Vanderbilt Programming Board hosted author, screenwriter and actor B.J. Novak on Nov. 21, best known for his role in “The Office.” Moderated by political science professor Jon Meacham, the sold-out event touched on Novak’s entry into the entertainment industry, his experience writing and acting for “The Office” and projects he is currently working on.
In a message to The Hustler, senior Alex Karch, co-chair of the VPB Speakers Committee, described the process of getting a speaker to come to Vanderbilt.
“It’s a back-and-forth process of voting, gathering quotes and refining the list until we finalize the decision,” Karch said. “B.J. Novak was a popular choice throughout this process, and we were thrilled to bring him to campus!”
Journey into the entertainment industry
Meacham first asked Novak how he started his journey into acting and screenwriting. Novak answered that he switched between wanting to become an actor, a director and a TV writer in middle school. In college, he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon and hosted a comedy show titled “The B.J. Show” with another student named B.J. They invited Bob Saget to the show, who invited Novak to write for his show.
“I moved to [Los Angeles]. His manager became my manager,” Novak said. “I was immediately this high-paid comedy writer, [and] I’m 21. [The] show sucked, but it was an amazing experience.”
After that show got canceled, Novak switched to stand-up comedy, where he was discovered to act in the MTV show “Punk’d.” After “Punk’d,” Novak was hired by Greg Daniels, who adapted “The Office” into an American TV show, to be a writer-actor for the show.
“[Daniels] said, ‘I liked your jokes, but what I really liked were the pauses between your jokes. It felt like you thought you were better than everyone, and I think it’d be really funny to have a temp who kind of thinks he’s better than everyone,’” Novak said. “And I said, ‘Sign me up.’”
Experience on “The Office”
Meacham asked Novak what his experience was being both an actor and a writer for “The Office,” to which Novak responded that the writing-acting dynamics and the hours were “stressful.”
“You kind of want to write for yourself. You don’t want to seem like you’re writing for yourself, so you don’t write for yourself, and then no one else writes for you, because they think, ‘Well, who am I? He’ll write his own stuff,’” Novak said. “So, I think me, Mindy Kaling and Paul Lieberstein, who played Toby — all of us — had a little bit of awkwardness, like, ‘No, you go, no, you go,’ without writing for ourselves.”
Meacham then asked Novak about the time he realized “The Office” had become such a popular show. Novak said the cast originally thought the show would get canceled because it had very low ratings after its first season, but Lieberstein said they should still try to make the best show they possibly could.
“[Lieberstein] said, ‘We know this is getting canceled. Let’s just make the funniest show we can so that other comedy writers know to hire us.’ [That] was very smart,” Novak said. “I think of that sometimes: motivate yourself like you know you’re gonna be fired. Just make it good, don’t try to be popular. Then the paradox is that that’s often what makes you popular.”
Novak said he felt the show was something big when people started coming up to him and singing one of his lines from the episode “The Fire.”
“Michael Schur, one of the writers who also played Mose, laughed [after the episode was filmed] and said, ‘People are going to be singing ‘Ryan started the fire’ at you for the rest of your life,’” Novak said. “We all laughed because the show was so poorly rated, [and] no one was ever going to see this episode. [But] sure enough, people sing that to me every day in my life.”
Novak went on to discuss the power young people had over making the show as big as it is today.
“It was often, for some reason, 13-year-olds [watching]. I never understood it, [and] I still don’t. You’ve never worked in an office,” Novak said. “I often wrote [the episodes] based on school — like, a lot of “The Fire” was based on playground dynamics — so maybe there was some secret thread there. I think the humor was very authentic and dark and dry, and I think young people often relate to that in their humor.”
Meacham asked Novak if he thinks there were jokes he wrote for “The Office” that would not be appropriate today. Novak responded that he believes the issue is not that the jokes are offensive but that writers and TV networks nowadays are preemptively afraid of offending their audience.
“There are jokes that people would be afraid to make now or put out now [that] I believe, more or less, you could. People aren’t offended by those jokes, as evidenced by the fact that people watch ‘The Office’ and are not offended,” Novak said. “I think audiences can handle it, so I think there is a problem with the gatekeepers who don’t trust that people have a good sense of humor.”
Meacham then asked Novak about the role of improv in “The Office.” Novak shared that as a writer, he would sometimes get jealous of the other actors for improvising a line that he knew would “be the famous line” from the episode he had written. Novak praised his castmates, however, for their ability to “make lines feel realistic.”
“I think the fact that the last takes were always improvised made everyone more naturalistic because you had to pass off the line as improv,” Novak said.
He also applauded “The Office” for its realistic camera shots that mimicked documentaries. Novak said the crew carefully thought about what the characters would let a camera crew see if they were real people. For example, he said the audience never sees Jim and Pam in bed together because Jim would never allow the cameras in that space.
“Sometimes I get annoyed when other shows [depict] characters washing [their] face in the sink, and it’s being filmed,” Novak said. “Why are you letting the camera in there?”
The two then turned to the writing process, starting with Novak sharing how he felt restless after writing for the first couple of seasons of “The Office.” Novak said he was sick of writing and wanted to quit, but he met the actress Jane Seymour at a party, who encouraged him to continue.
“[Seymour] said, ‘Don’t [quit]. That’s what every writer feels at this point,’” Novak said. “‘You cannot force a show like [“The Office”]; it just happens. You have to stay on it.’”
After his conversation with Seymour, Novak said he started carrying around a small notebook to write down his ideas for future projects, and he continued to write for “The Office.” Despite challenges, including having his episodes completely rewritten or working all night to get an episode done, Novak said he felt “fortunate that [he] got to do it.”
Current projects and advice
Novak told the audience that he’s working on a few projects right now, including a historical movie and a new comedy show.
“I’m doing a show about a megacorporation that is really fun because ‘Dunder Mifflin’ was so small,” Novak said. “This company is sort of a fictional Apple, Amazon [and] Google. These companies really run the entire world, not just technology but our consciousness, [too]. I’m writing a comedy about a gang of well-meaning idiots who run a company like that.”
Novak also discussed how he balances writing multiple projects at once, even asking Meacham for advice on the writing process. Meacham said the best way to keep a project ongoing is to work on it every day.
“It’s like exercise,” Meacham said. “If it’s 100 [pages], write a paragraph. You don’t have to keep it. I find it hard to go away from something for a week [because] it takes a longer time to get back.”
Meacham then turned to politics, asking Novak how he handles comedy writing in an era where “politics is so divisive.” Novak said he now feels like comedy and politics are “one and the same.” He specifically referenced President-elect Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk for their humorous “s—post” approach to X, in contrast to comedians who now give “speeches” on their shows.
“I don’t know what world I’m in,” Novak said. “It feels like comedy has completely changed hands from always being the left and the political underdogs to more of the right [who], I think, see themselves as the cultural underdogs.”
The discussion ended with Novak offering advice to students, encouraging them to “write for the kid sitting next to you.”
“I think the real thing to do is to learn how to entertain your own generation and then people like me will desperately turn to you and say, ‘How do we reach young people?’” Novak said.
Student reactions
Senior Amelia Murray said she enjoyed learning more about the process of filming “The Office” after watching it when she was younger.
“I grew up watching ‘The Office,’ and I’ve probably seen the whole series [almost] three times, and it was just awesome to hear the behind-the-scenes of it,” Murray said.
Senior Seth Hemingway said he enjoyed the discussion of the relationship between politics and comedy, saying Novak gave “an insightful answer” to the question posed by Meacham.
“I think how politics and comedy play into each other is really important with how society develops, but also how we move forward and get closer without defending each other,” Hemingway said.
Master’s student Emma Cronin said the discussion was “really interesting” and that the questions posed by Meacham were well-suited to the event.
“I think it was a good choice to choose a political writer as the [moderator], and I like the questions he posed,” Cronin said. “The main one that stuck out to me was the one about how the political landscape now compares to when the show aired, and how it would change the perspective of the audience and the receptiveness [of the audience] to [the show].”
Senior Rachael Lee, vice president of VPB, added that her favorite part of the night was Novak’s discussion of the characters in “The Office” in light of a different cultural environment now than when the show first aired.
“That’s what makes ‘The Office’ such a good show — despite having these odd (and slightly problematic) characters, you still love them and root for them because you know their intentions are good,” Lee said in a message to The Hustler. “I experienced that as a viewer, and it was cool to hear that [Novak] felt the same way as a writer and actor.”
