Dan Mintz Talks Influences, First Job on Crank Yankers

 

When assigned to interview Dan Mintz, I was expected to ask questions about topics that are current right now (like The Awesomes) or most popular right now (like Bob’s Burgers.) However, this unique situation also afforded me the opportunity to ask whatever the hell I want, because America.

I checked in with Dan to inquire about his favorite shows growing up, and how he got his start writing – on a show that happened to be one of my favorites growing up.

Dan’s influences came from a very unsurprising source. “The Simpsons, obviously,” he said. “It was such a transformative experience for me, watching that as a kid. It’s amazing to be on the same night as it now.”

“And Beavis & Butthead I really liked too,” he added. But, “ever since I started doing comedy I stopped watching comedy, so now I only like to watch TV shows that I can become completely immersed in, like Breaking Bad and those kinds of shows. It used to be like that for comedies, but as soon as you start doing it, you start thinking about it in a different away and start thinking about it more academically. Now it’s annoying whenever I watch a cartoon, because I picture the people in the recording studio and it’s that much harder to be present in the cartoon itself. I still laugh and think it’s good or not good, but I don’t just have a pure enjoyment.”

I think I can relate to that, having written about and even met some of the voices behind my favorite shows. However, it’s worth mentioning that this also adds an extra element to watching, because you can picture the absurdity of a real person delivering an outrageous line or an actor pulling off an especially entertaining performance.

Delving into Dan’s work history a bit, I asked him about his time on the former Comedy Central prank call puppet show, Crank Yankers. “That was my first job, actually,” he said. “I got it through doing stand-up on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, and did well, and they asked me to submit.”

For those of you who are unaware, Kimmel was a creator, producer, and writer for the show. Personally impressing him was clearly an easy way to land a job. “When you submit through being asked, as opposed to being in a huge stack of submissions in their office, they’ll actually read it,” Dan said.

For a show that was primarily based on real people’s real reactions to prank calls, it must have been difficult to write for the show. “More recently I wrote for Nathan For You, which is a similar thing,” Dan said, referring to the docu-reality comedy series behind the “Dumb Starbucks” stunt. “With both those shows, it makes writing become a different job compared to writing a script. With Crank Yankers, you couldn’t write scripts for people, because you have no idea how it’s going to go. So it was more about brainstorming a bunch of different premises, and [the producers] would pick the premise that they liked and you would come up with lines for the talent to say, like something that probably would come up in the situation. That kind of thing was very different because you’re just writing all around the periphery of the central thing, which you don’t have control over, as opposed to the scripted thing, where you can know exactly what’s going to happen.”

Did the writers need to be present on the calls? “For the calls themselves, a couple of writers would actually be in the recording studio,” Dan told us. “It was very low-tech. It was like 2003, so it should’ve been higher tech, I guess, but we just had marker boards and we would write ideas and hold them up. It was fun because for legal reasons the recording couldn’t be done in California, so we got to go to Vegas for a weekend and do it. Though it was pretty stressful sometimes.”

If anyone is looking to follow a similar creative path as Dan, he offered some advice. “I was on the Harvard Lampoon, which is a good way to get a writing job, although most of the stuff I got was through doing stand-up,” he said. “There are some people that don’t do stand-up and get writing jobs, but there’s a catch-22 where you need someone to read your script, but why would they read your script if they don’t know you’re good? With stand-up – or any kind of performance – you can bypass a lot of that because people will happen to just be at a show, even if they’re not going to see you, and they see you perform because of that and you can get known that way. But it’s a lot of luck too. In the end you just need to be out there so you don’t have to convince someone, or corner them and get them to read your script.”

However Dan Mintz pulled it off, it’s clearly working for him now as he has his hands full juggling multiple shows. The second season of Nathan For You begins tomorrow on Comedy Central, Season 2 of The Awesomes premieres in August on Hulu, and Season 5 of Bob’s Burgers returns to FOX in the fall. Also in the fall, be sure to look for Dan’s new FOX show, Mulaney, with the extremely funny comedian John Mulaney.