Upload showrunner Greg Daniels knows comedy. Best known for adapting The Office for the United States and for co-creating Parks and Recreation, he has also written on comedy classics such as The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, and King of the Hill.
His latest creation is the Prime Video series Upload, which combines science fiction and comedy. Daniels shares how two genre-mashing books inspired his future work in TV. One is Douglas Adams’ 1979 comedy-science fiction franchise The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The other, which he has given to his writing staff for reference, is the 1985 The Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis.
More: ‘Upload’ Season 3: Showrunner Greg Daniels on Big Tech and the art of the mockumentary
This segment has been edited for length and clarity.
When I was a 12-year-old growing up, which is like the perfect time to be super into comedy, which I was, you couldn't go on YouTube and look anything up. There weren't even VHS tapes. The only on-demand viewing were comedy albums and books.
The interesting thing about comedy books to me is that there are so many more books published than TV shows, and yet, there aren't that many good comedy books compared to TV shows, which I find weird.
But two of the ones that I like a lot came out in this time period [of] ‘79 and ‘85. One of them is the classic sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I suggest if you haven't read it, and you like Upload, you will probably love it. It's filled with many ideas, comedy and science fiction.
Actually, my first job as a writer, I was in a little rental house writing a comedy video game about a parody of all the video games of the ‘80s with a bunch of people. I was reading Hitchhiker's Guide and every morning I would come down having read some Hitchhiker's Guide and I would tell everybody that I was working with, that our ideas had already been used by Douglas Adams because he could think of so many different things.
And the other book that I like to promote is by a writer named Charles Portis, who people probably know as the guy who wrote True Grit, and is a marvelous comedy writer, kind of in a Mark Twain-y vibe. And in 1985, he put out a book called The Masters of Atlantis, which is an extremely funny book about a guy that comes back from World War I and starts like a social club slash cult. He's a complete fool.
“The men wept, overcome with gratitude. He said his name was Nick and that he was an Albanian refugee from Turkey. After supper he revealed that his real name was Mike and that he was actually a Greek from Alexandria, in Egypt. The dream book was worthless, he said, full of extravagant lies, and he apologized for imposing in such a way on the young soldier. He apologized for his body odor, saying that nerve sweat or fear sweat made for a stronger stink than mere work sweat or heat sweat, or at least that had been his experience and that he was always nervous when he spoke of delicate matters.” – Excerpt from The Masters of Alantis by Charles Portis.
Mark Twain [uses] a quote that I really liked about how to tell a story. He wrote an essay called How To Tell A Story, and it sort of draws a distinction between the people who tell you it's going to be funny and the people who kind of hang back and just let it drop and look at you and see if you get it. And I feel the Portis writing style is less emotional, but it's so filled with good things and makes you feel good.
