The Depressingly Funny World of Raphael Bob-Waksberg
By Elai T
Raphael Bob-Waksberg describes the frst house he lived in LA. It was a beautiful mansion in the Hollywood Hills. He remembers being told that it was the third-highest elevated house in all of Hollywood. However, his room was a glorifed closet. “ Tere was a little extra room that I guess that they realized they could monetize if they called it a bedroom,” Bob-Waksberg says. Te house was accessible only by car as it was on a very long and windy road.
Unfortunately, soon afer moving in, Bob-Waksberg got into a car accident which lef him stranded in the house. “I just remember feeling so trapped up there and so isolated. And I remember looking out of the deck and feeling like I was literally, like, on top of the world, but also more alone and isolated than I’d ever been” . Tis experience was part of the inspiration for his most famous character, BoJack Horseman. “It was someone who lived in a house like that and seemingly had everything but still couldn’t fnd a way to be happy” .
Raphael Bob-Waksberg is a writer who fnds humor in everyday sufering. He is primarily known for creating the Netfix series BoJack Horseman, as well as co-creating the Amazon Prime series Undone. In collaboration with Bojack Horseman production designer Lisa Hanawalt, he executive produced her show, Tuca & Bertie. Bob-Waksberg has also written a short story anthology called Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory. Bob-Waksberg’s work follows his idea of “Finding the comedy in sadness, but also fnding the sadness in comedy.”
Bob-Waksberg grew up in Palo Alto, California, minutes away from Hanawalt. Tey both attended Gunn High School, which Hanawalt described in a California Sunday interview as, “One of those schools where if you didn’t take fve AP classes and get 1600 on your SATs, you were considered subpar”.
Apparently, he was known more for his humor than for his academic performance because he was voted “class clown.” However, he did not win “Funniest”, which he believed better represented his subtle wit.
Humor runs in the family, as his mother, Ellen Bob, explains: “What I do know is that I will do almost anything for a laugh. And he got that from me. And then his father’s ability to tell a funny story, he got that from
him. And it was a problem for him in school because he enjoyed making people laugh and he would get bored and to entertain himself, he would try to make the whole class laugh”.
Bob-Waksberg grew up in a very Jewish household. Both of his parents were highly active in the local Jewish community. He once described his parents as “two professional Jews”. His mother, Ellen, ran a Jewish book store with his grandmother, and later joined Congregation Etz Chayim in Palo Alto as their Executive Director. His father, David Waksberg, was involved in the movement to free Soviet Jewry, and CEO of Jewish LearningWorks from 2005-2020.
Bob-Waksberg feels his Jewish upbringing deeply infuenced his humor: “For me, my Jewish upbringing was everything. Te way I think about comedy is defnitely infuenced by the kind of comedy that I grew up with, which I think was very Jewish comedy.” To illustrate, Bob-Waksberg tells one of his father’s favorite jokes. He clarifes that the joke is not his number one favorite joke, just a joke that he likes.
“My Jewish upbringing was everything”
“A Nazi ofcer is driving through the streets of Germany and he sees a Jewish man with a long beard and he decides to have a little fun. So he rolls down his window and he says, ‘Who are the enemy of the German people?’ And the Jew knows the correct answer. And so he says, ‘ Te Jews and the bicycle riders.’ And the German ofcer is confused. And he says, ‘Why the bicycle riders?’ And the Jew says, ‘Why the Jews?’” .
He notes the combination of humor and sorrow in his dad’s joke. “ Tat is a joke that I think is funny. But there’s a lot of pain in it, right? Tere’s a lot of sadness” . His mother, Ellen, adds, “We weren’t big on fart jokes and we weren’t big on ‘slipping on a banana’ like slapstick jokes, right? Tey were all sort of, you know, the ‘deeply difcult situation of Jews historically’ jokes. I’m sure there were jokes that were Jewish jokes told at the table.”.
Bob-Waksberg is following a long-standing tradition of Jewish humor laughing at the darkness. As Jason Zinoman, an author and a critic for the New York Times, explains, “Some artists argue that making light of prejudice, or turning purveyors of it into absurdities, robs hatred of power.”
Bob-Waksberg took this Jewish outlook with him to Bard College, where he majored in playwriting. He
recalls how he decided on his major. As a senior project, acting majors would have to act in a play and write a long paper, but playwriting majors only had to write a play, and, as he put it, “ Tat seemed easier to me than writing a research paper and so I guess I became a writer because I wanted to write less.” . While at Bard College, he founded the sketch comedy group Olde English with his friends, including his roommate and later on, collaborator, Adam Conover.
“I guess I became a writer because I wanted to write less.”
Afer graduating, he spent his time writing very serious plays, while also making goofy sketch comedy videos with his friends as part of Olde English. Tey did live shows, but also posted their videos online. As time went by and they began to gain some recognition, he started to miss telling the longer, more serious stories. He sent his manager a spec pilot, and that was his way into television. “I was thinking about how can I combine some of the skills I learned in sketch comedy and some of the skills I learned as a playwriting major and do something kind of in the middle” .
Te road from staring out across the deck of that Hollywood mansion to the fnal character of Bojack Horseman illustrates Bob-Waksberg’s creative process. While talking about his creative process, he shared a compelling analogy to a video game from his childhood, Katamari Damacy: “It was this video game where you’re a little guy with, like, a ball and you’re running around collecting things and things are sticking to your ball, right?” he explained. “So you’ll be, like, running around my desk, say, and, like, this piece of tape will get picked up by the ball and this clip, and this pen, and suddenly your ball is a little bigger. And now you can pick up bigger things like this computer mouse. And eventually you could pick up the whole computer and the ball’s getting bigger and bigger and you start picking up chairs and tables and offce furniture and before you know it, you have a ball that’s the size of a city” .
He says this snowballing process was how he created BoJack Horse-
man. “First, I kind of have this idea of, like, ‘Oh, I want to do something with these animal people.’ And I kind of like roll that around a little bit and I collect things and I go ‘Oh, maybe there’s something here about the way that I was feeling while I was, you know, on the deck of this house in the Hollywood Hills.’ And I keep rolling it around and I go, ‘Oh, maybe this guy was, like, a professional actor. And now he’s like, kind of washed up’” . He completes the analogy: “It’s asking questions and then coming up with answers and you are, like, accumulating this thing like it’s bigger and bigger and you bring more people into it, right? Like my friend Lisa draws the characters. I bring in a staf of writers who we can collaborate together and talk about. We bring in directors and animators and actors, and so it becomes this collaborative, growing, growing thing. But if I had to think at the beginning like, what is this whole thing going to look like, you know, soup to nuts, that’s really intimidating and scary. And so I think really you have to kind of look at like, what is today’s work? And today’s work is just kind of rolling this little ball around and just seeing what you can accumulate” .
Bob-Waksberg says the process of writing his shows is 8 or 9 writers bouncing ideas around and asking questions: “Why is this character like this? Or what’s the dynamic between these two characters? What are some fun stories that could illustrate that, or what are some funny things that could happen? …We talk about our own lives, our own days, like what’s bugging us right now, what’s a weird thing that happened to us on the way to work and kind of spin out from that.” He continues, “Instead of… cutting that guy of in trafc, [what if] you just, you know, swerved in front of and just sat there and made him wait, you know, what kind of character would do something like that? How would he react, or how would you react if someone did that?” . As they narrow down these ideas, the writers fgure out the story beats, the motivations of the characters, and the cause and efect. Tey go through that process over and over again, refning these loose ideas into episode structures. Bob-Waksberg describes it like taking a cup of water and pouring it into a new cup every time: “Just the act of pouring it, you know, the literal act is like rewriting it on the board. But in rewriting it, you’re kind of revising it.”
For example, in a season 1 episode 0f BoJack Horseman, BoJack steals the “D” from the Hollywood sign in a drunken stupor. While this alone made for a fun episode, as BoJack tries to cover up his crime, Bob-Waksberg and his team returned to this joke re-
peatedly throughout the rest of the show. Hollywood had ofcially been renamed to “Hollywoo”, but nobody acknowledged this absurd change.
With a new show just now beginning, he’s started up the process of bringing in collaborators. Soon, he’ll be back in the writers room, going through the process of creating the show. “I’m sure some of it’s gonna come back to me like riding a bicycle, and some I’m going to have to relearn” . He isn’t quite ready to break the story yet, as the show hasn’t been ofcially announced, but he’s rolling out the little Katamari ball again.
Drawing on his experience and his background of Jewish resilience, Bob-Waksberg gives this advice to young and aspiring writers: “If you want to be a writer, write. If you want to make stuf, make stuf. You don’t have to wait for someone to give you permission… I think it’s easy to kind of daydream and think like, ‘someday I’m going to, I’m going to be a writer or a flmmaker or an actor,’ and you don’t have to wait for someday… Te act of making it is going to make you smarter and better and more interesting” .
