“I started off as a journalist,” said Courtney Lilly. “I knew I wanted to tell stories. I knew I wanted to write, but I didn’t know how to do it. I needed something with a definite paycheck behind it, so I chose journalism at the time.”
Lilly met many amazing people and picked up many good writing habits along the way, but his curiosity and passion led him to online writing and eventually to screenwriting. “I didn’t know you moved to LA or worked in a mail room or became a PA. I didn’t know any of those paths, but a friend learned that Nickelodeon had a writing program, so I went to a bookstore, bought some Frasier scripts, and I ended up writing a spec of The Simpsons.”
Simultaneously, Lilly’s online writing fell through and he was awarded the fellowship to write for Nickelodeon. “I got my feet on the ground in Los Angeles, learned a little about the business, and the Hollywood writing culture.” Fast forward to today and Lilly’s credits include Invader ZIM, Arrested Development, Everybody Hates Chris, My Boys, The Cleveland Show, and Black-ish.
Writing Comedy
Looking back on his career, Lilly said he “never had the guts to do stand-up” but he felt a natural connection to formulaic comedies. “A friend of mine did stand-up. He was funny. I was funny. But he was really doing it, so I started writing down sketch ideas.”
These sketch ideas were essentially just written in private, but at the time, Chris Rock had a sketch comedy show and the premise of one of the sketches from Lilly’s notebook was replicated on air. “They do a version of it. It’s the way the world works. Just a funny idea they executed, but I remember thinking it was a good enough idea.”
From Lilly’s perspective, he had seen enough television to understand the basic structure of comedy writing. This, plus the validation of seeing similar ideas on television, led him to believe he could follow a similar path.
“There was a lot of comedy and I remember that I just got the rhythms of it. I could hear the music of it if that makes sense. It made sense. I could see the structure. Even if I didn’t have the vocabulary, I knew The Simpsons would do a first act mis-lead. You can see the structure. I just copied that structure.”
Courtney Lilly (Photo by Heidi Gutman/ ABC)
He continued, “I hadn’t taken any writing classes. I just watched a lot of TV and emulated what I watched. You just watch it and go with it. It’s rough, but you can approximate it and make it funny. I knew the characters. I knew the voices.”
Lilly said there also wasn’t the barrier of having to perform or create characters. By writing spec scripts based on shows already on the air, the analysis was simply whether or not it was funny based on prior knowledge. “I sent off scripts and got lucky. There were enough things to get people to laugh to win that fellowship.”
Thanks to his journalistic background, he’s able to investigate where things come from. With this in mind, it’s easier to see the rhythms of comedy when watching television. “I had to do research and figure out where I fit into the stuff I love.”
Humanistic Threads
“Ultimately, the best version of any story has a humanistic thread through it. It’s obvious that there’s no sci-fi that is just sci-fi. It opened up a world to me,” he said of his Invader ZIM days. “Versatility was one of my calling cards and I never sat there and said this is who I am as a comic writer.”
In some ways, Lilly thinks this versatility came from his wide view of comedy, along with coming to the art later in life. Other friends of his, who were obsessed with Monty Python or one particular path, were less likely to choose a versatile path.
“It was this hybrid thing where I knew what was funny and I knew what I liked, so as I started to gather my comedy identity and move forward, [it became clear] that a joke is a joke is a joke. It’s all set-up. If you can make the set-up line work, it works. You start seeing the commonalities of storytelling in the threads of things you like. You’re allowed to be exposed to more.”
In many of these examples, the screenwriter found himself coming on to a show where he could watch a backlog. But this wasn’t the case with My Boys, a sitcom starring Jordana Spiro, Reid Scott, Kyle Howard, and Jim Gaffigan. “All I saw was the pilot, so we started relatively early.”
“Usually, you have the pilot to go off of. It’s kind of fun because you’re part of the creative building process that’s going on. The thing in TV that’s different from film is that TV needs to remain a writer’s medium because you’re with the characters for more than three hours or even nine hours.”
He continued, “Like, how many hours did we spend with Tony Soprano? That comes through the writers continually mining what makes that character interesting. It is like the sculptor with the marble. You have to find that stature within. You keep defining and refining that thing. The closer you are to the ground level of that, the more you can have your own fingertips and marks in it.”
With My Boys, Lilly met with Creator Betsy Thomas and he spent a great deal of his meeting talking about friendships, seeing as the show was about a female sports columnist and her group of male friends. “Friendship stories were integral to what we did. It was a building block to character.”
The Writer’s Room
“Invader ZIM was a fellowship, but it wasn’t a traditional writer’s room. The first time I was in a room was Arrested Development. It was the early 2000s so even the idea of a writer’s room [was confusing]. Maybe we’ve seen it on Larry Sanders, but the concept was vague.”
Walking into Arrested Development, Lilly didn’t know the terminology. “They gave me an office, but I was new to all of it. I was terrified of having it all taken away, so I worked my ass off. I’m not being hyperbolic or comedic: I was the worst at it. And, it sucked being the worst, but the only way to get around it was to go through it.”
“I can say this now, but we did a podcast and were talking about the first years, but it was like grad school for me. I was learning from masters. Abraham Higginbotham (Arrested Development, Modern Family) said ‘it was good for a staff writer’ but for me, I used it as a marker for where I needed to get. I knew it was funny and I knew it wasn’t there yet. It set a level of standards that were incredibly high.”
The screenwriter said there’s a difference between being a writer and being in the writer’s room. “When you’re a writer, you’re in control of everything. You’re laboring over words. In a writer’s room, I realized I may never write. There are writers who don’t write episodes,. You have to be given an episode to write. You have to learn to tell stories and pitch verbally.”
Artisanal vs. Art
Logistically, beyond work ethic, he said he spent a lot of time just watching the shows. While watching, he would diagram the episode, which was sort of like writing a bad version of the script. These breakdowns helped him better understand the format.
“I tell writers all the time: you have a favorite show. Watch five episodes of it and transcribe it. Literally sit there and write interior this, exterior this. You will have written five good drafts of a show. That’s a starting point even if it’s not your voice and not your ideas. You see patterns and rhythms rather than just intellectualizing it.”
“Television is more artisanal than it is an art,” said Lilly in regards to the craft of writing. “We’re making a thing that has to serve a purpose or function, like a table or chair. There’s design, but it has to serve that purpose first. The structure is visible, so get good at doing that.”
Main cast of Blackish bidding their fans farewell. Photo courtesy of ABC
For Lilly, the goal is to “understand how a story needs to be built for television.” He adds, “You need to break down how a show works so you can mimic that show and voice. It’s practicing. It’s mimicry. Until you get good enough to make it your own, it’s mimicry.” As someone who found a voice through mimicry, it’s interesting where this voice has taken Lilly and how the industry has changed over the years.
All Black Casts
As mentioned throughout this interview, Lilly grew up mostly watching white television shows with the exception of shows like In Living Color. Today, two of his most recent credits – The Cleveland Show and Black-ish – feature essentially all black casts.
“I think it’s hard to write comedy as a black writer or any type of minority. The thing you have to do with comedy is be willing to not have a certain amount of dignity. A comic is almost begging you to laugh, so if it doesn’t work, you cringe.”
He continued, “For communities that have had [struggles], whether it’s LGBTQ or these things where dignity is something you’re fighting for, it gets very hard to do comedy. It’s a way to be degraded, so audience is something I’m always thinking about.”
Lilly brought up the moment Dave Chappelle left The Chappelle Show, because of the audience. “We’re always thinking about audience but I think I’m trying to think less about audience. Maybe it’s where I am professionally, maybe where we are in the world, and everyone is talking about legacy with Black-ish wrapping up…but as I think about audiences now, it’s hard because I’m not saying I want to write race-less, but I just want to write what I’m interested in.”
The screenwriter said many of the unattainable goals have been attained. “There’s a black writer in the Marvel universe. All of these barriers are in the midst of crumbling, which is very positive, so it’s more about what I want to write and what I want to say. I’ve always wanted to write from a place of ideas.”
To add to this idea, we recently sat down with screenwriter Weiko Lin who also spoke about universal ideas, stating that Get Out and Crazy Rich Asians were essentially the same idea: trying to make a good impression when meeting a spouse’s parents. Lilly joked that he would like to write a 300-page race-less novel that ends with the line, “Oh, by the way, every character in this novel was black.”
Ideas First
“As a black writer, I don’t want to write something thinking about what everyone will understand. I want to understand what I want to say first and then color it with my details and let the audience determine the rest of it. My interaction with audience, whether they’re more sophisticated or less sophisticated, has to be about what I give them.”
Since filmmaking and television live in a visual market, however, Lilly says it does somewhat come down to marketing. “I try not to think about the audience because it’s a marketing question. There are real deal, practical things. If you want to make a sci-fi fantasy epic, they want to know how you’re going to pay for it. I get that. But my creative process needs to be separate from my business process.”
Lilly concluded that despite all of these complications, there are still films like Black Panther that work for everyone. “It’s not a niche movie. Maybe it took the backing of Marvel and the history of that place to make it work, but we are seeing the broadening of what’s niche and what’s not niche which are naturally expanding, but I know I also need to be practical.”
“Whether it’s niche or whatever, I have to think about the story I want to tell. Here’s how I want to deal with this. Here’s what I’m feeling. Maybe it’s a short. Maybe it’s a feature. But if I’m asking people for $200 million to make something, those people want their expenses recouped. I’m going to deal with whether they’re true prejudices or not, or just financial things, I’ll deal with the gravity of that.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.
You can also read our interview with the show’s creator Kenya Barris here.
