🎧 ‘Penis, Penis, Penis, Penis, Me’: Comedy Legend Nell Scovell Tells All

The TV writing titan on early days at 'Vanity Fair' and 'Spy,' and battling the boys' club from 'Letterman' to 'The Muppets'

WORK IT OUT “I break it down into people, product and process,” Nell Scovell tells Richard. “And it's very rare that all three are a joy on any show.” (Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

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This is the fourth episode in Richard Rushfield’s second season of Hollywood Stories, this time featuring tales of television. Earlier episodes include candid conversations with Big Mouth creators Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett; Leesa Bellesi, the American Idol pastor who lifted rising stars like Katharine McPhee in her prayer; and Bruce Vilanch, the comedy maestro behind years of Oscar telecasts and some of the most memorable and unhinged variety TV spectaculars from the 1970s.

Today, I sat with the candid and quick-witted Nell Scovell, creator of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and writer for everything from The Simpsons to Late Night with David Letterman. Before breaking into TV, Scovell sharpened her voice at Spy and Vanity Fair, where editors Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter taught her to “be funnier, go harder, be meaner.” She shares how she defied her agent to leave Vanity Fair and dive into the boys’ club of TV writers rooms, a dynamic she was still battling decades later — even on The Muppets in the 2010s.

She also expands on the highlights from her sharp, hilarious 2018 memoir, Just the Funny Parts, which she jokes she really wanted to title, “Penis, Penis, Penis, Penis, Me, Penis.” (Scovell: “It would have sold more.”) In this episode, I call it “one of the best memoirs of working in television I’ve ever read.”

Enjoy!

EARLY WORDS Scovell at age 8, already scribbling. (Courtesy of subject)

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