Comedy genius Larry Doyle on life after The Simpsons

Larry Doyle left his mark on 88 episodes of The Simpsons, making him a cult hero to humor writers everywhere. His pedigree as a former Spy editor and frequent New Yorker contributor only burnished the legend. And now he's written a novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper, about an awkward teen valedictorian who utters that very phrase during a graduation speech. It just might do for today's high schoolers what The Breakfast Club did for Generations X and Y. Radar rang Doyle up at his suburban Baltimore home, where he lives with his wife, three kids, and dog—just about as far away from Hollywood as he could get.

RADAR: Do aspiring young humor writers ever try to punch you in the face?
LARRY DOYLE: One of the good things about being in Baltimore is there aren't really a lot of those. I don't really see any writers out here. John Waters I see in the grocery store every once in a while—he has a surprisingly large head.

[My wife] convinced me that if we stayed in Los Angeles, our children would become heroin-addicted gang membersOr maybe just a very small mustache.
He has a very small mustache, but he has like an alien-size head. He's always impeccably dressed at the Whole Foods at the bottom of the hill.

You've talked about the frustrations and difficulties of writing for film and dealing with the Hollywood machine—and now you live about as geographically far from L.A. as it gets. Why Baltimore?
My wife's parents decided to sell the house that she grew up in, and I'm just along for the ride. She convinced me that if we stayed in Los Angeles, our children would become heroin-addicted gang members. I kind of liked Los Angeles because you did genuinely meet a lot of really smart people. That said, working in L.A., especially doing screenwriting, can be incredibly frustrating because I always thought growing up the thing I didn't want to be was a salesman. I didn't want to be selling joints and stuff—metal joints. And that's what being a writer in Los Angeles is. Ninety percent of the job is going out to get the job.

You mentioned earlier that you recently went to L.A. for "meetings, pitching, and bullshit." Sounds like you're not a big fan of the process.
Well, it's perfectly fine, but you waste huge slots of your life doing it. I remember one of the things that made me agree to buy this house was when my agent called and said, "They want to do a comedy remake of Twelve Angry Men." And my first inclination was, that is one of the worst ideas I ever heard. And my second inclination was, Okay, how would you do that? So they round up the usual suspects, and I got on the list of because I had two movies that came out.

Because both of those movies were failures, however, I was on the list of people they had to talk to but could not, under any circumstances, hire. And so I would waste time coming up with the comedy version of Twelve Angry Men, which by the way is typical in film: They get an idea that is already a cliché in television sitcoms and think that it's new. The comedy remake of Twelve Angry Men ... they did it twice on The Odd Couple and there's probably no sitcom that's gotten past 100 episodes that hasn't done a version of it ... So you go in and do the dog and pony show—and then you won't get the job. The good thing about Hollywood is—at my level, anyway—if you sell one thing a year, you're good for the year. But it is quite possible not to sell one thing.

Let's talk about something maybe less frustrating—the book: Not since American Psycho have I seen brand names deployed so effectively as signifiers of a character's psychic make-up. Are teenagers and homicidal misanthropes really so alike?

In American Psycho, he was doing it as a satire. I was doing it to try to accurately convey the world in which they live. And I do think that consumption is, and always has been, a signifier for teenagers. I preface everything I say about this book: I may talk about it in terms of what sort of literature went into it, but I don't consider it the Great American Novel. It's a piece of entertainment from my point of view. The theories behind it might sound awful highfalutin, but I wasn't aspiring to nor do I believe I've created the equivalent to Catcher in the Rye.

Anyway, I like the literary theory that all description in a book should somehow be within the worldview of the characters you're writing about. Which is why my book has a lot of strange scientific or quasi-scientific metaphors—that's what the character thinks about. There are some really good books that are really badly written, like The Shipping News. Now she's [E. Annie Proulx] going to come and try to punch me out. She can probably take me; she rides horses and stuff. That book is just filled with all sorts of descriptions that are completely out of the universe of the characters. Like one thing I remember, talking about putting down a dress the way a valet might drape a coat over a chair. Well, that might be apt, but now you've taken me out of the world.

At one point a teacher tells the protagonist: "The world is full of Beth Coopers." Do you believe that?
Well, what she's saying is that Beth Cooper is not as special as you think she is. There are a lot of girls who are going to turn your crank just as equally and you just don't realize it.

The book does what I think a lot of the best John Hughes movies do.
It was an exercise similar to The Breakfast Club, which was to start out with all these high school stereotypes and then mix them up and show their different sides.

Has the book been optioned?
Yeah, which is also part of the cover-your-ass thing—had it been simply an idea, it's easy to say no. But if it's a book, it's a real, hard thing they can point to and say, "That was the thing of value that we bought." Ideas have no value, but an idea on a piece of paper does. One of the biggest insults they can give you when you go in and pitch an idea and they say, "That's a wonderful idea, but it's execution-dependent." Which means two things: It's only worth something if it's good, and we're not sure you're good enough to do it. The most interesting thing about that is it assumes that they believe there is such a thing that is a non-execution-dependent idea. They'll buy a lot of things that they can see the poster for and they don't care if the writer can do a good job because they know hundreds of people they can then bring in and throw out everything that writer wrote.

If you didn't have three kids, would you be putting yourself through this misery?
You know, part of the hope is that I can sort of gracefully go into writing books. And if I didn't have three kids, I probably would not be doing this. I'd be spending all of my money on strippers and coke.

Larry Doyle left his mark on 88 episodes of The Simpsons, making him a cult hero to humor writers everywhere. His pedigree as a former Spy editor and frequent New Yorker contributor only burnished the legend. And now he's written a novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper, about an awkward teen valedictorian who utters that very phrase during a graduation speech. It just might do for today's high schoolers what The Breakfast Club did for Generations X and Y. Radar rang Doyle up at his suburban Baltimore home, where he lives with his wife, three kids, and dog—just about as far away from Hollywood as he could get.

RADAR: Do aspiring young humor writers ever try to punch you in the face?
LARRY DOYLE: One of the good things about being in Baltimore is there aren't really a lot of those. I don't really see any writers out here. John Waters I see in the grocery store every once in a while—he has a surprisingly large head.

[My wife] convinced me that if we stayed in Los Angeles, our children would become heroin-addicted gang membersOr maybe just a very small mustache.
He has a very small mustache, but he has like an alien-size head. He's always impeccably dressed at the Whole Foods at the bottom of the hill.

You've talked about the frustrations and difficulties of writing for film and dealing with the Hollywood machine—and now you live about as geographically far from L.A. as it gets. Why Baltimore?
My wife's parents decided to sell the house that she grew up in, and I'm just along for the ride. She convinced me that if we stayed in Los Angeles, our children would become heroin-addicted gang members. I kind of liked Los Angeles because you did genuinely meet a lot of really smart people. That said, working in L.A., especially doing screenwriting, can be incredibly frustrating because I always thought growing up the thing I didn't want to be was a salesman. I didn't want to be selling joints and stuff—metal joints. And that's what being a writer in Los Angeles is. Ninety percent of the job is going out to get the job.

You mentioned earlier that you recently went to L.A. for "meetings, pitching, and bullshit." Sounds like you're not a big fan of the process.
Well, it's perfectly fine, but you waste huge slots of your life doing it. I remember one of the things that made me agree to buy this house was when my agent called and said, "They want to do a comedy remake of Twelve Angry Men." And my first inclination was, that is one of the worst ideas I ever heard. And my second inclination was, Okay, how would you do that? So they round up the usual suspects, and I got on the list of because I had two movies that came out.

Because both of those movies were failures, however, I was on the list of people they had to talk to but could not, under any circumstances, hire. And so I would waste time coming up with the comedy version of Twelve Angry Men, which by the way is typical in film: They get an idea that is already a cliché in television sitcoms and think that it's new. The comedy remake of Twelve Angry Men ... they did it twice on The Odd Couple and there's probably no sitcom that's gotten past 100 episodes that hasn't done a version of it ... So you go in and do the dog and pony show—and then you won't get the job. The good thing about Hollywood is—at my level, anyway—if you sell one thing a year, you're good for the year. But it is quite possible not to sell one thing.

Let's talk about something maybe less frustrating—the book: Not since American Psycho have I seen brand names deployed so effectively as signifiers of a character's psychic make-up. Are teenagers and homicidal misanthropes really so alike?

In American Psycho, he was doing it as a satire. I was doing it to try to accurately convey the world in which they live. And I do think that consumption is, and always has been, a signifier for teenagers. I preface everything I say about this book: I may talk about it in terms of what sort of literature went into it, but I don't consider it the Great American Novel. It's a piece of entertainment from my point of view. The theories behind it might sound awful highfalutin, but I wasn't aspiring to nor do I believe I've created the equivalent to Catcher in the Rye.

Anyway, I like the literary theory that all description in a book should somehow be within the worldview of the characters you're writing about. Which is why my book has a lot of strange scientific or quasi-scientific metaphors—that's what the character thinks about. There are some really good books that are really badly written, like The Shipping News. Now she's [E. Annie Proulx] going to come and try to punch me out. She can probably take me; she rides horses and stuff. That book is just filled with all sorts of descriptions that are completely out of the universe of the characters. Like one thing I remember, talking about putting down a dress the way a valet might drape a coat over a chair. Well, that might be apt, but now you've taken me out of the world.

At one point a teacher tells the protagonist: "The world is full of Beth Coopers." Do you believe that?
Well, what she's saying is that Beth Cooper is not as special as you think she is. There are a lot of girls who are going to turn your crank just as equally and you just don't realize it.

The book does what I think a lot of the best John Hughes movies do.
It was an exercise similar to The Breakfast Club, which was to start out with all these high school stereotypes and then mix them up and show their different sides.

Has the book been optioned?
Yeah, which is also part of the cover-your-ass thing—had it been simply an idea, it's easy to say no. But if it's a book, it's a real, hard thing they can point to and say, "That was the thing of value that we bought." Ideas have no value, but an idea on a piece of paper does. One of the biggest insults they can give you when you go in and pitch an idea and they say, "That's a wonderful idea, but it's execution-dependent." Which means two things: It's only worth something if it's good, and we're not sure you're good enough to do it. The most interesting thing about that is it assumes that they believe there is such a thing that is a non-execution-dependent idea. They'll buy a lot of things that they can see the poster for and they don't care if the writer can do a good job because they know hundreds of people they can then bring in and throw out everything that writer wrote.

If you didn't have three kids, would you be putting yourself through this misery?
You know, part of the hope is that I can sort of gracefully go into writing books. And if I didn't have three kids, I probably would not be doing this. I'd be spending all of my money on strippers and coke.