“Who Jackie?”

April 21, 2023 7:27 AM

Unraveling the Greatest Writers’ Room Story Ever [Vulture]

Zuker had started a new job as a writer-producer on Grace Under Fire by this time, but that show’s offices were also on the Radford lot, directly above the common area at Roseanne. He remembers hearing explosive laughter from below on the day some former co-workers came running upstairs at lunch to tell him the “Who Jackie” story. “What made this a legend for me,” he says, “is that within 24 hours, you’d be walking around the Radford lot and hearing people say, ‘Who Jackie?’ I was leaving the next night, and I heard two security guards saying, ‘Who Jackie?’ and laughing their asses off.”
posted by riruro (18 comments total)

The meat of this story, I think, is in Part V: An Intergenerational Game of TV-Writer Telephone, where it is pointed out that, somehow, the joke doesn't quite work when you say "Who is Jackie?" or otherwise aren't making fun of "a guy in the room — a Black guy".
posted by Etrigan at 7:54 AM on April 21, 2023 [18 favorites]

”Those are my thoughts about the story now,” he adds, ”while still thinking it’s the funniest story ever.”

This line really drives home how effectively this piece makes everyone involved seem like terrible people.
posted by mhoye at 8:03 AM on April 21, 2023 [21 favorites]

Hmmmmmmm.
posted by Jody Tresidder at 8:09 AM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Right, like, it is a very funny story. It would be funny even if it had been Norm asking the question. But the reason it's been repeated so many times is the racist undertone (maybe not so under). It's not "who's Jackie," it's "who Jackie," the AAVE absolutely essential to the retelling (as noted).

That said... I enjoyed this piece? Like, giving David a chance to tell his story and -- rightfully! -- just ask for credit, is worthwhile.
posted by uncleozzy at 8:22 AM on April 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

No paywall.
I’d worked with Danny Z on the Worst Show Ever, and he was the funniest person on the show.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:38 AM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

If this is the greatest writer's room story ever then I can't imagine how much casual racism is in the mediocre writer's room stories.

Kudos to Barr for apparently having a policy of spreading around all the money involved in having a hit show by hiring anyone who was even marginally funny and needed work, though. It's a shame she went down the Q hole.
posted by egypturnash at 9:44 AM on April 21, 2023 [14 favorites]

Nothing in that article struck me as truly funny except this:

Barr — who didn’t respond to interview requests for this article — reportedly fired writers so often, and later hired them back, that they developed an unofficial rule: When she fires you, just go home and come back the next morning like nothing happened.

I agree though that the fact that this story is "the greatest writer's room story ever" goes deep into barely charted territory.

Something about how we always have to have scapegoats, maybe? And that if you’re the only Black person around, there’s about a 90% chance the scapegoat will turn out to be you?
posted by jamjam at 10:39 AM on April 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

Are we sure the best writer's room story isn't this, now?

... someone had been impersonating Tyree while telling the story, when a Black writer walked in and asked what everyone was laughing about. The writer then repeated the story without doing an impression ...

Comedy's subjective, but personally, I find that hilarious.
posted by RobotHero at 12:40 PM on April 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

“At what point is it a very funny story,” Fogelnest asks, “and at what point is it the story of a human being who has been the butt of this joke of wealthy privileged television writers who drive their Teslas on the lot and then keep people in a writers’ room until 10 p.m. because they don’t want to see their wife and kids?”

ooh I think I know
posted by ZaphodB at 4:02 PM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

I grew up thinking Norm Macdonald was funny, but I've grown to really dislike the guy. He was virulently anti-trans. He was a Cosby apologist. He called Tig Notaro cowardly and narcissistic for talking about her cancer, then when she called him on it he wussed out and claimed he wasn't actually talking about her. (As a cancer survivor myself, fuuuuuck his macho bullshit about how it's more courageous and noble to just suffer in silence.) Now here he is taking a creepy, kind of racist story and making it even more creepy and racist, really honing it to its racist, creepy essence. The man just adored punching down.

It's weird to read about these writers all desperately jockeying to get a joke into the show, because it wasn't like Roseanne was packed with "jokes," exactly. It was a character-based sitcom with dramatic elements, closer to something like All in the Family than some comedy roast full of rat-a-tat gags. I've got to figure that Barr herself was just so toxic (even then) that she created a work environment where everybody was hyper-competitive and on edge all the time, and it brought out the worst in everyone. Somehow a good and surprisingly empathetic show happened despite all that... until Barr's total bugfuckery boiled over in the later seasons and the show became an incoherent mess.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:56 PM on April 21, 2023 [14 favorites]

(And yeah, I know Macdonald had cancer too and probably had it when he made those remarks about Notaro. If he wanted to keep quiet about his own diagnosis that was perfectly fine, it was his choice. But suggesting that Notaro was a coward and an attention whore, because she chose to talk about her own cancer? Fuck the fuck out of that.)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:19 PM on April 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

Glengarry Glen Groucho.

I asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph in Norm's voice. It refused, calling my sexual orientation into question just for asking. Come to think of it, that's probably the most Norm thing it could have written.
posted by zaixfeep at 9:36 PM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I guess I don't really get the joke?
posted by Horkus at 8:19 AM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I guess I don't really get the joke?

I'm a bit confused as well, but near as I can figure it's something like "this one guy wasn't familiar with an obscure feature of the Roseanne universe. It's funny because he's Black!"

Maybe you had to be there.
posted by Not A Thing at 5:49 PM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

an obscure feature of the Roseanne universe

Laurie Metcalf was third-billed on the show and had won multiple Emmys as Jackie by the time of this incident.
posted by Etrigan at 6:27 PM on April 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

That is one part inside baseball, one part racism, and one part what am I missing. If that's the funniest writer's room story, don't think I would laugh much.
posted by blue shadows at 1:48 AM on April 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also for the time, it would have been extremely common for any writer added to an existing show to have written spec scripts for that show as part of their job interview. Which would go a long way towards knowing who the major characters are in the show.
posted by mmascolino at 6:29 AM on April 23, 2023

The 'humor' derives from the audience of writers being vicious (a necessary trait for stand-up) and insecure (a lot of very funny people out there but only a few are lucky enough to get in the door and even fewer get to stay). This combo drives them as a demographic to show no mercy to anyone weaker or slower -- in this case what they perceived as a dull-witted incompetent affimative action hire -- a little too lucky for his own good.

The joke's racist, but the racism is just the black cherry on top of a slippery banana peel of schadenfreude.
posted by zaixfeep at 8:41 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]