#565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect”

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Living tissue over metal skeleton. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. My guest today is Michael. Sure, depending on who you ask on Twitter at Ken tremendous, we're going to ask about that. Mike. Michael created the critically acclaimed NBC comedy the Good Place and cocreated Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn nine nine, and the Peacock series Rutherford Falls. He is also an executive producer on HBO, Max's Hacks, and Netflix's Master of None. Prior to Parks, Michael spent four years as a writer producer on the Emmy Award winning NBC hit the Office. His first tv writing job was at Saturday Night Live, where he spent seven seasons, including three as the producer of Weekend Update with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon. His new book is how to be Perfect. Subtitle the correct answer to every moral question Michael, welcome to the show.

Thanks for being here. Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here.

I thought we would start with something we chatted about just a little bit before pressing record, and that is the Harvard Lampoon. I have this fascination with the Harvard Lampoon, and I would just love to perhaps offer you the mic to introduce the Harvard Lampoon to people and also describe how you entered the fray, how you actually became part of the Harvard Lampoon.

The lampoon is this very old institution at Harvard. It was founded in, I think, 1876, and it is this weird satirical comedy magazine that has just been kind of plugging along for now almost 150 years. And there's a couple of interesting things about it. One of them is that the alumni are numerous and very high achieving. Like William Randolph Hearst was in the Lampoon, and so was John Updyke, and so was George Plimpton, and a million comedy writers from the present who have written for Letterman and the Simpsons and SNL and all these shows. Conan O'Brien was the president of the Harvard Lampoon twice, which is a very rare thing. So it's just this kind of weird little humor outlet that people who are obsessed with comedy kind of learn about at an early age. I learned about it from just noticing that it kept popping up when you would see certain movies that you thought were funny. Or like Doug Kenny wrote Animal House and he was on the Lampoon. And Jim Downey, who was a legendary comedy writer at Letterman, I think he was Letterman's first head writer and wrote so many of your favorite SNL sketches throughout history. He was on the Harvard Lampoon. So when I applied to college, that was like, on my essay for Harvard was, I want to come here because I want to join the Lampoon. So when I got there, that was like, goal number one for me was joining it. And there's, like, an audition process. You have to write material, and then you get, the pool of people gets winnowed down, and then they accept a few writers every semester.

I have to imagine, by the time you got there, certainly it was thought of almost as a feeder into these careers in comedy. And therefore, there had to be quite a wide funnel in terms of people interested in becoming part of the Lampoon. They can't accept everyone. What did the audition process look like? What constituted the audition process?

The lampoon is a pure, to the extent that it could be, was a pure meritocracy. There were artists, writers, and there were business people who sold ads. And if you were trying to get on as a business person, it was like, did you sell enough ads? If you did, you got on. If you didn't, you didn't. If you were an artist, you drew a bunch of pieces, you were critiqued and sort of given notes by the other artists on the staff. Then they voted on who their favorite artists were. And same with writing. You wrote three pieces, comedy pieces, of the subjects were up to you. You were winnowed down from the total number of people trying to get on to half that and then half again. And then they would bring six to eight people to the election and then vote however many that they wanted, they would vote on. This was part of the sales pitch, was that it was a meritocracy. So I decided to kind of test that theory because I was skeptical. So I submitted my pieces. The first time I tried out, I submitted anonymously to the extent I could. I only wrote my first and second initial, so they didn't know whether I was male or female. They didn't know really who I was at all. And I got admitted. I made it past the first cut, and they have, like, a cocktail party for people who make it past the cuts. And I showed up, and they were like, oh, you're that guy. Welcome. Congratulations. And I was like, wow, you really was anonymous. They didn't know who I was. They didn't care. They just were like, are these things funny, or are they not funny? So then you did that again. You submitted three more pieces. You had got notes. There was another round of cuts, and then there were elections, and you just waited