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.