Exclusive Interview With "Over My Dead Body" Creator Steven Kunes

October 20, 2023·55 min·5 clips

Norman Lear wrote Steve Kunis a $5,000 check and hired him after reading his unsolicited letter.

Steve Kunis grew up in Levittown, Pennsylvania watching television through a cabinet TV in his room, developing an unusual habit of memorizing the names of crew members from the credits. He attended NYU and wrote spec scripts for MASH and Taxi, then followed his professor's advice to write personal letters to industry figures rather than knocking on doors. He sent roughly 14 letters to producers including Aaron Spelling, Steve Cannell, Norman Lear, and Grant Tinker, receiving responses from all of them. Norman Lear in particular invited Kunis to send samples and, when he flew out to Los Angeles with his pregnant wife, met with him and offered a job with a $5,000 relocation check. The offer was conditioned on Kunis returning to California after his son's birth in May 1983. Kunis's first produced work for Lear, AKA Pablo, was listed by TV Guide as one of the 45 worst shows in television history, while a Love Boat episode he wrote later was listed among the 82 greatest episodes of all time. He spent four and a half years writing monologue jokes for The Tonight Show, describing the daily rhythm of writing in the morning and seeing 27 million viewers watch the jokes the same night. He delivered the final joke in Johnny Carson's last episode, a Lorena Bobbitt courtroom one-liner. Writer David Lloyd, who wrote for Mary Tyler Moore, Cheers, and Frasier, taught Kunis the technique of audio-recording TV episodes and listening to them hundreds of times to internalize character voices. Kunis applied this technique to his MASH and Taxi spec scripts and confirmed its effectiveness when a MASH producer praised the dialogue. He recounts the advice of Norman Lear, who said dialogue and comedy cannot be taught but story construction can be learned by studying scripts. Kunis spent his career on staff writing and one-off episodes across numerous shows, plus spec script sales including a million-dollar sale of a romantic comedy called First Comes Love. He also adapted a Jimmy Buffett novel and wrote a prescient spec about a company spreading a virus to sell its own cure. In later career, he created the Amazon Prime show Over My Dead Body, in which voiceover actors portray dead celebrities being interviewed at their graves. The show received an education classification from Amazon in addition to comedy, as many younger viewers were unfamiliar with figures like Jackie Gleason, Mae West, and Phyllis Diller. Kunis describes an upcoming special called the Hollywood Lifetime Achievement Awards, pitting all past Oscar best picture and best actor winners against each other with presenters including Don Rickles in an in-memoriam segment featuring living actors whose careers are over. He closes with advice to aspiring writers: write personal letters, listen to shows rather than watching them, and be willing to relocate to where the industry operates.

As heard by us

A calm look at late-night joke writing and Carson's final punchline.

Steve Kunis revisits 41 years in the business with dry, easygoing honesty that gives the conversation its shape. He talks through the call that came after sending material to Ray Siller, the jump onto Johnny Carson's monologue team, and the four and a half years of writing jokes…

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For the last joke Johnny Carson ever aired, told by the writer who wrote it.

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