Sitcom Writers and the Color of Funny

Facts aside, the true gripe within Paul Brownfield’s article (“Hey, This Isn’t Funny,” June 19) could have been more accurately expressed by the title “Hey, Why Aren’t White Writers Working This Season?” In the end, it seems the article is really concerned only with the plight of the white sitcom writer.

Why else would “the pledge networks made [to the NAACP] to bring in more minority writers” be listed as a mitigating factor that has “[overridden] sheer talent” and caused the hiring process to become “less and less a meritocracy”? To even include this as a possible excuse offered up by--of all creatures--an agent, is most definitely not funny. It is a sad, continuing commentary on how minority talent is perceived in this town and in this country.

Forget about the “black mark” that sitting out a year of employment makes on your career. That can be remedied with the next job. Minority writers, particularly African Americans, seem to have an indelible black mark on our careers: our race.

By virtue of our race alone, we are automatically judged less talented, less capable, less deserving of employment, particularly on “mainstream” (read “white”) sitcoms.

If this were not true, then experienced, 36-year-old, Ivy League-educated, savvy, New York-native women who happen to be ethnic minorities would be and would have been employed as writers on “Mad About You,” “The Nanny,” “Friends,” “Spin City,” “Just Shoot Me,” “Seinfeld,” “King of Queens,” “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “Will & Grace” and so on and so on. But we were not and are not (as of this writing). Race, it seems, supersedes all other qualifications.

Of the 8,312 current active members of the Writers Guild of America, West, 274 are African American, 99 are Latino, 52 are Asian and 16 are Native American. Qualified minority writers do exist. We are members of the same union as our white colleagues. But we are still the invisible men and women to those (mostly white) agents, studio and network executives, and executive producers who are in positions to put us in the employment pipeline. Yet even when they are pressured into seeing us, because of the activism of a few, the presumptions and biases still supersede their objectivity.

Objectivity? The industry party line is that writing is subjective, not objective.

Oh really? I say that what you like is subjective, what you are comfortable with is subjective. Good writing is not. For years English teachers have been able to evaluate what is good writing from what needs more development.

I’m reminded of an incident this staffing season, when an executive producer of a popular, “mainstream,” major-network sitcom asked that I call him at home. From long distance I returned the call, thinking it must be a good thing that the producer who said he had “hundreds of spec scripts to read” would read mine, call me and ask that I call him at home.

I’m an excellent writer, he told me. My spec was well-written, he told me. I should be earning a living in this business, he told me. Then he proceeded to subjectively nit-pick my spec to pieces to justify why he decided not to hire me. That I first met him at a guild mixer intended to familiarize show-runners with minority writers could not possibly have influenced his hair-splitting, right? Right?

I repeat: Race supersedes all other qualifications.

More scientifically, the most recent Hollywood Writers Report statistics (1998) showed a pattern of hiring that can be described as nothing less than segregative. Minorities accounted for just 7% of the writers employed in television in 1997.

More recent statistics (October 1999) published by the NAACP and the Coalition of African American Television Writers reported that of the 839 writers working in prime-time television in the 1999-2000 season, only 6.6% were African American. Seventy-seven percent of the programs that employed African American writers were on UPN and the WB. The numbers were less for other minorities: 1.3% Latino, 0.3% Asian and 0% Native American writers were employed last season. While there may be a few exceptions for this coming season, the overall exclusion still exists.

Perhaps we should get rid of the overpaid industry “decision makers” and give their jobs to our underpaid English teachers. I’m certain the overall hue of television employment would look a lot different than it does now. For minority writers, it seems that being an excellent writer with well-written material is still not good enough.

My message to those white writers who find themselves the newly unemployed byproduct of industry politics, disingenuousness and b.s.?

Welcome to the club.