Joking all the way to the top
Just the Funny Parts ... And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking into the Hollywood Boys’ Club Nell Scovell Dey St.
When Nell Scovell started writing for the David Letterman show in the early 1990s, she was the only woman in the writers’ room. It was her dream job, but she left after a few months.
Her experiences on Late Night were soul-crushing. Half of Letterman’s assistants appeared to have been sleeping with the boss. Not Scovell, who had a hard time being taken seriously by her male colleagues. But working for the late-night legend looked swell on Scovell’s resumé. And now it’s scribbled on the cover of her memoir, Just the Funny Parts, amid a tower of her scripts for The Simpsons, Murphy Brown and other popular TV shows.
Her memoir’s subtitle is And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking into the Hollywood Boys’ Club, and she relates a Superfund site’s worth of sexist garbage for anyone brave or foolish enough to follow her career path.
Scovell’s resumé is dizzying, frantic even. Now 57, she seems to have worked on more shows than most people have watched. It’s never clear whether this moving around is the result of miserable working conditions, customary Hollywood protocol or Scovell’s eternal quest for something better. She helped pave the way for more female writers and served as their champion, although women are still woefully under-represented on most shows.
Scovell worked with Garry Shandling, the Muppets and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Scovell created Sabrina the Teenage Witch and served as co-executive producer on Charmed. She also crafted White House Correspondents’ Association dinner jokes for then-president Barack Obama, such as this one: “There’s someone who I can always count on for support: my wonderful wife, Michelle. We made a terrific team at the Easter Egg Roll this week. I’d give out bags of candy to the kids, and she’d snatch them right back out of their little hands.”
Funny Parts includes lots of stories and a tonnage of names dropped, but it still seems that Scovell’s on a quest. Larded with aperçus and advice, this is another one of those girlfriend memoirs — a femoir — the sort mastered by Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Mindy Kaling that sell brilliantly and are devoured in an afternoon.