Bruce Eric Kaplan is best known as a writer on Seinfeld and an Emmy nominated writer/producer on Six Feet Under. In his spare moments he is also a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. He just completed his first narrative cartoon book, Every Person on the Planet: An Only Somewhat Anxiety-Filled Tale for the Holidays. That book is about an average couple who decide to throw a party for the holidays. As their guest list becomes longer and longer they begin to worry that they will forget to invite someone so they invite every person on earth.
Buy Every Person on the Planet
Daniel Robert Epstein: What was the inspiration for Every Person on the Planet, was it a Hollywood party?
Bruce Eric Kaplan: Not one party in particular. It was definitely a lifetime of wanting to go to parties as well as dreading them and that was the inspiration.
DRE: How are you at parties?
BEK: Im dying to be invited to every party that exists and I dont want to go to any of them. Its like with everything with my life but parties are a little more magnified. Before I go Im in a state of terror and dread but once Im there, Im okay. I can enjoy myself to a degree and then after I leave Im talking about what a horrible time I had. Thats about it for every experience.
DRE: Isnt everyone in LA like that with the parties?
BEK: I have no idea, possibly. I trust you, if thats been your observation.
DRE: Do you see very Person on the Planet as a graphic novel?
BEK: I always envisioned it as a picture book for adults. I was inspired by books in the library I would see when I was a kid I would see them in the library. In comic books and graphic novels, it seems like every inch of it is covered in something. Jules Feiffer used to do picture books for adults and I always wanted to do one, but I never had the right idea until this came along.
DRE: Is Jules Feiffer someone that you admire a lot, because it seems that you two have a lot in common?
BEK: Truthfully, there are other people that I feel a more profound effect from. Charles Addams was a huge thing for me as a kid, but I like Jules Feiffer.
DRE: Is this your first sequential book?
BEK: Yeah, my first narrative, I had a cat book that was a sort of insane cat book thing.
DRE: Yeah, I read that you interviewed cats or something.
BEK: Yeah, it was like a mini coffee table book in a way or my version of a mini coffee table book. Cats talking about the cats that influenced their lives. The illustrations are the cats that are talking. Its the work of a madman.
DRE: Did you write Every Person on the Planet first and then do the pictures?
BEK: No, I do it like a short story. I wrote a short story in about six weeks, but I wrote it knowing that I was going to illustrate it so there were certain aspects of the writing where I knew where the drawings would go. But its how I write anything because I dont really have an easy process. Creatively, I struggle with everything. I tend to go through hell and back on each thing.
DRE: Do you even struggle with your TV stuff at this point?
BEK: Oh my God, I descend into madness when I have to write; I crawl under my desk, even with Six Feet Under which I worked on for five seasons. Writing the show in the fifth season was the same for me as writing for the first season. I would just cry and be miserable that someone was forcing me to actually do something. At a certain point in the process I loosen up, but very late.
DRE: I would imagine that you cant just cry in the writers room all the time.
BEK: The writers room is different. Being alone with a piece of paper, whether its a drawing or computer with writing is much different. I wouldnt cry in the writing room, maybe once I did. Thats like hanging out with people discussing people in your life. With television writing the characters become very real to you so you just talk about what did they do, why you like them or why you hate them.
DRE: How much did this story change from when you wrote it as a short story until you drew it?
BEK: Not that much. Just slight changes in terms of something I described which I realized would be much pithier in illustration.
DRE: Do you publish you non-cartoon writing at all?
BEK: Oh, no. Except for the cat thing this is my first published narrative.
DRE: Do you see yourself wanting to do longer form stuff now?
BEK: Yeah, I think so. Id like to do another picture book and a novel at some point.
DRE: A novel with no pictures?
BEK: Id probably say a novel with a few pictures. I always like when a novel has pictures at the top of each chapter. It doesnt happen as often as it should.
DRE: How often do you do a cartoon for The New Yorker?
BEK: Theres an art meeting once a week and usually I submit about ten cartoons then. How much I draw each day varies, I try and sit down at my drawing table everyday to work on them. If Im going into the studio to work on a TV show, I can only draw a few hours in the morning. If Im on hiatus from a TV show then I can spend six hours at my table drawing.
DRE: Ten a week sounds like a huge amount.
BEK: I actually do more than I send. But it isnt as much as you think; theyre rough drafts, so the drawings dont have to be as polished as the finished version. Although since my style is pretty spare some people cant even tell the difference between my rough and my finished. For me its a vast difference because Ive changed someones hand or something like that. Then in terms of the content, its closer to writing jokes than anything else. Comedy writers write a lot of jokes at once and maybe one of them is good. It is similar with cartoons, I always leave a day thinking Ive done this incredible work, but then I look at it the next day and theres these five captions that make sense to nobody, not even myself. I dont even remember what I thought the joke was. Some of those I send, because at the time I think theyre great and then I look at them later and theyre not so great.
DRE: Did you see or hear about the episode of Family Guy where Brian the dog went to work for The New Yorker?
BEK: No, not at all. My name is on Family Guy, I heard from a friend of mine, Im the dogs therapist, I believe.
DRE: Basically, Brian goes and works for The New Yorker and its this hoighty-toity place, very upper-crusty type thing. Thats the impression a lot of people have of The New Yorker and I was wondering if it is true at all.
BEK: I think thats more what The New Yorker may have been at one time. Now in the Conde Nast building, its not so hoighty-toity. So I dont know if its as true as it once was.
DRE: How long have you been working there?
BEK: About 14 years.
DRE: When you first got it, it must have been amazing.
BEK: Yeah, actually that was the time I cried. I cried for so long. I had been submitting cartoons every week for years. Then when I finally got an acceptance, its was the hugest thing professionally, that ever happened to me.
DRE: How was it when they offered you the regular position?
BEK: That wasnt as big of a deal because once they started buying them, they started doing it regularly. Then theres a contract where you stop being a freelancer and start being a regular and really its just a different pay scale. It doesnt actually guarantee you anything. You could be a regular and never appear in the magazine but obviously the following year they probably wouldnt ask you to be a regular.
DRE: Has anyone ever offered you the chance to actually work for a comic book company, not superheroes, but like a small press?
BEK: No ones asked me. I guess I would approach them if I had the idea. Ive never been contacted by any comic book company.
DRE: If amazingly, Marvel Comics said, Would you want to work on a superhero character? Would you have any interest?
BEK: Maybe if it was something that matched my sensibility, but could you see me doing that?
DRE: They have some really good comics; theyre always revamping characters, so who knows. Maybe you could pick a character that was never used properly or hasnt been used for years and do something interesting with them.
I got to interview Danny Hoch years ago. I always wondered if it was him talking about not getting on Seinfeld is what inspired the Kathy Griffin episode of Seinfeld where she says bad things about Jerry. I figured I would ask you since you wrote the episode.
BEK: No, he goes around saying that all the time. The Kathy Griffin episode is based on Kathy Griffin. Kathy Griffin involves her life in her act and she did an episode of Seinfeld. She was working on Seinfeld the week the Golden Globes were airing, she wanted to bring a signed picture to her Golden Globe party and Jerry or one of the actors, didnt sign this picture for her. She did this monologue at UnCabaret or somewhere in Los Angeles. So she talked about how Jerry Seinfeld is an asshole. Jerry loved it. He loved the performance so much that he used video of it as part of the warm up for the studio audience. Then Jerry had an idea for an episode where Kathy comes back as her character. So it had nothing to do with Danny Hoch but he keeps saying that it did.
DRE: You also wrote the episode of Seinfeld when Elaine gets the job doing cartoons at The New Yorker, did you have to get permission from The New Yorker?
BEK: Yeah, they had to sign off on it.
DRE: Thats hysterical. What TV show are you working on now?
BEK: I just turned in a pilot to HBO.
DRE: Whats it about?
BEK: Its about teenagers. But I have to wait to see if they actually do anything with it.
DRE: How has working in TV affected doing your cartoons?
BEK: Basically experiences show up a lot in cartoons because I think of them as a journal. So whatever Im doing, when I sit down the next day to draw a cartoon, that experience is going to be reflected in the content. In terms of formally, I would say its the opposite. The cartoons probably have affected my television writing in that with cartoons you have to be so economical in a caption. Its one sentence to capture this whole situation so youre forced to be incredibly economical with words and content. I feel like thats actually helped the television writing in terms of getting a fair amount of information across quickly.
DRE: Have you ever wanted to do a cartoon?
BEK: Yeah. The first thing I did in television was write a pilot for an animated show based on my cartoons for CBS. But its never been an enormous goal of mine.
DRE: What was the pilot like?
BEK: I thought it was good. At the time, 15 years ago, the people at CBS loved it. This was when CBS was Touched By An Angel, not the CBS of Survivor. It was not remotely the demographic of the show that I turned in. The show was called This Stinking Town. It followed the lives of 15 animated characters in a fictional urban world. It was sort of a comedic, animated soap opera, but with New Yorker-like interstitial moments. Youd follow a character in a scene and you would pass by an animated character whod give you a caption for a moment. It was very beloved by readers in Hollywood. I got a lot of meetings off of it.
DRE: Would you do a TV show that you didnt create at this point?
BEK: Sure. I wasnt planning to do Six Feet Under, but the script was sent to me and I just really connected with the show. I would go do another show someone else created if I felt it I had something to say through those characters.
DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?
BEK: I looked at it when the request for the interview came. I had seen it once with the writers of Six Feet Under for a character. We looked at it for Edie [played by Mena Suvari]. We felt that Edie should look like them. Oftentimes all eight of us writers would huddle around the writers assistants computer to look at it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy Every Person on the Planet
Daniel Robert Epstein: What was the inspiration for Every Person on the Planet, was it a Hollywood party?
Bruce Eric Kaplan: Not one party in particular. It was definitely a lifetime of wanting to go to parties as well as dreading them and that was the inspiration.
DRE: How are you at parties?
BEK: Im dying to be invited to every party that exists and I dont want to go to any of them. Its like with everything with my life but parties are a little more magnified. Before I go Im in a state of terror and dread but once Im there, Im okay. I can enjoy myself to a degree and then after I leave Im talking about what a horrible time I had. Thats about it for every experience.
DRE: Isnt everyone in LA like that with the parties?
BEK: I have no idea, possibly. I trust you, if thats been your observation.
DRE: Do you see very Person on the Planet as a graphic novel?
BEK: I always envisioned it as a picture book for adults. I was inspired by books in the library I would see when I was a kid I would see them in the library. In comic books and graphic novels, it seems like every inch of it is covered in something. Jules Feiffer used to do picture books for adults and I always wanted to do one, but I never had the right idea until this came along.
DRE: Is Jules Feiffer someone that you admire a lot, because it seems that you two have a lot in common?
BEK: Truthfully, there are other people that I feel a more profound effect from. Charles Addams was a huge thing for me as a kid, but I like Jules Feiffer.
DRE: Is this your first sequential book?
BEK: Yeah, my first narrative, I had a cat book that was a sort of insane cat book thing.
DRE: Yeah, I read that you interviewed cats or something.
BEK: Yeah, it was like a mini coffee table book in a way or my version of a mini coffee table book. Cats talking about the cats that influenced their lives. The illustrations are the cats that are talking. Its the work of a madman.
DRE: Did you write Every Person on the Planet first and then do the pictures?
BEK: No, I do it like a short story. I wrote a short story in about six weeks, but I wrote it knowing that I was going to illustrate it so there were certain aspects of the writing where I knew where the drawings would go. But its how I write anything because I dont really have an easy process. Creatively, I struggle with everything. I tend to go through hell and back on each thing.
DRE: Do you even struggle with your TV stuff at this point?
BEK: Oh my God, I descend into madness when I have to write; I crawl under my desk, even with Six Feet Under which I worked on for five seasons. Writing the show in the fifth season was the same for me as writing for the first season. I would just cry and be miserable that someone was forcing me to actually do something. At a certain point in the process I loosen up, but very late.
DRE: I would imagine that you cant just cry in the writers room all the time.
BEK: The writers room is different. Being alone with a piece of paper, whether its a drawing or computer with writing is much different. I wouldnt cry in the writing room, maybe once I did. Thats like hanging out with people discussing people in your life. With television writing the characters become very real to you so you just talk about what did they do, why you like them or why you hate them.
DRE: How much did this story change from when you wrote it as a short story until you drew it?
BEK: Not that much. Just slight changes in terms of something I described which I realized would be much pithier in illustration.
DRE: Do you publish you non-cartoon writing at all?
BEK: Oh, no. Except for the cat thing this is my first published narrative.
DRE: Do you see yourself wanting to do longer form stuff now?
BEK: Yeah, I think so. Id like to do another picture book and a novel at some point.
DRE: A novel with no pictures?
BEK: Id probably say a novel with a few pictures. I always like when a novel has pictures at the top of each chapter. It doesnt happen as often as it should.
DRE: How often do you do a cartoon for The New Yorker?
BEK: Theres an art meeting once a week and usually I submit about ten cartoons then. How much I draw each day varies, I try and sit down at my drawing table everyday to work on them. If Im going into the studio to work on a TV show, I can only draw a few hours in the morning. If Im on hiatus from a TV show then I can spend six hours at my table drawing.
DRE: Ten a week sounds like a huge amount.
BEK: I actually do more than I send. But it isnt as much as you think; theyre rough drafts, so the drawings dont have to be as polished as the finished version. Although since my style is pretty spare some people cant even tell the difference between my rough and my finished. For me its a vast difference because Ive changed someones hand or something like that. Then in terms of the content, its closer to writing jokes than anything else. Comedy writers write a lot of jokes at once and maybe one of them is good. It is similar with cartoons, I always leave a day thinking Ive done this incredible work, but then I look at it the next day and theres these five captions that make sense to nobody, not even myself. I dont even remember what I thought the joke was. Some of those I send, because at the time I think theyre great and then I look at them later and theyre not so great.
DRE: Did you see or hear about the episode of Family Guy where Brian the dog went to work for The New Yorker?
BEK: No, not at all. My name is on Family Guy, I heard from a friend of mine, Im the dogs therapist, I believe.
DRE: Basically, Brian goes and works for The New Yorker and its this hoighty-toity place, very upper-crusty type thing. Thats the impression a lot of people have of The New Yorker and I was wondering if it is true at all.
BEK: I think thats more what The New Yorker may have been at one time. Now in the Conde Nast building, its not so hoighty-toity. So I dont know if its as true as it once was.
DRE: How long have you been working there?
BEK: About 14 years.
DRE: When you first got it, it must have been amazing.
BEK: Yeah, actually that was the time I cried. I cried for so long. I had been submitting cartoons every week for years. Then when I finally got an acceptance, its was the hugest thing professionally, that ever happened to me.
DRE: How was it when they offered you the regular position?
BEK: That wasnt as big of a deal because once they started buying them, they started doing it regularly. Then theres a contract where you stop being a freelancer and start being a regular and really its just a different pay scale. It doesnt actually guarantee you anything. You could be a regular and never appear in the magazine but obviously the following year they probably wouldnt ask you to be a regular.
DRE: Has anyone ever offered you the chance to actually work for a comic book company, not superheroes, but like a small press?
BEK: No ones asked me. I guess I would approach them if I had the idea. Ive never been contacted by any comic book company.
DRE: If amazingly, Marvel Comics said, Would you want to work on a superhero character? Would you have any interest?
BEK: Maybe if it was something that matched my sensibility, but could you see me doing that?
DRE: They have some really good comics; theyre always revamping characters, so who knows. Maybe you could pick a character that was never used properly or hasnt been used for years and do something interesting with them.
I got to interview Danny Hoch years ago. I always wondered if it was him talking about not getting on Seinfeld is what inspired the Kathy Griffin episode of Seinfeld where she says bad things about Jerry. I figured I would ask you since you wrote the episode.
BEK: No, he goes around saying that all the time. The Kathy Griffin episode is based on Kathy Griffin. Kathy Griffin involves her life in her act and she did an episode of Seinfeld. She was working on Seinfeld the week the Golden Globes were airing, she wanted to bring a signed picture to her Golden Globe party and Jerry or one of the actors, didnt sign this picture for her. She did this monologue at UnCabaret or somewhere in Los Angeles. So she talked about how Jerry Seinfeld is an asshole. Jerry loved it. He loved the performance so much that he used video of it as part of the warm up for the studio audience. Then Jerry had an idea for an episode where Kathy comes back as her character. So it had nothing to do with Danny Hoch but he keeps saying that it did.
DRE: You also wrote the episode of Seinfeld when Elaine gets the job doing cartoons at The New Yorker, did you have to get permission from The New Yorker?
BEK: Yeah, they had to sign off on it.
DRE: Thats hysterical. What TV show are you working on now?
BEK: I just turned in a pilot to HBO.
DRE: Whats it about?
BEK: Its about teenagers. But I have to wait to see if they actually do anything with it.
DRE: How has working in TV affected doing your cartoons?
BEK: Basically experiences show up a lot in cartoons because I think of them as a journal. So whatever Im doing, when I sit down the next day to draw a cartoon, that experience is going to be reflected in the content. In terms of formally, I would say its the opposite. The cartoons probably have affected my television writing in that with cartoons you have to be so economical in a caption. Its one sentence to capture this whole situation so youre forced to be incredibly economical with words and content. I feel like thats actually helped the television writing in terms of getting a fair amount of information across quickly.
DRE: Have you ever wanted to do a cartoon?
BEK: Yeah. The first thing I did in television was write a pilot for an animated show based on my cartoons for CBS. But its never been an enormous goal of mine.
DRE: What was the pilot like?
BEK: I thought it was good. At the time, 15 years ago, the people at CBS loved it. This was when CBS was Touched By An Angel, not the CBS of Survivor. It was not remotely the demographic of the show that I turned in. The show was called This Stinking Town. It followed the lives of 15 animated characters in a fictional urban world. It was sort of a comedic, animated soap opera, but with New Yorker-like interstitial moments. Youd follow a character in a scene and you would pass by an animated character whod give you a caption for a moment. It was very beloved by readers in Hollywood. I got a lot of meetings off of it.
DRE: Would you do a TV show that you didnt create at this point?
BEK: Sure. I wasnt planning to do Six Feet Under, but the script was sent to me and I just really connected with the show. I would go do another show someone else created if I felt it I had something to say through those characters.
DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?
BEK: I looked at it when the request for the interview came. I had seen it once with the writers of Six Feet Under for a character. We looked at it for Edie [played by Mena Suvari]. We felt that Edie should look like them. Oftentimes all eight of us writers would huddle around the writers assistants computer to look at it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
courtneyriot:
Bruce Eric Kaplan is best known as a writer on Seinfeld and an Emmy nominated writer/producer on Six Feet Under. In his spare moments he is also a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. He just completed his first narrative cartoon book, Every Person on the Planet: An Only Somewhat Anxiety-Filled Tale...