Mrs. Miller performs on TV’s The Hollywood Palace.

FEW POP SONGS are as delicate, lovely and sophisticated as Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova classic, “The Girl from Ipanema.” Most know it from the version recorded by Stan Getz and João Gilberto with vocals by Gilberto’s wife, Astrud. She is neither a trained nor technically proficient singer, which lends the song its magic. Her soft, shy sibilance fits the song’s irresistible sway, the perfect marriage of dreamy soundscape and insouciant delivery. “And when she passes, each one she passes goes, ‘Ah!’”

This, then, is the setup for one of the greatest jokes in pop music history. Mrs. Miller’s trip to “Ipanema” is a master class in her art. The track opens with 34 seconds of what may be the lushest, most sweeping treatment the song has ever known.

And then at 0:35—to adapt a phrase from today’s electronic dance music scene—Mrs. Miller delivers the drop. “AhhhOHH, but I watch her so saaAAad­-le-EE-ee….” If Astrud is the voice of the seductive Rio beauty, then Mrs. Miller is a rogue elephant stampeding down the beach, trumpeting away without a care in the world. It’s not that Mrs. Miller can’t sing; it’s how she can’t sing. She proclaims each syllable as grand opera—the kind that’s shouted above thunderous tympani—and her vibrato is seismic. Pitch is of no concern; that she often comes close, in fact, renders her delivery even more maddening. And she never met a downbeat she couldn’t miss.

If this sounds vicious, please know that a handful of music nuts—myself included—adore Mrs. Miller, and being objective isn’t easy, especially about an artist—an alumna of the College—whose notoriety came seemingly as the butt of an extremely cruel joke.

Because this issue of PCM is dedicated to humor, I felt I had to check to see if her music is still potent nearly 50 years on. Is the joke funny? Was it ever? An uninitiated friend was driving us to dinner. “Mind if I play something?” I asked, slipping in a CD. Thirty-four seconds of instrumental intro. My friend smiled and nodded. This is good! Then it happened. He started laughing so hard, he had to pull over. “Oh my god!” he said, gasping to contain himself. “What is she … ? MAKE IT STOP!”

Meet Mrs. Miller

She had a first name. It was Elva. The fact that she didn’t use it professionally is a clue for understanding the joke and determining if Elva Ruby Connes Miller ’39 was in on it or not. More clues in unraveling the mystery: She released three albums—Mrs. Miller’s Greatest Hits, Will Success Spoil Mrs. Miller?, and The Country Soul of Mrs. Miller, covering everyone from the Beatles to Buck Owens—in under two years (1966–67) on entertainment industry behemoth Capitol Records. A fourth album, Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing, was released in 1968 on a tiny label out of Hollywood. That Mrs. Miller disowned this effort is the strongest evidence we have that she wasn’t fully in on but later caught on to what was happening. We’ll get to all of that soon enough, but first we have to meet Mrs. Miller.

She was born and raised in mid-American cattle country, where she met and married John Richardson Miller, a man nearly 40 years her senior. They survived the Depression and retired to Claremont (as people do) in 1935. As a housewife with time on her hands, Elva studied music at Pomona, where, she told a Life magazine reporter, the students warmed up to a more mature classmate. “They liked the idea of an older woman there,” she said. “And within three weeks they were coming to my house, to copy my notes or listen to my records.”

And by records, she meant the ones she’d recorded. Mrs. Miller booked time at local studios (paid for by Mr. Miller) to indulge her love of singing. She told the Progress Bulletin, “[Making Greatest Hits] certainly wasn’t my idea. It was just a series of coincidences that could happen to anyone. Everyone has a hobby. Some people take pictures and file them in albums. Others paint pictures and store them in the garage. I’ve made records of sacred or classical songs for my own amusement. A closet at home is filled with them.”

Some of them found their way out of that closet: She would give records to churches and day care centers. Along the way she met three men who would steer her toward becoming a reluctant recording star. Gary Owens was a deejay at Los Angeles radio station KMPC who, following Mrs. Miller’s success, became a regular on ’60s TV comedy sketch show Laugh-In. He heard one of her records and sought her out to record comic jingles and station IDs. In his tongue-in-cheek Greatest Hits liner notes, Owens claimed to have discovered Mrs. Miller. That honor actually belonged to Fred Bock, a church musician whom Mr. and Mrs. Miller hired to accompany Elva on her hobby recordings. Bock, in turn, introduced the Millers to Lex de Azevedo, a novice record producer who had industry “connections” thanks to being the son of one of the King Sisters.

With that, the stage was set.

A Capitol Idea

So why would a leading record label—home to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, to Frank Sinatra’s imperial period and Peggy Lee’s renaissance—want to have anything to do with Mrs. Miller? Maybe because Jonathan and Darlene Edwards won a Grammy.

Cocktail club singer Darlene Edwards sang sharp—distressingly so—and her pianist husband Jonathan had the unique ability to play different keys and separate time signatures simultaneously. As illustrated by the cover to their debut album (on Columbia, Capitol’s main rival), he was born freakishly with two right hands.

It was a funny joke perpetrated by jazz vocal great Jo Stafford and her big band–leader husband Paul Weston. Stafford was known to have stunningly perfect pitch; so sure was her instrument that she could sustain the Herculean feat of intentionally singing above pitch. And he was so nimble on the 88s that he could accompany in fitting style by throwing in extra beats per measure and flying off into impossibly inept cadenzas. They used these dubious talents to personify two ditzy, dreadful lounge lizards—Jonathan and Darlene Edwards—to entertain their friends at parties. The gag was so popular among jazzbo hipsters that Stafford and Weston released The Piano Artistry of Jonathan Edwards just for kicks.

Imagine their surprise when its follow-up brought home the 1961 Grammy for Best Comedy Album and revved up the market for musical comedy albums in general. With the industry’s need to give the people more of the same, record company halls soon resounded with, “Get me the next Jonathan and Darlene Edwards!” At Capitol, Mrs. Miller’s do-it-yourself 45s ended up in some talent screener’s inbox; by that time Bock had convinced her to record a couple of the day’s pop hits. The pitch was made: Rather than find someone talented to play dumb like Stafford—someone who would expect to be paid—why not go with someone actually untalented?

Mrs. Miller was signed. De Azevedo was tapped to produce. Bock helped with the arrangements and recording. Owens came on board to add industry cred. And this juicy bonus: Rumors persisted, once the album was a hit, that Mr. Miller had footed the bill for the whole enterprise, as he had done for all of his wife’s hobbies. (Confronted with this by the Progress Bulletin’s Vonne Robertson, Mrs. Miller reportedly snapped, “He didn’t buy me a career!”)

There was a significant and telling departure from the Edwards formula—a ready-for-pasture lounge act massacring yesterday’s moldy oldies much to the delight of the hipper-than-thou cool school. (Stafford and Weston enjoyed a stupendously long career and would eventually have the Edwards record hits of the day as well, including the Bee Gees’ falsetto-driven disco smash “Stayin’ Alive” in a parody so wicked and on-the-nose that Barry Gibb allegedly was not amused.)

Capitol’s grand plan for Mrs. Miller drew inspiration from the nascent Silent Majority v. Hippie Freak culture wars. The joke was funny because she was someone on the wrong side of cultural history, proving how far behind Mom and Pop had been left by the rock ’n’ roll revolution. Not that she would be brought in on the joke; that might ruin its purity. They told her she would be presenting rock ’n’ roll as opera.

What follows is Mrs. Miller’s recounting of how Greatest Hits was made, assembled from several chronological news sources spanning a two-year period, a period where what had happened to her slowly dawned on Mrs. Miller: “[Recording] it was easy. We didn’t even have rehearsals. If there ever was a square, I’m it. I’d never attempted popular songs [before]. The studio men just popped the music in my hands—sorta sneaky like—and I started. I don’t sing off-key and I don’t sing off-rhythm. They got me to do so by waiting until I was tired and then making the record. Or they would cut the record before I could become familiar with the song. [I suspected something was up] when they printed [my worst performance of] ‘The Shadow of Your Smile.’ They told me it was an experiment. I am naïve, and I am somewhat lacking in musicianship, but I really [didn’t think it was] a gag. At first I didn’t understand what was going on. But later I did, and I resented it.

“I don’t like to be used.”

The Hits Just Keep on Coming

Capitol released Mrs. Miller’s cover of Petula Clark’s “Downtown” as a single along with the album. What happened next was well captured by Joe Cappo writing in the April 21 Chicago Daily News: “Wally Phillips, WGN’s zany morning disk jockey, premiered the LP on air last Friday. [He reports] the first batch of people who called said, ‘Get that nut off the air.’ Then after a few more plays, the listeners said, ‘We want more Mrs. Miller. She’s better than the rest of the junk you play.’ Phillips says he has received hundreds of telephone calls since the first playing and is scheduling at least one Mrs. Miller tune every day. Phillips said, ‘I play her records when I want to work off my hostilities against the world.’”

Greatest Hits sold out of its initial run of 50,000 in a matter of days. Another 150,000 were quickly pressed. They sold in a matter of weeks. Reports vary on how many finally were sold, ranging from 250,000 to 600,000.

Mrs. Miller Mania had hit. This was her itinerary for 1966–68: She was whisked to New York to be on the Ed Sullivan Show. She would also be a guest of Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas and Art Linkletter. There was The Joey Bishop Show. There was an appearance on TV’s Hollywood Palace where she sat atop a piano to sing “Inka Dinka Doo” with Jimmy Durante. There was an appearance at Carnegie Hall with Red Skelton. Hollywood came calling. She played a version of herself in a low-budget film called The Cool Ones with Roddy McDowell.

A nightclub act was quickly pulled together with a backing band and chorus. (An ad in the trades may or may not have read, “Wanted: musicians who can keep a straight face.”) Mrs. Miller’s first appearance was in Ontario at the Royal Tahitian. (A review had positive things to say … about the “good chicken stuffed with almonds and apples.”) Two more albums were made, each selling significantly fewer copies than the previous. A fourth appeared on a small independent label, Amaret Records. It disappeared without a trace, despite a promotional appearance with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

And then it was over.

Reports also vary on profits. Capitol is said to have made millions off of the Mrs. Miller phenomenon. She is reported to have earned less than $40,000 from Greatest Hits and not more than $100,000 in total earnings from royalties, fees and personal appearances.

The May 13, 1966, issue of Time magazine mentioned in what amounted to a parenthetical aside that Mrs. Miller had put her earnings into a medical-care trust fund. Likely over the course of Mrs. Miller Mania and certainly by its end, Mr. Miller had needed round-the-clock nursing care. He died at age 96 in December 1968.

I Don’t Get It

How do you explain Mrs. Miller Mania? She was interviewed by The Collegian after her initial success and said, “I just don’t know what to think about it, because I have never done anything which has brought any attention of any kind whatsoever, and I just don’t know what to say. Now the boys in Vietnam, they want me to come, but I have to go back East first. I will go there because I think the service boys come first.” On further reflection, she told reporter Bob Thomas, “I don’t understand [my record sales], but teenagers seem to be buying them. As I see it, there are two kinds of teenagers. There are the sophisticated ones, who dress like Sonny and Cher. They don’t buy my album. Then there are the teenagers who dress neatly; they are the ones who do buy my records.”

This points to the 1960s culture wars, but in her admitted naïveté, Mrs. Miller overlooked something crucial. Like the boys in Vietnam or the hippies in their freaky frippery, her “character” embodies a sign of the times. As she warbles opera in her fusty frock and Sunday hat, she is the priggish society matron, the antithesis of all things with-it and groovy, practically begging for our smug derision. Think Margaret Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies, Mrs. Stephens on Bewitched, or, more benignly, even dear Aunt Bee and neighbor Clara on The Andy Griffith Show. Humor in those shows was often generated by letting the air out of such old gas bags. She’s singing rock ’n’ roll! But she can’t! It’s hilarious!

Recall as well that during Mrs. Miller Mania, America had its love affair with camp. We watched Batman on TV and listened to Tiny Tim (a hippie with talent who nevertheless warbled the hoariest of musical chestnuts while coyly strumming a ukulele). Even the Beatles got into the act with the likes of “When I’m 64” and “Yellow Submarine.” (Mrs. Miller took a ride on the latter.)

Capitol Records—home to polar opposites like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Dear Heart,” both songs scaled by Mrs. Miller—had its fingers on that pulse. Ultimately, Mrs. Miller wised up as well. In a review of her February 1967 appearance at L.A.’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub, John L. Scott noted that Mrs. Miller was playing the show as pure comedy, noting that she delivered very deliberate one-liners with great comic timing. And she was very aware that she had the audience in stitches. She knows—’cause when she passes, each one she passes goes, “Ha!”

But that didn’t mean she gave in or pretended to be anything she wasn’t. She went by “Mrs. Miller” for a reason, and it wasn’t because it had a marketing ring to it. It was polite that wives were properly identified in public as their husband’s property. Interviewed by Skip Heller in an article in Cool and Strange Music Magazine, Mrs. Fred Bock—to sustain a trope—recalled when, after a gig, she, her husband and Mrs. Miller met actress Natalie Schafer (Mrs. Thurston Howell III, the Gilligan’s Island version of the blue-blooded old biddy). The actress said to Mrs. Miller, “You can call me Natalie.” To which Mrs. Miller replied, “And you can call me Mrs. Miller.”

Desafinado

Antônio Carlos Jobim, who gave us “The Girl from Ipanema,” penned another classic, “Desafinado” (translation: slightly out of tune). Its English lyrics speak of love gone sour; the original Portuguese gets at something deeper, suggesting that only privileged ears can hear things perfectly, that bossa nova can’t help but be out of tune. It chides, “What you don’t know and cannot feel is that those out of tune also have a heart.”

Mrs. Miller wasn’t the first pop sensation to have been lauded for singing poorly. In her day she was compared to the Cherry Sisters, a 19th-century vaudeville act popular although—no, probably because—it was said “they couldn’t speak, sing or act. They were simply awful.” And then there was Florence Foster Jenkins, the grossly untalented opera singer who rented grand opera halls to torture her friends. (In a 2016 film, Jenkins was played by no less than Meryl Streep, who proclaims, “People may say I couldn’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.”) Susan Alexander Kane’s atrocious public screeching is a central plot point of Citizen Kane. And try as you might, you cannot forget William Hung, can you?

Music is a particularly prickly muse. We are very quick to accept, even champion, foibles and faux pas in other art forms. We celebrate primitive painters. We keep Norman Mailer in the pantheon despite his having opened Harlot’s Ghost with an egregious dangling participle. And Nicolas Cage keeps getting acting gigs, for crying out loud. But stray one iota off key….

It’s often said visionaries are ahead of their time. In 2019 we have a word for the Mrs. Millers of the world—disrupters—and it’s the hot thing to be. So isn’t it odd that the chaotic disrupter of the music industry’s professional norms and expectations—the joyous elephant stampeding down that Ipanema beach—was none other than the persona of the stuffy establishment matron whose comeuppance we so deeply desired? And if you’re having trouble wrapping your head around that double irony, here’s the mindblower. When it comes to cooler-than-thou, competence isn’t spared, either.

Nearly concurrently, 30 miles to the southwest, another transplant from the East who blossomed in a college music department was about to become a thousand times more famous than Mrs. Miller and come crashing down a hundred times harder. Only she was the best voice of her generation. Karen Carpenter came out of Downey, Calif., and the music department of California State University, Long Beach, to sell more than 90 million records. Carpenters records dramatically changed popular music—yes, even rock ’n’ roll. The duo invented the guitar-driven power ballad, and their recording, performing and marketing techniques set standards throughout the industry. But they could not break the critical determination that they were unhip and square—okay, they were unhip and square—and that disservice lingers. Riots likely will break out should they ever be inducted into Cleveland’s Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

Karen now is regarded as a preeminent interpretive pop singer, yet frustrations with the duo’s inability to shake their negative image, coupled with her own personal demons, led her to die of anorexia at age 32. Elva couldn’t sing a good note. Karen couldn’t sing a bad one. And both were out of tune with their times. Which just goes to show you that the arbiters of taste in their indifferent and often unfounded dismissals can be truly heartless monsters.

One for the Boys

Mrs. Miller and Jimmy Durante sing a duet on TV’s The Hollywood Palace.

Two postscripts. One bitten, twice shy? Hardly. It seems Mrs. Miller could not catch a break. After she was dropped by Capitol, news articles appeared noting that she was going to change her image. In April of 1968, she released Mrs. Miller Does Her Own Thing, working with noted L.A. producer Mike Curb. (He would go on to produce the Osmonds, date Karen Carpenter and serve as California’s lieutenant governor.) Scattered among the usual pop hits that anyone but her should be singing, were suggestive, trippy titles such as “The Roach,” “Mary Jane,” “Granny Bopper” and “Renaissance of Smut,” that would have been better if the pot and porno references had at least been dressed up with coy double entendre. The cover was psychedelic and garish. Mrs. Miller is winking knowingly and offering a salver of brownies presumably enhanced with what we now call “edibles.”

Her new image was a pusher? Yet again, she had been hornswoggled. She didn’t get the sex and drug references. The cover art had been manipulated. She didn’t even get it when a winking Johnny Carson asked how the weeds were in her garden. (Was there ever a time when male entertainment honchos didn’t exploit their power differential with women? MAKE IT STOP!)

When she was woke to this new betrayal, Mrs. Miller said “Enough!” She lived quietly in Claremont but remained engaged in her community. She was the grand marshal for the Fourth of July parade, and she judged The Claremont Colleges’ Spring Sing. She moved to Hollywood, where she enjoyed classical concerts and theatre. She later moved to an apartment in Northridge that was destroyed in the 1994 quake. She was relocated to an elder-care facility, where she died in 1997. She was 90.

She did keep her promise to the boys in Nam. In 1967 she joined Bob Hope’s annual USO tour. Life magazine’s Jordan Bonfante covered it, noting of her performance, “In Vietnam, clad in jungle boots and a muumuu, she chatted with audiences about the 15 years she spent studying music, lopped five years off at each burst of laughter, and finally offered, ‘Would you believe one?’ When that was howled down, she confessed she was starting lessons ‘tomorrow.’”

She had timing. She had one-liners. And—as captured in photos of her among the adoring troops—she had the time of her life.

“And when she passes, each one she passes goes, ‘Ah!’”

ON A RANDOM weeknight at a comedy club in Burbank, Pomona College Professor Ori Amir bounds onto the stage.

“Hello, party people!”

By day, the bearded redhead with perpetually tousled hair is a visiting professor of psychology who has taught at Pomona since 2017.  By night? An amateur stand-up comic.

“As you can tell by my accent, I am a neuroscientist,” the native Israeli says, drawing titters from an audience that doesn’t quite know what to believe. “Sorry, I forgot I’m in Hollywood: I’m a neuroscientist-slash-model,” he says.

“I did get a new haircut. I went to Floyd’s and I told them I work at a college, so could you just give me the haircut of whatever celebrity is most popular among college students these days? So they gave me the Bernie Sanders.”

This time, the laughter is in full.

To Amir, stand-up comedy is like a scientific experiment that provides immediate results. You test the hypothesis that your joke is funny: They either laugh or they don’t. There are variables such as word choice, delivery and audience demographics, but the feedback is instant—sometimes painfully so.

His academic research is a far more sophisticated inquiry. Other researchers have used fMRI analysis, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, to study the brain’s responses to humor. Amir’s work with fMRIs and eye-tracking technology is groundbreaking: He studies the workings of the brain during the actual creation of humor.

Comedy, it turns out, is a nearly perfect subject for exploring the creative process.

“It’s a cognitive process that under the right setting could take 15 seconds, and you can replicate it many times. Anybody can at least try to do it,” Amir says. “It’s hard to ask a novelist to come up with a novel while you’re watching.”

Amir’s research has been featured by Forbes, and the journal Nature reported on his work last fall in an article about how neuroscience is breaking out of the lab, citing his doctoral research at the University of Southern California with Irving Biederman on the neural correlates of humor creativity. The Guardian, Reader’s Digest and the website Live Science also have featured Amir’s work.

For his research at USC, Amir recruited professional comedians—including some from the Groundlings, the famed Los Angeles improv troupe that helped spark the careers of Melissa McCarthy and Will Ferrell—along with amateur comedians and a control group of students and faculty. He then showed them examples of the classically quirky cartoons from The New Yorker with the original captions removed and asked the subjects to come up with their own captions—some humorous, some mundane and sometimes no caption at all—as he recorded which areas of the brain were activated.

What Amir found was somewhat unexpected: The regions of the brain lit up by the creation of the funniest jokes by the most experienced comedians weren’t so much in the medial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with cognitive control, but in the temporal lobes, the regions of the brain connected to more-spontaneous association. The findings fit perfectly, he says, with the classic but decidedly unscientific advice by improv comedy coaches to “get out of your head.”

Amir has expanded his work at Pomona, where he teaches such courses as Psychology of Humor, Data Mining for Psychologists and fMRI Explorations into Cognition. His current work uses eye-tracking technology to examine the relationship between visual attention and the creation of humor.

That study has given undergraduate students who are headed toward entirely different careers an opportunity to contribute to research that Amir expects to publish in a scientific journal next year. Recent cognitive graduates Konrad Utterback ’19, who is beginning his career as a financial analyst, and Justin Lee ’19, who plans to go to law school, will be among the paper’s coauthors. Other collaborators include Alexandra Papoutsaki—a computer science professor at Pomona whose expertise in the emerging uses and potential of eye tracking has been featured in Fortune and Fast Company—and students Sue Hyun Kwon ’18 and Kevin Lee ’20, who wrote computer code for the project.

Konrad Utterback ’19 models the use of the Tobii eye tracker to track eye movements as subjects try to create a punchline for an uncaptioned New Yorker cartoon.

Once again using uncaptioned New Yorker cartoons as prompts, Utterback and Justin Lee conducted experiments using a similar assortment of professional comedians that included comics from the Groundlings and Second City, along with amateur comedians and students.

The eye-tracking device—a low-end model by Tobii that costs about $170 and looks like a narrow black bar attached to the bottom of a standard computer monitor—allowed the researchers to chart the movement of the subjects’ eyes on an X-Y coordinate plane over the 30 seconds they were given to look at each cartoon.

The results were then compared to something called a saliency map of the cartoon image.

“It’s this algorithm that basically determines which part of the cartoon is the most visually salient; it defines visual saliency in terms of things like edges and contrast and light—factors which are likely to attract low-level, primitive visual attention,” Utterback explains.

Once again, the results were surprising. The expert comedians focused most closely on the salient or conspicuous features of the cartoon, including faces.

“It’s actually a little counterintuitive because you would think, well, you have all this experience doing comedy and then you end up looking at those features that the low-level algorithm has determined to be the most salient ones,” Amir says. “Our interpretation was that it has to do with them actually using the image to generate the captions, using the input to generate associations to come up with something funny, as opposed to trying to sort of top-down impose their ideas.”

That made sense to Utterback.

“The fact that these were improv comedians in particular is relevant because that’s consistent with how comedians do improv comedy,” he says. “They’re basically trained to listen to what other people are saying first and not ruminate internally too much trying to think of something funny on their own, and sort of just be reactive. It makes perfect sense with these results because they were focusing much more on the actual content of the image to create the joke rather than trying to generate it themselves and forcing it to fit the cartoon, which is what we would expect people with no comedy experience to do.”

Justin Lee’s part of the study built on those results, adding the captions the subjects produced to the original cartoons and then asking three different people to rate the funniness of the cartoons and their captions. “We were able to use the data to determine that this fixation on the salient parts of the image directly correlates with how funny the caption actually ends up being,” Lee says.

The students’ findings support Amir’s earlier results. “We basically proved the same thing that he did using a different modality (eye tracking versus fMRI),” Utterback says. “In a nutshell, both experiments show that people with more comedy experience display a higher level of bottom-up, automatic control and less top-down, intentional influence on the humor creation process.”

Growing up in Israel, Amir watched his father “joke all the time” around the house and even do some comedic appearances on Israeli television.He tried his own hand at stand-up for the first time about seven years ago while still in graduate school at USC, telling a couple of jokes at a campus comedy event. Later, he started showing up around L.A. for open-mic nights. He has appeared at some famous L.A. comedy clubs and can even be seen on TV’s Comedy Central and CMT—“assuming you watch those channels 24-7 on a split screen, without blinking,” Amir writes on his comedy website.

His mainstay is performing at smaller clubs, joints still dotted with appearances by famous or once-famous comics, where he can continue to hone his craft. The life of most comedians, he quickly learned, is not what he saw on TV growing up, somebody telling jokes for an hour in a big arena.

“You don’t know the path,” he says. “The path is—you’re going to end up performing for a long time in front of three apathetic strangers at an open mic, and you’re going to wait two hours to do that and have to buy something from the place. Especially in Los Angeles, it’s an extremely competitive sort of thing. But obviously if it wasn’t so rewarding, people would not be working with so much effort.”

Amir’s influences include George Carlin, the late comedian remembered for his HBO specials and his sharp political and social commentary, as well as British comedians Eddie Izzard and Bill Bailey.

As a foreigner and an academic, Amir has an uncommon perspective for a comic. Audiences don’t always believe he is who he says he is. “I had a couple of times when people said, ‘You’re not really a neuroscientist, and your accent is so fake,’” he says with a laugh. Amir also likes to needle Americans with the insight of an outsider.

“I do like being a foreigner, but sometimes I’m a little concerned that Trump is going to deport me now to Mexico,” he says onstage. “I’m trying to seem more like an American by walking around saying American things, like, ‘Hey, this is America—speak English. Jesus loves you. Sign here.’

“I love the American English,” he goes on. “I love how rich your vocabulary is. You have words like communist, socialist, Marxist, anti-American—and these are only just the synonyms for poor.”

Social and political commentary and the typical off-color comedy club fare can be a little dicey for an academic, particularly one without tenure, Amir knows. He doesn’t invite students to his gigs, but his act was squeaky clean the night PCM visited.

“I do actually have a reporter from my college here,” he told the crowd, “so I can’t say any jokes that could be offensive or construed as prejudiced or sexist or dirty in any way, so … Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen!”

That one, he says later, would have worked better if he had led with it. His comedy is part improv and partly always being refined. He doesn’t expect to give up his day job any time soon, nor does he plan to quit performing.

“I do want to see how far I can get with it,” he says. “Very few people actually make money doing it—and also, my visa doesn’t allow me to do that for money anyway.”

Ba-dum-bump.

Back in the lab, Amir plans to turn his gaze to the potential for artificial intelligence to produce comedy.

His initial instinct is that comedy is an “AI-complete problem”—one of the few things robots are not soon going to be able to do better than humans. There are types of humor, however, that computers should be able to excel at—such as puns, the proverbial lowest form of humor.

“That’s the first type of humor computers are able to do,” he says.

By the way, Amir—who performs around Los Angeles maybe a couple of times a week—already has had the distinction of being the opening act for a joke-telling robot.

The electronic novice of the stand-up circuit was pretty funny, he admits. However, there was a catch.

“The robot told jokes written by a good comedy writer.”

Wendy Molyneux holds a stuffed version of the mysterious Kuchi Kopi character from Bob’s Burgers.

TV FANS MIGHT get their notions of a comedy writer’s workplace from the sitcom 30 Rock, with its gaggle of unkempt guys tossing around food and sexist jokes. But reality is the polar opposite at the gleaming new offices of Fox’s long-running animated series Bob’s Burgers, where Wendy Molyneux ’97 works as a writer and an executive producer.

Molyneux’s private office is colorful and comfortable, but also tidy and sunny. Artwork by fans, depicting the show’s goofy but lovable characters, adorns the walls, attractively framed and carefully aligned. Beyond her door, the common areas provide roomy and serene spaces where colleagues can convene for group writing sessions or have a bite at a working lunch counter, a replica of the one on the show.

The offices reflect a designer’s orderly touch, not the unruly, chaotically creative mind of a comedy writer.

Tidiness, Molyneux will admit, is not her strong suit. She once hired a professional organizer to help get her life in order, as she explained to podcast host and fellow Pomona alumna Alison Rosen ’97. During that assisted cleanup, Molyneux rummaged through boxes of her old college stuff and got a glimpse of herself more than 20 years ago as an aspiring scribe. She didn’t like what she saw.

“I looked at some of the things I had written and thought, ‘Oh God, how did I have a single friend?’” Molyneux said on the episode of Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend. “Some people are better than I was at that age, but I think I was really pretentious.”

If so, Molyneux, now 43 and expecting her fourth child in just a few weeks, certainly seems to have grown out of it. Dressed casually with hair uncoiffed, she takes a seat on a cozy couch. At times, she seems self-effacing. Interrupted by the reporter, she apologizes: “Sorry, I ramble.” Asked a follow-up question for clarification, she takes the blame for the confusion: “This is, like, the least-clean bio of all times.” But she says it with a friendly laugh. Not a belly laugh or knee slapper, but a natural, spontaneous laugh that punctuates and ripples through her sentences, as if what she hears herself say just struck her funny.

That lighthearted quality hasn’t changed since her college years.

“I remember Wendy vividly and fondly,” says Thomas G. Leabhart, resident artist and professor of theatre at Pomona. “The mischievous twinkle in her eye and her love of a good hearty laugh did not prevent her taking her studies seriously. She performed classic roles with as much authority and ease as contemporary ones and seemed perfectly at home on stage.”

For Molyneux, the road from college theatre to professional comedy would be long and winding, with more than its share of potholes, detours and dead ends.

Wendy Molyneux (left) and her sister Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin chat in a working replica of the diner in Bob’s Burgers.

Molyneux  was born in New York and grew up in Indiana, the second child in a family of four girls and one boy. Asking if her family name is French elicits another laugh. “Our last name sounds a lot more sophisticated than we are,” she says. “We’re like 80 percent Irish, or more. We’re actually potato people.”

She attended Franklin Central High School on the outskirts of Indianapolis, an area that was, at the time, primarily white, staunchly conservative and stubbornly bent on maintaining its rural lifestyle. She calls it “very proto-Trump country.” Her parents, Richard and Susan Molyneaux, were “Democrats in a sea of Republicans.”

The kids, however, did not see the world in political reds and blues. For them, it was a fascinating playland of childhood adventures and sibling shenanigans. They were “free-range kids,” recalls Molyneux, out of the house in the morning, back at night. There were no fences, and no adult supervision.

It smacks of the idyllic suburban life nostalgically portrayed in Steven Spielberg movies. “We literally had a cornfield at the end of our street,” recalls Molyneux. There was also a creek running through their backyard, and endless open space where they could run wild, along with their imaginations.

That carefree lifestyle is still a source of inspiration for story lines on Bob’s Burgers, focused on the off-kilter but loveable Belcher family: owner Bob, his wife Linda, and their three rascals, Tina, Gene and little Louise with her perennial pink rabbit ears. Molyneux does not rely on her children for ideas; she draws on her own childhood experience to animate the episodes she co-writes with her sister and longtime collaborator, Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin. To them, the cartoon Belchers share much in common with the real-life Molyneux family of a bygone era.

That era came to an end when Wendy was 15. Her father, an engineer, got a new job with Mattel, the corporate toymaker based in El Segundo, and the family moved nearby to the tony suburb of Manhattan Beach. Wendy enrolled at Mira Costa High School, among the best in the country. Lizzie, who is eight and a half years younger, was barely starting grade school.

California real estate prices gave her parents sticker shock. But the political climate on the left coast gave them a new sense of belonging. “It was a revelation,” Molyneux recalls, “like, ‘Oh my God, not everyone is conservative!’”

Despite their age difference, Wendy and Lizzie were great friends. They went to the movies and joked around together. It would be another 15 years before they would start writing together too.

After graduating from Mira Costa in 1993, Molyneux started weighing her college options, though not too rigorously.  All she needed to make her choice was a casual glance through a promotional booklet for Pomona College that belonged to her sister Jenny, older by a year and a half, who had preceded her at Pomona.

Wendy zeroed in on a small boxed feature in the booklet, and there it was—her mission in life. “I literally can remember where it was on the page: bottom right-hand corner, somewhere in the middle of the book. A little box says, ‘Pomona College has an improv comedy group called Without a Box,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I have to go here,’” Molyneux recalls. “Literally, I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t understand that most colleges have improv groups. I thought this was incredibly special.”

At Pomona, Wendy and her older sister took different tracks. Jenny majored in economics and sang in the Glee Club. After graduating, she worked in Pomona’s admissions office.

Wendy Molyneux works on a script with some of her colleagues at Bob’s Burgers.

Meanwhile, Molyneux was performing leading roles in classical theatre(Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière) as well as contemporary theatre(Sam Shepard, María Irene Fornés). When not on stage, she was immersed in the study of English literature and poetry, informed at times by her passion for feminist issues. Mixing the two did not always please her professors.

In her junior year, Molyneux took a course on modernist poetry, a seminar led by then English Professor Cristanne Miller, a foremost authority on Emily Dickinson with a strong interest in women’s studies.

“Only seven students were in the class, and Wendy was among the strongest, although I recall that we had a few conversations about the need to moderate her tone in her papers,” recalls Miller, now a SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. “A note in my grade book indicates that I handed Wendy’s first paper back ungraded, asking her to rewrite it, since it mostly raved about a single idea rather than developing an argument. The idea was in essence feminist and I was sympathetic to it, but expressing anger about T. S. Eliot’s portrayal of women is not sufficient for a literary critical paper—even a short one. Her second essay in the class was much better.”

Nowadays, Molyneux is not restrained by academic rigor in expressing her strong opinions on a host of topics, from feminism and gun control to motherhood, women’s rights and her none-too-subtle feelings about President Trump. Her Twitter feed (@WendyMolyneux) is peppered with F-bombs and other profane put-downs aimed at trolls, bots and other critics.

Some of her tweets are funny. Others are deadly serious.

“It’s going to be funny right until I get murdered,” she says, still laughing. “I did attract NRA trolls for a while. They send you pictures of guns and basically be like, ‘I hope you lock your doors at night.’ And then you report it to Twitter, and Twitter does absolutely nothing.”

Molyneux decided she would not be intimidated or back down. They want people to be afraid, she says, as a way to silence the opposition.

Recently, Molyneux spoke out against the diet industry as harmful to women’s self-image. She was particularly critical of a weight-loss app for kids called Kurbo from Weight Watchers. She tweeted a link and a deeply personal observation: “The first time I was told my body wasn’t okay, I was 4 or 5. Sad, right?!

Molyneux graduated from college with an English    degree and a lack of direction. “I think a lot of people came out of Pomona being like, ‘I’m gonna be a doctor. I’m going to be on Wall Street.’ And I was like, ‘I’m going to move to San Francisco and work at a crepe restaurant. It was not a good plan. But now I work on a show about a restaurant, so I guess in a way, I was being incredibly smart.”

For a few years after college, Molyneux “floundered around” in search of a clear career path in comedy, but with no map.

“I had literally no idea how to make anything happen,” she says. “I didn’t have any family in the business, and I didn’t know how you were supposed to get started. It’s not like jobs are on LinkedIn. It’s more like a room that you want to be in, but nobody’s ever seen the door, and you don’t know where the door is. So you kind of, like, have to feel your way into it.”

Molyneux “flamed out” in San Francisco after a year. She moved back to L.A., waited tables, took temp jobs, worked for an answering service. Through trial and error, she eventually “stumbled sideways” into comedy as a life-sustaining endeavor.

She got a day job selling group tickets for the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, “a little troll that they kept in the basement … and no one checked on me all day.” In her downtime, she started writing short humor pieces for the website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, “which is still a great place for young people to get their humor-writing published.” After hours, Molyneux pursued her passion at the legendary ImprovOlympic West in Hollywood (later the iO West), a training ground and cultural hub for comedians in L.A. until it closed last year.

But there’s one thing that Molyneux, a self-described introvert, would never, ever even try—stand-up comedy.

“I was too intimidated to do stand-up,” she says, recoiling at the thought. “Oh, no, no, no. I found it frightening to be on stage by myself.”

Improv, on the other hand, has been very, very good to Wendy Molyneux. It not only put her on a career path, but also on a path to starting her own family. She met her husband, fellow writer Jeff Drake, through the improv world, and their career paths merged along with their personal lives. At one point, Drake had a job writing promotional pitches for shows on NBC, and she joined him on the in-house staff when another job opened up.

They’ve worked closely together ever since.

In 2006, they were both hired as writers for a new NBC talk show featuring Megan Mullally, of Will and Grace fame. Though short-lived (less than five months), the show marked Molyneux’s first break into the TV-writing business.

During that time, Molyneux also started working for the first time with her sister Lizzie, who was still in college and doing a summer internship in entertainment. When Lizzie pitched a script idea to a producer, he liked it. With no experience, she turned to her older sister for advice. They worked on the script together, and though it didn’t go anywhere, a successful sibling writing team was born.

Theirs was no overnight success. They continued to work on pilots that didn’t get picked up and specs (or sample scripts) in hopes someone would like their ideas. They’re not sure how, but one of those specs made it to the desk of Bob’s Burgers creator Loren Bouchard. Suddenly—miraculously, they still think—they were hired for the show’s very first season in 2009.

“That’s the thing with entertainment,” Molyneux said on the podcast. “You have to keep throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks.”

The Burbank offices of Bento Box, the animation studio behind Bob’s Burgers, has been home to Wendy and Lizzie Molyneux for the past 10 years. Wendy’s husband Jeff (@hatethedrake, for all you Seinfeld fans) works on a different show in the same building, with offices just upstairs. Molyneux also thinks of her colleagues as family, all pitching in ideas, punching up jokes, putting final touches on scripts.

Fans are part of the family, too. They not only contribute artwork, but also fanatically keep track of episodes, minor characters, and running gags. One website ranked the show’s 149 special burgers by pun (no. 5: the Poblano Picasso Burger). Other fans intently try to catch all the punny names on neighboring storefronts (a pottery shop called “Welcome Back Potter,” or one of Wendy’s favorites, “Maxi Pads: Large Apartment Rentals.”)

The Molyneux sisters have become their own brand in the business, racking up writing awards together and getting hired as a team for new projects. Last month, they began work as showrunners and executive producers on a show they created themselves, along with Regular Show alumna Minty Lewis, called The Great North, about a single father in Alaska and his weird bunch of kids.

Molyneux is at the top of her game. But like many adults, she’s astounded how fast time passes. At heart, she admits, she’s “super sentimental and nostalgic,” especially when thinking back on those seemingly endless days of her childhood.

“I think that’s one of the reasons it’s good to work on an animated show,” she said on the podcast. “You get to stop time with these characters sort of permanently, which is maybe what all of us want to do at certain points in our lives. Like, ‘Oh, this is good right here. Let’s stop! Like everything’s fine right now. Let’s just stay here, getting to live in the eternal present.”

Photos by Iris Schneider

Art and story by Andrew Mitchell ’89. Full script available here.

Liz Fosslien ’09 is the co-author and illustrator of the Wall Street Journal bestseller No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work. She is also the head of content at Humu, a company founded by Laszlo Bock ‘93 that uses behavioral science to make work better. In her spare time, she draws cartoons that have been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, and TIME.

Q: When did you first start drawing?

I’ve always been an avid doodler. While I was working as an economic consultant in my early 20s, I started putting my feelings into charts and illustrations. One of the earliest projects I put online was “14 Ways an Economist Says I Love You”—super nerdy, but economists seemed to like it, which gave me the motivation to continue drawing in a more serious way.

Q: How do you come up with ideas?

A comedian friend of mine once said he only goes to gatherings he knows will be amazing or horrendous, because extremes give him the best material. I feel similarly. When I’m brainstorming ideas, I try to think back on the moments when I felt intense emotion, good or bad.

For example, last summer I went to a wedding that started at noon, which is a very early time to start an event that goes until midnight. I’m an introvert, so around 7 p.m. I could not bear the thought of one more small talk. The only closed-off, quiet area was the coat closet, so I went inside it, sat on the floor and started messing around on my phone. A few minutes later, another woman came in to do the same thing. We quickly bonded over being in the coat closet and then had a long and lovely discussion about all the things we’d done just to get some peace and quiet at a party. I made a cartoon out of that.

Q: How do you keep track of your ideas?

I send myself text messages. I tried writing ideas in a notebook, but it became too cumbersome to constantly be responsible for a notebook. Here are a bunch of idea texts I recently sent to myself: “weather forecast,” “coffee and garbage can,” “sharing and oversharing firehose.” They’re semi-nonsensical, but they usually do the job of jogging my memory. I don’t remember what the “coffee and garbage can” text meant, though, so it’s not a perfect system.

Q: What do you find funny?

Economics, the comic series Calvin and Hobbes, the book Catch-22, the human Larry David. And my partner—he is pretty funny.

Q: Many artists seem to have rituals. Do you have any?

So many. I’m most rigid about my morning routine. I’ve eaten the same thing for several years: seven mini-scoops of Trader Joe’s plain nonfat Greek yogurt and one s’mores Luna Bar. While eating breakfast, I read academic abstracts or, if there is a new episode, listen to the podcast Reply All.

Trader Joe’s has the best plain, non-fat Greek yogurt. My partner doubted there was any real difference between this yogurt and other brands, so we did a blind taste test. He fed me seven random spoonfuls of Trader Joe’s, Fage, Chobani, and Wallaby yogurts, and I had to identify which one was the Trader Joe’s yogurt. I got a perfect score.

More recently I’ve been experimenting with a new breakfast by swapping out the Luna Bar and swapping in peanut butter and walnuts. This is for health reasons only. The new breakfast is not as delicious.

Q: Have you ever had a cartoon bomb?

Sort of. I posted this cartoon [next column] on Reddit, where it made it to the front page and was then promptly ripped to shreds by Internet trolls. The top comment was “Hooray, I get to have a colonoscopy!” and it went downhill from there. My parents thought it was hilarious. My dad, who lives in Chicago, still texts me from time to time. “I get to shovel the driveway again,” he’ll write. “I get to file my taxes.”

Q: You’ve written a book about work. What’s a good joke to tell when you’re late to an important meeting?

My advice is to be punctual to important meetings.

Illustrations by Liz Fosslien ’09