Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Katie O'Connor: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Katie O'Connor, and today I am excited to be speaking with the, dare I say, iconic Chuck Lorre, who has created some of the most successful shows in television history, including Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Young Sheldon, and many others. Welcome, Chuck.
Chuck Lorre: Thank you.
Does it ever exhaust you hearing your own résumé read back to you like that? Like, "Man, I really did all of that."
Actually, if anything, it's embarrassing. It's a little off-putting, because it's just the work you do is the work you do, and the work I have to do today is the work I have to do today. And what's happened in the past is exactly where it belongs, in the past.
Well, we have one more thing to add to that list. Congratulations on your memoir, Sitcom. I enjoyed getting a peek behind the curtain at the road that led you to all of that television history. Why now? What made you decide to write this memoir in this moment?
A good friend of mine just kept nudging me, pushing, and I've been talking about a lot of these events that happened in my life for a long time. I was just really encouraged by someone I trusted to write them down. I put it off for a couple of years, and once I started going, I realized it's therapy. It's cathartic to put it all down. And by putting it down, it helps to make sense of it, to see not just the good things that happened but the bad things that happened, that needed to happen, in order for the good things to happen.
The whole thing is correlated in a way. You can't get there just thinking. You have to write. Putting the words on a laptop or whatever really helped me get a sense of what this ridiculously lucky journey has been, although at times it didn't feel lucky at all.
Yeah, I'm sure it was very confronting, too. And you do share at the beginning of the memoir that you didn't really want to dwell on your childhood, but you knew that people expect stories of those early years in memoir. How did you approach writing your story, and what happened along the way when you decided what to include or not include?
Well, in order to keep this thing from being impenetrably boring, I decided early on that what might be a thread that would go through the memoir is how the early events colored the things I wrote later on. How did stuff that happened as a kid impact sitcoms written 50 years later? I was trying to organize it so that it wasn't stand-alone events that happened in 1970. Those events were seminal in how I would eventually stumble into television and write about it. Not necessarily writing about those events that happened to me, but it certainly impacted on my perception.
Yeah, threads or character names, as you share, too, along the way that maybe had some early inspirations. What are some memoirs that you have enjoyed over the years?
Before I started writing this, I did a deep dive into other people's memoirs and autobiographies, and I think Tina Fey was a big influence on me. That was a great read. I really enjoyed it.
Bossy Pants, love that, yes.
Loved it. I loved it. She knows how to make you laugh. Either on a printed page or in person, she understands where the laughs are, and I really enjoyed that.
The first line of what we call the publisher summary of your audiobook reads, "Narrated by Chuck Lorre against his will" (laughs). Take us into the recording booth with you. Was it that harrowing of an experience?
I was told it would be difficult, and I was told the truth. There's this impulse when you're reading a book you've written about your life, you want it to be entertaining. You want to put on a performance, but I'm not a performer, I'm a writer. And I had written at one point that I'd hoped that I was going to get Idris Elba to read about my life. I didn't actually do that, but I just thought it was humorous.
You're like, "I think it would just be sounding better if it was him."
That big baritone, sonorous voice, wouldn't that be cool?
It'd be lovely.
As opposed to the nasal Long Island version.
I have to say, I did enjoy hearing it in your own voice, though. Definitely felt the humor come across as well.
Okay, so you're the first person I've spoken with who's actually listened. Okay, that's interesting.
Well, you did great.
Thank you. Thank you.
I think music is very much a part of comedy, in my experience. There's a rhythm to good comedy. There's a syncopation. There are pauses, like rests in music.
You did great. I also appreciated the little asides where you would go, "Moving on..." Your first love really was music and songwriting, and you are still releasing music to this day. Can you take us through a day in the life of your creative pursuits? How much time are you spending on music versus shows versus philanthropic efforts or whatever else excites you?
I don't know how to carve up the time to answer that question. I just know that I still love the craft of songwriting. I love to listen to great songs. I was just listening to “Graceland” this morning. It's a magnificent piece of work that I believe will last forever. I love great songs. I've loved listening to songwriters for all my life. I guess I just pursued that. “Boy, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could write a song that had meant something.” I peaked with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Wasn't meant to be, but it was still my first love.
Do you feel like it's exercising a different part of your brain, or do you feel like all of that writing is generally coming from the same place?
Oh, it's absolutely a different part of the brain. I think music is very much a part of comedy, in my experience. There's a rhythm to good comedy. There's a syncopation. There are pauses, like rests in music. There's pauses that are critical in order for comedy to work. I've long thought that great writers like [Aaron] Sorkin and [David] Mamet, if you took their scripts and took the words and turned those words into notes, it would be musical. I mean, when I watch certain great writers that I admire in film and television, there's a musicality to it, and especially in comedy. An extra syllable can kill a joke. It's really quite vulnerable and fragile. I think it's been a gift that I didn't know that I had received. By banging my head against the wall for decades trying to be a songwriter and a musician of any caliber, that has impacted on my career in television in a very beneficial way.
Yeah, I'm sure just in the beats, right? A rhythm, learning the beat of something.
Absolutely. If you spend enough time failing at music, those beats are in your head. They're part of how you listen. One of the themes of this memoir was to be grateful for the failures because they ultimately weren't failures. They were necessary. They were necessary steps in order to get where I got, and I'm very grateful for where I got.
It's interesting. It sparks a different question for me, actually, which is that in the process of songwriting, you are perpetually reading your lyrics out loud to hear how they're sounding on the ear. And, of course, with television writing, you have that benefit of the actors reading your lines. But do you ever read them out loud first?
Oh, absolutely. If you can't do it as a writer, if you can't make that line of dialogue flow or work or land as a comic moment, why would you foist it upon an actor? So, yeah, the first line of defense against bad writing is to read it out loud. Or at least be able to read it out loud in your head and recognize that this is an incomprehensible sentence or it's clunky, or if the intent is for this to be funny, it's failing. Maybe it's glib, it's clever, it's amusing, but those are different than funny.
I've always tried to delineate between amusing, "Oh, wasn't that clever." That wasn't the goal. The goal was out-loud laughter, which I've come to understand laughing is involuntary. You can't choose to laugh. Laughter happens to you. It's a really delicate thing to cause someone to laugh out loud. And that's the goal, anyway. I leave it for other people to determine whether I've succeeded or not.
I think you've had a lot of success there, sir.
Yeah. Well, we can easily just stop right here and just discuss all the people who disagree with you.
Well, your early television work was really motivated by one major thing: health insurance. And this feels so uniquely American. At what point did this quest for health coverage for your family transform into true passion?
At a certain point, I realized television was a gift. I felt, perhaps arrogantly, and incomprehensibly, I believed I could do it. I can't write “Graceland,” you know, but maybe I can write an episode of Roseanne. What starts out as, "Oh, boy, if I can get in the Writers Guild, we'll have health insurance, and when the kids go to the doctor, we won't go bankrupt.” So, that was an initial goal. It was really quite simple.
There's health insurance and there was another thing in the Writers Guild that I thought was just fascinating, which was called residuals. That if you wrote something and it was photographed, filmed, and then at some point down the road, it was on television again, someone sent you money. Which was like, are you kidding me? That's a fantastic idea. You actually have some equity in the whole process, which was really important, with young children, to be able to get over that mountain and have some economic security.
Yeah, stability.
Yes, and that had to happen first, and then over time I realized, "I think I know how to do this." I was wrong a lot. I didn't know how to do it, but I thought so, which was enough. The naive and arrogant belief that you can accomplish something might sometimes be an advantage, because otherwise I'd be frozen. I wouldn't pursue something because I was afraid I'd fail. But arrogance, misplaced arrogance, can actually be a benefit.
It's very true. But it was also interesting to see how your confidence grew with each show that you did, and the way that that impacted how you would react with network executives as well. There were times where you would just say, "Yep, whatever you want, I'll sign that away. No problem, moving on." And then you started to, with each new show, find your voice and push back against certain things that you believed in, too. So, yes to that arrogance, but also that confidence definitely grew, I would say.
There was a moment, I still remember the moment on Two and a Half Men, maybe in the second or even third season, where it dawned on me that I can trust myself. And that was easily 15 years into this journey, where I had that moment, and it was a quiet moment to myself of sitting in a room full of comedy writers, really great comedy writers on the show, and we were arguing over something. I don't recall what it was, but I had this strange feeling, this sensation, that I can trust myself. And not necessarily trusting myself absolutely guaranteeing that I'm right in my opinion, but trust myself enough to go, "It's worth trying, and if I'm wrong, we'll fix it."
The other thing was, I learned over and over again that when I did as I was told, when I was a good soldier and I took the notes from the network executives or whoever, if the show failed, it was not their failure, it was mine.
Still yours, right.
So, at a certain point, I thought, "If I'm going to fail, let me fail on my own instincts. Let me fail on my own perception as to how to go about telling this story." And that took a while. I think if you listened to the book, you saw that on many, many occasions I just did what I was told. I was in no position to stand my ground, at least at the time. I had no confidence that I could stick to my guns and say, "No, this is the way to do it." I was just terrified of being sent home.
Let's chat fandoms. Perhaps your most intense experience with a fandom has been via The Big Bang Theory, and you have this fun anecdote in your memoir about how much you underestimated the numbers you guys would do at Comic-Con. What do you take away from fan encounters? And as some of your shows have reached stratospheric heights, did you feel that pressure in the writers’ room?
No, not at all. It was something that I learned about as we went. I truly didn't understand how visceral these characters were connecting to the audience. It was personal, as outliers. We were writing about characters who are brilliant—physicists, scientists—but incapable of operating in the real world. And there's a universality to that that I didn't understand right away. I eventually came to understand that they were speaking to a lot of us who felt like outliers, and regardless of how intelligent you might be, and it's an extreme intelligence when you're talking about quantum physicists, but there's still that element of "How do I participate in this world? How do I talk to a woman? Can I talk to a woman? Is that even in the cards?" That fragility was universal.
I've come to understand laughing is involuntary. You can't choose to laugh. Laughter happens to you. It's a really delicate thing to cause someone to laugh out loud.
I don't think I knew that. I know I didn't know that going in. I did mention in the book, there was a moment at Comic-Con where a young lady was getting her cast picture signed by Jim Parsons, and she was crying with tears of joy, like they were the Beatles, you know? And I wrote that I'd seen people get excited to meet John Cryer and Charlie Sheen. No one cried. The characters on The Big Bang Theory somehow touched a much deeper personal level for the audience, and that was a gift to us who were working and writing the show. And, again, it was, "Oh, look. Oh, we didn't anticipate this. We were just trying to make you laugh." A lot of the early attempts, the early drafts of The Big Bang Theory, was just a lot of stumbling around in the dark trying to figure out what we were doing.
I was really surprised to learn that there was a different original pilot.
Yeah, it was one of the great, remarkable gifts of my career with CBS. The executives at CBS didn't want the first pilot, and they were correct in not wanting it. It didn't really work. What worked in it was Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons. That duo was something they thought was worth pursuing, and they said, "Would you be willing to try again?" I've never gotten a do-over. This was a remarkable opportunity.
They wrongly thought that the problem was the female lead. I disagreed with that. I thought what was wrong with the first draft, the first pilot, was the writing. I don't think the script was terribly well-conceived. So, Bill Prady and I, who I created the show with, we wrote a new pilot. And we kept a couple of moments from the first one in it, but we wrote a brand-new pilot where we just focused on the characters, because the characters were just a joy to write for and to conceive of. But the plot of the second pilot, which is the one that got us on television, was boy meets girl. Boy wants to impress girl by performing some heroic act. Boy fails. Credits. There was almost no plot whatsoever. The characters were sufficient to give us a leg in to getting on television and staying on television for what became, what, 12 years.
Yeah. I mean, grounding it in the human experience.
In character, right? And that outlier feeling of no matter how smart you are, and these are extremely smart characters, there's an outlier quality that I think everyone can relate to. Not everyone, there's always the high school quarterback and the prom queen. They might not relate to it, but the rest of us, the rest of us understand.
Let's stay with The Big Bang Theory here for a second. You've at this point officially created a cinematic universe. It has spawned Young Sheldon, Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage, and Stuart Fails to Save the Universe. Do you think you will always want to keep one foot in this world?
No (laughs). Not at all.
Say more, please. (laughs)
I'm always looking for stories and characters that interest me and that I think I can personally care for. The first thing that has to be achieved before laughter happens, is you must care about the characters. You have to have some empathy or compassion or whatever the word is for these characters in order for their journey to become comedy. If you don't care about them, there's no joke in the world that's going to carry the show. That's how I proceed.
Spinning off a character from The Big Bang Theory, that's just a gift because the audience, they're rooting for you. Young Sheldon, we had spent years talking about Sheldon's childhood in East Texas. So, when we started to do that show, we realized very early on the show was about his family. How does a family with regular kids and hardworking parents and very religious mom, how do they deal with a unicorn, a child who's just remarkable? Who is off the charts, a once-in-a-generation mind, if you will. How do they carry on? What happens to Sheldon's twin sister, who is just a kid, right? And his older brother who's just a young kid trying to get through high school. His father is a football coach. How does he deal with a child who is going to graduate Caltech at the age of 14?
The first thing that has to be achieved before laughter happens, is you must care about the characters...If you don't care about them, there's no joke in the world that's going to carry the show.
So, that gave us a lot of impetus to go ahead and do something like Young Sheldon and stuff. But spin-offs are, if they're economically generated, they're a waste of time. There's no reason to do a spin-off, "Oh, boy, let's make money." We've been blessed. We have been beyond blessed in the success of Big Bang and Young Sheldon and Two and a Half Men.
The point of doing work going forward now is it's gotta feel worthwhile. It's gotta feel like, "This is a great idea, let's do it." And that's how Stuart came alive. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe was just always, "Wouldn't this be cool if we could do something at this level with these kinds of computer graphics and the special effects and a big-time adventure story with comedy? That'd be fun to do." And the fact that it's a spin-off of The Big Bang Theory, that's a bonus. But the idea of doing something ridiculous like this just felt like it was worth trying. And it took, what, 10 years to get this thing made. Nobody really wanted to do this.
Is there a particular character or show that has left the biggest impression on you?
Gee, I don't know. I don't know. It's like picking which one of your children is your favorite. That's a question I'm loath to answer. I do know that The Kominsky Method was very personal in that it was examining the minutia of getting older. Not the bucket list stuff of "Let's jump out of a plane and parachute or drive our motorcycles across the country." No bucket list, just getting old, friendship, romance, children, all the things that constitute just living a normal life, how are they changed with age? That was very personal for me.
Yeah, and it also seemed, too, to harken back a bit, or at least force you to reflect more on your own father and your relationship and trying to understand him a bit more after his passing.
Absolutely.
Your vanity cards are legendary. How much time on your end goes into them?
I still write vanity cards like I'm in junior high on the bus to school. I can have three months' warning to write a vanity card and the morning I have to deliver it, I'm scrambling to write something. So, a lot of it is a mad dash to try and put something there. The point of the cards was always, "Wait, I get two seconds of network airtime because of this tradition." I didn't create the tradition of the vanity card. The vanity card had existed long before I came along. But the idea that two seconds are allotted to me, and maybe I can make those two seconds count as comedy. Maybe people reading these things might laugh or at least be mildly amused, in which case those two seconds aren't wasted. I've always been very particular about not wasting the audience's time. When you think about it, and I guess it's different now because network television is clearly on the decline, but when I started on Roseanne, say, routinely, 40 million people would watch the show in real time.
It's crazy.
Real time, you know? So, when I got a shot to make my own shows, I was really quite cognizant of the fact that this is a miracle. I have an opportunity now to communicate in some fashion to millions of people. I can't presume to know what they want. I can only presume to know what I think is funny, and then I hope they agree with me, is my process. But what I'm trying to get at is, why waste a second of it? Why waste one second of the 22, 23 minutes you get on a network television show to entertain the audience?
I mean, it's just a twitch of a finger on the remote to have them leave you. So, the relationship with the audience in television is really fragile. If they can find the remote in the sofa cushions, they can say, "Goodbye, I've had enough. This is not entertaining. Thank you. I'll find something else. Or maybe I'll just take the dog for a walk, but I won't watch your show." It's so fragile. So, you have to be sort of maniacal, I think, I guess. I've been rather maniacal about trying to capture every moment, make it worthwhile, and that includes the vanity cards.
They've also become a time capsule of sorts. I love the Dharma & Greg ones that are like, "Thank you for taping the show. And now watching it back and hitting pause."
In the beginning, you can only read them if you had a really good VCR. You needed to have a really high-quality VCR, otherwise it would wobble. The screen would wobble and you couldn't really read.
That's right, the shake.
And early on, most people thought it was boilerplate, like legal boilerplate somehow was at the end of the show.
Oh, funny.
In the beginning, ABC, which was where Dharma was, they didn't know what I was doing. It took them about, I don't know, about six, eight weeks before they went, "Oh, what's happening here?"
“What is this?” (laughs)
"What is this?" And then suddenly, it wasn't quite so simple. Suddenly, lawyers were involved.
Gotta do a quick review before you put that on TV, huh?
Yeah, and they would periodically, both then and CBS later on, would ding cards that they felt were objectionable. It is their bat and their ball, so that's how that works.
I think you're standing on the shoulders of what's come before you, no matter whether it's a script, a novel, a song, an opera, whatever it is. Everything you've read and everything you've listened to is coming into what you're doing now.
Have to play ball. Towards the end of the memoir, you give the advice, "Do not lean on current events for laughter. It becomes dated very quickly." Smart advice. But how do you solve as a writer for that, while wanting to create a show that resonates with a modern audience?
Whether you're doing contemporary reference stuff or not is a juggling act. It's a guessing game as to what's appropriate and what's not. The Big Bang characters eager to go see a new Star Wars movie, almost timeless, you know? Regardless of whether you're watching it in 2005 or hopefully 2030, it's kind of a timeless event to go see a marquee film like that. The lesson we learned from Murphy Brown was Dan Quail jokes don't travel.
Right. (laughs)
They were very funny. They were brilliant. And I love that show. I never missed Murphy Brown when it was on in the early '90s. But it didn't have shelf life because those kinds of jokes just didn't register years later. And I didn't want to do that. I wanted to make a show that I've often likened to a handkerchief as opposed to Kleenex. You blow your nose with Kleenex, you throw the Kleenex away. A handkerchief, you can launder it and use it again. I wanted to make handkerchiefs, not Kleenex. I wanted the shows to have some longevity.
I guess that also comes from my fascination with songs. A great song has no time. It elevates above time, and it doesn't matter if it was written in 1967 or wherever, it's beautiful and it's still valuable 50 years later. I don't think that's going to happen with the sitcoms that I've been involved in, but it was worth trying. It's at least worth trying to make the content in them not become irrelevant over time.
Well, it goes back to grounding it in the human experience, right? That character focus.
Exactly. If it's about heartbreak over a relationship gone wrong, or fear of failure, or confusion as to how to handle a real-life situation, those things don't date. So, making sure you're telling stories that have to do with human living, you have a better chance of having the show have some kind of shelf life.
And they're universal. It makes it global, too.
Hopefully, yeah. It's always been amazing to me that some of these shows, like Big Bang Theory, have a phenomenal audience in non-English-speaking countries, which just knocks me out. I just love that.
You also share that to be a good writer you need to be a good reader, and you rattle off a very impressive list of literature that has had an impact on you, which was kicked off by Ray Bradbury, actually. A Ray Bradbury book was handed to you by your sister's then-boyfriend who was really just trying to get you to bugger off. What are recent books or audiobooks that you've loved?
Wow. Recently. Oh, well, I'm reading constantly. I just finished a book, Exit Party. One of the great reads recently, in the last couple of years, was The Three-Body Problem. Great. Right up there with the Foundation Trilogy and just magnificent sci-fi.
I was going to say, and this kind of relates, too, to the list that you share at the end of your memoir, you love sci-fi.
Yeah, I do. Maybe there's some escapism in that. But whatever it is, ever since Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles, it's been a deep love. I remember when I saw Star Wars in the '70s, when it came out, I sat in the audience with my arms folded, kind of pissed off that so much of this was stolen and no one was acknowledging that this was taken from Bradbury and Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke, you know? There was no mention of all those names that different elements in Star Wars were drawing from. I was being a bit “Look at me. I've been reading this shit for years.”
"I'm so well-read."
“I'm so well-read. I've been reading this stuff for years. I know where this stuff came from.” And actually, it's strange. It was a bit of youthful arrogance there that I couldn't thoroughly enjoy the movie because I wanted the precedent to be these books that I'd read.
I kind of love that.
Yeah. I just met George Lucas recently and what a thrill that is.
Were you like, "Have you read Asimov?"
Of course he did!
"Cause I've got some notes."
Of course they did. But that's the whole thing. If music is the goal, you listen. And those things find their way into what you're doing. Is it copying? Yeah, a little bit. I think you're standing on the shoulders of what's come before you, no matter whether it's a script, a novel, a song, an opera, whatever it is. Everything you've read and everything you've listened to is coming into what you're doing now. It has to impact on your perception and your bar as to what's good and what's not good, what's funny, what's not funny, what's a great song, what's not a great song.
Not a day goes by that I don't think that I should probably walk away from this. But the occasion of doing something that makes people laugh is still really gratifying.
So, the old computer adage is “Garbage in, garbage out.” If you're listening to great music, it can only help if you're trying to write something of value. I think that holds true for something as silly as writing a sitcom. I studied Phil Rosenthal's episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond and all the brilliant episodes of Cheers and Norman Lear's shows in the '70s, Archie Bunker, and, of course, Seinfeld. I watched them. One of the great things about Everybody Loves Raymond that always astonishes me, that Phil knew how to write a script where there was 20 pages on a couch, and then 20 pages in the kitchen, credits. I mean, it was a beautiful little play, you know? He also had the wherewithal to go, "You know what? I don't want to write about the kids anymore," and the kids just disappeared. The kids just disappeared.
Get 'em off (laughs).
“I know what the show is now. The show is about these brothers and the in-laws.” And the great thing about if you survive in television long enough is you get a chance to learn. You make a movie, the movie's done, the movie's out, movie opens and closes in a weekend or whatever; it's done. Television, if you survive, you get a chance to grow it. You get a chance to evolve it. You get to say, "Not that, this. Oh, this is not funny. This character's fantastic. This relationship is great. Let's pursue that." And you learn as you go.
What's next for you?
What's next for me? I actually don't know the answer to that question. Good, because not a day goes by that I don't think I should quit. Not a day goes by that I don't think that I should probably walk away from this. But the occasion of doing something that makes people laugh is still really gratifying. You know, "How was your day?" "Well, I made people laugh today." That's a good day.
I often wonder about people who make movies and television shows about horribly graphic, violent, butcher body horror and just exhausting dark themes. When they go home at night after a long day of work, and it's hard work: "How was your day?" It's like, "Oh, we did a decapitation scene. It came out great. Head popped right off and rolled in front. I couldn't have shot it better. It was fantastic decapitation."
My day was, “We did this scene with Georgie and Mandy in the bedroom and it was hilarious." That's a nice thing to do at the end of the day, to look back and go, "We made people laugh today." If you're going to have any kind of perspective on what you do for a living, I'm pleased with that. I stumbled into it. I can't say it was the plan. It was not the plan, but it's what happened. I try and stay grateful for how it worked out.
Well, thank you for making me laugh today. I very much appreciate your time.
Thank you for talking to me. This was a lot of fun.
And listeners, you can get Sitcom by Chuck Lorre right now on Audible.
That's me, on the Audible! That's me!
