- You've probably laughed at his jokes.

If you've watched the Daily Show or the TV series Shrink, Ted Tremper is an award-winning writer.

And he's from the Northwest.

In this episode of Traverse Talks hear how young he was when he discovered the Daily Show about dealing with the death of his mother and comedy in politics.

(Rock Music) So you, you mentioned you grew up in the Northwest, but you spend time in North Bend.

Was this before or after they had the outlet malls?

- It was, it was after outlet malls.

- So did you spend time there?

- Yeah, we were in what is called "the truck town exit", which is exit 34.

It used to be Ken's truck town.

And now it's a bunch of other ones.

So as people are driving over to WSU from the west side, they'll know that sort of the last stop before the mountain range.

So if you get off there and turn left and then take your first like long right that's Middle Fork Road.

And we were way like four miles down that road, like we literally had to dig our own driveway.

And then we used a lot of the wood that we cleared to build the house and whatnot.

So it was like, it was an adventure.

- Mmmhmm.

- We were raised with no television because my dad had lied to us and told my brother and I, that we were too far for the cable to reach and that the trees were too tall for a satellite dish.

(laughing) So my mom was an elementary school teacher at Woodridge Elementary in Bellevue and for whatever reason they had cable.

And so I would go from my school to her school on the bus, and then I would record a six hour VHS cassette tape when we left on Comedy Central and then I would get it the next day.

And so I was always watching TV one day too late.

And that VHS cassette tape ended up becoming my paperweight at the Daily Show when I went to go work there with.

- Okay.

So that moment, when you got your job at the Daily Show as a field reporter, what did others say?

I assume you told them that used to record the show when you're a teenager.

Like, what did others say?

- Yeah, that was my first sort of really big break job.

It's a, so I was a field producer, which is basically the crew is extremely small.

Like when you're going out, it's, it's one producer and then two camera guys, a sound guy and the correspondent, and you go off to these crazy places and, and interview oftentimes somewhat crazy people.

But it's interesting.

I feel like the, the environment, the Daily Show is so welcoming and so wonderful that they kind of invited me to be as weird as I was and was very much like I've oftentimes like played up my a hayseed country boy demeanor because it it's just nice.

It's the way that I feel.

And it was very entertaining to a lot of these people who were like born and raised in New York city to meet a guy who, you know, grew up, fly fishing and didn't have a television.

And Hassan Minhaj very early on, would go around and just ask people if they had talked to me yet.

And then they, they would say, no, they'd say you should go talk to him.

And then he gave me the nickname, the most interesting man in the world, because I've had a lot of like weird job.

My first job was shining shoes at Nordstrom's in Bellevue.

And that was like still to this day, one of, if not the best job that I've ever had.

And I taught English in Japan and, and lived in New Haven and, and was a special ed paraprofessional and worked in New Haven public schools and like all different weird lives that I'd lived up until that point.

It was just very entertaining to have had lived so many different lives, but then also just knowing random stuff.

I mean, that was kind of our currency growing up.

I had very nerdy friends and we're a big trivia hounds.

So it was sort of, you know, I kind of became like the Wilson neighbor on home improvement, but to all of my colleagues at the Daily Show.

(laughing) - Ted, if your parents could describe you as a kid, what would they say?

- Well, I've, I've found later in life that my siblings and my family members will constantly remind me how protective my mom was of me.

And I think a lot of that is just because I kind of, I was the youngest.

So I got away with more than anybody else had.

I think my parents were fairly exhausted, but I I'll tell my girlfriend.

If I met me at age like 6, 8, 10, or 12, I would be so annoyed.

I would not be able to deal with it at all.

Like I was one, a super, super overweight kid.

I weighed 246 pounds when I was like 5' 3" - Really?

- And think most kids who grow up as big boned Husky children will tell you that the usually humor is the defense mechanism that you find to sort of have entree into different social groups.

So that was a big thing, you know, how to get attention, but also, you know, just having funny friends and things like that.

But, but yeah, incredibly annoying kid, I think, but hopefully also somewhat charming.

(laughing) Just always trying to get more and more attention through humor, I think was kind of the, the M.O.

- Do you have a moment or a memory of when you realize being funny was helping you fit in or made you feel good?

- I think, yeah.

I think just making, it's interesting making my mom laugh, making my dad laugh, certainly, always felt good, but I think really when we moved out to the country, it was just the thing where we didn't have any other entertainment other than each other also growing up, you know, my mom was very sick, growing up.

She had, if you've ever seen the movie, the Big Sick, she had the same disease that the woman has in that movie where it's just a terrible auto immune disease.

And so she got that when I was about eight and then she had it until I was about 12.

And then it went into remission until I was about 15 or 16.

So we had like these three great years between the two times that she was sick, but when we were growing up, she kept it all very close to her vest about how sick she was, but she would just need to be bedridden a lot of the time.

And I think in that case, you know, when you have somebody that you love, the person you love most, you know, in more or less constant pain, it's pretty nice to be able to make them laugh and make them happy.

So I think that, that, you know, in terms of moments that I remember, I don't remember a specific moment in that regard, more or less, it was just how much fun it was to see her happy.

You know, I think that that's probably the earliest memory of that.

- Yeah.

So Ted, when you were in college, your mom passed away, what is it like to grieve a parent?

- Oh, goodness.

Well, it was an especially hard circumstance because I had, I took a summer course at WSU.

The full story is I had fallen deeply in love with a woman who I'd started dating.

And then two months into our relationship, I found out that she was leading a like Maury Povich level, double life.

So she was, she was, she, I was very naive.

This is how and, and, and a word to all the college students out there that if you are dating someone for two months and you never have been to their apartment because the roommate is really annoying, they are in a relationship with their roommate.

(laughing) And so basically I had found out that this woman was leading a double life, like on our two month.

You know, at that time I was young enough that you still had like a two month anniversary, even though that's not what the word anniversary means.

So that had happened.

And I decided, you know, I was taking summer school classes cause she was a year ahead of me and I wanted to be able to graduate on the same time that she was, I was all in.

- Oh My.

- And so I finished the summer term and found all of this out.

And then I decided I'm going to go on a road trip with my best friends from high school.

So I went back to North Bend, we got our Subaru Outback together.

And then I went on a 4,700 mile road trip.

And the day after I got back, my mom died.

- Oh my God.

(somber music) And it was very, it was very bad.

My brother and I were both there.

And, you know, in the worst imaginable terms, we're there trying to save her life and we're unable to do that.

And so at that point being as close to my mom as I was, that truly was the worst thing that I could have imagined.

And so for me, what that did was, you know, basically having my heart completely destroyed.

And then 15 days later having my mom die, it set me off into this period where I realized there truly are no promises and there are no rules in life really.

And basically not only, you know, you, you sort of get this blistering reminder that every moment is precious, but also that you really should be charting your own course because there are absolutely no guarantees that, you know, a piece of an airplane could fall off and kill you or a pandemic can hit, you know, any number of horrible tragedies can happen that are just completely bizarre freak accidents.

Yeah.

So I think that, you know, for me, it made me extraordinarily grateful for the people that I had in my life and specifically the friends I had at WSU and the professors I had, you know, one of the things that came out of it, Peter Chilson who's I think still the head of the creative writing department right there at WCU.

He and I did an independent study where basically I just wrote what ended up becoming a, a longer essay about my mom dying.

That was really the only way to process that, that I had and my friendship with him and with Buddy Levy, who was also another professor there, it got me through it in the only way that I think that I could have, which was to turn it into something creative, which is what I was doing with Peter, but then also Buddy, not being a stranger to tragedy, but also having a great sense of humor.

You know, that was the way that, that I had been accustomed to getting through things.

And they were both really helpful reminders for that, but it also became a reminder, you know, throughout the entirety of my mom's illness, you know, the thing that kept our spirits up was that we laughed all the time, you know?

And I think that that's yeah, I think a lot of it was, was that was, was taking every day as it comes.

I actually, Buddy always reminds me one of the first things I did.

I knew that I wasn't going to be in a place where I should be dating anyone for quite some time.

So I had really long hair at that time, I cut my hair into a mullet and I referred to it as my blue period.

Cause I knew that I was, I was giving myself permission to be very depressed.

And I referred to the mullet as the great mullet that liberates upon seeing.

But the great mullet that liberates upon seeing was named that because Buddy and I were walking across Avery to Thompson hall and he was just laughing because everyone that saw my mullet would either get really happy or really angry or really confused.

(laughing) And to me it was this thing where if I, if that would bring people into the moment that they had now than I felt like that was kind of a small liberation that a mullet could provide.

- What a great story.

Oh my goodness.

- These are good formative years.

- I think you could definitely pull off a mullet today.

If you had to do it again, we'll see.

- It's funny.

They've actually become quite fashionable.

I've been wearing Crocs for like 12 years and now those Post Malone has made those very, very popular.

- They're awful!

- I've just used them as gardening shoes.

And because, you know, they, they seem to never disintegrate.

- Crocs will kill people.

I don't know how many times my husband has slipped - Oh!

- going down the hill in Crocs.

- So it's funny.

I don't have, I've never used them in an icy climate, but I imagine, yes, the on-water, they would just be immediately the slippery.

- In a recent article.

You, you mentioned how after the 2016 election, you became depressed for a variety of reasons, but you took a break, but in 2017, so Shrink comes out.

Right?

- Oh yeah!

- And I'm wondering, because it's about a med med school graduate, who's doing free psychotherapy in his parents' garage, which is brilliant.

- Yeah.

- Ted that's hysterical.

Did you work through any feelings when you created that when you were I believe in improv first and then when it was a show?

- Yeah.

So, so the, the origin story of that was, you know, I came up through the Chicago improv scene and, and this is at a time when not every phone had a camera.

So there were all these brilliant improvisers who nobody was filming.

And I was going to graduate school at the time of the school of the Art Institute of Chicago.

And I did some math and I found out that my graduate degree costs 3 cents a second.

And out of spite, I started checking out video cameras all the time to get my money's worth out of my degree.

And I started taping the improv shows that I would go to.

My friend, Jared Larson, who is still one of my very best friends.

He also went to SEIC.

So we would tape shows for each other that we'd missed.

We would also make DVDs of them for our improv heroes.

So we sort of built up a relationship with them as being the guys who filmed stuff.

And then I ended up making a web series called Breakups that won a bunch of festival awards.

That was all improvised breakups.

My goal always was to make people feel about improv the way that I did, because mostly when you think about improv, you really think of a terrible show you've seen in person or Whose Line Is It Anyway?

And in Chicago, it's very different Chicago.

It's all about truth and about finding honesty and small moments and letting that and letting emotion and character be the things that make you laugh.

In level one of any improv class in Chicago, you'll learn, never make a joke unless your character is making a joke.

And that is illustrating about your character.

So Shrink became, can I do this on an episodic level?

And so Tim Baltz, who is the star of Shrink he and I made that pilot for $211 in Chicago and ended up winning the New York television festival.

And then later on got sold.

But from the moment I pressed record on the first frame of Shrink to when it debuted on Seeso, which is it's now on the NBC app.

If people want to watch it, was I think four years and six months.

So, you know, it was an extremely long process, but for me, I've always been fascinated by characters who did everything right And somehow everything goes wrong.

So David in Shrink, he went to medical school and accrued $486,000 in debt.

And anybody who's gone to medical school knows there's a thing called matching where you match with your residency program and a very small percentage of people don't match.

And in David's case, he was dating somebody and only applied to the program that she did because they were going to go there together.

And his grades were very good, but he screwed up his interview.

And so he didn't match.

So now looking in the face of $486,000 in debt, he realized the only job that he could get that would even get close to being able to pay off his loans was therapy.

He basically realizes if he can do 5,128 hours of supervised clinical therapy, he already has the pre-recs to become a therapist.

So that's what the show is about.

- I'm loving it!

- So yeah, a lot of my ideas and the things I'm fascinated by are those stories of people who did everything, right.

Everything was going perfectly and then it all goes horribly wrong.

And then using humor as a way to elucidate these stories because yeah, it's, I it's, I'm realizing, as I talked to you, that that essentially has been the story of my life.

(laughing) Not that I did everything right.

I did most things wrong, but I think that, you know, having traumatic events teach you where you belong is, is really important.

- And so many comedic writers and comedians really talk about their standup days.

Why is that such a big stepping block to success for people?

- I think it's a few things.

I think whether you're doing improv or sketch or stand up, you know, in standup, it's, it's typical that the sort of ballpark figure is you're going to be bad for five years.

It's fair to say almost all comedy is pretty bad.

Most people are only seeing the very best of it.

If you look at any comic or any improviser, the people who stuck with it, and if you stick with it long enough, I think in Amy Poehler's book, she, she says something along the lines of, if you're nice to people and make friends, let's just continue doing improv for 10 years and one of your friends will hire you or something like that.

But I think there's a few things like, it's, you look back at those times with great fondness because by and large, once you're playing at a, at a national level or you're working on a TV show or whatever you can't fail anymore, you know, so the times when you were young enough to do a very bad job, you know, be able to have your friends laugh at you or you to be able to laugh at yourself, or, you know, you long for that.

You know, and it's really interesting having, you know, I show ran a show for comedy central called This Week at the Comedy Cellar.

And I got to see Chris Rock come and try out jokes at the comedy cellar.

And it's very interesting because if you see a very, very famous person and one of the greatest stand-ups of all time do comedy in a cellar with a hundred people in it, him being Chris Rock gets him about five minutes of purchase.

And then he has to be funny or else that people aren't going to laugh.

And it's so fascinating to watch that craft and watch how important an audience is to that craft.

Cause they're the governor that tells you, oh, you went too far or you didn't go far enough.

Or most comics will tape their sets and then relisten to them and learn, oh, this, you know, it took me too long to get to the punchline here.

Like they're craftspeople, - They're really working on it.

- Yeah.

And I think that, you know, Norm McDonald is sort of gone on the record about why it's so hard for comics now, because you know, if a famous person goes to a different club, other than the comedy side of the comedy side, that they lock your phones up because of this, because of what I'm about to explain.

But if you are, you know, Amy Schumer or, you know, a fairly famous comic and you go and do jokes at a club and somebody tapes your set and its jokes, you're working out, and you say something that is horribly offensive, that you will later yourself know, oh, I went too far here.

I got to fix this, blah, blah, blah.

If they go put that on the internet, then you are the comic that said, XYZ, disincentivizes.

- You're done.

- Yeah, you may not be canceled, but you know that one, you can't do that joke, but it creates this situation where a hundred people don't go into a painter's studio and look over their shoulder and comment on, on the work that they're making or, you know, a hundred patrons of a restaurant, don't go into the kitchen in the off hours and sample the dishes that fail.

- Yeah - But comedy is, is something that can't exist in a vacuum.

- Wow.

- And, you know, the importance of the craft is trying it out in front of smaller audiences and getting that feedback.

So that way, when you present it writ large as a finished project, it is allowed to become a forensic work.

It's allowed to be deconstructed.

- Right.

Fascinating.

Before you were mentioning, you know, I'm going to bring it back to your mom, you wrote an essay to deal with the death.

And I'm curious, did they edit that?

- There was no, really they, they, yeah, they, they, I mean, they were provided notes and whatnot, and it's funny because that was sort of one of the two stories I submitted for graduate school for writing the essay.

If I recall was called "Everything I Can Remember" and ended up winning the Landscape's award for Best Nonfiction.

- Oh my goodness.

- But I later worked on that at, I got a master's in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

And I ended up writing a story that was, I'm realizing now how much I like long titles, but that story was called the Updated and Annotated Version of the Story About How I Felt And Sometimes Still Feel That I Killed My Mother.

- Oh, good (laughs) - And what that was, was the original essay but just with footnotes of all the things that I felt I had left out because I was too close to or too scared about writing it, I actually, I did Alex Hammond, who at that time was the head of the English department.

I just asked him if I could do a Hemingway study cause I'd kind of fallen in love with his writing.

So I feel like a lot of the essay that I'd written and I think a lot of essays that people write when they're undergraduates are just kind of pretending to be your favorite writer.

So I think a lot of what the original essay was, was just me pretending to be, or doing my best Ernest Hemingway impression.

- Interesting.

- And as I got older and you sort of experiment and you find your voice and, you know, become more aware of the fact that truth is much more important than style.

I just became way more candid in the way that I was writing.

And I think I was, you know, in my mid twenties then, so it felt a little bit more, not only ownership of the story, but I think, you know, so much had changed since then that, you know, looking back on it, I was a little bit less afraid of the memories that I was having, you know, I sort of needed to process a different layer and it had become very interesting because I'd realized how much of my sort of story that I had been telling myself and the person I'd become was the kid who watched his mom die.

And, and sort of that was in a lot of ways, was a betrayal of what my mom would have wanted my life to be.

You know, I sort of became very, you know, when, when you live through something that's very traumatic, there's a temptation to either make that the most important piece of your identity.

And in a lot of ways, I think it is and needs to be for a time.

But in writing that second piece, the thing that really helped me was realizing that it didn't have to be that way, you know, for, for, for a decade, really, anytime I would think of my mom, I used the metaphor I used was it was sort of a river that led to a waterfall and the waterfall was always what it was like to be giving my mom CPR and to, to watch her die.

And I guess I sort of realized in, in, in, in my, my mid twenties and now into my thirties, that I'm allowed to get off the river and, and walk back up before I go over the waterfall, if that makes sense.

- Oh it does.

- Yeah.

So I think that was that, that was the bigger part of, of learning the lesson of surviving, something like that.

And, and living through it is, you know, in the ways that it defines you, you're allowed to have the bad parts and the good parts.

- Yeah And that's something, I think that was odd.

Well, I don't know.

I don't know if it's odd, but it took me truly 10 to 15 years to realize that.

- I mean, that's like a, sounds like also a journey of, I know the word authentic is kind of a big deal now, people trying to be authentic.

- Sure - But when you're young, it's almost as if you don't have a whole lot of mentors to help you process your very unique feelings about grief.

And so I find that process for you was very moving and interesting, and I hope that it helps others too.

- Yeah, I hope so.

It's funny.

I think the big lesson is, is really not only to always find humor in things I'm remembering something now, which I haven't thought about forever, which was, she was a wonderful student therapist at WCU, but I went to the, the sort of student counseling the fall after my mom died and this relationship fell apart.

And I sat down for our first session and I said, well, I was in love with a woman.

And it was completely like redesigning my life so that we could be together.

And then I found out that she was living with her boyfriend of two years, and then I went on a road trip.

And the day after I got back, I watched my mom die.

And this woman like took that all in.

And I think her response was literally wow.

Okay.

And it was so clear that she just had no idea what to say.

That, that for me was a thing where like, those are actually the moments that are to speak to authenticity, the most beautiful, profound, hilarious moments I think in life are ones that, you know, it's things that you can't make up because the simplicity of people's natural reactions are the things that are beautiful.

- Yeah.

- You know, and I think that, I think that younger writers, and I don't know if younger writers typically, but me certainly in a lot of my cohort when I was an undergrad, we were always looking for a way to make the sentence sound fancy or the writing sound good or the plot point to, to feel right or whatever, you know, it's, it's the reason why you get so many stories in, in young writers that end in suicide or end in a murder.

And in, you know, some grandiose thing when in reality, you know, recently I've really fallen in love with a there's a graphic novelist and cartoonist named Daniel Clowes it's spelled C L O W E S. And some of the funniest moments in this guy's writing are just people being pathetic.

And I mean that in, in, in, in its original intention, that it elicits pathos in the moments that you can't see them.

And, and it makes you realize the moments in one's own life when you've done something, that's just so ridiculous and embarrassing that you have to start laughing.

You know?

And I think I'm just specifically thinking about the last time I ate something out of a trash can, which was much more recently than I'd like to admit, (laughs) but it's things like that where it ought to be the lesson that one takes from tragedy is, oh boy, even the most ridiculous things, you know, you can find joy from them, whether it's making a toilet stool out of discarded wood or, you know, finding something actually really beautiful to make, you know, the lessons are all over.

- That's Ted Tremper writer and co-creator of the TV show Shrink.

You'll hear more from Ted.

We have a second part of our conversation on Traverse Talks with Sueann Romella