Bruce Vilanch, the famously bespectacled writer, actor, comedian, songwriter, and erstwhile Hollywood Square, has long been the sassy pen behind some of your favorite funny people’s funniest jokes. But, on this late-winter afternoon, he and I settled in for a cozy video chat about the times the funny flopped.

In his insightful, hysterical new book, It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote, the two-time Emmy-winner pulls back the curtain on a litany of infamous misfires he had a hand in, like The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Based on George Lucas’ characters and concepts, the special aired around Thanksgiving 1978 to a TV audience mystified by the musical variety show featuring Chewbacca’s Wookiee relatives, guest stars Art Carney, Bea Arthur, and Harvey Korman, and precious little else that made much sense.

“The phone didn’t ring too much the weekend the show aired,” Vilanch writes in the book, which broadly chronicles his career of hits and misses in Hollywood since the early ’70s. “The ones who did call were mildly amused by what they had seen. They recognized the show for what it was. The ones who really would have appreciated it were too stoned to reach for their remotes.”

Vilanch is characteristically irreverent throughout the book, whether discussing the slings and arrows of writing for the Academy Awards telecast for 25 years or considering the legacy of his performance as the evil emperor Weird Wendon, a disembodied head plopped onto an android body, in the 1984 Star Wars-parodying disaster The Ice Pirates.

Initially, Vilanch was called in during the troubled Ice Pirates production merely to “fluff” up the comedy, as the sci-fi adventure starring Robert Urich evolved into a spoof. But somehow, the funny man wound up as a severed head bouncing down a set of stairs.

“It’s amazing how many people know it,” Vilanch marvels now. “Anjelica Huston, it was her second movie and she won an Oscar for her third movie. So they had nothing to show when they would [do] ‘It’s Anjelica Huston Night on TNT,’ and they had to show those three movies.”

Like many so-called failures, “Ice Pirates never went away,” Vilanch says. The film has gained cult status, as his pal Huston attests. “She says, whenever she’s interviewed by somebody younger, the first question is, ‘Tell me about The Ice Pirates. How did that happen?’ Which is actually what my book is. People saying to me, ‘How did that happen? Who said yes to that?!'”

Although, sometimes the more pertinent question is “What were you thinking?” — as I asked Vilanch regarding a project not mentioned in the book, the 1985 dance-pop album Sex Over the Phone by The Village People, another perplexing item on his lengthy resumé.

Vilanch co-wrote the album’s suggestive title track and other tunes with the group’s late producer-impresario Jacques Morali, after the two collaborated on another box-office bomb that’s reported in the book, the disco-themed curio Can’t Stop the Music.

“After the debacle of Can’t Stop the Music, Jacques continued with the Village People, [and] he wanted me to write an album,” Vilanch recalls. “So we wrote an album and it was called Sex Over the Phone. That was a popular thing in those days before the internet and smartphones and all that, the hotlines.”

The video for the track — which we highly recommend as a chaser to this story — is a beautiful relic of mid-eighties music video “edge,” and a daring representation of the queer sensibility that Vilanch, who’s been out as a gay man his entire career, has always infused into his work.

Even as we sit parsing his greatest flops, he currently has a hit — the Dolly Parton musical Here You Come Again, for which he co-wrote the stage book — making its gay way around the world. It seems like a good idea, for the time being, to keep counting on Vilanch for laughs.

METRO WEEKLY: In the book, you mention you have the EGOT of TV writing, since you’ve written for all the shows — the Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys. Which is the toughest gig?

BRUCE VILANCH: The toughest gig is the Oscars, because it’s the most observed, and there are so many fragile egos on the line. And it is a big deal. They’re so fraught with emotion, there’s so much riding on it.

The Tonys are wonderful because they’re very supportive. It’s people who are doing shows eight days a week, and they’re at the top of their game. So you know the performances are going to be terrific. And they also are accustomed to being on stage live, so when they come up to accept an award, it’s fun, it’s theater. Even when they present something, it’s fun and it’s theater. So that’s just a gift to do that show. Of course, the same seven million people watch it every year. It’s never more, never less. It’s always the same seven million people.

The Grammys are fun, but the Grammys have become a concert show. They have like 88 categories, and they can do maybe 12 in three hours. So they have to do the most popular things, and it’s become famous for the mashups, the duets, and the special-event aura that comes from that.

The Emmys are hard only because it’s the same people winning every year for a stretch. The Game of Thrones stretch, the Sopranos stretch. And now, what we’re looking at, The Bear. Also, the dichotomy of the Emmys is that the town — what we call “the town” — is in love with certain shows that the public doesn’t necessarily embrace, like The Bear. I mean, the town loves The Bear. It’s on Hulu, and who knows what fraction of America actually watches it, as opposed to a rerun of The Big Bang Theory, which is a big popular network show. So that’s always weird because you have to reinvent it every year, and it’s the same people parading up. And also, there’s no, what we used to call, entertainment value on the Emmys. They stopped doing production numbers. Maybe they’ll do one, depending on who they get to host, but it’s a parade of people you’ve seen already.

MW: As far as your skills are concerned, what is your secret to writing funny?

VILANCH: If you could bottle that, I’d be much wealthier. I mean, I wouldn’t be talking to you from this man cave. I would be at my burned-out beach house or something like that.

I think it’s just a way of looking at the world that develops when you’re a kid, mostly. And some people keep it very close to the chest until they’re older, but when you’re a kid, and you’re not a standard-issue kid, when you’re not athletic and you’re awkward and you have a life of the mind, and you find that if you can make them laugh, as Whoopi says, you’ll get a head start. They won’t come after you because you’re the funny one.

I once said this a few years ago on The View, and Joy Behar said, “Well, I had a wonderful childhood.” I’m not going to fight with that. I don’t know her childhood. She apparently does. So I think it is kind of an ingrained thing that comes from, I just think it blossoms at different stages of people’s life where they say, “Okay, oh, I can do this. I can write this or I can perform this.” The stand-up comics are generally the kids who were banished from the Thanksgiving table because they would make jokes about the relatives, because that was how they expressed themselves. Now, I was the kid who was dancing at Thanksgiving, whether you wanted me to or not. So I think we see all this stuff early on, and it just stays with you. You either got that or you don’t.

MW: Other than the fact that it’s funny to talk about flops, why compile a book of misfires?

VILANCH: [Laughs.] Well, it seemed like a bad idea at the time. I just did so many podcasts during COVID, where people were just on podcasts and entertaining each other online, and all these Gen X and younger guys would be asking me about these TV shows that they had encountered on YouTube. These were all things that were done before they were born, and they sincerely wanted to know how things happened.

And so I started explaining why this happened and that happened, and how George [Lucas] managed to sell CBS a musical special starring characters who cannot sing, dance, or even move in their costume. So as I was doing this, I said, there’s a book in this, because I had so many of them. The Brady Bunch Hour, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, The Ice Pirates, Can’t Stop the Music. I mean, they would find things that they had seen way after I was involved in them. And I thought, well, this is interesting because people want to know how did these disasters occur?

MW: I have a couple of “How did this happen?” questions, but they’re not necessarily about disasters. I’m just going to throw one out there: “Where Is My Man” by Eartha Kitt, which I was unaware of, until yesterday.

VILANCH: Really?

MW: Yeah. I don’t think I’d heard it in a club or anything.

VILANCH: Because you weren’t around in a disco when it was out in a disco.

MW: Did you and your co-writers [Fred Zarr and Jacques Morali] write it for Eartha Kitt? How did the song find its way to her?

VILANCH: Jacques Morali, who created The Village People, and I got friendly on Can’t Stop the Music. And afterwards, he said to me, [thick French accent] “Darling, I think you are a lyricist.” He’s very French. And I said, “Okay, thank you.” And he had a show in Paris. There was a club called The Crazy Horse, which was a famous club in Paris, and it was all gorgeous, six-foot-tall Amazonian women with huge boobs, and they lip-synched to recordings, many of which were original songs done by famous singers.

And he said, “I’m working with Eartha Kitt. I’ve got to write a song for Crazy Horse, and you can write the lyric.” He gave me the melody and the title, “Where Is My Man.” So I wrote a lyric to it, and he liked it, and he said, “Now we have to pitch it to Eartha.”

Eartha was living in Connecticut, raising a kid and had been blacklisted after she spoke truth to power. She went to the White House and talked to LBJ about Vietnam, and she was kind of blackballed after that for a while. She was looking to reemerge. And so we recorded the demo, and I kind of did my Eartha Kitt impression. “I don’t want to be alone/Where is my baby?/I don’t want to be alone/Where is my man?” And she called me up, and she said, “You do a very good impression of me. If I hear you are getting paid for it, I will kill you.”

So, we went to New York and she recorded it, and then Jacques went back to Paris and it went into the show, where it was sung by a six-foot-tall blonde Amazonian woman doing Eartha Kitt’s voice, lip-syncing. It was hilarious. And Jacques’ partner, Henri Belolo, in Paris, got a record deal for a disco record, and it went all over the world. I have gold records, platinum records everywhere but the U.S., where they wouldn’t play disco on the radio. Back then, it was AM radio and a couple of FM stations that were called Progressive. That meant they played album cuts. The AM stations played singles. And this was neither nor — this was a 12-inch, you should pardon the expression.

It was so big that we did an album called Where Is My Man. I mean, we wrote about 12 other songs for Eartha, and some of them were very funny, and none of them got the traction that “Where Is My Man” got. But it really did bring her back, because all over the world, suddenly she was a star and she would go play all the clubs that she used to play in and do concerts. And she couldn’t do this number because she had to sing to track. She would have a combo with her because she was doing her old nightclub act. But she wound up doing a lot of theater and all that. I mean, she never went away after that. Eventually, she found a way to do it. I was in Chicago, and she was appearing at a disco there singing the song. And she said, “I’m going to sing your song because I know you wrote it for me, but it’s really about you.”

MW: Was her insight true?

VILANCH: What, where is my man? Oh, of course, I’m on the endless hunt. Yeah, sure. I’m still looking. So was she, but actually, she would never let on. I mean, I think actually that part of her life had ended. She was very busy being a grandmother and having a good time, because it was truly a Norma Desmond comeback, a real one. I mean, she came back with guns blazing. She was fabulous, a fabulous character. I loved her.

MW: It’s timely we’re talking about people coming back since you write in the book about Victor Willis leaving the Village People and the movie Can’t Stop the Music partly because he didn’t want to be branded with the pro-gay image. And now, he’s back, using the Village People — and letting the Village People be used — as a tool for the right wing, which is bizarre. How does that strike you, knowing from exactly where they came?

VILANCH: I didn’t get to know Victor because he was… Well, I did get to know him a little bit before he left. He quit right before the picture started shooting. I was already off the picture, but Allan Carr kept calling me for things because we were friends. And even though there was a salary dispute, he kept calling. So I think that Victor was always conflicted. Also, there’ve been a lot of substances in Victor’s life, not the Demi Moore kind, other kinds of substances. And I think in his mind, he always felt that it was an acting job. He is willfully ignoring the fact that Jacques wrote all those things about his experiences as a gay man from Paris coming to New York in the ’70s. So I think [Victor] got control of the Village People because they gave him a writing credit on “YMCA” and a few of the other songs. I don’t know how that happened. So now he owns it all, and he’s restaffed it with people. He sees people doing “YMCA” at baseball games, standing up in the stands and doing a wave with all the “YMCA” stuff, like it’s a “Macarena.” So as far as he’s concerned, I think all the sexuality has been removed from it. He probably really does believe what he is now saying, and he likes the fact that Trump is using it because Trump won. But to try and figure out, and go into the mind of Victor, it’s a task above my pay grade.

MW: Something of a similar stripe, our magazine actually ran a story recently about the Dolly Parton musical, Here You Come Again. They were on their U.K. tour and being disrupted on basically every stop by people who were objecting to the gay content.

VILANCH: That’s an exaggeration. There was one drunk Karen in Manchester, and the actor who was playing the lead opposite the actress who plays Dolly Parton got a lot of press by putting this thing online. While I applaud him for taking a stand, because he is gay himself, it’s not exactly accurate. I mean, yes, in every city we’ve ever played it, in the States or the U.K., there are walkouts because there are homophobes everywhere. And when they come to the theater and they discover that it’s about a gay guy and she’s helping him with his problems, they don’t want any part of that. But it’s a very small group. This was the first time anybody had ever actually stood up and spoke back to the stage, and made a literal disruption.

So it was wildly exaggerated. On the other hand, it got the show a lot of press, so what can I say? Y’know, no publicity is bad publicity. And we finished in the U.K. last week, and now we go to Australia for six months starting in June. Who knows what’ll happen there.

One headline said, “Dolly Show Suspended.” I thought, “Suspended. What are they talking about? I’m getting a check every week.” And they said, “No, that performance was suspended while that woman was escorted out.” Oh, I see, that kind of suspension. So it’s amazing how the media, especially now when everybody is online, it’s all this keyboard warfare, how it’s all blown out of proportion.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to belittle the fact that the homophobia is out there, no question about it. And it’s been a delicate marketing situation because you don’t want to scare people away because it’s not a gay play. It’s about people. At one point, we were in Nashville, actually, and somebody at the theater said, “Well, you could make it a straight guy that she’s helping out.” And the play is about a guy who’s a gay comic, the club closed, he never happened. And he’s quarantining during COVID in the attic of his parents’ home in Longview, Texas, having an intimate relationship with his imaginary friend, Dolly Parton, who steps off a poster. He’s a Dolly Parton fan. And it’s about what happens that night and how she straightens him out, as it were. I said, a straight guy spending a night with Dolly Parton would have other things on his mind that would not be in this play. So that’s a page-one rewrite. I don’t think so.

MW: Good defense.

VILANCH: Yeah. That’s another play. And also because Dolly has been such an ally to everyone, but especially to gay people. I mean her whole idea, her classic line, she says, “Well, if I came back in another life, it would be as a drag queen.”

MW: Did you and your co-writers get to spend time with Dolly to write this?

VILANCH: I had worked with her over the course of 30 years. I’d worked with her on her TV show and her stage act. And so, I knew her, and she knew Trisha [Paoluccio], who was playing her, because Trisha played her in the 9 to 5 musical, so she had seen her, and in fact, Dolly had cast approval and said “She can play me anytime, anywhere.” But once we had it together and we did a Zoom of it, we sent it to her because we needed the music rights. And I thought, “Nah, she’s not going to do this, she’s got her brand.” And she loved it. She’s become our partner.

MW: Way to go, Dolly. Did you work on the variety show where she comes down in the swing?

VILANCH: Why, yes, I did.

MW: Oh, my God, I love that show!

VILANCH: I was part of the rescue team that came in when the ratings were tanking, and they said, “You know, she’s not Carol Burnett. We can’t turn her into that. We have to focus on her strengths.” And that’s when I was brought in to do it. And it became less of a sketch thing and more of a show about her in various places, various gimmicks that we used, but there were still a few sketches. I mean, she had a couple of characters. She had a truck stop waitress that was a great character, and a truck stop, the stories literally drive in the front door. They don’t put on the brakes. So that was always a good thing, a good place to go.

I’m glad you enjoyed it. It flamed out brilliantly. I mean, by the time it ended after the first season, they canceled it, so she didn’t have to do a second season. It was a pay-or-play deal, which is always wonderful. They pay you for not working. It’s fabulous. I love passive income.

MW: So that seems like one of the hits because you tease in the intro of this book that there could be a book of the hits. Are you really planning that? What might be in that?

VILANCH: Well, I’m not, but I suppose it would be the Oscar shows that worked, and Hairspray, which I did for two years. I mean, I would write memories of that. And I don’t know, Bette Midler probably, but I don’t want to write a book about Bette Midler. We made a pact that we wouldn’t write a book about each other. She doesn’t want to write a book about herself anyway, so it’s fine. But I don’t know. I really haven’t thought about it because part of what interested me in doing this book was I didn’t have to do a memoir. People say, “Oh, write a book. You have great stories.” And I thought, “Oh, everybody writes that book, and I want to find some other way in.” So if this one works and they come pounding on my door saying, “More! More!” maybe I’ll find more flops, I don’t know. I have no shortage of either, so it’s a good thing.

MW: You also talk a lot about the people that will call you up and ask for some material here, a few jokes there. The people you talk about are amazing: Bob Hope, Diana Ross, Midler. Who, among the people that you’ve worked with this way, was the funniest without any assistance?

VILANCH: Oh, my God. Well, I suppose Robin. Robin Williams comes to mind because he was a font. It just kind of poured out of him. He was really, really funny.

I mean, what happens is when you start working and nobody’s interested in you, you write all your own material. Then you hit, and suddenly, you’re in what Joni Mitchell called the star-making machinery, and you’re all wrapped up in being on Fallon and Colbert and all these things. The time you used to have to write is gone. You’re very busy being in makeup and hair and all of that, and talking to your lawyer. So that’s when you begin taking on collaborators. And that was generally where I would step in, with people like Billy Crystal and Bette and Nathan Lane and all of these people. It happens after they have established themselves.

So they’re all funny to begin with. They’re all brilliant to begin with. They’re all driven. Some of them are real type-A personalities that you have to realize these are the people who become the head of General Motors or President of the United States or something like that, because they’re alphas. And you have to remember when you’re dealing with an alpha, the alpha is who matters most. As wonderful as they are as people, they are alphas, so they’re looking out for themselves.

But they’re all brilliant to begin with, the ones who I’ve worked with. So it’s hard to say who was automatically funny, but Robin, with that machine gun delivery of funny stuff, he was one of a kind. Although he would bow to Jonathan Winters, who was his mentor and inspiration, who was similar that way, but he was weirder. Robin was much more of his generation.

MW: Who are your comedy inspirations?

VILANCH: Well, I liked all the fat guys when I was growing up. Jackie Gleason, Zero Mostel. I liked the fat guys who could dance, move well. I wanted to do that, and those were the ones, because I thought I had a shot at being something like that. I mean, I had a lot of people who I thought were brilliantly funny, obviously — Jack Benny’s timing was like nobody else’s. But I had a soft spot for the fat guys. Even the dramatic ones, like Wallace Beery. Wallace Beery was a big MGM star, and he was not pretty. He was a character actor with a gravelly voice, but he had terrific timing. If you see him in Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight, he’s always playing the self-made guy who came from the gutter and really is not polished at all, but is moving among high society and they consider him a buffoon and he’s trying his best to be accepted by them. So there’s an undercurrent of sadness to everything he does, but he has great timing in the way he does it.

MW: Something else you mentioned in your book, two things that were gay awakenings for me. One, you talk about watching Tony Danza train at —

VILANCH: Boxing. Yes!

MW: Train at boxing during off-moments shooting Taxi. You also mentioned Battle of the Network Stars, which was absolutely a gay awakening for me, thanks to John James from Dynasty and Willie Aames. I asked about your comedy inspirations. What about your gay awakening?

VILANCH: My gay awakening? What does that mean, realizing you’re gay?

MW: I guess, yes, some idol that might’ve made you aware.

VILANCH: There wasn’t one, there were just a whole lot of them. When I was growing up, I was in love with Fabian and Tab Hunter, who I actually got to know as an adult, and Troy Donahue, who I got to know as an adult, and Tony Curtis — I got to know them all, actually. I mean, I fantasized about them when I was a kid, and then I got to actually meet all of them and have fun with some of them.

MW: What kind of fun are you talking?

VILANCH: It wasn’t a single thing. My awakening of what I wanted to do was when I was about, I don’t know, eight and I went to see my first Broadway show, which was a musical, a flop called The Vamp that starred Carol Channing. She was this apparition with these big eyes and big mouth, and everything she did was large and timed brilliantly, and the stage was gorgeous and full of pink lights. I said, “Well, I just want to live on that stage. I just want to be in that world.” There you go. And the first movie was The Greatest Show on Earth, which was a circus picture. I think it was always something I wanted to do, and my birth mother was a showgirl, so I think that some of it comes from that, down in the womb.

MW: You didn’t know that, I’m presuming, because in the book acknowledgments, you mentioned your “newfound birth family.” How did that come about? Did that happen recently?

VILANCH: Well, DNA was invented, and after my mother died at 95, I spit into a cup and seven years later, a first cousin showed up and we reached out to each other and I discovered through DNA and Ancestry, 23andMe, all those things, confirmed that this was my birth family. The elder generation was gone except for one Aunt Helen who has a gay son — so I wasn’t the first gay element in the family — but everything matched up. So I discovered this phenomenal new family. They all live out here in L.A. in what I call Kardashistan. It’s out in Calabasas, where all those reality people live. And it’s been great finding all that out, the last thing I expected to happen in this part of my life.

MW: That’s really great. So, your last question pertains to another book that you had writing in, but it wasn’t your book, A. Ashley Hoff’s With Love, Mommie Dearest. You wrote in there that you were at one point going to do the Mommie Dearest musical, which didn’t happen.

VILANCH: Yeah. I tell that story in the foreword to his book.

MW: I feel like you probably have a bunch of interesting ideas that didn’t happen.

VILANCH: Yeah, that could be the next book, stuff that didn’t fly.

MW: There you go. You’ve got your title. What else didn’t fly that you wish had?

VILANCH: Oh my God, it’s so arcane. When I mention it, it won’t mean anything to anybody. But Patrick Dennis, who wrote Auntie Mame, had a book called Genius, which is a hilarious novel about a disgraced director like Orson Welles at the time, who is fleeing the tax man in Mexico, living with one of his old mistresses. And he has to make a movie on a shoestring to pay off his tax debt to go back to the States. He cobbles it together from all the elements down there.

It’s a hilarious novel, and it’s been tied up in a rights dispute for sixty years now. There was a movie called The Stuntman that Peter O’Toole did that was similar to it, to the idea. But that is my personal favorite that got away. This never happened, but I’m sure there are others that I haven’t thought about. Now, that’s a good question. I’ll have to start thinking about it.

Bruce Vilanch’s It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote is available wherever you buy books.