October Review Challenge, #3 - Evidence of influences

October Review Challenge, #3 - "What artistic influence has the strongest influence on your work?"

All of us as artists are a product of our influences. Certain stories or pieces of art speak to us deeply enough that we carry them along with us, and often shape our aesthetics going forward. So naturally they’re going to shape what we produce in our own work.

I’m sure sharp-eyed audience members can spot the major pieces that influenced me. There would be no Mrs. Hawking without Batman: The Animated Series. I clearly read a TON of classic British literature early on, particular in the adventure and mystery genres, that shaped my tastes to this day— Doyle, Christie, Stephenson, Dickens, Green, Lewis, Tolkien, Coward, Shakespeare, Sayers, Austen, Bronte, Kipling. The sound of my prose has a lot to do with C.S. Lewis particularly, though that’s a bit subtler. But I think the one that has been the most pervasive throughout all my work, to the point where it shows up in basically every single thing I’ve ever written, might be a little surprising. It’s the TV show Frasier.



To this day, it’s one of my all-time favorite shows. I came to it in an odd way. When I was twelve or thirteen, I was a big fan of The Simpsons, and I watched it frequently in reruns on Fox. But at that time, Fox also broadcast Frasier in close proximity, and I end up seeing quite a bit of it as it followed. I absolutely fell in love, even though it was hardly targeted to a tween-aged audience. I loved how witty it was, how it trusted the audience to understand its big vocabulary and intellectual references, how it blended humor with humanity. I was immediately drawn to Kelsey Grammer’s voice, since that’s a thing with me, and his and David Hyde Pierce’s performances in particular. To this day, they’re some of my favorite actors of all time for how they managed to be so funny, so ridiculous, and so sympathetic all at once.

It’s shown up in my writing in a hundred tiny ways. My very first real play, To Think of Nothing, was inspired by an episode of Frasier where he talks to figments of people he knows in his imagination to figure out a problem. That style of dialogue, where people with big vocabularies and deep reference pools snap back and forth with a crackling, lightning-fast wit, is the style of comedy I most excel at. The particular way they interwove humor with pathos is something I look for in any comedy piece, and something I try to instill in any of my own. I just love and sympathize with the kind of guys Frasier and Niles are, brilliantly intelligent, of excellent taste, and with a ton to offer, if they can only just get the fuck over themselves and their insecurities in relating to people. Niles in particular is on the spectrum of refined, sensitive gentleman-types that is one of my all-time favorite character types— without him, there would definitely be no Nathaniel Hawking, who shares many qualities with him at different degrees. And the relationship between the brothers Nathaniel and Justin is SO Frasier and Niles, that constant alternating between teasing and rivalry versus loving concern and support. I've ever written an entire pilot for a spinoff of Frasier, The Cousins Crane, where the challenge was to capture the style of it as closely as I possibly could.

But honestly? I’ve stolen so many goddamn jokes from Frasier. SO MANY. I would be very surprised if I have a single piece of any kind that has NO joke or line from Frasier, because I do it all the time. The fact that I’m doing a comedy show right now, Dream Machine, means basically resisting the temptation to always recreate it. But because that kind of witty, verbal, dry sort of humor is so often a good choice to leaven my projects, it turns up in my work pretty much all the time.