Fired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, and Dismissed

by Gurwitch, Annabelle; Maher, Bill; Huffman, Felicity; Saget, Bob; Reich, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780743294409
• ISBN10: 0743294408
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-01-02
• Publisher: Atria Books

Summary

If you've ever been fired, you're in good company. That's what actress and writer Annabelle Gurwitch discovered when she was fired by her idol Woody Allen, who added, "You look retarded." In confiding her tale of woe to others, she realized there is a world of people out there with similar laugh-out-loud experiences. How did Bob Saget learn he was being phased out of his job onThe Morning Program?"One day I showed up and my hosting chair was gone!"A collection of anecdotes from people who've all gotten the ax, the boot, or been canned at some point in their lives,Fired!boasts an all-star cast from Tim Allen to Jeff Garlin and features contributions from people all over the country. Uproariously funny and refreshingly true, this book proves it's not the bounce that counts, it's the bounce back.

Author Biography

Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress and writer best known to television audiences as the cohost of the cult TV hit Dinner and a Movie on TBS. She is a contributing writer and commentator on NPR's Day to Day and has appeared in numerous television shows and movies. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

Annabelle recently appeared in The Shaggy Dog with Tim Allen, stars in the indie Melvin Goes to Dinner with Jack Black, and was recently seen in Boston Legal going toe to toe with Candace Bergen. Ironically, Candace fired Annabelle as her secretary in Murphy Brown.The documentary film Fired! will be coming to theatres in the Fall of 2006 and will then play on The Sundance Channel.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xiii
Who Came Up with the Phrase ``You're fired''?	xv
The Job So Terrible You Can Only Hope to Be Fired	1	(20)
That's a Fact	2	(5)
Andy Borowitz
The Big Red Shoe Diaries	7	(6)
Paul Feig
Bimmy in Training	13	(2)
Larry Charles
The Snuggery	15	(6)
Eric Gilliland
Bruce Cameron Remodels Your Redundancy	21	(20)
Don't Call Me, I'll Call You	24	(5)
Judy Gold
Poor Judgment	29	(5)
Illeana Douglas
Number One Pooper-Scooper	34	(3)
Robert Reich
Nesting	37	(2)
Jessica van der Valk
When Children Fire You	39	(2)
Ian Gomez
The Firing You Didn't See Coming	41	(23)
The Little Fuck That Could	42	(5)
Sandra Tsing Loh
Extra! Extra!	47	(5)
Brian Unger
Schandenfreude	52	(3)
Anne Meara
Sent to Cyberia	55	(9)
Lori Gottlieb
Harry Shearer Minds His Credibility Gap	64	(3)
Fired by the Queen and Dumped by Trump	67	(8)
Joyce Beber
Felicity Huffman on Popping Your Cherry	75	(11)
Dead Man Working	76	(5)
Jason Kravits
The Do-Bee	81	(5)
Martha McCully
David Cross Might Just Be Too Big	86	(17)
Mauve	88	(4)
Jack Merrill
Fried	92	(3)
Hillary Carlip
One of Them Stories	95	(3)
Tate Donovan
Steak Today	98	(2)
Wildman Weiner
Substandard Performance	100	(2)
Anonymous
Dahling, It's Eva Gabor	102	(1)
Glenn Rosenblum
The Time You Deserved to Be Fired	103	(17)
Video, Video	104	(4)
Paul F. Tompkins
Short Ends	108	(7)
Jonathan Groff
Crimes and Mythdemeanors	115	(5)
Annabelle Gurwitch
That Garlin Boy: An Interview with Jeff Garlin	120	(12)
Right On!	124	(4)
Jill Soloway
Friendless	128	(4)
Fisher Stevens
Bill Maher: Warm Body Telling Jokes	132	(17)
The Postman Never Rings Twice	135	(4)
Richard Colburn
Ba-looney Tunes	139	(5)
Matt Walsh
Grrl Genius Gets Canned	144	(3)
Cathryn Michon
All Those Parts	147	(2)
Shirley Gurwitch
The Time Getting Fired Leads You to Something Better	149	(42)
Patricia Heaton Hopes You Enjoy Your Stay	150	(4)
Jimmy the Idiot	154	(6)
Dana Gould
The World's Worst Waiter	160	(5)
Jeff Kahn
I'll Knock Your Block Off	165	(2)
Andy Dick
Bob Saget Doesn't Sit Here Anymore	167	(4)
Can You Get Fired If You Aren't Being Paid?	171	(1)
Morgan Spurlock
I Was the Master	172	(2)
Tim Allen
Madison Scare Garden	174	(5)
Elizabeth Warner
D. L. Hughley: Lot and Lobby to Late Night	179	(2)
No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service	181	(7)
Maxine Lapiduss
But We'd Love to Work with You Again	188	(2)
Judd Apatow
Shock and Remorse	190	(1)
Lilly Anderson
The Time You Had to Fire Yourself	191	(36)
A Thoroughly Modern Firing	192	(3)
Tonya Pinkins
Remembrance of Porn Past	195	(7)
Scott Carter
Last Shift at the Fetish Deli	202	(4)
Mark Haskell Smith
Attractive in a Bad Way	206	(6)
Rob Cohen
Cappi's Pizza and Sangweech Shop	212	(5)
Carl Capotorto
No More Rain Days	217	(2)
Janet M. Lorenz
Recipe for the Recently Redundant	219	(4)
Walter Scheib
The Fired Song	223	(4)
Roy Zimmerman
The Letter You Wish You'd Sent to Your Boss! Now You Can!	227	(2)
Notes	229	(8)
Acknowledgments	237

Excerpts

Chapter One: The Job So Terrible You Can Only Hope to Be Fired

Work is the province of cattle.

-- Dorothy Parker

I do not like work, even when someone else does it.

-- Mark Twain

I have only been fired once. I was let go from an office job where the boss told me that he was firing me because he wanted someone to work for him who, when he said, "Jump!" would say, "How high?" Ironically, the job was in the offices of the multiple sclerosis society, where the majority of our clients scooted around in motorized wheelchairs.

-- Rainn Wilson, actor

That's a Fact

Andy Borowitz

I did a number of things in the '80s I'm not proud of. On more than one occasion I shouted out the phrase, "Everybody Wang Chung tonight." But there's one thing I did that was so heinous, I've never told anyone about it. In 1984 I wrote for the TV showThe Facts of Life.

I'm sure everyone remembers the cultural phenomenon that wasThe Facts of Life. But for those of you who somehow missed it,The Facts of Lifewas a coming-of-age saga about four teenage girls at an exclusive boarding school in Peekskill, New York. There was Blair, the sarcastic beautiful one; Natalie, the sarcastic chubby one; Jo, the sarcastic tomboy; and Tootie, the sarcastic sistah. Watching over all of them was their mentor, Edna Garrett, also known as Mrs. Garrett or, when the girls were in full Fonzie mode, Mrs. G.

Oh, and here's one more piece ofFacts of Lifetrivia: It was the worst television show ever produced. Now, given how monumentally it sucked, you may wonder, why did I agree to work on it? Well, quite simply, for the money. You see, I was the sarcastic whore onThe Facts of Life. But you have to give me a break: I was just out of college, I was broke, I didn't have a car. I had to take the bus, which in L.A. is tantamount to eating out of a Dumpster.

I remember my first day on the show, going in to pitch stories to the producers. These were two middle-aged women charged with the responsibility of making sureThe Facts of Lifedid not lose its edge. And the show was at a critical point: It was moving from the safe confines of the boarding school to a whole new setting, a gourmet cheese shop cleverly named Edna's Edibles. It was a move fraught with risk. There was no margin for error. And that was the hornets' nest I was stepping into.

As I sat down in the producers' office, I noticed that they each had coffee mugs with theFacts of Lifelogo on them. I was like, "Cool mugs, where'd you get them?" "Mrs. Garrett gave them to us," one of them explained. It turns out that Charlotte Rae, the actress who played Mrs. Garrett, liked to reward the writers by giving themFacts of Lifelogo mugs, and the better job you did, the more mugs you got. Now, you want to talk about an incentive!

I started pitching my story, entitled "Gamma Gamma or Bust," in which Blair, the sarcastic beautiful one, pulls out all the stops to get into the Gamma Gamma sorority. The producers took it in, chewed it over, and then one of them finally spoke. "It's an interesting story, Andy," she said. "But what's the 'fact'?"

"Say what?" I said.

"The 'fact,' " she said. "EveryFacts of Lifestory has a fact, a moral lesson, if you will, a deeper truth that the audience can take away with them."

Suddenly the room started to spin. I realized: They don't know the show sucks. They think they're doing Molière here. And I'm a comedian, I don't really do moral lessons, so I just started spinning my wheels...A stitch in time saves nine? Neither a borrower nor a lender be? Finally, with their help, we agreed that the fact of my story would be "Be yourself."

I started to write the script and I thought to myself, I'm going to try something that's never been tried before onThe Facts of Life: I'm going to write funny things for the girls to say. I finished it up, handed it in, and didn't hear anything back from the producers for a week. Finally I went up to one of them and said, "Did you get a chance to look at my script?"

"Well, we did, Andy," she said, "and quite frankly, we were disappointed in it."

"What was wrong with it?" I said.

"Well, you didn't get Tootie at all."

I asked her what she meant.

"The way you wrote Tootie, she sounds exactly like Natalie."

I said, "Well, maybe that's because they're both, you know, kind of sarcastic characters."

"They're not sarcastic," she said, genuinely offended.

"Natalie is wisecracking and Tootie is sassy. The way you've written them, you can't tell them apart."

And I was like, "Well, the audience will be able to tell them apart because one's fat and one's black." But I didn't say that. Instead I said, "Well, I'll try to fix it in the next draft."

"That's all right, Andy," she said. "We'll take it from here."

All of a sudden I felt something I hadn't felt since I started working there: I cared. I wanted to prove that I could writeThe Facts of Life. I wanted to prove that I "got" Tootie.

Well, as the season wore on, it became clear that the decision to move the show to a cheese shop was an unmitigated disaster. The girls were gaining weight at an alarming pace. To counteract this, the producers removed the muffins and cookies from the snack table and replaced them with carrots, celery, and lettuce. It was like we were being catered by Farmer McGregor. The girls noticed, and they were pissed.

At this point I was given one last chance to prove myself. The producers no longer trusted me to write a script on my own, so they teamed me up with their two pet writers, a team of eager-to-please suck-ups known only as the Two Jims. Our assignment: to write a fantasy sequence set twenty-five years in the future, when Jo, the sarcastic tomboy, would be Jo, a sarcastic high-powered businesswoman.

Now, I thought to myself, finally I'm being given a chance to play to my strengths. No facts, no moral lessons, just unbridled wackiness. So, with the Two Jims' agreement, we wrote a scene in which Jo, inhabiting a futuristic world much like the Jetsons did, attempts a leveraged buyout of Spacely Sprockets.

The producers never told me what they thought of the scene, but the Two Jims later told me that they had been called into the producers' office. "We're very disappointed in the Jo fantasy scene," the producers told them. "But we don't blame you -- because we know Andy was in the room when it was written." I couldn't believe it -- I had become a cancer onThe Facts of Life!

Needless to say, I wasn't asked back for a second season, which means I totally missed the arrival of the young George Clooney, who played a sarcastic handyman. But as I cleaned out my office on the last day of work, I noticed a gift box on the desk. I opened it and inside were two Facts of Life mugs. Could it be that Mrs. Garrett, in her infinite wisdom, had seen something in me that no one else had? I was so excited, I picked them up and ran into the Two Jims' office -- and saw that each of them had received ten mugs.

As I look back on that year, I ask myself, Is there any moral lesson, any deeper truth that we can take away from this?

I think it's this: The only thing worse than being a whore is being a whore and totally sucking at it. And that, my friends, is a fact.

After being fired fromThe Facts of Life, Andy Borowitz was "fired up," as often happens in Hollywood, and created the series that launched Will Smith's acting career,The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.He currently writes forThe New Yorker, The New York Times,and CNN, and is the creator of the very popular Web site and series of booksThe Borowitz Report.

Fired Fact

Increased risk of heart attack faced by employer firing an employee in the week after wielding the ax: 100 percent.

Copyright © 2006 by Annabelle Gurwitch

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Excerpted from Fired!: Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, and Dismissed
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.