This is a transcript of the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast that takes you inside the screenwriting industry to talk with screenwriters, television writers, executives, and industry influencers. To listen to the podcast click here. To listen to other podcasts visit podcasts.finaldraft.com.
Pete D’Alessandro: Podcasting from Hollywood, the movie capital of the world, this is the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast that takes you inside the screenwriting industry to talk with screenwriters, television writers, executives, and industry influencers. I'm Pete D’Alessandro. I'm just going to jump right into getting our first guest introduced. He's been a huge hit at the Edinburgh and Just for Laughs comedy festivals the past several years. He headlines all over the world, and now he has his own show on FX and is coming back for a second season called Legit. His name is Jim Jefferies. He's a comedian, writer, actor, and star of Legit. Welcome, Jim.
Jim Jefferies: Hello. Thank you for having me. I didn't know this was the first show.
Pete D’Alessandro: This is it.
Jim Jefferies: This is very exciting. [Laughs]
Pete D’Alessandro: Yes, you're our first guest. Well, thank you for joining us.
Jim Jefferies: Alright.
Pete D’Alessandro: The one thing I want to just start out by talking about is, you know, you have a very different path in than a lot of writers and a lot of people who have shows. What was your path in to the entertainment business in general? Can you just give us a brief overview for those who don't know?
Jim Jefferies: Actually, I went to study musical theatre and opera at university many, many years ago, maybe 15 years ago now or 17 years ago now, and that didn't work out. And I became a standup comic about 12 years ago, and then I left Australia and went to the UK to pursue comedy and I was there for 10 years, and then I've been in America for four. But as for becoming a writer as such, you know, I only ever used to write my standup. Writing scripts and stuff only came when I got the TV show. I basically went into FX and pitched a standup routine of mine as a TV episode and they bought it, and then I told them I could write and I've written a lot now. I'm working on a couple of movies and it's something I enjoy very much.
Pete D’Alessandro: So how was the transition? I mean, the first time you're writing tons and tons of standup, I know you've been on the road for years with tons of materials, what was the transition then like actually changing that into a script?
Jim Jefferies: Well, the actual storytelling bit wasn’t hard because I mostly told stories in my standup anyway, but it's learning little bits and pieces. There has to be an act, there has to be an intro, there has to be a…especially for half-hour comedy writing, knowing where the act breaks need to be, which is obvious vastly different when you're writing a movie or something like that. Having to write a story that has to be within sort of 30 pages was a big thing for me.
You know, sometimes you get stories you'd finish and be like 40-something pages when I first started and it'd be like, “Oh, well, that’s too long. Start working on making it shorter.” And then often you'd have a story you think would reach 30 pages and you only get to 20. But also, especially in my show, when you're writing standup, all the stories are just about you. When you start writing a sitcom and you got the characters, no matter what, every character has to have a plotline. They all have to have a story. So sometimes that's a bit harder when you've got one real good main story and your B or your C stories are harder to find.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, I was really impressed by the fact that the show Legit is not just about jokes, it really is story-driven and character-driven from these guys, and all of them really have something to do every episode, something they need.
Jim Jefferies: You've got to have each person fitting a vital cog in the wheel. That’s what I always liked about Seinfeld, is the full characters always seem to link back on each other.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, that was something…the tone felt a little bit like Seinfeld because it does link.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, yeah. You try to have like little side characters that come in and out that you use to move the story forward. A lot of the side characters are only in like half the amount of episodes. So Billy and Steve’s parents and a character called Rodney, and they're only in about half the episodes. And often fans of the show will write to me and go, “I want more Rodney in each episode,” but for me I only put a character in if they serve the story, and I feel like sometimes actors talk to you like, “Hey, I think my character could do a lot more and they…” [laughs] you know? Like, “Well, I think so as well, but they didn't come up in the story that I was writing that week.”
Pete D’Alessandro: What other sorts of difficulties do you wind up dealing with in production when you're actually dealing with one of the scripts for Legit?
Jim Jefferies: Like notes-wise by the network or when we're actually fully in production?
Pete D’Alessandro: Yes, yes, I was actually going to get into both of those, so either one.
Jim Jefferies: FX is pretty good with notes, actually. They let you go…you know, for us, FX isn’t HBO, so you can't use certain words, so I just try to live in a world where the word fuck doesn’t exist, you know, for the sake of the TV show, rather than try to get around the word and start saying words like freakin’ and all that type of stuff.
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] Right.
Jim Jefferies: I don’t. I just act like we live in a world where that word doesn’t exist, and I think that makes you a little bit more inventive with your swear words and actually that gives it a little bit more flair, I think. But as for…like they will tell you if they don’t like a storyline or they’ll tell you if they think they don’t like a character that we've written in, but for the most part if you argue with them and you try to give a reasonable reason why you like the story or the character, they’ll normally just sort of give you “okay, well, it's up to you” type of a conversation. But the funny thing is the standards and practices people at FX…we have an episode coming up this season where we had the term “lick my pussy” in it and it was in this script about 30-something times and it was a very like, “She licked your pussy, she licked the pussy. Why’d you lick her pussy?” like that. It was very conversational like that. And the standards and practices people, when they saw the script, said, “No, that’s too much. You go and take out at least half of those.”
So we got it down to about 20 in the script, and then when we filmed it, we edited out just naturally about seven of them, because our editssometimes go to about sort of 10 minutes over. And we edited out seven of them, and so we had it down now to 12 or 13 of them, and they said that we were allowed to have I think seven or eight, was the amount we were allowed to have.
And now for me, I don’t understand what’s the difference between seven “lick my pussies” and 12 “lick my pussies.” Is there a moment when the audience watches it and goes, “Well, now this is too much.” And do they have a book that has that sentence where they go, “Or is it just one person’s opinion?” So I can never judge what they're going to stop and what they're not going to stop, but as for censorship, otherwise, they're very good to us, you know, content. We don’t have many graphically sexual scenes or anything like that, but we talk about sex quite graphically. We do have drugs in the show quite openly and no one is, like, in this new season, we show a girl taking heroin, shooting up heroin, we show the three main characters doing cocaine at a party, and no one’s ever mentioned anything about that.
Pete D’Alessandro: Wow. [Laughs] So they really let you have your freedom for the most part and let you do what you want to do?
Jim Jefferies: Yeah. Look, I don't think I have the deal that Louis C.K. has where he just hands it in and…you know, I still get…once we hand in an episode as well, they critique it and give all their notes.
FX will tell us they didn't like a scene, they didn't…and sometimes that's hard for you when you think something’s funny and they don’t, but for the most part you only get about eight or nine notes per episode and the notes will be mostly editing based.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s great. So that’s actually very easy to implement rather than the big story notes at that point.
Jim Jefferies: Well, it's easy to implement as long as you've got other shots to give them. [Laughs] Sometimes they're like, “We don’t like this close-up on Jim’s face. Can you do a wide shot there?” And we're like, “Well, not really. We just didn't do that,” you know?
But for the most part we normally have something. We take very long takes on our show and the director hardly ever yells cut and you just do it again, do it again, do it again. So I don’t feel envious of our editor. He's got a tough job every day just looking at these 40-minute, 50-minute takes.
Pete D’Alessandro: I guess that’s not easy as working with one- and two-minute shots.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, well, our director has a theory…well, I don't know, he's never said this to me, but I think he thinks that if you yell “cut” you lose momentum.
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure, I've heard that before.
Jim Jefferies: I always find with the acting aspect of the whole thing, me and DJ Qualls and Dan Bakkedahl, the other two main guys, we're always a little bit shit after lunch. Right before lunch we're really good, and then we have an hour off for lunch and we come back and we're a little bit off for the next hour.
Pete D’Alessandro: Right, just not as much energy.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, maybe not as much energy, but also you might lose the context of the scene you were doing a little bit. A lot of what I've found in acting is remembering…because everything shot at a sequence is remembering, what was my character’s mood like the scene right before this?
Pete D’Alessandro: Huh, right. I understand. That’s something that’s kind of linear when you shoot, but…
Jim Jefferies: I don't think acting’s very hard, and seeing that people who review the show always comment that acting is just adequate, so I know I'm not a great actor, but I don’t believe that acting is super-hard. I think there are people who are good at it and…there are people who can do it and people who can't do it, and then you have the people who can do it, those people who are extraordinary at it, and then the rest of us are capable. I think writers and people who score things and directors, I think they really deserve all the kudos at the Oscars instead of the actors. I always look at the actors and go, “Well, yeah, you read those words very well.”
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] So you're siding with the writers in that debate, okay. Good.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, I think writing’s a far harder thing than acting and I think that writers don’t get as much credit. I think casting agents and I think casting in general should get more credit than the actors. Actors look good because of the other actors around them, and we've all seen what we consider to be a great actor in a good film and then you go, “What, can he not act anymore or is it just that it was a shit script and shit actors around him?” I've seen Matthew McConaughey in complete and utter rubbish but of course brilliant in the Dallas Buyers Club. [Laughs]
Pete D’Alessandro: I completely understand.
Jim Jefferies: Right now I know there are actors that are just pissed with me. I can just hear them through the…
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] Well, fortunately, this is a writer-centered podcast, so maybe they're not listening.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, I don't think there are any actors who have logged on to this. They wouldn't even give this podcast a second look. They're too vain to want to know…they don’t want to see how the sausage is made.
Pete D’Alessandro: Right. Well, that’s what we're here to do. So let me ask you about one of the sausage questions then.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah.
Pete D’Alessandro: How did you first connect with showrunner Peter O’Fallon?
Jim Jefferies: Well, me and Pete are both with CAA, and another one of our writers, there are three of us who write…a guy called Chris Case, who is also on the show. Me and Chris had just gotten a development deal with Comedy Central. We'd sold a script and everything with that. Now, we sort of held with Comedy Central for maybe a year where I couldn't even audition for anything else or send in any other scripts or anything.
And Comedy Central had a changing of the guard. The person running Comedy Central changed, and I'm sure a lot of writers are listening to this or actors who have had development deals know that when the management changes often all the projects that the previous management has had goes out the window no matter how good they are because everyone wants to clean house. So I was about to get that one made and it was all about to happen, and then, “No, we're not doing it,” and I was like, “Oh, alright.” So I was out, and then I went to CAA and I said, “I've got another idea for a show, this time…” Because my last show was more high-concept. It was me working as a guidance counselor at a school.
And then I was talking to CAA and I said, “I've got another idea for a show, which is based off a standup routine that I used to do about taking a friend with muscular dystrophy to a brothel,” which is something I did in my real life. I took a friend to a brothel who had never had sex before he was in his 30s because he had muscular dystrophy. And the thing I found out about that story was as gross as it sort of sounds off the bat as soon as you hear it, boys going to a brothel, it sounds like a dirty sort of thing, but when I actually got down to it, it was extraordinarily one of the most heartwarming experiences in my life. Like I'm not a religious man, but if I was spiritual I would call it a spiritual journey that we went on.
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure, that actually comes across in that first episode. I mean, I think you really feel that as the audience.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, and it was something that I said I wanted to make a comedy involving me maybe taking care of a disabled guy, and then the brother character was basically my best mate in real life. And I obviously…there were only sort of three networks that I was thinking I could even pitch this to and it was HBO, Showtime and FX. Then, Peter O’Fallon had just finished…he made The Riches with Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver, which critically got a lot of acclaim but I think was cancelled after its second year, and I know that because the critics liked his last show and I got told that FX wanted to work with Peter again, they set me up with a meeting with Peter, I said I have an idea, and then me and Peter flushed out the characters a little bit more and we brought in a few side characters and worked out the parents and whatnot, obviously moved the storyline from Australia to Vegas, and I went into FX and I didn't know if they knew it was a standup routine or just a very polished pitch, but I went in there and did the standup routine in front of all the executives, but I acted more like I was doing it off the top of my head even though I'd told this story a thousand times onstage, you know. And John Landgraf, the head of FX, was nice enough to buy it in the room. He said, “Yeah, okay, we'll make that.” He said we could go off and make a pilot, and we were off filming I think within a month.
Pete D’Alessandro: That is really fast.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, yeah, we got it all together. I think Peter’s idea was, “Let's get these going before they change their mind.” [Laughs] And so we went to Portland to film the first episode because he had just worked with a crew there on Leverage, and the crew was already there and just finishing up the TV show Leverage and they were ready to go, so we took their entire crew and just made this show.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s great. Really happy relationship to walk into.
Jim Jefferies: It worked out good for us, yeah.
Pete D’Alessandro: So you guys have this, you know, the season’s going, you have Season 1 underway, and then when that season ended when did you actually hear that there was going to be a second season? What was that conversation like?
Jim Jefferies: You hear sort of midseason. We heard maybe around…with the screening of Episode 7 of the first season. I think I was in New York when I found out. We went…sorry, I can't remember the…what it was called, the TCAs, the Upfronts, New York, and I'm sure most people listening to this probably know what the Upfronts are but if you don’t, it's basically where networks bring all their TV shows to New York for a sort of a party and you meet with all the people who are selling advertising for you, or like you meet…like someone’s from Microsoft and someone’s from Coca Cola and someone’s from GM cars or whatever, and whether they buy ads for your show… So FX, they took us all bowling with all these advertising people, and I remember like looking around the room and all the FX people were sort of like the characters in their TV shows, like all the Sons of Anarchy guys really looked like…they were all in a corner acting like the tough kids at school. And Timothy Olyphant from Justified just looked like the coolest outlaw in the whole room, and so sort of like my show and Wilfred and Archer, we were sort of the nerdy guys, because comedies of course are always deemed to be maybe a lesser art form than drama. But that’s the whole thing, you know, when you watch the Oscars no one’s ever won it for a comedic role.
Pete D’Alessandro: Right, right, I mean, there's a separate category just to kind of compensate for that, I think.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, and I sort of…I feel like that’s unfair. I know that my cast and crew would have a better job at doing, let's say…okay, I'm going to talk about a great drama, right, say something like The Sopranos. I was going to say Breaking Bad. Bryan Cranston’s so funny that that blew me out of the water, right? I can't really use that as an example.
But let's say The Sopranos. The cast of The Sopranos would have a harder job carrying off the scripts for Legit than the cast of Legit would have carrying off the scripts of The Sopranos. Now, may I say I'm not for a second saying that we would do just as good a job, we would not, but I'm just saying that comedy is as hard if not harder. People can list…okay, in the last five years, drama’s gotten so good on television, if you said, “Give me top five dramas,” I would be struggling, like I would be arguing with myself which ones are keeping that top five.
There'd be ones that I'd have to lose…you know, I could give you a top 10 easy in the last five years. But if I said to you, “Give me your top five sitcoms over the last five years, you'd be struggling to find five that you really dig, that you really like, that are up there with your Cheers and your M*A*S*H and all the classics, Archie Bunker and all that other stuff.
Pete D’Alessandro: Right. I mean, you're saying the overall in history, this isn't the height of sitcom but it might be the height of drama at this point.
Jim Jefferies: Well, no, I'm saying that to write a really good sitcom is harder than writing a really good drama, at least one that lasts.
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure, sure, I follow you.
Jim Jefferies: Like name me right now, name me your top five sitcoms over the last five years.
Pete D’Alessandro: For me the last five would be 30 Rock, I love Episodes, I'm going to have to throw Legit in the middle of that.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, I love Episodes, yeah.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yup, Episodes is brilliant.
Jim Jefferies: What’s that?
Pete D’Alessandro: I have to throw Legit in there.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah…
Pete D’Alessandro: I have to.
Jim Jefferies: You know, you don’t have to. I don’t mind. I don’t mind.
Pete D’Alessandro: Okay. But I do love those. Archer I think is hilarious, so is Louie, and I do…everybody loves Girls. I'm on the fence on Girls but it's…
Jim Jefferies: I'm not a big fan of Girls either, but you know I think that Girls is good but it's just not made for me, if that makes sense.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that feel that way, and I think once in a while they get an episode that is “made for me” and I think maybe some people latch onto those.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, but I think Episodes is the best thing in the last three years.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yes, yes, a brilliant one that I don't think a lot of people seem to know about yet.
Jim Jefferies: Right. If you had to go on your whole life, Seinfeld and all those type of things, they come along very rarely. Like, will Episodes be remembered in the same breath as Cheers and Seinfeld and M*A*S*H and…
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.
Jim Jefferies: Probably not.
Pete D’Alessandro: Probably not, right. I understand.
Jim Jefferies: But it probably might be…like classic network sitcoms are very difficult to make. See, I think Two Broke Girls is complete and utter rubbish but one of the most popular things on TV.
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure, sure.
Jim Jefferies: So I think what I'm saying is I don't know what works. [Laughs]
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] Well, Legit certainly seems to work. I mean, I think that one of the strengths of the show is that it really does get those characters right. I was going to ask, what is the writing process like for an episode of Legit when you sit down to break a story all the way to getting a finished script before you shoot? What is that process like?
Jim Jefferies: Well, for me, I normally…the first season was so based on my standup that it was pretty easy to get the storylines out. Then, Season 2 was we decided to have a full linear story where every character had an arc and there was a big ending for them all and it all came to a head by Episode 13, was what we wanted this year. I feel we achieved that but, for me, I write…a lot of the other writers will get pissed with me saying I write most of the storylines, and then what we do is we go in, we decide, you know, if you have 13 episodes…we normally write storylines for 16 episodes, and then out of those 16 obviously you start flushing out which ones you think are crap or you start working when you think it's really good and you just never quite get it right. We sit in the room until we can flush that story out. There's always someone standing up by the whiteboard trying to go, “Okay, well, what happens in this scene? We forgot about this character and we've got no way for this character to go.”
And then eventually you go, “Okay, these are our 13 episodes.” And then what we did was we broke it up into, “You write this episode, you write this episode, you write this episode,” and if a person finished an episode quicker, then they could go on to another one, or if it got through the network there were maybe two episodes that went to the network where they didn't like them and we decide to pick one of our other stories out of the 16, you know? But for me, I use…so then we all go off our separate ways while we write the individual episodes, you know?
Pete D’Alessandro: And that happens kind of all at once?
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, yeah. So we're all off at home or we can go into the office, in the office we will have our own room, but I prefer to work at home for when I'm actually writing an episode. Now, I use…I know this is for Final Draft, but I use a writer’s assistant…
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure. [Laughs]
Jim Jefferies: [Laughs] Who uses Final Draft? But I lie on the couch and I dictate the whole thing. I just find that’s how I've always written my standup, maybe talking to a Dictaphone or whatever. But it's quite an odd experience for me because I might write 10 pages in like an hour, hour and a half, and then nothing…I'll be mulling over that next page for four hours. Once we've broken a story and we've decided the beginning and the end of the episode, I'll write it in about three days, it'll take.
Pete D’Alessandro: Okay.
Jim Jefferies: That script will come in normally at about, for me, between 29 and 33 pages. And then we give it to the other writers and they all look at it. We all sort of do a table read amongst the three of us and people will throw their two cents and whether they like or they don’t like a scene, and we'll work through that together. We did use to work in a system where another person would take a script and do the rewrite. People got their feelings hurt too easily doing that, so all rewrites happen in the room with everyone there.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s great. I get this team spirit that goes with that.
Jim Jefferies: Well, see, the thing is because if someone takes it away and then they go, “I'll just fix a few things,” and you're like, “You fucking idiot, why’d you get rid of that? That line was so important. That was a character development. And if you read the end of the script, it all comes back together.” So people get their feelings hurt too easily, where if we can all debate and argue and stuff in the room before anything’s changed, then everyone can be happy with it.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So do you have the same staff this season that you had last season? There were just the couple of you last year, just…Rick Cleveland was there?
Jim Jefferies: Well, we had another writer called Rick Cleveland in the first season who we let go for the second season, and then we brought in Chris Case, is the guy that I developed with my other TV show who we're being very, very happy with. Chris is a great writer and we have a good relationship. But I didn't have a good relationship with Rick, and Rick’s comedy sensibilities, we had differences of opinion, let's put it that way. Rick could write a lot more on things like he’d written on The West Wing and all these type of things where everything was a little bit more drier maybe than I wanted it.
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure. No, I understand the difference. That’s important. So you had this plan from the show from the beginning where I think you would sit…in one interview I read that you went in to pitch a standup, you had a bunch of stories lined up from standup. Did those same stories that you planned on pitching, did they actually become the ones that became episodes or did you have to…?
Jim Jefferies: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Season 1, eight of the storylines out of the 13 are directly lifted from my standup. Now, the difference is when I first conceived the idea for the show it was more about me as a comedian maybe meeting with different people, doing different…sort of less of an ensemble cast than it is now. And when we made it, the character of Billy, I was thinking of having him die at the end of going to the prostitute, which I thought would be a pretty cool, dramatic thing to have on a half-hour comedy, just the pilot, you know, you fall in love with the character and then, bang, they're dead. I saw that like I was writing Game of Thrones or something, you know? But then we never thought we'd ask anyone who was sort of recognizable because we don’t pay super-great to the actors. It's cable comedy. That’s pretty standard. And when DJ Qualls came in, obviously, you know, the skinny guy from Road Trip, and I just watched him in an episode of Breaking Bad. Anyway, then I decided we wouldn't kill him off, have him as a character that came in and out of the episodes, you know? But then the pilot test…and the pilot tested well, but everyone returned to positive as soon as DJ came on the screen, and I thought, “Alright, people love this guy.” So then rather than me and my mate acting like an idiot, it became me, my mate and his brother, you know? And it became a story of me with a disabled guy. And so the problem we faced then, is “I'm going to give you stories from my standup when maybe I've had a one-night stand or I've gone to Afghanistan or whatever I've done…” and now we have to do it with the guy in a wheelchair, you know?
Pete D’Alessandro: Right, that’s very different.
Jim Jefferies: Which at first I sort of went, “Well, this is going to be a pain in the ass,” but looking back on it, it challenges you a little bit but it always gives the story a little bit more heart, not because he's a guy in a wheelchair but because the guys have to put themselves out to make things happen and his life can be better. I feel sorry for anyone…you know, and I think it's very important with that character to never write him as a victim or anything like that. He's got to always be written as one of the guys.
Pete D’Alessandro: Right, he comes across very much that way. He is just one of the guys that lives in that house.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, but I'll tell you what, if we get eight seasons of this show, which I sort of think maybe to tell the whole story that I want to tell, because I've sort of figured out what I want to do with Season 3 already if that happens, but I think maybe six would be the perfect number for this show or something, but if it goes to its full conclusion, he has to die in the last episode. [Laughs]
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] So there might be some spoilers in this podcast.
Jim Jefferies: I don't think I'm ruining anything for anyone, but eventually…it's like when we watched Breaking Bad we knew that Walter White had to die in the end, you know?
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure, sure. Right, there was only one appropriate way to end it.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, it has to end with Billy dying.
Pete D’Alessandro: Alright, that’s great. Glad we know that now.
Jim Jefferies: Well, the thing is, you know, in the first episode we already realized that he'd outlive his life expectancy. So we can't have him…although the guy that he's loosely based on in real life is still living as well and that’s been seven years now since we thought he was going to die. So, you never know.
Pete D’Alessandro: No, that’s great. One more writing question that I wanted to talk about just to end on. You said when you're not writing Legit or at least in the past when you've been writing features and other work, what is your writing habit like? And maybe that even applies to your standup and your standup routine.
Jim Jefferies: Well, with standup writing it's…I have a discipline with that where I try to write one minute a week. I figure if I write a minute a week that means I'll have, you know, you'll have good weeks and bad weeks, but that means I'll have around an hour’s worth of standup to sift through. And if you write an hour of standup a year, you're ahead of 99% of all standup comedians because most comics sort of, like, their career never took off. They're always like, “I'm always killing out there,” and you're like, “Well, you haven't changed your material for years.” And, “Well, this joke kills,” and you're like, “Of course it does, but people are only going to watch you twice. They're not going to come and see a third time.”
And so for that I'm very disciplined and I try to make sure that I'm bringing out a comedy special at least sort of every 18 months. I'm about to bring out another one. I've brought out four…it'll be four that I've brought out in the time that I've been in America and this is my fifth year in America. So I try to bring one out as much as possible on that. So as soon as I bring out a special, that means I stop telling those jokes. I never tell those jokes again, which that forces me to write another hour of standup because I don’t want to give them anything off the DVD.
I'm already panicking about that now. Now, as for the writing, I go on the road to do standup sort of Thursday to Saturday. I'm always on the road doing jokes. So Monday to Wednesday I try to sit down with someone I'm writing something with or just by myself and I try to sort of dedicate a few hours each day to writing a script or coming up with different concepts all just on my iPad just in note form and then try to write an act. And then when I get to the stage when I'm ready, I bring in my writers and I start lying on the couch and just talking it out, you know. Up until that moment, it's all just scribbles and post-its and little things on my iPad. And the moment that I've got a movie idea I'm all but ready to write the whole thing, but I'm just missing what to do in the second act. And I've got a killer ending for the film and I've got a great beginning and a great third, but I don't know what… [Laughs]
Pete D’Alessandro: That second act mystery.
Jim Jefferies: And that’s an important act. Yeah, that’s an important act, so I'm not going to even bring anyone in to help me write it or anything or start writing dialogue until at least I've got a vague idea what I'm going to do there, you know? And so I also do little things, right? I write down all the characters that I want to have in something and I do write a little paragraph on each one of them, and the paragraph that I write on each one of them may have…I'll do stupid things. I think that a person’s…what they like to eat is important to the character. And not necessarily like, “Oh, this person like’s cherry pie,” but whether is this person…they eat healthy, they eat regular meals, and they don’t do this thing and, you know, little character traits like that, because then you can start seeing what they may be like.
Pete D’Alessandro: Right, to get that complete picture of somebody before you really start to make them do things.
Jim Jefferies: Yeah, what type of movies they're into, what…you know, I basically write a character on a little paragraph about them and then I write a bit underneath them, which is the equivalent of what was used to be written, what probably still is written, next to Playboy centerfolds.
Pete D’Alessandro: Okay.
Jim Jefferies: You know what I mean?
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah…
Jim Jefferies: Like walks along the beach, they like this type of food, men that are pushy, their biggest turn-ons are this and that, you know what I mean?
Pete D’Alessandro: Right.
Jim Jefferies: I write basically everyone’s centerfold little documentation.
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] So all the characters get to feel like they're in Playboy, at least.
Jim Jefferies: [Laughs] In theory, yes.
Pete D’Alessandro: Well, that’s great. Well, Jim, I'm really amazed, I'm really impressed, and thank you for joining us. I'm just amazed that between the show, being in the show, writing it and doing standup and traveling you've still got time for other projects of your own, and that's really inspiring, so thank you.
Jim Jefferies: Oh, thank you. Yeah, look, I'm going to look at it this way. There's going to come a time and it may be sooner than later where people won't want to hear my bullshit, so I might as well plumb it.
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] Right, so you're just warming up now for that stage, right?
Jim Jefferies: [Laughs] Exactly.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. That was really perfect.
Jim Jefferies: Thank you very much for having me. Anytime.
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