Remembering Garry Shandling; graphic novelist Daniel Clowes

It was my first real job and Garry was an incredible teacher. One of the great things about Garry was he obviously loves people and character-based comedy. I wasn't really a joke writer, but he was such a sensitive reader that he would find the joke, like the funny thing I was going for and he would excavate the joke. He would show me how to bring it to the fore so that everybody could understand what I was going for. He would always emphasize starting the story right away...that is something that is always in my mind, to get to it right off the bat. 

Yeah, when you have a mentor who finds something in you that you're too young or you're not even thinking, you don't have a whole picture of the world yet, you're just a kid, who can find that thing in you and really support it and teach you how to make the most of it. What an amazing thing. 

He loves awkward real human interactions. Being in the writer's room with Garry always was intimidating. I think his electrical engineering background, his voice was so distinct and idiosyncratic, but he really had a nuts and bolts understanding of jokes and yet they never sounded like the typical set-up joke thing. I remember this one time I had been in some kind of young person drama and I'd been up really late, but I wrapped myself in a blanket, I think I was pretty sad, I was on the sofa sleeping and Garry kept saying "Is she...is she sleeping? That's ok, that's fine, ok...But...Is she sleeping?" He was really amused and befuddled by it, but he was very sweet about it. 

He taught me to really go for honesty. He loves pain in comedy, I love that, too, but he paved the way for that in terms of putting yourself on the line, trying to get to the real emotion in the moment and the show sounded so different than everything else. I think he changed the way comedy can sound. It's very humane, the way he approached it. 

I have many fond memories, but we would often go up to his house to go through the script with him for the Monday table read. We were up there and this big package arrived. Garry was trying to open it, it had a lot of bubble wrap and he was slashing at it with some scissors and it was a big pain. Half way through opening it he said, "Oh, Maya this is for you." It was this giant mirror and I never knew whether it was actually for me or if he'd just gotten really tired of trying to open it. It was a perfect Garry awkward gift-giving situation. I still have that mirror. 

Yeah it was this strange circumstance where Judd Apatow, who is just so great at mentoring young filmmakers and comedians, said he'd come out and host a Q&A session for us at an ArcLight screening in Los Angeles. Little did we know he was bringing his good friend Garry Shandling with him, who is just an idol. Not only were we nervous about releasing our first studio film, but we were nervous about Garry Shandling sitting in the audience watching it with us. Afterwards, this guy's busy and he's a comedy legend, he came with me and Jay and Judd and we sat in the PF Changs for about three hours talking about movies and talking about comedy. He just gave us so much love and support and he had no agenda. It's not like he wanted to produce anything of ours, he was just being a nice, supportive guy. 

I think from a stylistic standpoint that comedy of discomfort, the comedy of people that seem unlikeable, that are neurotic, was huge for him laying that kind of track. Also from a format perspective, for us to be able to come onto HBO now and make the kinds of things that we make there. For a guy like Garry Shandling to be, quite frankly, just a huge television star. It paved the way for dorks like us to feel like we could do it too. 

I remember the early HBO standup show and I remember sitting around as a family, I was probably eight years old and I remember him telling that great joke about how people get excited about fishing in these ponds, but people are just starving the fish in the ponds and the fish are coming up onto land and you have to kill the fish with your Top Siders. My dad was cracking up in his early to mid-40s, my mom and my brother, who was 12, was cracking up and I was cracking up. It was just a shock that we could all share that kind of thing. That age is a time when nobody can agree on anything to watch on TV, but we could watch Garry Shandling. 

He has this famous quote that I just find so comforting and so strangely full of heart and hope, I'm paraphrasing, but it's "Whoever said that nice guys finish last they clearly don't know where the finish line is." I really believe that. There's guys like Judd Apatow who when they come up they raise people up around them. Garry Shandling raised Judd up and Jay and I are doing our best to raise up anybody around us that we can. This is a cut-throat business, and that level of humanity is just so needed and important. If there's any message that I want to see spread it's that you don't need to be threatened by the newer model, you need to raise them up and help them out. 

The initial engine that got me interested in the story was the idea of a person — a 25-year-old — who then becomes a very different person at 55. I had spent the last couple of years putting together reprints of some of my early work and I had a one man show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and I had to put together all of my work for that. In the process of that, I found myself in a strange dialogue competition with this alien young man who was me in 1989. I thought that had the basis for something that would keep me interested in what turned out to be five years. 

The idea that there are these days of your life that alter the flowchart of who you become — there was a day I was living in Chicago and I was out in Berkeley at a little book signing and wound up by pure chance meeting my wife on that day. There's a million things that could have happened that would have prevented that from happening and I would have never have known her. That's a perfect example of a single day where everything in my life changed dramatically. 



You start to see that life has these movie script moments where you have plot points, or it shifts from act two to act three, or you have reversals of things that you expected to happen but didn't happen. It became much more apparent looking at it at the vantage of a 54-year-old. 

Well, that comes from growing up in Chicago. 

Every time I get off the plane in the Midwest, and all of a sudden I feel like, "Oh my god. I'm back in one of my early comics." I feel like it was a transcript of this sort of Midwestern look that I grew up with and I, myself, had and that you tend to forget about when you live in a place like the Bay area. 

I spent a long time working on that character. I actually redrew his face five or six times until I got it right. It was something I noticed when my son was very small. He'd be on the playground and there would be certain kids, and you could just look at them and imagine them as adults, and you could feel like certain kids and this DNA to be, not necessarily bullies, but aggressive in this way that was so early on and so a part of their DNA that it was kind of astonishing to me. So I was trying to capture that air to that young child that you shouldn't be imbuing with that kind of life sentence. 

Very judgmental of these kids. Well, it's funny, and you see them grow up and of course they all turn into themselves. All of my son's friends I just plug in to being versions of my friends when I was growing up. So if a kid looks vaguely like some kid I knew who was stealing money from his parents to buy drugs or something, I'm always telling my son, "Ah, watch out for that kid." 

Of course, and the kid that I'm trying to get my son to play with will be a cyber-hacker or something. 

Well, certainly, they are and always will be crushed beyond overshadowed. We're just a tiny blip on the radar and I always find it funny because when I started in comics in the '80s, the kinds of comics I did were really relegated to a tiny box in the back of the comics store that was entirely all superheroes, that's all it was. We were lucky to have our little space in the back room in the "arts only" box. 

Yeah, at best. Usually it was with Elf pornography... 

So at that time, we all harbored this thought that our comics are the really mainstream comics. These are about adult situations and normal interactions, and they're not about these superheroes, which seemed like such an odd thing for comics to be exclusively about. Now that the culture has embraced superhero films, it shows that we were completely wrong and that we've always been this little niche in this vast juggernaut that is this huge industry that I see no sign of it slowing down anytime soon.