Elliot, the head writer, called the meeting to order by sticking two fingers in each corner of his mouth and whistling, and we got down to it. Cast members who’d turned in sketches always gave themselves the leading role, which they’d read, whereas writers assigned roles to various cast members, and these assignments sometimes stuck and sometimes didn’t. If Nigel decided a cast member, especially a favored one, had a “light week,” he might unilaterally make reassignments as a sketch advanced.
We started with a sketch about the porn actress alleging that Trump had paid her to keep quiet about their affair, then there was a sketch where Noah was performing the national anthem before an NFL game as a duet with a famous diva played by Henrietta, and they were competing over the high notes. The first sketch to make me really laugh was the one now titled Blue-Eyed Soul, by Tony, in which Noah was the white politician preaching to a Black congregation.
Even after nine years, I found table reads fascinating because they represented the intersection of multiple creative and psychological forces. In a room filled with the people who mattered in my life, but with no outside audience, I was always desperate with curiosity to find out how my sketches would be received and what the other sketches were like; I was often shocked by the brilliance of some sketches and the crumminess of others; and it was unsettlingly easy to infer social dynamics by the laughter and warmth, or lack of, with which a sketch was received. More than once, it had been at a table read that I’d first suspected two people were romantically involved, or that someone was going to be let go at the end of the season.
An hour and five minutes in, we got to The Danny Horst Rule. After what I’d thought of as my best line, there was only half-hearted laughter, while, to my chagrin, the loudest laugh lines were the ones Danny had written for himself. Still, I could feel that the sketch’s catchily self-referential premise meant it was likely to make it to the next stage.
Formal feedback didn’t happen during a table read—whether your sketch ended up in the lineup for the show was the feedback. But before we went on to the following sketch, the writer Jeremiah, who was sitting behind Nigel, said, “What I really respect is Sally’s fearlessness in the face of offending half the staff here.”
From my chair against the window, I said, “I’ll take that as confirmation that it strikes a chord.”
A writer named Jenna said, “And they lived heteronormatively ever after,” and Bailey leaned back from the table to fist-bump Jenna.
By coincidence, my Blabbermouth sketch came right after The Danny Horst Rule, and Blabbermouth also got respectable if not inordinate laughs. Writers often sought out the cast members, including the host, who’d be reading their sketches to make suggestions about what tone to use. Though I hadn’t sought out Noah—I’d arrived at the read-through just before it started, and also, for some reason, I would have felt weird instructing him—he did a good job. The conceit was that the male judges of the singing competition were speaking over him, too, in addition to speaking over the female judge, and he and the female judge began doing other things, like filing their nails, playing checkers, and pulling out yoga mats and sitting in the lotus pose. The alchemy happened that I’d described to Noah the previous night, when a sketch went from words on a page to a much funnier live enactment.
After Blabbermouth, though, there was a string of duds, including one by a first-year writer named Douglas whom Henrietta, Viv, and I referred to behind his back as Catchphrase because his primary goal at TNO seemed to be to send a catchphrase into the zeitgeist. This week, the catchphrase that Catchphrase was trying to coin was “Ridin’ toward ya, ridin’ from ya”—the sketch featured Catchphrase himself on a unicycle—and I felt a flare-up of loathing. How and why had Catchphrase been hired? How and why was he so confident? In his second week, I’d suggested during rewrites for someone else’s sketch that a woman get on all fours to force a fart out before her date arrived. Referring to a viral sketch from seven years earlier, Catchphrase had said in a casual yet knowing tone, “That’s too derivative of My Girlfriend Never Farts.” I’d replied, “Hmm, I wonder if that’s because I’m the person who wrote My Girlfriend Never Farts.” Appearing not at all chastened, Catchphrase said, “Ah, so you’re a self-cannibalizer.”
Noah’s sketch—Choreographer—was after Ridin’。 It got laughs right away, when Nigel read the Madison Square Garden, May 2001 title card, and though the laughter dwindled rather than building as the sketch continued, it still seemed funny enough to make the cut on its own merit and not just because it had been written by the host. At the conclusion of the sketch, Noah made eye contact with me and nodded once. I nodded back.
The Cheesemonger was the very last sketch of the table read, by which point there was a palpable restlessness in the air. People were constantly getting up to use the bathroom or stretch their legs; even the midpoint break had been ninety minutes before. The earlier in the table read your sketch came up, the likelier it was, regardless of quality, to be well received. For this reason, and because I hadn’t been feeling all that inspired when I wrote the Cheesemonger, my expectations were low.
I was wrong, though; the sketch was met with lots of laughter. And most of it could be attributed to Noah. In the stage directions, I’d called for him to sing the lines that introduced the cheeses—“This is a Swissss,” or “Here we have a delectable Camembert”—and he really went for it, in an operatic way. I’d given the roles of the three customers, who approached the cheese stand one after the other, to Henrietta, Viv, and Bailey, and they all had great chemistry with Noah. Or perhaps it was just that everyone was relieved to have reached the end of the meeting.
As we all finally stood and people threw away their paper plates and chatted, I pulled my phone from my jeans pocket. Sometimes, of course, I had the impulse to check my phone during meetings, before remembering that there was an infinitesimal chance that any message from outside could matter to me as much as what was happening in this room.
I’d heard back from my college roommate Denise: Your friend can definitely try to ask out the doctor but most doctors would be like, “Oh thank you. You are too sweet.” And then move on with the visit. Basically not even acknowledging the asking.
I screenshotted the text, sent it to Viv—who was standing fifteen feet away, talking to Nigel and Autumn—and added, Obviously my roommate doesn’t know the friend here is you and the law of gravity doesn’t apply
WEDNESDAY, 9:13 P.M.
After the table read, Nigel, Elliot, Bob O’Leary, and another producer named Rick Klemm would go to Nigel’s seventeenth-floor office and close the door. An hour or two later, you’d find out if your sketch had been picked for the Saturday show—or more accurately, if it hadn’t yet been eliminated—when an intern appeared in the conference room and posted a copy of the list of sketches from the read-through with the picks highlighted, then unceremoniously left additional highlighted lists on the table. Meanwhile, in Nigel’s office, brightly colored index cards featuring sketch titles were pinned on a corkboard in order of their tentative appearance. All this information could have been sent out via email, sparing the mingling of people receiving good and bad news, but this was another TNO tradition that Nigel apparently had no desire to change. Typically, a handful of people were waiting in the conference room to see the list, and those who weren’t waiting quickly filtered in as word spread that picks were out.