“If my whole schtick is honesty, am I being hypocritical?” - Dan Harmon, creator of Community
Since Dan Harmon created Community, he has had a lot more people interested in what he does every day. When he was just a credited writer on Monster House, The Sarah Silverman Program or the unseen pilot to Heat Vision and Jack, people pretty much left him alone. Then he created a network TV show that some people love, but it’s always on the bubble for cancellation, and he was even fired from the show last year, but they brought him back and everyone still wants to know what Dan Harmon thinks.
In 2011, Harmon started performing a monthly comedy show in the back of Meltdown Comics on Sunset Blvd. This show is where he infamously played an angry voicemail from Chevy Chase for the audience, which proceeded to go viral. That didn’t stop Harmon from opening up to his Harmontown audience. The show went weekly and became a podcast.
Last year, Harmontown went on the road with Harmon, cohost Jeff Davis, Dungeon Master Spencer Crittenden and Harmon’s girlfriend Erin McGathy. Filmmaker Neil Berkeley filmed the Harmontown tour for a documentary. Harmontown premiered at the South by Southwest film festival and offered further insight into Dan Harmon. For example, he is drunk before every show, and as he said on stage, he used to wipe with T-shirts when he didn’t feel like going out to by toilet paper, and owned a Real Doll which he wore out in a matter of months. During the tour he owed two studios a pilot script. The one he finished never got made, and he still owes Fox one.
In Austin for the film’s premiere, I got to speak with Harmon, who remained as honest and forthcoming as he is on his podcast. Community is now back under Harmon for its fifth season, and his animated show with Justin Roiland Rick and Mortywill get a second season at Adult Swim.
SuicideGirls: Are you really always drunk before each show?
Dan Harmon: For each Harmonton show probably. There might be some scheduling reason why I’m sober, like maybe if I was just coming from a funeral or something, I don’t know, or an important meeting. But that hasn’t happened yet. The show’s late enough at night and on the weekend all the time so I consider part of the format to be me liquored up.
SG: When you would wipe with T-shirts to avoid leaving the house, would you do a lot more laundry back then?
DH: I actually just threw my T-shirts in the garbage. I would have a big trash bag full of poop covered T-shirts that I would take out to the back and put them in the dumpster, just for the month that I couldn’t leave the house.
SG: So how many T-shirts did you have? That seems more expensive than toilet paper.
DH: Yeah, it wasn’t a practical time in my life. It wasn’t based on cost analysis. It was based on depression.
SG: So Real Dolls really do wear out?
DH: Yeah, their heads fall off. They’re made out of silicon and it just eventually develops little rips and tears. It’s disgusting.
SG: So they fall apart, but it’s not the “practical” portions of them that wear out.
DH: Sure, I guess. I guess those fall apart too.
SG: When we first did interviews for Community, you used to do interviews paired with Chevy Chase before we knew there were any problems. Were you just hiding all the anger in those sessions?
DH: I didn’t have any anger in those sessions. I only got angry at him one time when he walked off the set instead of doing a particularly important tag for an episode, and it was the last day on the set. So when he walked away, he effectively made it impossible to ever get it shot and I found out about this while I was at dinner with my parents. The next day was the wrap party, so I jokingly blew off some steam about my frustrations with him throughout the season and allowed other people in the crew to do the same by saying it was okay to say, “Fuck you, Chevy” if you wanted now and nobody could be fired for saying it. Everyone said it, smiled and laughed. Then the gossip blogs took over because of the voice mail, but there was really nothing to it then or now. He and I still text each other, make dick jokes and things.
SG: But he still didn’t want to come back to the show?
DH: Oh, I don’t know. You have to ask Sony about that. I think they love doing interviews. Contact anybody that works at Sony Pictures Television.
SG: I can tell you from experience they love doing interviews and being asked about Community.
DH: Yeah, everyone that works in television that isn’t creative is always a very honest personality and they’re very transparent. They prefer to communicate with people on an equal level so you’ll track them down and ask them all about Chevy, because I wasn’t there.
SG: And the sarcasm will go over perfectly in print.
DH: Yeah.
SG: What tag replaced the one he wouldn’t shoot?
DH: I can’t remember. Back then we would shoot several Troy and Abed goof offs just to have up our sleeve for an emergency.
SG: What was the tag he never shot?
DH: It was going to be at the end of the 8-bit video game episode. It was going to be Danny Pudi as Abed coming up to Pierce and revealing to him that he had done some modifications to the programming on his father’s video game that turned it into a game that Pierce could play on a laptop where if you place the space bar, a tiny Pierce through a baseball to his giant father’s head who then would give him 1000 points and call him a good son. That was it. That was all there was to the game. Pierce pressed the space bar seven or eight times and then silently turned and hugged Abed. That was going to be the tag.
SG: That’s already my favorite episode and that would’ve made it even better.
DH: Yeah, Adam Countee came up with that. When he pitched it to me in the writers room, I started crying and then started laughing. That’s what a good episode of Community should do to you so I was very upset when that was sacrificed because, as it was reported to me, he didn’t think it was funny or he didn’t get it or he didn’t understand. I mean, all he had to do was sit in a chair for five minutes. It would’ve been nice, so I got mad at him a little bit. I’ve been trying to get him to come on Harmontown forever. He’s not opposed to it. He often says, “Okay, yeah, if I’m in town, I’ll come down.” I’m positive that one day he’ll blow everyone’s mind by showing up at the back of the comic book store.
SG: In the last year you co-created Rick and Morty but you still haven’t written the Fox pilot?
DH: No, I’m going to get around to it. They were very, very cool about it when they saw the headlines about me going back to Community. They immediately rolled the deal. I think that they feel the same way I do which is that if I write something for Fox, it has a chance of getting on the air and being good and none of us want to screw that up by forcing me to poop something out real fast just to fill an obligation. I think anyone that hires me now knows that I want to make sure the job gets done right and that’s what’s for sale. So I want to write a good pilot for Fox and Fox wants a good pilot written. Maybe they just don’t care but they were very gracious and considerate in rolling the deal so that I could get my community drama finished up.
SG: You'd said when you came back to Community it would be more grounded than episodes like the 8-bit video game. I feel like there haven’t been any less theme episodes this year, like the David Fincher episode. Did you realize you still had opportunities to do that?
DH: I mean, one doesn’t think of the Ass Crack Bandit episode as being a concept episode right away. And then sometime during the writing of it you realize well, when we shoot this, let’s make this feel like a Fincher film. Partway into the shooting of it you realize okay, this is one of those weird episodes. It’s hard for me to tell what a normal one is and what a conceptual one is. When there’s only 13, once you get through the list of stuff you’ve always wanted to do, there’s only a couple left. I guess I gone and done it again.
SG: Did you get every last idea out in season five?
DH: Every last idea ever? As far as I’ve always wanted to do this or that, I think I’m to the bottom of that bucket. It would be nice to get a sixth season and grant this wish that some people seem to have that it’s just a show set in community college with these characters that we love. I’d like to see if it’s possible to grant that wish.
SG: Is there a final finality of this season finale?
DH: No, I did what I learned to do after season one which is just try to create a story that has some gravity to it and then just take a bow for the season with no regard to whether or not the series itself is going away. If I try to do a series finale every time I thought that the show might not be coming back, we’d be on our fifth finale.
SG: How many times did you do the slow motion high fives on the Harmontown tour?
DH: I only did that once in Phoenix.
SG: Then did they start happening for real?
DH: No, not necessarily. I mean, every show is different. There were shows that were very quiet and conversational. There were shows that were raucous joke driven shows. There were no shows where I actually got a slow-mo high five in earnest. In Brooklyn I crawled like a little baby into the audience and rolled over onto my back and they crowd surfed me around the room. It was exhilarating.
SG: The night you had a fight with Erin that you decided to talk about, do you have an internal monitor?
DH: No, no. In fact, part of what you’re seeing there was actually the indirect result of Neil asking me a question in an interview backstage. To paraphrase him: is there anything you could do or say on stage to make these people not like you? It was more nuanced than that, but is there anything that they could learn about you that would make them not like you. I tried some things the night he asked me that question. I was like yeah, he’s got a good point. If my whole schtick is honesty, am I being hypocritical? Are there things I’m not being honest about? I went on stage that night and I really emptied my head of all the crimes I could think of, social, political, personal. It became a very experimental night. I remember that night Erin got a little abraded by something I did. Then that chain reacted into a low point for our relationship on the road. I think at that point, something that had been already a source of strain for two lovers on the road, a camera crew 24 hours a day monitoring the man and the world changing this guy’s diaper. Everything was about me, me, me and at the point where I started abusing the relationship for fun and profit on stage, I think Erin and I hit our rockiest point. To answer your question, no, nothing’s off limits. For better or for worse, if somebody were to dare me to talk about something in particular on stage I would probably accept that challenge. I do believe in my heart that if everyone knew everything about each other that we would be able to forgive each other and come to solutions about the things that made us different, and that we’d all be happier. I know that it’s impossible and I’m not suggesting that the NSA be in charge of knowing everything about us and sharing everything about us. I just mean that the more honest we are, there are so many things we walk around with, I think they burn inside of us and make us feel generally ashamed on a level we don’t even realize, until we get that opportunity with a close friend, for instance, to say, “You know what? I did this thing yesterday. How insane is that?” And they go, “Eh, I did that too” or “I understand” or “That’s hilarious. I can’t believe it, you’re crazy.” But you still said it and you survived saying it and it makes you feel better.
SG: Do you see any similarities between Harmontown and Kevin Smith’s Q&As?
DH: I’ve never seen those but I do think that like Kevin Smith, I’m inspired by Kevin’s relationship with his fans. I’m inspired by Joss Whedon’s relationship with his fans. I think around the time of Buffy, there was a slight revolution in terms of a TV writer’s relationship with his audience. Joss really exemplified that. The amount of detail he put into his show, the amount of obsession that that resulted in on the part of the fans and the amount that he rewarded that obsession and responded to it, it was always very inspiring to me and I knew going into Community, my first network sitcom, that I wanted to be that kind of showrunner. I wanted to be that kind of a show.
SG: He went the other way, had a fan base and then started podcasting.
DH: Yeah, I just find ways to make people pay attention to me. There’s no plan to it.
SG: Does any of the fandom overlap?
DH: Oh, certainly. I’m very positive about that. There’s a lot of Whedonites and Smith, Smith, Smithsonians? I don’t know what they’re called, in the Harmontown crowd.
SG: Have you started coming up with stories for Rick and Morty’s season two?
DH: Yeah, we have. I’m very excited about it. I’m excited just for people to see the episode tomorrow. What people don’t realize that have been loving the show so much is that they’ve only seen the worst episodes. We didn’t really know how to write Rick and Morty yet. We sort of switched into high gear for the second half of the first ten. They still have yet to see some of the greatest stuff that Rick and Morty has to offer for season one. Then for season two, I brought two Community writers, Matt Roller and Dan Guterman. Season five was the best writing staff Community ever had and I brought two of those guys into Rick and Morty which is perfect compatibility. We’re just having a blast breaking stories and coming up with concepts. It smile when I talk about that show. Community has become a marriage. I love it. It completes me, etc. but there’s a lot of ways to do it wrong.
Look for more on Harmontown at http://harmontown.com.
