor. And it probably informed what the story I just told you about going to the comedy cellar, too.

Steve Cuden: I think it does. It’s a little bit also, less is more. Sometimes it’s.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah, of course. Yeah. But it’s more about being in it. Being is interesting and that you don’t have to put something out there to deserve the attention.

Steve Cuden: So one of the more important phrases for actors is to be in the moment. That’s what you’re talking about, really, I.

Steve Skrovan: Think, yeah, to be in the moment. But, I, trust, again, it’s like, trust that your existence, I mean, this is a Life lesson, too. This is what we all need to get to the point where it is. You have to trust that your existence is important enough and that you don’t necessarily have to earn your life. You deserve to be here.

Steve Cuden: I think that’s great. You don’t have to earn your life. I love that.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah. A lot of, you know, a lot of us grow up. Unfortunately, I wasn’t necessarily one of them. I think I entertained because, I like the juice of it. But they feel if it has no meaning unless I am, out there doing something, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do things and make something of your life and have a purpose. But at base, a well adjusted person is going to trust that I deserve to belong here.

Steve Cuden: You actually are telling me that you were in Hollywood all those years and you knew well adjusted people.

Steve Skrovan: Well, I was the one. I was the one. and I said, actually, I am notorious among my friends for being well adjusted, because most of them, you know, I listen to Mark Marin’s podcast a lot, and, you know, he’s great. And one of the reasons he’s great is because he’s. He is kind of, he is neurotic, and he is confessional, and he is vulnerable, and he puts it out. People relate to that, which is why I wouldn’t be that type of character. Because I just don’t have that. It’s one. My good friend Ray Romano, who I wrote for, for all those years, he’s neurotic and quirky, and that’s what makes him an interesting character indeed. But I don’t fit that mold, and I’m not that funny.

Steve Cuden: And yet he comes off as a very ordinary, normal person. He doesn’t come off as a wild, crazy person.

Steve Skrovan: No, no, he’s not crazy at all. He’s like most of us.

Steve Cuden: Right, exactly.

Steve Skrovan: Yes.

Steve Cuden: I think that that’s what makes him unique is that he’s got those underlying quirks, but yet he’s ordinary.

Steve Skrovan: Well, yes. I mean, he’s got those. A lot of people are quirky, but Ray is somebody who can translate that to this artificial thing called the stage and be authentic in that artificial situation.

Steve Cuden: Did you know him as a stand up?

Steve Skrovan: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: You knew him as a standup back.

Steve Skrovan: In those New York days.

Steve Cuden: So let’s talk about sitcoms then, because that’s a pretty good way to get to it. You know, the old line, the very old line is dying is easy. Comedy is hard. I know it’s really hard to describe, but what do you think makes comedy so difficult to do?

Steve Skrovan: Well, probably because there’s so many variables. It’s a very delicate thing, which is the reason why I think, if AI conquers the world, comedy be the last thing it conquers, because there’s context, there’s the speaker, the attitude, there’s the relationship with the audience. Because when you’re doing standup, it is really a dialogue. The audience doesn’t have words to say most of the time. Sometimes they use words. You suck. Okay, that’s a word. That’s. Yeah, it’s two words. Okay. you know, but they have this, you know, I consider laughter, kind of a mating call. You know, laughter is kind of this thing that we do when we understand something. When a thought crystallizes, we laugh. You can’t laugh when you’re confused about something, you have to make something clear, has to be specific. There’s just so many things to go into it, including the environment that you’re in. when you’re talking specifically about stand up, you know, if I walk into a room, I can tell if this is going to be easy or hard. If there’s a very high ceiling and people are sitting in soft furniture and they’re spread out, this is going to be very difficult. The first thing I look at is the ceiling. If it’s low ceiling and they’re sitting on hard chairs, and there’s no other place to look but this little postage stamp of a stage. Then you, and it’s people are crowded and there’s intimacy. Intimacy, in the stand up realm is really important. Actually, it’s important for any kind of laughter being close. That’s why people who are up front, they’re laughing harder than the people in the back. It’s not because the joke got less funny as it traveled at the speed of sound to the back of the room. It’s that the intimacy factor is a little bit removed, and the people in the balcony are even farther removed. And when you’re watching television comedy, you’re in the way back balcony, and the baby’s crying and the phone’s ringing, and somebody’s, talking across the room. There’s a lot of things competing with your attention for that, which makes it.

Steve Cuden: Harder, but you actually get to see the face and the eyes.

Steve Skrovan: On a tv show, well, you can get a close up, the camera can manipulate who know where you’re supposed to be looking, all of that. But it’s hard because there are all those variables and they’re hard to conquer. And when you get into it in a live situation, you have to be able to adjust to whatever those variables are presented to you. Not only, ah, you, know, and adjust your expectations. Like, I would go, I would do the comedy seller that we talked about on a Saturday night. And Commissat was a great room for all the reasons I stayed. A low ceiling, no place to look, people packed together, and just a real good focus. And, you know, the laughter would be bouncing off the walls. And then I’d walk into Soho to do a place called Green Street, which was a big loft space, and it was mainly for singers, and the comics would go on before the singers, and it was a huge, big ceiling. People are sitting in soft furniture. It’s kind of got this music, cool vibe. And you couldn’t expect to have the same set you had at the comedy cellar that you had at Green Street, because they were just two different rooms. So I would have to accept the fact that a chuckle at Green Street was like a belly laugh at the comedy cellar.

Steve Cuden: That’s so interesting.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah. And so some comics hate to go into Green Street because they couldn’t make that adjustment.

Steve Cuden: They need that feedback that’s raucous in a way.

Steve Skrovan: Well, yeah, they always used to working in a certain rhythm, and here you had to change your rhythm, you had to slow down, you had to kind of let it settle and not don’t let them see you sweat. You have to act like I said, that thing. That’s not the part that’s supposed to get the laugh, even though it was. I’m going to move over here and do this part and maybe that’ll get the laugh. And when the audience feels confident that they’re not making you feel bad, they will relax and they will more likely laugh anyway.

Steve Cuden: And you got, I assume, pretty decent at reading that and adjusting in a way that made it work.

Steve Skrovan: Exactly. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: All right. So at what point in your stand up career did you start to think about writing for others, that is, scripts for tv?

Steve Skrovan: Well, I always wrote back in the days when I was doing stand up, wrote sketches, and I actually put together a little Cabaret show called Live Scrow acts on stage, which was, we did a little Cabaret, in New York and east side of New York. I got some, fellow actors together, and my friend Fred Stoler, comedian, he was in it too, and we did these sketches that I wrote. So I was always writing and always exercising that muscle. But it was after I came to LA, because the jobs that I got in television were hosting jobs, because the thing that I was best at as a stand up was being an emcee, which was dealing with the audience ad libbing with an audience setting about. I could get laughs as a headliner around the country and everything. But I think what I was best at was being a host. And so I got a job hosting a talk, show in MTV in New York for six weeks, and then I got a job, doing a hidden camera show in LA on the then fledgling Fox network. And that’s what brought me out to LA. And then I did another show, hosted another show in Orlando, Florida, for the Family channel called that’s my dog. It, was all these weird shows that, these three weird shows that I got to host, and then that kind of dried up. And a friend of mine who had done sketches with, his name is David Fury, who’s had a great career himself, working on Lost and 24 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But this was all before that when we were all just kind of stand up actors. And he said, you know, I’ve got this writer’s group. We, meet on Tuesdays in my apartment. You should come. And you know that sketch you wrote for this show we did? That might be a good thread for a Seinfeld episode. You could write a Seinfeld spec in this group, I thought, yeah, yeah, maybe. So I started going to this group and I took this sketch that I written and fleshed out the other characters and wrote this Seinfeld spect onto the auspices of this group. None of us knew what we were doing. We were just all just trying to write. But it gave me a deadline, gave everybody kind of a deadline. If you wanted to participate on Tuesday night, you bring something in and we would read it out loud and talk about it. So I wrote the spec script and I got it to Larry David because I had known Larry David from New York stand up days.

Steve Cuden: Ah, very good.

Steve Skrovan: And figuring he might buy the idea or something. And instead he called me up and said, do, you want a job? And, ah, I said, yeah. And he hired me and three other comics that he knew to sort of be a think tank. He didn’t want us to write scripts because he wanted to write the scripts, but to come up with ideas for what became the fourth season of Seinfeld, which was the season where they did the show within a show. It was about how Jerry got the show of Seinfeld.

Steve Cuden: Right, right.

Steve Skrovan: That was the arc for that whole season. And I was there and that was my, and I was, that was my first writing job. And that changed the trajectory of my career 180 degrees.

Steve Cuden: Well, sure. naturally it would. It’s interesting how you got there is by being a stand up all those years, knowing people like that and then knowing a guy like, Larry David. That’s a critical juncture for you, is to know people. When you work with a Larry David or a, Phil Rosenthal, they’re two totally different people. They present differently. The material’s different. The worlds that they’re working in are very different. How do you then adapt to their worlds? And what is it about them that makes them unique, that makes those worlds work?

Steve Skrovan: Well, they’re both brilliant, and they’re both brilliant in different ways. And the main difference, I would say, between them is that Larry is an introvert and Phil is an extreme extrovert. Larry needs to work on his own, you know, I mean, that’s kind of the definition of an introvert, is that it’s not that you’d hate people, but being with people saps you of energy as opposed to gives you energy. Phil, it was the opposite. He loves the writer’s room. It gives him energy. He’s great at running the room and getting ideas from everybody and building a story Larry was more like, you’re working on a case in a detective office and Larry’s the lead detective. And you come in and I, he says, okay, I’ll follow this lead and you go off. And that show, for me, I was only there for a year, because that show for me was not. Didn’t, reflect, what was going on in my Life. I was not a single person. That was about single people in New York. I didn’t have dating stories. And I felt like I audited a masterclass rather than wrote for the show because I just got to watch Larry and Jerry work.

Steve Cuden: You were actually in the room as things were being revised and rewritten. Or were you there prior to that happening?

Steve Skrovan: Well, no. In that situation, Larry and Jerry, even the other writers, you stuck your script under the floor and they took it. And then you saw it at the table read. There wasn’t a writer’s room where we bounced ideas off everything. It was like, you know, Larry knew what he wanted. He knew the tone that he wanted to. And he was brilliant enough to be able to produce it. Not everybody is. You better be a genius if you’re going to do it that way without the help of a lot of other people.

Steve Cuden: Well, no kidding.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah. And there are people who came out of, like, Larry’s stable of people who have tried to work that way. And, they just can’t do it because they’re not as good as Larry.

Steve Cuden: Well, ultimately goes off and makes curb your enthusiasm. In which there is no script.

Steve Skrovan: Yes. Except there is a very detailed outline.

Steve Cuden: Outline. But there’s no actual dialogue written in advance.

Steve Skrovan: Right. And I. And I did one of those. You could look it up on YouTube. Larry cast me in one of those, which was like, in the second season, like 20 some plus years ago. And, you know, you get the page that has your scene in it. And there may be some suggestions of lines and things. But, yeah, you just do take after take. And the director will come out or Larry will say that the way you said, you know, I’ll tell you a story about working on Seinfeld. That I only got things on there by accident. What does that mean by saying something stupid? I’ll give you two examples. One is short example. The year I was there was, 1992. And there was the Barcelona Olympics. And Seinfeld was still just a cult hit. It was still on Wednesday nights. It was still getting its ass kicked by home improvement, the ABC show, Tim Allen show. So they were trying to promote it during the NBC had the Barcelona Olympics, and they wanted to do two summer shows. And they couldn’t do them with Elaine because Julia, Louis Dreyfus had just had a baby. And so she wasn’t available. She wouldn’t be available to the fall. So they devised these shows where it was just, I think just Jerry and George and maybe Kramer. And, you know, they went out to Hollywood. Larry Charles wrote those episodes. And then they write the episode where Lane comes back. And this backstory for her is that she hasn’t been around. Because she’s been on a vacation with her psychiatrist. Who she’s fallen in love with. And who has this hold on her, who knows all her secrets. And so she’s feeling constricted by the fact that he has this power over her. And we were kind of talking about this, how we reintroduce her in that relationship. And I said, oh, so he’s kind of like a svenjali. And Larry goes, svenjali? Did you say svenjali? I said, I don’t know. Did I say svenjali? Svenjali. It’s svengali. I said, okay. I said, yeah, I guess it is. Yeah. Svenjali, sir. And that was it. Able Reed comes around. Elaine says, I don’t know. He’s got this, this hold on me. He’s like a svenjali. And Jerry says, svenjali. Did you say svenjali? And she goes, did I say svenjali? And Jerry says, george. George goes, sven jolly. And the joke was that, I guess he kind of svenjali. He has a cheerful hold on you. And so by saying that, by mispronouncing that word, I got something in the script. The other story was, my friend Bill Masters and I were working on an idea. And we were going to pitch it to Larry. But Larry was, not feeling well. And Larry was like the iron man. He was like Lou Gehrig Kalripken. He always showed up. But he was renting a house in Studio city. Not far from where we were, where the studio was. And he said, come over and, you can pitch it at my house. And so Bill and I drive to where he’s staying. And he’s on the couch with like a little blanket over him. And he says, if I, if I, if I get up to have to go to the bathroom, don’t think that’s a reflection on, your pitch. I just have to, you know. So Bill and I start pitching this show. And we’ve rehearsed it, and we’re putting it out there and we’re pitching it. And I got my part, and he’s got his part. And boom, boom. And sure enough, about halfway through, Larry goes, excuse me. And he gets up and he goes into the bathroom. Shuts the door and bill and I look at each other and we go, I think it’s going pretty well. I think, yeah, he might be by no sooner do we say that than we hear behind the door, he’s just throwing up everything he’s ever eaten in his Life with his toilet. And we hear the flush. He comes out and he says, well, I don’t know about your story but I’m going to use this. And sure enough, in the season, Jerry and George are pitching to NBC executive played by Bob Balaban. They set it up that Bob Balaban had a bad piece of shellfish. And they’re pitching at his apartment and they’re in the middle of it and they’re doing this thing. And Bob Balaban excuses himself. That was the scene that played out. So Larry rejected our story which was all carefully crafted, and his vomiting during our pitch is what made the series. That’s how I got things on.

Steve Cuden: You can say you made Larry David sick enough to put it into show.

Steve Skrovan: Yes, exactly. We sickened him so much that he put it in.

Steve Cuden: So then what is the difference? Obviously the personality difference, but what is the difference in then working with a Phil Rosenthal? How does that process go?

Steve Skrovan: Well, Phil Rosenthal, as I said, is just, he loves the room. the thing about Phil is he is so, facile. I mean, he just knows theater and he knows how to talk to actors and he knows how to direct. He has the ability to take in information from all sides and filter it and say, yes, no, no, yes, yes, no, no, and not get overwhelmed by it, which most writers would. And somebody like Larry couldn’t take all that input. He doesn’t want a lot of people in his ear. Phil could take like 15 people talking to his ear and he could process it and accept it or reject it and do it quickly. And I’ve not seen anybody able to do that with that kind of aplomb, as Phil does, because there would be a run through and a scene would end and Phil would come in first with all of his notes and re block it and just kind of do his magic. And then he turned to us and all the writers individually come up and whisper something to his ear about that. You go, yeah, go tell him that, no, we’ve done that. Or boom, boom, and then meet with the actors after they run through, while we went back to the room to start rewriting the script based on what we learned from the run through. And then he’d come back in and we say, you know, this joke didn’t quite work. He goes, nah, don’t worry, I told him how to do it. Well, how about this one? no, he just entered too late. They were too far away. And this is why we never had late nights. We never had to stay for dinner at Raymond in nine years, whereas every other show I’ve been on except Seinfeld, because Larry did everything, you’re there, usually late in the night having dinner. That’s the debilitating thing about writing for television. Have to crank these things out. And so Phil just, had this ability not only to determine what was an acting problem versus what was a writing problem. Most writers, they want to solve everything through writing. M that’s what they do. And so when something doesn’t work, we need to fix this through writing. But Phil would know, no, that’s not a writing problem. It’s because these two people were standing too far away from each other. That’s why that didn’t work. And he’d have them stand closer to each other and boom, all of a sudden, it worked. So you weren’t wasting all this time writing laterally. That’s what takes the time, because you’re pitching a joke or a line. One is just as good as the other because that wasn’t really the problem.

Steve Cuden: So both Larry David and Phil Rosenthal, when you hear them speaking, and obviously we know much more about Larry David from his then subsequent show, curb your enthusiasm, we’ve seen a lot more of him than we’ve ever seen of, Phil Rosenthal, even with his around the world eating show. But both of them have a specific way of speaking and a specific way of delivering whatever they’re saying. Their lines in Life, their real Life lines. When I think about it, both of those voices come out in their individual shows, their own voice. Everybody loves Raymond is a sort of a combo between Ray Romano and Phil Rosenthal. But you can hear Phil Rosenthal in that show. You can hear that voice.

Steve Skrovan: That’s another good contrast that I could bring up, because the combination of Larry and Jerry, Ray and Phil, the combination was greater than the individual parts. It was just one of those things that happens, a relationship between the showrunner and the star. And for Larry and Jerry, what was so powerful about that combo was that Jerry was a great comedian and very accessible. You couldn’t throw him. He could do an hour and nobody’s laughing. And he just said, well, there’ll be another audience tomorrow. Whereas Larry had the reputation of being on stage and somebody would cough in the wrong place and he’d storm offstage, sure. But Jerry had a very, You know, it was clean. It was accessible. Larry has this. Has this very dark sense, of humorous. I mean, as a person, he’s not dark at all. But he knew that the key to comedy is those things. Those dark things that only people would only think of and never act upon. And that’s what he spent Seinfeld and curb dramatizing. Is all those things that you would never really act on. Those dark things. So you had Larry’s dark vision going through Jerry’s very accessible prism. And that was just a very powerful combination. So Jerry made Larry more accessible. Which he wasn’t in his own career. And Larry made Jerry more hip and itchy. As far as Ray and Phil, it’s a different dynamic with different, parameters. But Ray thought, all you need to do is have comics. He and his friends are talking, and we’re all funny. So let’s just be about me and my friends talking. And Phil was like, no, you need a story And Phil, who had just grown up on tv. Had internalized stories so well that the combination of Ray’s. Ray had a very unsentimental view of family Life. Phil had something more of a, I remember in the beginning, the first season. We always used to have to have some warm, huggy kind of moment. And by the second season, that was kind of drained out of Phil. So Phil made Ray understand that you needed a story And Ray made Phil a little less, sentimental. And the combination, again, was greater than the individual part. I mean, it was just a very good collaboration. They were complimentary pieces there in both cases.

Steve Cuden: Well, Seinfeld, you know, the mantra was no hugging, no growth. Right. That was the mantra.

Steve Skrovan: That’s Larry’s mantra. Yeah. Yeah. No. And Larry is one of the least sentimental people I know.

Steve Cuden: Sure. And then you get to everybody loves Raymond. And it’s a family story As opposed to Seinfeld, which is a, kind of a family. But not an actual family. Versus Raymond, which is an actual family in the story And it’s those family feelings that you get. They’re very different, obviously.

Steve Skrovan: Well, yeah. And every every show is a family. Whether it’s a workplace comedy, the office. Or whether it’s, about a literal family. And there are archetypes that each everybody falls into. But the thing that is, was always under the surface of Raymond though. Which was darker than people give it credit for. Was Oedipus. It was an oedipus story

Steve Cuden: Interesting.

Steve Skrovan: I mean, the very last episode is Marie crawling into bed in between Ray and Deborah when she, her baby had almost died. And that, symbolically, we knew what we were doing. Phil knew what he was doing when, he staged it that way, is this battle between the daughter in law and the matriarch. They’re battling over the soul of Raymond. And Oedipus was always sort of the dark undercurrent under Raymond that never had. It was always subtext, never came to the surface, but was, I think, an, edgier thing that we, would get credit for.

Steve Cuden: I think that that’s a very interesting take that I’ve never heard before, so thank you for saying that, because I think that’s a really interesting way to think about. Everybody loves Raymond having a slant of oedipus in it, which is very intriguing. You also, in your career, have taken some of those shows, including Raymond, and reintroduced them into foreign venues. correct?

Steve Skrovan: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: How challenging is that to do? What is that like?

Steve Skrovan: it’s really fun. I mean, it’s, Each case was different. I went to Israel first, and Israel there was a great showrunner that they had, Daniel Lapin, who had already adapted all the scripts, or at least 13 of them, the 13 that we did. And so the scripts were already written, and so I was there mainly working with the actors and eliciting the performances there. But Daniel had already adapted the scripts because, he was very good at it, and he had his own hit show in Israel, and it didn’t really work there because, they already had on Israeli tv, the real show in syndication, and so the adaptation was competing against the real show. So we only did 13 episodes there. But it was a fascinating place to be for five.

Steve Cuden: Was it in Hebrew or English?

Steve Skrovan: It was in Hebrew.

Steve Cuden: In Hebrew.

Steve Skrovan: So what I’m doing when I’m there, whether it was in Hebrew, I wasn’t. In Russia was a different situation. I wasn’t on the stage. My friend Jeremy Stevens, late Jeremy Stevens, he’s the one who was there for four or five years. That’s a whole other story So he had relationships both in the writer’s room and on the stage. I was just there trying to help them write original stories after they had adapted all of ours.

Steve Cuden: So less adaptation and more new stuff that was.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah, because in Russia, they, what they call strip the show means they show it every day. And so they blew through our 200 episodes in, I don’t know, 200 days. It’s in the Guinness book of world Records as the most foreign adapted show.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Steve Skrovan: Because they’ve done in Russia, over 400 episodes now, more than twice as many as we did. And so by the time I got there, I was just, working in the writers room, helping them come up with original stories.

Steve Cuden: So do you speak Russian?

Steve Skrovan: No.

Steve Cuden: So how did that work? Did you have to have an interpreter?

Steve Skrovan: I had an interpreter there, a young man named Yvonne, who was brilliant, who would sit at the writers room table, and he would be playing a video game in his iPad. And I would talk, and he would translate it to Russian, and then they would talk, and he would translate the English all the time wearing his video pad. It was some left brain right thing. Thing that he could do.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Steve Skrovan: What was interesting about it was, for me, I had to speak in chunks, and supposed to speaking like I’m speaking now, just run on sentences. I had to kind of speak for a little while, then stop, let him translate. And then while he’s translating, I could then think about the next thing I was going to say and have it a little bit more organized in my mind than I normally would if I’m just babbling like I am now.

Steve Cuden: Was that good, or was it frustrating?

Steve Skrovan: No, it was good. It was great. It was a control mechanism there. The same with the translation back. But this interesting process story I’ll tell you about Russia was we were doing these original stories. I had been away from the show for eight years. By that time. I was ready to come back. The well had filled up. By the time we had finished the nine, years of Raymond, we were done. We didn’t want to repeat ourselves. We’d done all our stories eight years ago, and by, okay, it’s fun revisiting these characters. So I would ask them, okay, what’s conflicts going on in your Life with your wife or your husband or what’s going. Somebody would say something, and I go, okay, let’s take that. So what if from that, this scene happened, and I described, like a, fragment of a scene, and then I say, okay, then what would happen next? And I’d look around, and they kind of stare at me, and I go, okay, well, what if this happened? And then what would happen next? And again, they’d stare at me, and I realized, I’m writing the whole fucking show, and this is supposed to be their show. And what I realized was they were so concerned about saying something wrong or getting rejected, so I said, okay, this is what I’m going to. I’m going to teach you a thing called room bits. Now. Room bits are just funny things people do in rooms. And every room has them. And a lot of rooms, especially in the generation I worked with, you know, a lot of rooms have the same room bits, and a room pit could be just, you know, my friend Jay Kogan, his big room bed, he would just stumble into the room when he made an entrance and make everybody laugh. I would do things like, you have to have, something you do that’s funny. If one of your ideas bombs. And one of the things I told them was, okay, try never to stand when you’re pitching, because if that pitch bombs, that’s a very long trip back into your seats. One of the things I would do, and this wasn’t a big deal, is if I pitched something and it didn’t work, I would just slowly fall out of my chair and I would get the laugh and everybody would have, some room that they would do when something didn’t work and that would make everybody laugh and take the onus off the thing that got rejected. So I realized they’re too worried about taking risks. So I need to encourage them to take risks in order to do that. They need something to save the laugh. It’s like what Johnny Carson was famous for when one of his monologue jokes would bomb. He would save it by commenting on it. And this is part of the stand up ethos, too, is that something doesn’t, you know, joke doesn’t work. You say something that acknowledges that and that gets the laugh. So I literally showed them a room bit. And this is a room bit that I credit to my friend Mike Rowe, who’s a great, Emmy award winning, writer. And he calls it the, up and away. And it’s also going to be called the get up and go. And it’s too bad where I, just on audio here because I can’t really show it to you, but I’ll try to describe it as well as I can. The idea here is you say something and the boss goes, no, that’s no good. The idea is you Act like you’re going to quit, and so you start gathering anything that’s close to you. Your laptop, your keys, anything, papers. You make a big show of you’re packing up and you’re leaving. And the idea is that to have as much of what’s laying on the table in your arms as possible, sometimes even taking a person with you and storming out of the room, people laughing as you’re doing this. So I said, okay, I’m going to say something. I’m going to demonstrate this. Dmitri, when I say something, you say, no, that sucks. And I said something, made some attempt at some joke, and he said, no, that sucks. And I did the room bit. And I’m gathering things up, and I’m. And I boo, and I leave in a huff, and they are on the floor laughing at this. And I said, this is probably the most important thing I could teach you is how to save a joke, because that will teach you to take a risk, and you won’t sit there thinking, I have to say, the Perfect bon mo. You can put something out there, and if it doesn’t work, fall out of your chair and still get a laugh. Or get up and go and still get a laugh. Whatever the room bit is, is an exercise in taking risks.

Steve Cuden: Well, you’re all the way back to being a stand up and bombing. You’ve got to go through the bombing to get to the stuff that works.

Steve Skrovan: Exactly. Yeah, but you have to have the presence of mind to know that if something didn’t work, that’s not going to kill you, you’re still alive, and you’re going to acknowledge that.

Steve Cuden: Did that then turn into your articles in bits and pieces?

Steve Skrovan: Well, yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, because I would like to, publicize bits and pieces. This is a stack blog that I do. If, you’re not familiar with substack, it’s a publishing, platform. And a friend of mine who is the writer development person at the time, she encouraged me to do it because, during the quarantine, I had written something on Facebook. Just every day for 365 days from March 2020 to March 2021.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Steve Skrovan: Some sketch. Something most disciplined writing had ever done. And she said, you should transfer, that you should keep doing something on substack. I said, yeah, I can’t do something every day. That was great, but I’ve got other things I want to do. But I could do something once a month. I created this substack page called bits and pieces. I’ve been doing it for a little over a year now. There’s about 13, or 14 stories. They’re short stories and essays, all funny. They’re mostly nonfiction. But I did put a fiction thing up there called, Jesus in high school. But they’re all funny. And some of them are inside show business stories, kind of like the one probably, you know, I’ll make a substack blog out of the story told you about pitching on Seinfeld and Larry vomiting. One is going to come out in a couple of months, probably, in, August, where I tell a Seinfeld story Behind the scenes at Seinfeld, there’s a couple of Raymond stories I’ve already told. A Raymond story was my very first one called Rick DZ hates me. And it was about this thing that I turned into an episode. I won’t get into it. You’ll have to read it. Go to Stevesgrovean dot substack.com. it’s called bits and pieces. You can catch up on that. The very first one, which refers to Raymond, is called Rick Dees hates me.

Steve Cuden: I know. I read the article on, you were a speaker at college graduation or high school graduation.

Steve Skrovan: That was, that was called my speech to the graduates. That was an adaptation of some of the stand up that I did at my reunion that I told you about.

Steve Cuden: Got it.

Steve Skrovan: Instead of talking to people of my own generation, I made it as if I was talking to young people like I was an old person talking to young people.

Steve Cuden: Nice.

Steve Skrovan: I adapted it that way. Changed the polarity of that.

Steve Cuden: So tell us about the Ralph Nader radio hour. What’s that?

Steve Skrovan: Ralph Nader radio hour. it indirectly came out of a sitcom idea because what happened was a friend of mine named Henriette Mentel was a comic back in the eighties in New York, and she used to work for Ralph in the late seventies, early eighties. And she would tell me, we’d be, like at the bar, catch a rag star. She’d tell me stories about working for Ralph, and I’d say, boy, this is long before I was a writer. I’d say that’d, be a Good, setting for a show like a public interest office. Anybody can come in and you flash forward 15 years later. I’m in the middle of the, Raymond run, and I have a development deal. And I pitch an idea to the people at CBS, and they don’t like it. And I don’t want to admit that I don’t have another idea. So I kind of put them off and I run into Henriette, who I hadn’t seen in years, and I had remembered her telling me these Ralph stories. I said, have you ever done anything with your Ralph experience? She said, no. And she started introducing me to people who she had worked with, and they’re telling me these anecdotes and these little stories. And I had enough material that I put together an outline. And I went to my Raymond colleagues and showed them the outline. And they were asking me questions that I couldn’t answer because the experience was still too secondhand. So I said to Henriette, you know what? Let’s go to Washington the next hiatus, and, I’ll just go to the office and absorb the atmosphere and maybe meet some of these people in person and talk to them. And in the meantime, as I was researching this, I was reading about Ralph himself, was amazed at all that he had accomplished, and intrigued by the fact that everybody at this point now was very mad at him because this was 2003, this was after the 2000 election. Everybody’s blaming him for George W. Bush, and, you know, which is a whole other story But, I was talking to all these people in Washington, and inside the Beltway, you say sitcom, and it just didn’t compute. I could see in their eyes, but then I said, what about a documentary? And their eyes lit up because they knew this story hadn’t been told. And I realized I was in a position, through Henriette, to have access to not only Ralph, but all the people around him throughout his life. And so I put the sitcom in my back pocket, where it remains to this day. And I did a documentary with Henriette called an unreasonable man about the Life and times of Ralph Nader. It was an amazing experience. We went to the Sundance Film Festival. We got bought by FC. We had a theatrical run. We were on PBS independent lens. And that’s how I got involved with Public Citizen, which was Ralph’s original public interest group, and that was that. So about five years after that, my friend David Feldman, who’s fellow comedian, who has a show on the Pacifica, station here in LA, KPFK, he wants to do an alternate state of the Union. Now, this is 2014. Omaha The Movie came out in 2007, like seven years later. And he wants Ralph to be the guy to give us the alternate state of the union. And so he wants me to help him get in touch with Ralph. And so I hook him up with Ralph as people, and they arrange for the interview. And David says, okay, show up here at 430. And I said, well, what do you need me for? He says, because Ralph Nader is my hero since childhood, and I can’t talk. I’m too afraid to talk to him alone, even though it was going to be via phone and he’s in Connecticut and David’s in LA. So I said, okay, I’ll go. And I sat in the corner, I put headphones on, and David did a great interview with Ralph over the course there. I think maybe I threw in a couple of things, and we’re standing there with the program director after it’s all over, and he go, boy, this guy knows a lot we should do this every week. And so we put together a proposal. And by March 2014, a little over ten years ago, we did our first program. And at first it was just me and David sitting at the feet of the master and talking to Ralph. And Ralph got tired of that, not only talking to two mooks, but being just, the soul. He’s not a rush Limbaugh soloist. He wanted to have guests because he wants to promote other people’s ideas and other public interests and other advocates and journalists. So we started having guests. What the show has evolved to now to the point where I am the main host now, because David, through circumstances, moved to New York and I kind of took over the running of the show. And it has been such a tremendous education for me over the last ten years. I mean, doing the movie itself was a great education, but being privy to having Ralph talk to him for two or 3 hours a week and listening to him engage with others in all these different fields and his reading list and how his mind works and, what all these topics are that really kind of get underneath what’s going on in the world today. Not just what you see on CNN, which is all palace intrigue or natural disasters or election horse, race stuff. It’s really, what are the forces that we’re vying against with corporate power and anti democracy elements and dealing with those issues. That’s what I’ve been doing continue to do. we just recorded a show yesterday, and that’s our 540th.

Steve Cuden: Wow, that’s huge. And that sounds like someday you’re going to get a book out of that.

Steve Skrovan: Well, we have transcripts of the interviews. I mean, we could put a book together probably right now, or several. For several, yeah, just Ralph’s interviews of Noam Chomsky or, you know, Chris Hedges or some of these leading lights that progress.

Steve Cuden: That’s amazing. That’s really big.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah. You know, Ralph is an historical figure, and he leaves messages on my home phone, you know, Steve, it’s Ralph. Call, me. It’s very important. You know, I got this historical. He’s already in the history books. I have this relationship with him.

Steve Cuden: That’s amazing.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And you have relationships with other very, very successful, well known people, too.

Steve Skrovan: Yes, but none more impressive than Ralph.

Steve Cuden: Nate, I would agree that’s impressive.

Steve Skrovan: Even the people that he’s Johnny appleseeded, who I work with now at public Citizen and all these other places, these are the people who really impress me. Hollywood people, my being one of them, I’m not so impressed. With me.

Steve Cuden: I understand exactly where you’re coming from.

Steve Skrovan: I’m not impressed with me and my ilk. There’s this whole layer of people that we don’t know about who are out there fighting the good fight and keeping us safe and trying to defend democracy and fight corporate power, which is really kind of the, you know, the US Chamber of commerce is really the Death Star Thrower, and there’s all these people you’ve never heard about who are doing all this kind of stuff. Then that’s what I try to support in the way that I know how.

Steve Cuden: That is really great stuff. I mean, that’s really great stuff. So I’ve been having one of the most fascinating, fun conversations I’ve had in quite some time with Steve Skrovan And we’re going to wind the show down a little bit at this point. And I’m, just wondering, in all of your experiences, are you able to share with us, beyond the many stories you’ve already told us that are wonderful? A story of something that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or just plain funny?

Steve Skrovan: Well, I’ll, just tell you. I could tell you a story that’s just. I think it’s just plain funny.

Steve Cuden: Great.

Steve Skrovan: And it has to do with Raymond. And coming up with a story idea for Raymond. Well, actually, I’ll be doing a substack piece on this, so, you’ll get probably even a fuller version of it, in a couple of months.

Steve Cuden: We’ll also post that on the website so people will be able to find it.

Steve Skrovan: Excellent. So my wife wants to go on a couples retreat, not like, any far away, just in Pasadena, a few miles away. She heard about this guy who’s giving these, workshops because, you know, she’s interested in working on a relationship. And, you know, it’s like the last thing I want to do because it’s work. You know, even though it’s working on a relationship, it’s still work, and it’s a football weekend. But I got. I go and we do all these different exercises, and I’m being a good sport about it and doing, you know, taking it seriously. And there’s that one point where the seminar leader says, okay, now I want you to take this notebook and write down things that bother you about your partner. And I’m thinking, oh, my God, this is a trap. This is a trap. Nothing Good can come of this. And Shelley has her notebook, and she’s scribbling, she’s writing like a Steven King novel, and I’m staring at this blank page just thinking about. First of all, I don’t know what I’m going to say. And if I do say something, it’s, Just, I don’t think this is actually going to be therapeutic. It’s just going to be a problem. But I have to write something because I need to take the exercise seriously. And so finally something pops into my head. And it was, I don’t like the way she always makes me late. I like to be punctual, I like to be on time. And it irritates me. So I wrote that one thing down, and no sooner did I get to the end of the sentence that I realized, I think I’ve got an episode idea here. Whatever happens with our relationship, whatever is this. The important thing is I got a story out of it.

Steve Cuden: That’s the important thing.

Steve Skrovan: So I go to the writer’s room on Monday and I say, I think I got a story And I tell them the story about I don’t like the way she makes me late. And everybody has a story about that in their relationship. And it didn’t cut across gender lines. Sometimes it was the guy who was always late. Phil told a story about how when he’s at a party and his wife Monica says, we’re leaving. He goes to the door, but she’s doing the goodbye tour, which takes a half hour while he’s waiting at the door. And I go off and I think this is great because I’ve got this great theme. And stories are, three parts. It’s theme, it’s character, and it’s plotental. Usually you start out with a plot, a conflict or a character thing. Like I did an episode where Ray, I noticed Ray is a hypochondriac. So I’m going to do episode. But that was character start off kickoff. And sometimes there’s a plot kickoff where this incident happens and you take that incident and turn that into something here I had this theme about lateness. And I go back to my office to kind of work on it, to bring it back into the room, and I can’t. Okay, what’s the StoryBeat? I’ve got this theme, but what’s the StoryBeat? And I go to my friend Aaron Shore in the next office and I say, I can’t think of a story Obviously it’s very relatable. And he says, well, you know, he had a friend whose father had this thing called AI’s, which was ass in seat. He would set an ass in seat time for the family. And whoever didn’t make the AI’s time would be left behind. And he said, it always worked. Nobody was ever. They always made the AI’s time. He said that, in fact, the only time, the father did it was when the guy, his friend, was already an adult and a prominent doctor, and he left us. So we bring that into the room, that idea. Aaron tells that story and Phil goes, that’s your Act break. Ray leaves Deborah. I literally started shaking because I thought, oh, my God, that is the best Act break I have ever heard. Now, an Act break. For those of you who are not familiar in the network sitcom, there’s a commercial in the middle. So sitcoms are usually like two acts. They can also be three Act. They’re all essentially three Act things. But in this format, your Act break, when you go to the commercial, it’s like intermission at a play. It has to be. The stakes have to be high enough. You have to want to know what happens next to come back after the commercial or come back after intermission. And so that’s why an Act break is, important. And m if Ray leaves Deborah, that’s a great Act break, because you’re going to want to know what happens. How is that going to play out? And the reason it made me shake was because I could never imagine doing that. And here in a fictional setting, I’m going to be able to leave Shelley behind and see how that would play out and think about how that would play out. That’s the what if of storytelling. So I said, that’s all I need. I got AI’s, I got ray leaves Deborah. I don’t need anything else. And I went back and I wrote the outline and came back in. And basically, the first Act is Ray complains to Debrae, you know, we have an incident where Deborah makes him late. He complains. They have an argument about it. And she sees that this means something to him. She promises that the next thing they do, she will be on time. And the next thing they do is going to be a big event. It’s going to be like a sports award event, and it’s going to be black tie. And that’s how you raise the stakes, too. You make it this big formal event, and not just a family picnic. Debra’s gonna be on time, and he sets the AI’s time for 06:00 p.m. m. So the Act break scene is Debra. She’s getting ready. Ray is downstairs. He’s already in his black tie. He tells his brother and his wife, who are babysitting, that he’s gonna wait in the car because it’s five minutes to AI’s time. Deborah’s done, not down yet. We see Deborah. She’s gonna be on time. She’s just fixing her hair, doing a lot of things. She’s got a hair curler, and she does the last thing with her hair, curlerous, and puts it down, takes a step away, comes back to the mirror, does one more thing, and the curler gets stuck in her hair. She’s desperately trying to get the curler out of her hair. While Ray is now in the car, counting down the seconds to the AI’s time. She’s desperately trying to get there, and she runs downstairs. We cut to the car, and we did this in front of the audience. We had a car on the stage, and Ray is in the car. It wasn’t going to go anywhere, but you’re going to hear him start it up. And his, watch beeps, and he turns the key, and you hear the audience, because this is done in front of a live audience. Gasp. Just like I did when I was in the room when Phil said, ray leaves Deborah, because they couldn’t believe he was going to do it. And so he drives off, and the audience is like. And it confirmed what I thought. This is the greatest Act break I’ve ever heard. So the second Act is Ray’s at, the plate thing by himself. And where’s Deborah? The friends ask him and he goes, well, you know, he tells them the story and they are good for you, Ray. You know, you did it. You set the time. You push, set your foot down. Ray’s like, And one of his friends says, yeah, that’s great. Of course, I could never do that to, my wife. She’d kill me. And now Ray goes, oh, my God. He has that moment that Alec Guinness had in bridge on the river Kwai, where he realizes he’s built this bridge that is being used by the Japanese, and he’s gonna need to blow it up.

Steve Cuden: What have I done?

Steve Skrovan: What have I done? And Ray goes into spirals into, what have I done? Which is pure. Rey would do it anyway. Oh, my God. I’m not going to be able to go back home. I’m going to have to go into the witness protection program. she is going to kill me. And meanwhile, you go back to where Deborah has been waiting all night with not only the brother, and his wife, but then the parents come over, and then Ray comes in, and we had a discussion. Debate. Because usually you would have some big argument where everything gets hashed out in the second Act and gets resolved, or gets settled in some way. And Phil says, so what’s the argument? And I said, you know what? I don’t think there’s an argument. They’ve already had the argument in the first Act. We don’t need to re up all of that and have them yell at each other. I think it’ll be more powerful if Deborah does nothing. She just stares at him, and he comes back with a centerpiece of wilted flowers as sort of a peace offering. And he wants Deborah to yell at her, and she won’t. She just stares at him. And all the people in between, the brother and the wife and the mother and the father are in between them, and they’re all telling their stories about being late. And Ray’s father says, what’d you do that for? And Ray says, I did it because that was what you did with us when we were kids. And Frank goes, yeah, but I would never do it. You’d be an idiot to do that. And so they all leave. And Ray wants Debra to yell at her, but she won’t, because he’ll have nothing. He’s got nothing to push back against. And he says, you know, go upstairs, go to bed. And he goes upstairs like a dead man walking. He turns back and he says, you know, are you coming? And she says, I’ll be up in a minute. And we leave it, When we come back from the last commercial, it’s just Ray sitting still on the edge of the bed of whimpering, waiting for Deborah to yell at him or do whatever. We don’t know what she’s going to do, because we can all project and imagine what she was going to do. But that story came out of going to this couple’s counseling thing and writing this one little sentence down that said, I don’t like the way you make me late.

Steve Cuden: That’s amazing. And that turns into history.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah. Actually, the next day, after the show aired, what happened was on the view. Meredith Vieira had seen the episode, and she was talking to with all the women on the View, and they had basically the same discussion we had in the writers room. They all had some experience with that. Some of them were the late person, some of the partners were the late people. But it was very relatable. It got boosted, in another public forum.

Steve Cuden: I love hearing where stories come from. M that was really terrific. I loved hearing how that, transpired and built. So, last question for you today, Steve. You’ve already given us a huge amount of advice along the way in this show, but I’m wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice or a tip that you like to give those who are starting out in the business, or maybe they’re in a little bit trying to get to the next.

Steve Skrovan: Level, I would say. And it goes back to my, both the stand up experience and the writing experience is find a peer group. That’s what I tell young people is find your peer group, because old people like me are not going to be able to give you a job. But for me, the peer group was at the bar at the improv in New York, and it’s people who are aspiring to all the same things that you are. You’re in the arena with the people who are, going to end up giving you the jobs, which in my case was Larry David and Ray Romano. And it’s just because I was known among them, and that ends up paying off down the line. And it’s also, in a more practical way, you find out, okay, this job I’m talking about, the bar at the improv. Yeah, I did this job. who books that? Well, that guy books it. What’s his number? And you’re networking that way. So I tell young people, whether they’re writers or performers, I say, go to UCB, go to Second City, go to the groundlings, go to one of those places where they’re doing the thing that you want to do, and that doesnt mean that theyre even successful at it yet. Thats the same thing that happened with me in the writers room when I went to that writers group that my friend recommended. None of us knew what we were doing, but a number of people, a good percentage of those people ended up having very successful writing careers, and it was because we established some discipline of actually doing the writing. And then, yeah, this job, you should write that as a Seinfeld episode. Oh, yeah. And I do that, and I’m able to get it to the, you know, and that’s how it works. So find the peer group. Find the people who have the same dream that you have. Don’t be looking for the people who are already there. Go to the people who are at your same level or maybe a little bit ahead, and those are the people who are going to give you the jobs. Those are the people you need to network with. Those are the people that you’re going to grow up with in show business.

Steve Cuden: Well, I think that’s just spectacular advice, because that’s true. Not just in show business, where it’s incredibly important. It’s true in almost any industry, you want to find people that can help do what you do, and you can sort of build yourself up together as a group rather than as an individual, because as an individual, it’s very difficult to do what we do, especially in show business and especially in comedy and writing. It’s a lonely profession sometimes, and having others to talk to is really great. And like you say, the references then are a spectacular benefit from that.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah. And you make yourself known amongst that group, and, you know, none of you have to even know what you’re doing.

Steve Cuden: I think that that is really super valuable advice as writers. Sometimes you join writers groups and sometimes you find partnerships and so on.

Steve Skrovan: Right.

Steve Cuden: But it’s very helpful to make good with your peer group, which is what you’re saying.

Steve Skrovan: Yeah. Because the thing about anything in the, in the arts, whether you’re in the performing arts or you’re writing, is that you better like the process for sure, because that’s what you’re going to be spending most of your time doing. The show goes on the air for, you know, a half hour or an hour, and then it’s gone, or you’re in the play for, you know, 2 hours a night. I always analogize it to, football. You know, if, if you’re going to be a football player, you better like the practice, because that’s what you’re going to be spending most of your time doing.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Steve Skrovan: The game lasts, ah, 3 hours once a week.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Steve Skrovan: You’ll be playing half of that if you’re lucky. So if you’re an actor, you better like the idea. It better be exciting to you to go to your scene partner’s apartment and just work on the scene, that’s. You should. That should be fun. If that’s not fun, you’re probably in the wrong business.

Steve Cuden: I agree with you. And if you don’t like sitting in a room with a bunch of people for hours on end, it might not be for you.

Steve Skrovan: Right. Or if you don’t like, you know, I know I’m doing the right thing. When I’m working on a script and I look at the clock and I go, oh, moe, 2 hours went by, I didn’t even notice.

Steve Cuden: I totally agree. I call that being in the zone.

Steve Skrovan: yeah, then you know you’re doing the right thing. And the other thing I would say, just as far as having the temperament for this business is you not only have to tolerate uncertainty and tolerate the idea that you don’t necessarily know where your next job’s coming from. The idea of knowing where your next job is coming from should bore you a little bit. You know, if you knew, if you were an accountant, you know, I’m going to be here for the next five years. That’s for them. But what distinguishes the artist’s personality is what’s the next adventure on the horizon? That’s exciting.

Steve Cuden: Yep, that’s for sure.

Steve Skrovan: I don’t know what that is, but I’m going to get that phone call and I’m going to go to this audition and anything could happen. And that’s got to excite you. If that doesn’t excite you or that creates anxiety, you don’t have the temperament.

Steve Cuden: Because listen up, everybody. Steve was on one of the most successful shows ever in the history of tv and it was only nine years, which is a huge run, but it still ended after nine years. So then you got to think about what you’re going to do next.

Steve Skrovan: Exactly. And as successful as my career has been, it’s been 99% rejection. You’re going to have to tolerate that and learn how to not take that personally and learn to come back from that, because if you can’t, you’re not going to make it. I’ll say one more thing that I took to heart. I read this memoir, of Charles Groden, the great actor who’s from the heartbreak kid and Midnight Run and from Pittsburgh, actually, Charles Grodd from Pittsburgh. And you can tell I can hear his Pittsburgh accent. He, wrote a memoir called it would be so nice if you weren’t here. It was about his acting career. And that title came from the fact that early in his career he was doing a movie with Candace Berg and it was a World War Two movie and they were in a castle in Europe. And a duchess had been renting this castle in Europe, fallen on hard enough times, that she was renting her castle to a movie studio and he and Candice Bergen were in a room, sitting in a room, just waiting for a shot to be set up. And apparently it was a room that they weren’t supposed to be in, but they didn’t realize that. And the duchess happens to come by and she looks and sees them there instead of saying, hey, get the hell out of here. She’s polite and she goes, oh, it would be so nice if you weren’t here. And I think he, I don’t know if he actually explicitly said this, but I took it to mean he titled his memoir that is that that’s the message you get when you’re in show business. Everybody was telling you it would be so nice if you weren’t here.

Steve Cuden: Yeah, indeed.

Steve Skrovan: There’s so many people who want work, who are vying for all these positions who, you know, and it’s a pyramid, and there’s only so much room at the top of the pyramid or at the middle of the pyramid. It would be so nice if you weren’t here. And the people who do not go away are the people who end up having careers.

Steve Cuden: Mm That’s for sure. If you don’t stick to it, you aren’t going to be in it, that is for certain. Steve Scroven, this has been an absolutely incredible hour plus plus, and I cannot thank you enough for your time, your energy, and your spectacular wisdom. I’m so grateful for you being on the show today.

Steve Skrovan: Thank you very much, Steve. It’s my pleasure.

Steve Cuden: and so weve come to the end of todays StoryBeat If you liked this episode, wont you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform youre listening to? Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, tunein, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden and may all your stories be unforgettable.