Happy Birthday B.J. Novak!
Multi-talented actor, scriptwriter, and director B.J. Novak - born July 31, 1979 - is known for “The Office”, "Inglourious Basterds", "Saving Mr. Banks."). He directed his first film “Vengeance” in 2022. Seeing it reminded me of our conversation about his hilarious book of short stories, paragraphs, and more called ‘One More Thing’. Damned if he’s not ALSO good at writing. Check it out. We spoke in 2014.
TRANSCRIPTION OF BJ NOVAK INTERVIEW (note - it was done with otter ai and may not be completely accurate. Check by listeningt audio.
Ross 0:13
You may recognize BJ Novak as an actor in the office. He's been a stand up comic he went to Harvard, where he was a member of the Harvard Lampoon and Hasty Pudding club. Now BJ Novak has published a volume of short stories, short paragraphs and some jokes. It's called one more thing stories and other stories. Some of already are appeared in The New Yorker and in Playboy magazine. BJ, thank you so much for stopping by
BJ Thank you for having me on. I want to give people a flavor of the book, could you do a short reading for sure. Here's one of the as you said, they're very different lengths in the book. So here's one of the very short ones. On the abstract and brief side, this is the vague restaurant critic,more satisfying than a candy bar, but less satisfying than love, wrote the vague restaurant critic in his debut review. This is not helpful at all, murmured his readers to themselves, meaning no harm as they went elsewhere to find information more like what they had been looking for. Before the vague restaurant critic could write a second review, he was fired a couple of weeks more, and he might have caught on. He might have developed following beyond the world of the traditional restaurant review readers for what he was doing. For the statement he was trying to make about criticism about restaurants, about our expectations in life on a larger level. But he was fired before any of that could happen. If it was even going to happen. He didn't care. He knew what he did.
Unknown Speaker 1:42
But he did kind of care. He wished other people knew what he did to
Unknown Speaker 1:48
that's all J Novak reading. One of the things from one more thing, his collection of stories and most are, well, they're all very different. Some, some are much more traditional, and the short story format, but I wanted something to be sort of
Unknown Speaker 2:04
just sort of a an abstract piece then maybe makes you laugh, but also hopefully stays with you as a metaphor for other things that you notice in your life, that that's the kind of piece I wanted to write to. It's your first book, my first book, how long have you been taking to write it? Well, I wrote the book, in a very concentrated year of writing. But I think the ideas had been in the works for a very long time I had, I was working on the office as a writer for eight years. And that was a time where
Unknown Speaker 2:33
there were so many ideas that I could put in these characters, mouths and so many that I couldn't because the world of the office is very specific. It's a single paper company mostly in a single room. So while I could put romantic thoughts sometimes for Jim and hammer, foolish notions for Steve girls character, there were a lot of ideas that I was in love with that I had nothing I could do with. And they became the basis for the book. All right, I'll tell you my favorite, please it Sophia, it's kind of an opposite of this new film her about a guy who falls in love with an operating system. That sounds exactly like Scarlett Johansson. Sophia is a Sex Robot robot who falls in love with the narrator of your story, and immediately dumps her. What were you going for with that story? Well, thank you for saying that was one of my favorites too. And it's sort of the flip side of what I just read it. It's a very involved more traditional narrative. That story started, I didn't know where that was going to take me originally, that started with a joke that I had in my notebooks years ago, which was first artificial intelligence to feel love. falls in love with someone who doesn't want commitment. Then I wrote Garry Shandling question mark, I thought maybe it'd be a short film. And when I saw that later, I thought, Oh, that's a great idea. I'd love to, I'd love to I think it's a good idea. Let me test it. And as I wrote it, I realized I had a lot to say about love and heartbreak, and our expectations for love and how they are thwarted by circumstance, because love is idealized before we experienced it. And then it becomes something incredibly specific, which I think is also the nature of heartbreak is that you can never replicate something specific.
Unknown Speaker 4:15
The more specific it is the the more impossible it is to replicate. So
Unknown Speaker 4:19
I think those ideas and emotions work their way into the story that started in the first page is very funny, I think. But then it goes in much deeper directions because I realized that was what I wanted to explore. And it seems like it's partly a story about failure to commit, this guy can't commit. He can't commit him and he thinks it's because he's a romantic, which isn't an interesting paradox I've observed
Unknown Speaker 4:45
as
Unknown Speaker 4:47
a single person in the past decade, with a lot of friends like that is that often it is the people who feel and say their romantics, who are the ones who seem to an outside observer to be the
Unknown Speaker 5:00
least romantic, the people that are constantly dating and hooking up and on Tinder and Facebook. These are often the people who say that they are such romantics that they, they can't find this ideal that they're looking for I've been this person too. So there isn't an interesting and funny paradox to me that, that people who seem like they're just players often describe themselves to themselves as well as romantics. What's your favorite story? In the book? Yeah, it changes all the time. About right now, right now, a store called the ambulance driver, which is very pleasant story on its surface, but has a real
Unknown Speaker 5:43
to me, sort of
Unknown Speaker 5:45
an upbeat darkness. to it. It's about a guy who wants to use the best ambulance driver in his county, and he wants to quit and follow his dream to be a singer songwriter. But in this case, if he follows his dream, people will die. And he's not a good singer, songwriter, and his friend is trying to tell him, maybe don't follow your dream, maybe try to change your dream to what you're already doing. And go that, yeah, and saving and saving lives. And yet we have this culture where, and we have this inner longing that tells us following your dream is always the best thing you can do. So he does follow his dream. And he's really bad, and people die. But the story kind of follows how wonderful it feels to follow history. And I wanted to do justice to that feeling, even as the sort of the dark undercurrent
Unknown Speaker 6:35
was expressed, but but in a more subtle way. So that story, no one ever met. I mean, there's a lot of stories in the book, and the book came out last week, but no one has mentioned that one to me, and I'm kind of hoping someone well, all right, as I mentioned to you, you've got the Duke of Earl from Chandler in my mind, because one of the stories is about what would have been like, if the real Duke of Earl came to the United States and didn't know about the saw.
Unknown Speaker 6:59
Do do go to do to go to to go
Unknown Speaker 7:06
do to go?
Unknown Speaker 7:09
I just really liked it a lot. What was the inspiration for that? That was, um, I guess it was probably just hearing the song I was listening to a lot of 50s music for a while and, and really liked that song. And I did think it also the story big it's a short story is about three pages. But to me, that was one of the very first ones I wrote for this book. And it was for me a way to explore an idealized America, where this 1950s Sound is something that we associate with an idealized America. And politicians often seem to call back that era as sort of the the Norman Rockwell perfect American ideal. And it would have seemed that way even more so to the Duke of Earl who'd come to America and everyone he meets is humming this tune to themselves and lighting up at meeting this guy. And he doesn't know why. And I think that also has a sweet callback to the irony, in a very gentle way. The irony underneath that 50 That that 50 is ideal was because we were seeing it from a very particular angle. It was not nearly that that ideal to everyone alive in it. And I think the same would be true. Not everyone who, who meets everyone in 1962. He says I'm the Duke of Earl gets a great big grant. But he sees it that way. And he goes back to Earl wherever that is really always dreaming of America. I've read that you wrote tested these short stories before a live audience. Is that right? Yeah, I did. I read them at the UCB Theatre in LA. I was gonna say it wasn't a comedy club because you also have done stand up. It was it? It's kind of in between a theater and a comedy. UCB Theatre is a Comedy Theater. But the seats are arranged like a black box theatre. And there's no two drink minimum. It's not rowdy. It's kind of a more thoughtful. There's one in New York two. It's sort of a more thoughtful Comedy Theater. So it was the perfect in between. How did you know that the stories were hitting, or not heading versus your performance of the stories?
Unknown Speaker 9:05
That's a good question.
Unknown Speaker 9:08
Well, I'm not that good a performer. So this story is kind of, I was kind of telling the stories more naturally, then maybe a more animated performer what so I think I got a sense. But I also got a sense of when I wasn't into the story, when I was reading the story and thinking, This isn't that good. I don't believe in what I'm selling here, which I would try to avoid by reading it to my poor friends before I even read the stories and I would cut stuff in front of them. So the time I took the stage was pretty good. But
Unknown Speaker 9:36
that sense is, yeah, even if I was selling it as a performer, I would I would know like, I dread getting to this paragraph, because I don't think I'm going to score with this paragraph. Well, why maybe I should cut this paragraph. BJ Novak is my guest and we're talking about his book one more thing stories and shorter stories. This is for the fanboys supposedly, you're a character in the new
Unknown Speaker 10:00
Amazing Spider Man two, is this correct? Can you verify this? This is correct, and you're a villain. Well, I'm a bad guy, I think I don't know if I reached the threshold for villain. So you're not a despicable person? Are you? Are you I'm, I'm a despicable person, but, but I think it would be exaggerated my role to call me a villain. Alright, people don't have a picture, as you know, the guy who steals the show. I'm not that guy. People will not fear you, though. Are you? Are you a comic villain?
Unknown Speaker 10:26
I'm, I'm not a good guy. I would say but a, I wouldn't call myself a villain. You don't? You don't see enough of me, I think to call me a villain. Okay. I want to ask how you kind of came to your comic sensibility. Your dad wrote the big book of Jewish humor. So what did you learn around the house, growing up about humor, my dad and his good friend co edited the big book of Jewish humor. So it wasn't just that they had compiled this book, it also meant that our house was filled with a library of all these great
Unknown Speaker 11:00
all these great humor books that had been part of that book. And he also with the same friend co edited the big book of new American humor, which is less well known, but equally great. And that introduced me to things like Jacques Handys, deep thoughts. So those deep thoughts, books were around our house. And it really meant that the language of our house was really comedy, you know, and that it kind of was like a language. We all grew up, me and my brothers grew up speaking. So that was really a great way to have a childhood. You got into Harvard, which must have been a big thrill when you were headed to college. Surprise, surprise. Yeah. I mean, I, I wasn't so shocked that I hadn't applied. But I, it was a long shot. It was very exciting. So you had a very thin envelope. I was like, Well, I tried. So when BJ Novak is on his way to Harvard, is he thinking yeah, and I want to do stand up. Well, I wasn't thinking to stand up. But I was thinking the Harvard Lampoon, which I knew, which I knew was kind of the only place that I had heard of that was doing comedy on on a college level.
Unknown Speaker 12:06
And I thought it sounded really cool. It had this real history to it. And, you know, I really wanted to be cool. In school, and I wasn't, I wasn't like, I wasn't a pariah. But I wasn't one of the cool kids. And I wanted to be I aspired to that. But I thought that the Harvard Lampoon, I thought that there was a way that comedy seemed
Unknown Speaker 12:29
occasionally cool, for lack of a better word, just there was something dark and
Unknown Speaker 12:36
devil may care about a certain type of comedy that I think is what drew me to think, well, maybe I'm kind of funny. Maybe if I channeled it that way. I saw Pulp Fiction when I was 14. And that, you know, that image of Quentin Tarantino and a leather jacket like that was like, Oh, maybe I could, I could try to do that. That might be my way to be cool. So I think that's what the Harvard Lampoon was, to me it was I loved comedy, but I also, you know, like every teenager desperately wanted to,
Unknown Speaker 13:03
to be cool. And when did you know that this would be more than something that you liked? Or did in college?
Unknown Speaker 13:11
Well, I always thought I'd be a writer, because it was what I was best at in school. And I like to do it. And my dad was a writer. So I didn't have to wonder like, is this a crazy thing to do? I thought it would have, I thought I'd struggle, but I didn't. I didn't think it was crazy. So while I aspired to be a writer, I kind of realized, well, what I always get the most praise for in my English classes, or among my friends is my comedy. I'm on the Harvard Lampoon, I should try to focus on that somewhat. And I loved it, but I didn't. I didn't love it more than, you know, thrillers or drama or anything, but it was what came naturally to me. The other stuff didn't. How did you end up doing stand up? I did stand up because I got a job right out of school, writing for a sitcom called Raising dad, starring my good friend, Bob Saget. And I think the statute of limitations has expired, and I can say this was a bad show. And it was, it was hard for me to write for something where everyone praised the fact that I had a job. Because I was very young. I have a second job, but it was, it was also pathetic, and no one would say that to my face, but I knew it. I knew it was pathetic. And I knew I was on this track to be a very successful writer of very lame things. And that wasn't at all the Rock and Roll cool writer fantasy I'd had. So as the show died, I started
Unknown Speaker 14:35
I got the idea to start doing stand up comedy because a lot of the writers in the writers room had done stand up comedy, and their road story sounded glamorous to my sheltered suburban life of you know, bombing and a bar in Milwaukee. I thought that sounded pretty cool. And I also thought it was a way to find my voice and get recognized for my voice. If I told a really cool joke, it wouldn't get five laughs in the writers room before it died.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
I'd maybe someone would hear it and say, You're funny. I like your style. So it was a way for me to try to show people who I was. And how did it work out when you first walked out on stage to be doing stand up comedy, it sounds like a terrifying prospect for most of us. Yeah. And it was awful. It was it was as bad as you could imagine. The first time I went on stage, my roommate, and I remember may want to do it, too. We conned our way onto a show at a youth hostel. And the woman asked, Have you ever done Senate before and my friend ever bold said, at parties, I don't know what that means. We'll get hired to do parties, it's never done stand up. She's like, okay, and put us both on stage toward the end, totally terrified. I was stiff as a board told these really, really dry deadpan jokes.
Unknown Speaker 15:53
about September 11th. This is less than a month after September 11. To say it was on my mind very too soon. And not funny enough is the other thing too soon, often means not funny enough to justify it. And everyone at the Youth Hostel was, you know, from another country, very few spoke English, they were really responding with a physical comedy.
Unknown Speaker 16:12
And the emcee got on after me and said, takes a lot of courage to get up here. So that was pretty fun that I couple months later, I got the nerve to try again. And then I did it more seriously than the trick then was, I decided to book a show every night that week, so that even if I failed on Monday, I knew I had to get up Tuesday didn't want to take three months to recover every time I did badly. So the secret there was no secret. You just kept doing it. And well, yeah, that's the secret is don't let a bad performance be a referendum on whether or not you're going to try it. How did that lead to your role in the office after about two years of my dwindling savings from that one year as a writer and,
Unknown Speaker 16:55
and practice of doing standup? I was at this level where I was the stand up. I did the clubs I did
Unknown Speaker 17:04
sort of the alternative rooms, which is sort of the cool comics in the no book shows. And they put other people on it. And I was part of that. I was like having a little moment under the riot under the radar. But that's where Hollywood people start sniffing around like, who is like the cool. Yeah, you know, and that I was right at that moment where people were starting to ask and the answer was wow, this guy BJ Novak, this guy, Aziz Ansari, you know that right at that level, where that's where a lot of the LA people get discovered. And a couple people the first my first big break was on on the show punked as a prankster. And I played pranks on celebrities, Ashton Kutcher, his people discovered me doing stand up. And then only a few weeks later, Greg Daniels, who
Unknown Speaker 17:48
created the American office, saw me at it at a club at the Improv, and asked for a meeting based on my my standard performance. You had a role in the office. But I started to notice as I watched the show more and more, wait a minute, that guy who plays that role? He's kind of sitting in the back of the office, he's taking on all these other roles on the show in the credits. How did you come to? I mean, a lot of actors will direct an episode, but it seems like you went a lot further with it. Well, that was always the goal of Greg that, that he wanted a group of writer actors. And I was the first experiment that he did with that. And he told me that in the first meeting, that he'd be interested in hiring me as a writer and actor simultaneously, which I really wanted to do.
Unknown Speaker 18:29
And when that seemed fine, schedule wise that, you know, as long as I signed my life over,
Unknown Speaker 18:36
which I was more than happy to do, I was able to do both jobs. Then Mindy Kaling came on and Paul lieberstein To play Toby. All three of us were full time writer actors. And because we just knew the show so well. And everyone knew the show so well, because it was a pretty small group. The writers eventually became producers, as happens on most TV shows, we started directing, which doesn't happen on most TV shows, but we were also actors. So we knew how to talk to actors.
Unknown Speaker 19:02
I'm often I'm often a little embarrassed when people say, You've done so much. You're a director, you're a co executive producer, you're a producer, your story editor. I mean,
Unknown Speaker 19:14
it was all the same thing on the office, to be honest, it was we were just the people making the office. So we'd call ourselves all kinds of things. See, I saw a co executive producer and I went, I thought this guy is a performer and he's a suit. Yeah, and official guy and he's performing in a suit. So it was an easy transition to backstage. You subsequently consulted with your friend Mindy Kaling show The Mindy Project. What did you learn from doing that? I learned mostly from watching Mindy. Mindy is an extremely decisive person about her own voice. And I was a much more careful decision maker creatively before I got to see Mindy create her own show. I would debate things I would test them I would him and Han and be perfectionist about a little detail. Mindy will have
Unknown Speaker 20:00
instinct, and she'll know whether it's right or wrong, and act on it right away and put it in an episode, hire that person, bring on that guest star changed the course of an episode. And
Unknown Speaker 20:11
she has a very strong voice and she hears the very clearly to herself. So my, what I learned consulting on that show was oh, wow, you have to be this decisive about your voice if you're going to be successful on this level. And you are able to do that. If, if you have a voice that's worth listening to, you should be able to hear it a bit earlier than everyone else. So watching her really inspired me to be more decisively trusting of my own voice not trusting in that at the end of the day, I trust my voice after consulting everyone, trust your voice from from minute one. BJ Novak, your your acting career is flourishing. This is a terrific new book that you've written. You have all this experience in television, it sounds like you could go in any number of different directions going forward in your career. Is there a performer or someone out there who you kind of think, Man, I'd like to have that career based on where I am now? I'd like to go be like that person. I think of Steve Martin sometimes as as sort of a hero in that direction. Because he
Unknown Speaker 21:12
I don't think I'm as good as he is at all. But I play banjo. I don't play the banjo. Well, he's such a he's such a good perform not as good a performer by any means. But he, even when he performed whatever he does, you know, it's Steve Martin. You know, even if he's just acting in someone else's thing, when he gets on screen, you know, that's him. And when he writes, of course, you know, it's him. But that's what I want to do. Where if you see me in Spider Man, or you see me on The Mindy Project, you think I know who that guy is. He's not just a hired gun. He I know what I'm getting a little bit, and I see something in common with his writing.
Unknown Speaker 21:49
I really admire Steve Martin that way. I also really admire David Sedaris in that he is everything starts from his writing, but I've I've attended his live shows, they're spectacular. And he really makes his live readings, a performance and he's a performer of his work. He's not just a reader of his work, and that's something I really enjoy doing. I want to make my life performances, my live readings, shows the way he does. BJ Novak, thank you so much for stopping by what a great conversation. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
