Michael Schur — Lessons from "The Office" and SNL, Moral Philosophy, Storytelling, and More

Michael Schur traces his comedy career from the Harvard Lampoon through seven seasons at SNL, where he learned to never be precious about his own material. He explains how Greg Daniels taught him long-form character storytelling on The Office, contrasting it with sketch comedy's disposable single-premise jokes. Schur recounts how a minor car-accident dispute in 2005 sparked a decade-long fascination with ethics that eventually became The Good Place and his book How to Be Perfect. Throughout, he discusses his book collecting, his Ken Tremendous alter ego, favorite philosophers, the value of failure, and why he is donating all book proceeds to charity.

• Schur tested the Lampoon's claim of being a pure meritocracy by submitting his audition pieces anonymously with only his initials, and got admitted without anyone knowing who he was.
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• After Schur invited David Foster Wallace to a made-up Lampoon award dinner, Wallace personally phoned him, beginning a years-long letter correspondence that Schur deeply regrets not rekindling before Wallace's death.
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• Schur initially thought adapting the British Office for America was 'incredibly stupid and foolhardy,' but a two-and-a-half-hour meeting with Greg Daniels convinced him Daniels could teach him to write.
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• A 2005 fender-bender dispute, where Schur publicly pressured a stranger to donate to Katrina relief instead of repairing his car, made him feel guilty, drove him to call ethics professors, and seeded The Good Place ten years before it aired.
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• Schur de-risked the pitch for The Good Place by mapping the entire first season in advance and lining up Ted Danson and Kristen Bell, telling NBC the moral-philosophy engine would 'not feel like homework.'
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• Schur says the visceral SNL failure of a sketch dying in the read-through, with only the sound of pages turning, still gives him nightmares but permanently thickened his skin against any institutional failure.
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• Schur is donating 100% of everything he earns from How to Be Perfect, advance, royalties, foreign sales and speaking fees, to charity, and persuaded his advisor Todd May to donate the majority of his earnings too.
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• The Harvard Lampoon was founded around 1876 and counts William Randolph Hearst, John Updike, George Plimpton, and Conan O'Brien (twice president) among its alumni.
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• SNL producer Lorne Michaels' long-running aphorism is that 'the show doesn't go on because it's ready, the show goes on because it's 11:30 on Saturday night.'
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• Greg Daniels' rule for The Office was that every episode should leave the audience knowing a little more about the characters, which is how a poster of babies dressed as jazz musicians grew into a multi-season storyline.
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• Schur's online alias Ken Tremendous originated from a funny name he jotted down in college; Twitter later verified the account despite his telling them it was a fake name.
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• The Ken Tremendous backstory is that he works at a fictional company called Fremulon, which became the name of Schur's real production company.
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• Schur is a first-edition book collector whose collection includes a rare, exceptionally crisp first edition of Moby Dick and an inscribed copy of Infinite Jest from Wallace.
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• After The Good Place ended, Schur received a hand-delivered handwritten note from President Barack Obama saying he watched and liked the show; Schur framed it under the Wallace photo.
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• Philosopher Jeremy Bentham had his preserved skeleton, dressed in his suit with a wax head, put on display at a London university, where it still greets visitors.
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• Aristotle, whom Schur calls the 'friendliest philosopher,' also wrote defenses of slavery, which Schur jokingly laments as ruining his admiration.
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• The Good Place's season two storyline drew on Clemson professor Todd May's short book Death, which argues that mortality gives shape and meaning to morality.
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