Hey, friend.
Every so often, I share a post about people I think you might like. I like them all. Very much. I figure, if you like me, you’ll probably like them.
The series is called “Someone You Might Like”, and you can find the entire archive here.
#26: Tom Gammill
You may have seen a couple of articles in The New Yorker and the New York Times this week about a show that’s just opening in Brooklyn. It’s called A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller, and it was written by (and stars) my old friend Tom Gammill!
I write that with an exclamation mark because every time he introduces himself to someone, he uses his full surname and exclaims it like he just discovered his own name. (“Hey, I’m Tom Gammill!”)
If you’ve laughed at a television in the last forty-odd years, there’s a decent chance Tom had something to do with it. With his writing partner Max Pross, he wrote for the original cast of Saturday Night Live, helped start Late Night with David Letterman, then went on to Seinfeld and 22 years on The Simpsons. He’s the guy who came up with George’s fiancée dying from licking poisoned wedding invitation envelopes. He and Max also wrote “They Took My Show Away”, the after-school-special parody that a lot of comedy writers consider the greatest sketch in Letterman history…
None of which is why he’s in this newsletter today.
He’s here because he’s one of us. Tom is a cartoonist. He draws a comic strip, The Doozies, makes gloriously inept Learn to Draw videos, and has spent around forty years building one of the great Nancy collections. He started in the early ‘80s, buying original strips for about $40 each. (Try finding one for $40 now.)
You’d struggle to find a better person to put Ernie Bushmiller on stage. (He even performs in a tie that belonged to Bushmiller.)
For decades, Tom’s comedy-writer peers have been baffled by his love of Nancy. How could a guy behind some of the most irreverent comedy on television worship a gentle strip about a girl with frizzy black hair, her pal Sluggo, and a lot of dropped ice cream cones?
Anyone who’s spent time with Tom knows the answer. He loves sophisticated comedy, and he loves a cornball, dead-centre gag, and he sees no contradiction between the two. (Neither did Bushmiller.) Nancy was breaking the fourth wall long before Letterman and The Simpsons made a career of it.
Tom’s comparison with Peanuts sums it up. When Charlie Brown drops his ice cream, you get a sigh and some existential despair. But, as Tom puts it, “Nancy just licks it off a globe.” Funnier.
Tom and I go back a long way. We met in 2013, writing and filming sketches for the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Awards, back when we were both doing hosting gigs for the show. You can see some of our handiwork here and here.
In May 2024, I flew to Columbus for NancyFest and wrote it up from a departure lounge while the airline kept pushing back my flight “due to small tornadoes and lightning.” The closing act of the whole festival was the world premiere of Tom’s play. It blew the roof off!
It’s 1976. Ernie is at the drawing board trying to wring four gags out of Nancy and Sluggo, while a parade of unexpected visitors keeps interrupting him. In Columbus, every one of those visitors was played by curator Caitlin McGurk, and she was hilarious.
Seeing it in a room packed with Nancy devotees was something else. These are people who can tell you the date of a 1959 daily strip from memory, and they were friggin howling. I counted about 6,217 jokes in the first minute. I stand by that figure.
I got to do the animation for one of the show’s big sequences: the bit where Ernie draws on four drawing boards at once. (He famously worked on four strips at a time. If he were alive today, he’d have far too many tabs open.)
Along the way, I sat in Tom’s apartment with Patrick McDonnell, Owen Kline (who’s directing) and Steve O’Donnell (who’s producing), poring over the show and trading notes, edits and suggestions. It’s very humbling to be in a room with people that talented, and to be part of the process of making something like this.
I ended my NancyFest post with: “It was a lot of Nancy. But still not enough.”
Well. Here’s more.
This version has grown since Columbus. Lauren Servideo plays everyone who isn’t Ernie, including Nancy herself, Bushmiller’s wife, and at one point Tom Gammill, opposite the real Tom Gammill playing Bushmiller. There are songs, props, cymbals, a bucket on the head, and plenty of cartoons on screen. It also takes on the time SNL put Bushmiller on a list of people “definitely not as smart as dolphins,” which is a strange thing to dramatise when you used to write for SNL.
If you love comics, or Seinfeld, or the idea of a man spending fifty years chasing the Perfect Gag, get yourself a ticket. As Bushmiller once admitted, “I never quite seem to find it.” He came awfully close.
It’s on at the Mark O’Donnell Theatre in Brooklyn through October 17.
I’m going on Saturday, with a hefty clump of fellow cartoonists.
🎟️ Grab your tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-morning-with-ernie-bushmiller-tickets-1988133453679
(Oct 8,9,10 are all sold out - still tix left for 15,16,17)
‘til next time!
Your pal,
PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.
Such a funny, sweet, talented man! I wish I could be there!