Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
February 2018
You should not, I’ve read many times, reach for your phone first thing in the morning—the news, social media, and emails all disrupt the natural stages of waking and create stress—which is how I’ll preface the fact that when I reached for my phone first thing one morning and learned that Danny Horst and Annabel Lily were dating, I was furious.
I wasn’t furious because I was in love with Danny Horst or, for that matter, with Annabel Lily. Nor was I furious because two more people in the world had found romantic bliss while I remained mostly single. And I wasn’t furious that I hadn’t heard the news directly from Danny, even though we shared an office. The reason I was furious was that Annabel Lily was a gorgeous, talented, world-famous movie star, and Danny was a schlub. He wasn’t a bad guy, and he, too, was talented. But, for Christ’s sake, he was a TV writer, a comedy writer—he was a male version of me. He was pasty skinned and sleep-deprived and sarcastic. And, perhaps because he was male or perhaps because he was a decade younger than I was, he was a lot less self-consciously people-pleasing and a lot more recklessly crass. At after-parties, he was undisguisedly high or tripping. He referred often, almost guilelessly, to both his social anxiety and his porn consumption. When he’d considered going on Rogaine, I had, at his request, used his phone to take pictures of the top of his head so that he could see exactly how much his hair was thinning there, and when he applied the medication the first time, I’d checked to make sure the foam was evenly rubbed in. And I was so familiar with the various genres of his burps that I could infer from them what he’d eaten recently.
Danny was like a little brother to me—I adored him, and he stank and got on my nerves. But his foul and annoying ways had, apparently, not precluded Annabel Lily’s interest. She’d been the guest host of The Night Owls three weeks prior, coinciding with the release of her latest film, the fourth in an action franchise in which she played a corrupt FBI agent. She’d delivered the opening monologue while wearing a one-shouldered black satin cocktail dress with a thigh slit, highlighting her slender yet curvy body; her long red hair had been styled into old Hollywood waves. Annabel was beautiful and sweet and charming, and if she didn’t have the best comic timing, she was completely game, which was just as important. In one sketch, she’d been called on to play a woodchuck, which entailed crawling around on all fours and wearing a furry suit and two enormous prosthetic front teeth. In fact, Danny had written this sketch, meaning it was plausible that they’d first been attracted to each other while rehearsing it.
The woodchuck part was endearing enough that I might have been able to forgive them both except that theirs was the third such pairing that had occurred at TNO in the last few years, and, as anyone knows who’s ever written a joke—or heard a fairy tale, or read an article in the style section of a newspaper—there’s a rule of three. In this case, it constituted the trend of a romance between a bona fide celebrity and a TNO staffer who’d met on the show. But, crucially, a bona fide female celebrity and a male staffer. The year before, at a wedding I’d attended, an icy blond Oscar-winning British actress named Imogen Wagner had married a cast member named Josh Beekman, best known for his recurring character Backne Guy. And the year before that, the head writer, Elliot Markovitz （five-foot-eight, forty, and my Top-Sider-wearing boss）， had married a multi-platinum-album-selling pop singer named Nicola Dornan （five-foot-ten, thirty, and a special envoy for the U.N.）。 And this, of course, was the essence of my fury: that such couples would never exist with the genders switched, that a gorgeous male celebrity would never fall in love with an ordinary, dorky, unkempt woman. Never. No matter how clever she was.
But I also knew, as I lay in bed glaring at the screen of my phone—Danny and Annabel’s debut as a couple had occurred the night before, in the form of making out at the club where Annabel’s twenty-fourth birthday party had been held—that I would write about my fury. Just as I always did, I’d turn my feelings into comedy, and that was how I’d cure myself.
CHAPTER 1
April 2018
WEEKLY SCHEDULE FOR
THE NIGHT OWLS
Monday 1 P.M. pitch meeting with guest host
Tuesday 5 P.M. start of all-night writing session
Wednesday 12 P.M. deadline for submitted sketches
Wednesday 3 P.M. table read of submitted sketches
Wednesday 9 P.M. preliminary show lineup posted internally
Wednesday night–Saturday morning rehearsals; scripts revised; sets built; special effects designed; hair, makeup, and costumes chosen and created; pre-tapes shot
Saturday 1 P.M. run-through of show
Saturday 8 P.M. dress rehearsal before a live audience
Saturday 11:30 P.M. live show before a new audience
Sunday 1:30 A.M. first after-party
Monday, 1:10 P.M.
For the meeting that marked the official start of that week’s show, I planned to pitch two sketches. But I had three ideas—you could write and submit more but pitch only two—so I’d play by ear which ones I went with, depending on how the guest host reacted to the pitches preceding mine. About forty writers, cast members, and producers were crammed into the seventeenth-floor office of the show’s creator and executive director, Nigel Petersen. Nigel’s seventeenth-floor office—not to be confused with his office on the eighth floor, adjacent to the studio where the show was filmed—was both well-appointed and never intended as a meeting place for anywhere close to forty people. This meant that Nigel sat behind his desk, the host sat in a leather armchair, a few lucky staffers nabbed a place on the sole couch, and everyone else leaned against the wall or sat on the floor.
Nigel started by introducing the host, who, as happened about once per season, was also that week’s musical guest. Noah Brewster had twice in the past been the musical guest, but this was his first time hosting. He was a cheesily handsome, extremely successful singer-songwriter who specialized in cloying pop music and was known for dating models in their early twenties. Though he looked like a surfer—piercing blue eyes, shaggy blond hair and stubble, a big toothy grin, and a jacked body—I’d learned by reading the host bio we were emailed each Monday morning that he’d grown up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. He was thirty-six, the same age I was, and had been famous ever since releasing the hit “Making Love in July” more than fifteen years before, when I was in college. “Making Love in July” was a paean to respectfully taking the virginity of a long-haired girl with “glowy skin,” “a pouty mouth,” and “raspberry nipples,” and it was one of those songs that had for a year played so often on the radio that, in spite of finding it execrable, I accidentally knew all the words. In the time since then, Noah Brewster had won many awards and sold more than twenty million albums, a figure I also had learned from his host bio. It was not a coincidence that his tenth album was being released the following week; hosts, musical guests, and the combinations therein were usually either celebrating newfound fame or promoting imminent work.
After Nigel introduced him, Noah Brewster looked around the room and said, “Thanks for letting a musician crash the comedy party. Hosting TNO has been a lifelong dream, ever since I was a middle school misfit sneaking down to the basement to watch after my parents went to bed.” He smiled his big smile at us, and I wondered if his teeth were real or veneers. After nine years at TNO, I was as accustomed as one could be to interacting with high-wattage celebrities, though it often was surprising to discover who was even better-looking in person （most of them）， who was an asshole （not many, but definitely a few）， who was shockingly vacuous （the lead from a popular police procedural stood out）， and who you wished would stay on the show forever because they were so great in the sketches and also just so fun to hang out with in the middle of the night.