'Stuart Fails to Save the Universe' Creator on Making Comedy: "It's Hard"

The question seems simple, almost rhetorical: after creating a The Big Bang Theory spin-off set in a science-fiction multiverse, what is harder to do? Chuck Lorre didn’t need a second to answer. And the explanation that followed says more about the creative process behind Stuart Fails to Save the Universe than any official synopsis ever could.

In an exclusive interview with Omelete, Lorre and Bill Prady broke down the difference with the kind of precision that only comes from four decades working in the genre. Science fiction, according to them, has some margin for error. You can build an extraordinary universe, invent rules and technologies, and as long as the result satisfies certain genre conventions, audiences tend to go along with it. "When you come up with something really good, people can tell," Prady said. "People will generally like it if it satisfies certain science-fiction conventions."

Comedy doesn’t have that margin. "Something is either funny or it isn’t," Lorre summed up. "Comedy is much harder [to do]. Much harder. Laughter is forced on you by what you’re watching or hearing. It’s not voluntary. It’s an involuntary response. If you have to think and then laugh, give up." Prady added: "With comedy, you have no idea whether something you find hilarious is going to work for other people." And that, according to him, is the fear that never goes away, no matter how many successful seasons you have on your résumé.

What makes Stuart Fails to Save the Universe a particularly risky experiment is precisely the combination of the two. The series needs to convince the audience that its multiverse makes sense while also getting big laughs out of situations that emerge from that multiverse. For Lorre, the compass was always the same one as on The Big Bang Theory: "The goal was, on every page of every episode, to get a genuine, loud laugh." Science fiction is the setting. Comedy is the main event.

There’s one detail Lorre revealed that explains a lot about how that compass works in practice. After decades of taping in front of a live studio audience, he developed a kind of internal audience, a voice in his head that reacts to scenes as if it were sitting in the bleachers. "I can tell: 'this isn’t going to work' even without the audience. Because at a certain point, the audience becomes imprinted on your consciousness." Bill Prady said, laughing, that he could even hear the imaginary audience laughing inside Chuck’s head. "It’s genuinely disturbing," he joked. In fact, forty years of TV comedy leave their mark.

In the story, the character Stuart Blossom is tasked with restoring reality after a device built by Sheldon and Leonard causes an apocalypse. The series is available on HBO Max.