Chicago Ideas

Nell Scovell – Chicago Ideas – March 28, 2018

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Even with her marital tie to the movie industry (in case you’ve been living in a cave the last five years, her husband is George Lucas), well-known president of Ariel Investments Mellody Hobson, who described herself as a geek in designer clothes, seemed like an odd choice to interview comedy writer Nell Scovell until Hobson informed the audience that the two of them were close friends who spend a lot of time together.

They got to know each other when Sheryl Sandberg asked Hobson to write a chapter on race and owning who you are for Lean In for Graduates. Scovell had cowritten Lean In with Sandberg, who asked her to work with Hobson on her chapter in the second book.

As Hobson tells it, upon submitting her chapter, Scovell called to tell her that she and Sandberg had two things in common, they were both really smart and they both were terrible writers. This made me wonder whether Scovell might have ghostwritten Sandberg’s forward to Scovell’s book Just the Funny Parts: … And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking into the Hollywood Boys’ Club.

The book, as the title indicates, is about more than the funny parts. Scovell has long been a behind-the-scenes talent, well-known in the industry for her comedy writing for many television shows. She even has worked with Barack Obama, for whom, Hobson emphasized, Scovell wrote for White House Correspondents’ Dinners, not a State of the Union Address.

But Scovell made a public name for herself when she wrote a 2009 Vanity Fair essay, “Letterman and Me,” (https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2009/10/david-letterman-200910) that discussed issues relating to the employment and treatment of women in the late-night talk show arena.

Like the book, the interview covered both the funny and the serious. Her discussion of humor ranged as far as quoting the opening line of the novel Scaramouche – “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” Scaramouche, a buffoon character in the commedia dell’arte, is, of course, not to be confused with Anthony Scaramucci, who was White House Communications Director for 10 days.

Chicago Ideas 2017

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I went to see four Chicago Ideas programs in 2017. Chicago Ideas used to be called Chicago Ideas Week, but then they started having events throughout the year, though still concentrated during a week in October. The constant at Chicago Ideas programs has always been that, at the beginning of every program, they ask everyone to say hello to and chat briefly with a stranger sitting next to them. This makes seat selection crucial.

In April we saw Alec Baldwin discuss his book Nevertheless: A Memoir, which turned out to be a surprisingly interesting read, which was a good thing because we didn’t get much from the interview, held at the Athenenium Theater, where, at least in the balcony, the acoustics were horrible and we could barely hear.

An October event included professors of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Neuroscience & Business, BioNanotechnology, and Cognitive Neuroscience discussing things like tissue engineering. Does all that sound neat or what? I considered a career in science, but I hated lab classes, which helped inform my serpentine path to a college degree in Psychology without ever taking a lab class, and which probably explains why I don’t cook. Part of the presentation covered Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, whose acronym, CRISPR, made me think I had accidentally signed up for a cooking class.

The third event was rather sobering. I still haven’t seen the movie Concussion, but now that I’ve seen Dr. Bennet Omalu and others in person discussing Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), I don’t need to see Will Smith do his impression. And, I’m going to be more careful about bumping my head on open kitchen cabinet doors. Another good reason to avoid cooking.

In March I saw Blue Man Group cook up their special brand of entertainment, which acted as a precursor to an October Chicago Ideas lab behind the scenes of the Group, though only figuratively, as we sat in the regular seats while watching and listening to the performers, sans makeup (or are they really blue and were wearing makeup to look normal for this presentation – hmmm), describe and demonstrate to us how they interact speechlessly during a performance to create their unique show, much like any jazz band whose faces happen to be blue.