Scott Aukerman is a comedian and writer who created the podcast Comedy Bang Bang, which was picked up by IFC and turned into a tv show. Most recently he directed and produced the Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis episode with President Barack Obama, which received millions of views and created a lot of conversation. Willy Staley interviewed Aukerman for the Talk section of The New York Time Magazine. In the article, Scott Aukerman Goes Off-Script, one particular Q/A stuck out:
For a long time, you wrote movies and pilots that didn’t get made. Was that hard, writing into the void?
It was 10 years of just banging my head against the wall. It’s the reason I started doing the podcast, honestly. I figured I’m paid really well to do these screenplays, I’ll just do this thing for fun in my spare time. I wasn’t thinking, If I do a podcast, an emerging comedy network, IFC, is going to hear it, and be a fan of it and try to turn it into a TV show. There’s no way you can plan for that stuff.
If you read through Aukerman’s Wikipedia page, you will see that there were a handful of projects that he was working on or scripts that he had written that never came to fruition. Like he says, it was 10 years of frustration in never seeing his pieces of writing come to have an audience. Yet, what’s most admirable about this story is that he decided to just take matters into his own hands and find a platform where he could share his creativity with people outside of the writers’ room. His intentions were not to turn it into what it eventually became, but just to have an avenue to express himself and not have to wait for someone else to tell him when he could share it.
The other relatable piece is the idea of “writing into the void” or creating when you are not sure if it will ever be something more then just that – creating. When your profession is to create or write or build something and it never is consumed, at what point do you stop? One year, two years…ten years? If Aukerman had stopped writing and just given up, he never would have had the chance to create something he loved, meet the people he has met along the way and eventually make something that would include the President of the United States!
Even though he banged his head against the wall for years, he did not give up. Even if he had moments of doubt (which I imagine he did), he never cashed it in and went to get a desk job at an advertising firm. Even though there was no crystal ball to tell him that he would eventually have a tv show, he still trusted. He just kept at it, while at the same time creating his own opportunities. So in the end, what are we supposed to take from Aukerman’s story? It is the stuff you don’t plan for, that is the best stuff of all.
Images via Christian Oth for The New York Times
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