In the Land of Herring and Committee Meetings

In 23 years of writing and producing television comedy, I’ve never experienced the “perk” of traveling. Whenever I arrived to work on a series, they had just come back from doing the “family wins a trip to Paris” episode and everyone was too bulked up with heavy foods to go anywhere else.

My traveling luck changed recently, however, when I received a call from Jack Gilbert at the Warner Bros. Writers Workshop, where I’ve been an instructor for the past 11 years. Jack was helping out a consultant for Danish television. “Any interest in going to Copenhagen?” he asked. “They need somebody to teach their writers how to write sitcoms.”

Denmark and sitcoms seemed like an odd combination to me. What would they write? “Dharma & Sven”? Finally, my travel lust overcame my urge to crack wise, and I begged Jack to call the guy and sign me up immediately. I had only one stipulation: “I won’t eat herring.”

It took just a single quick meeting and a handshake to be approved by Kjeld Veirup, the director and creator of the Danish writing program, a mountain of a man with startling gray hair and charisma that could charm the commission away from a CAA agent.

Kjeld asked if I could find a second writer-teacher with sketch comedy experience, because an “SNL”-type series was something else they were considering.

I recruited a former producing cohort, Nancy Steen, now consulting producer of “Titus.” Having been a “sketch” actress and a teacher at the Groundlings, she would be perfect. Being Norwegian wouldn’t hurt either.

Once we were both officially signed on, Kjeld told me in an ominous voice: “You will eat herring.” There was no turning back.

Later, during planning meetings, we learned that the funding for the classes would come from the Union of Broadcasting Organizations in Denmark.

Their very progressive government levees a tax on all the blank videotapes sold in the country, and the money in turn is doled out in grants for programs to train writers, directors and actors.

For participating in our sitcom workshop, each writer would be paid 30,000 tax-free kroner, or $4,000. In return, they would attend five intense days of classes in June, spend a few months crafting pilot scripts and, finally, participate in a follow-up session in December, when they pitch their ideas to the three Danish television networks.

Unlike Hollywood, the Danes don’t shoot pilots before doing a series, or go to the networks with just a “treatment.” Instead, writers complete a full pilot script, pitch their idea, and if a network likes the script, it will order episodes of the series based solely on the writing. It’s a complete vote of confidence in the series creator, but it can also be a recipe for disaster if, four episodes into production, the actors have no chemistry or you discover there’s no audience for the series.

Still, production costs in Denmark are a fraction of what they are in America, so they’re willing to take the risk. And, with a total population of about 5 million, they need only a million fans to create a hit.

Yet for some reason, they’re having trouble developing a comedy series that’s as popular with the Danes as the American imports. They love our shows, especially “Seinfeld,” “Frasier” and “Friends.” Their notion now, quite obviously, is that importing television only spends money. A homegrown comedy series would generate it. That’s where Nancy and I came in.

Our classes took place at the Danske Filmskole (Danish Film School), a sparse, Scandinavian-designed facility on a beautiful tree-lined island that was once a Danish naval base. Our first meeting with the students was not a class but a lovely Sunday night, candle-lit dinner that included exceptional beer, plenty of good Danish cheese and the dreaded herring, which I managed to avoid. We felt totally at home.

Just like their Los Angeles brethren, Danish television people are also “noshers.” But unlike their L.A. counterparts, it doesn’t show. Nine men and three women arrived who had been chosen from a field of 40 applicants. Nancy and I gazed unashamedly as a dozen of the most attractive, physically fit people we had ever seen filtered into the room. They didn’t look like any writers I knew.

That night, we were also pleased to learn that our students were anything but novices. For example, there was Oliver Zahle and Jens Korse, two very hip guys in their early 30s sporting sunglasses and cell phones. This team had already gained popularity from its weekly sketch comedy show on Danish radio, and it was being courted to write and perform on television.

Another writer was Kit Goetz, a vivacious, curly-haired actress, famous throughout Denmark as a performer and playwright. She currently has a hit television series on Saturday nights called “Far, Mor and Blyp” (“Father, Mommy and Blip”) about two married airline attendants who become new parents. Also, there was Jannik Fuglsang, a 30-year-old freelancer who earns money doing the Danish version of “punching up,” or adding jokes, to existing scripts. But he looked more like Dolph Lundgren in “Rocky IV” than a comedy writer.

The remaining eight students were all professionals in journalism, the media or teaching. That night we also discovered that in Copenhagen in June there barely is a night. The sun sets at 11 p.m. and rises at 4 a.m. Despite our difficulty adjusting to the limited nighttime, classes started bright and early each day with Nancy leading improvisations. Our hope was to teach the students that some of the funniest material is not written but comes spontaneously from the subconscious, but we also knew that improvs would help the class bond and, most important, we’d get everyone on his feet each day and wake them up.

Little did we know that our hearty Danish writers would already be pumped and raring to go, having come to school on bicycles, some of them pedaling seven miles to get there. I made a mental note to relate this practice to my producer colleagues in L.A. the next time someone complained that his parking space “on the lot” was too far from the office. Still, the improvisations proved to be helpful. One team of writers, Svend Ravn and Lars Kristensen, was working on a series about a downtrodden clerk at the airport and his odd assortment of co-workers. When we asked the students to do an improvisation in the voices of their series characters, Sven and Lars realized they had no voices for these characters. It was during this exercise that they decided to retrench and develop a completely new idea with characters that they could visualize and inhabit. The improvs also exposed us to the wealth of comedy talents our writers had.

The rest of our days were filled with lecture/demonstrations on story structure, scene content, joke writing, script formats and character development. All of this interspersed with clips of episodes of American sitcoms that Nancy and I had written. As our students watched these segments, they laughed openly, once again reinforcing the fact that they had a good grasp on humor. This being the case, I began to wonder why no one in Denmark had successfully mastered the sitcom format.

One evening we had a guest lecturer whose input shed some light on the question. He was a producer named Mads Christensen, and he bravely came to speak to us about his own failure trying to produce a Danish comedy, “Home at Five.” He showed the students a 10-minute clip of the first episode, which featured a typical sitcom family. Being that it was in Danish, I could only guess what was happening on the screen, but what was occurring in our classroom was crystal clear. There wasn’t so much as a snicker from anyone, not even a grin.

When Mads stopped the tape and posed the question, “What do you see as the biggest problem here?” our youngest and most boisterous student, Christian Torpe, stated blatantly, “There was no jokes.” This, by the way, got the biggest laugh of the evening.

Part of the problem with “Home at Five” stems from a need in Denmark to render everything “artistically.” When they were making the series, Mads related, hour upon hour was spent in committee discussing every detail, including where cameras would be placed, how to light a specific window, what ambient sounds would be heard in the background, and what would be seen on the father’s computer screen. In the process, the writing and comedy took a back seat.

Here in Hollywood, minutia like that doesn’t phase us or waste our time. Indeed, the success of our sitcoms comes not only from the fast pace of our language and scripts, but from the speed of our production and the sheer number of episodes we produce. Kjeld Veirup went so far as to suggest that Danes might need to start doing more episodes of each series, just so that they can learn to develop the momentum, rhythm and speed of the Americans.

This cultural need to “discuss” also has an effect on the comedy. The Danes like nothing better than talking things out. Imagine an episode of “Friends” in which Rachel is upset with Phoebe for stealing her date and they just sit down and calmly discuss it. This flies in the face of the No. 1 comedy essential: conflict. One student told me, “We love watching your American violence and conflict. We just don’t do it ourselves.”

The week seemed to fly by as our students progressed and we helped them craft outlines for the pilots they would write in our absence. During our last lunch at the film school, I felt the need for some feedback, and I asked Oliver and Jens their impression of our workshop.

“Well, it is quite important to learn the rules,” Oliver replied.

“Yes”, Jens echoed. “You must learn the rules first before you can break them.”

My eyes widened. Kit Goetz agreed. “We are a small country that has been occupied by other countries. We rage against authority.”

As it turns out, this too is part of the Danish culture: to amiably, charmingly learn everything someone has to teach, then take the information and do it their own way, anyway.

I wondered if that attitude would hold them back, and yet at the same time I was envious. I wished that in my own career I had stood up more often and insisted on doing it my way.

When the workshop ended, there was time for sightseeing, canal boat tours and strolls through the beautiful parks of Copenhagen, lush with greenery and sunbathing women.

One day, on the outskirts of the city, I found myself gazing at the Baltic Sea as I stood on the ramparts of Kronborg Slot, the very castle that was Elsinore, in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” It seemed pretty ironic to be in the location of the greatest drama in history, having just taught 12 serious-minded Danes “that when all else fails, put a man in a dress.”

I would find out whether my teaching had succeeded or not when I returned in December to help the students pitch their scripts to the networks.

As I left the castle to trek along the rocky shoreline, I noticed a brilliantly blond-haired man fishing with his equally towheaded little boy.

“What are you fishing for?” I asked.

“Herring,” he said emphatically, as if there was no other choice. I’m sure he wondered why I smiled back at him so broadly.

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Fred Rubin has been a network sitcom writer-producer for the last 23 years and currently teaches comedy writing at UCLA, Loyola Marymount, the Warner Bros. Writers Workshop and the Disney Writer’s Fellowship.