Matt Kuhn is a staff writer on CBS’ show, How I Met Your Mother. In The Playbook, Kuhn wrote about the flirtation techniques of the show’s lead character, Barney Stinson. We caught up with Kuhn to find out more.
Q: Do you undergo different processes for writing books versus writing television scripts?
A: Yes. About the only constant is Barney’s voice. Since the books lack the, ahem, “narrative sophistication” of a How I Met Your Mother episode, writing for television by comparison is vastly more involved.
We want to keep the storytelling fresh either through the structure or the narrative or both so we work as a staff outlining an episode sometimes for weeks before it’s assigned to a writer. You might get a week to actually write your draft before the script goes back to the writers’ room during production when we get to “see it on its feet” and figure out what plays and what doesn’t. With Barney’s books the structure tends to be pretty straightforward so I spend the majority of the writing process working and re-working a joke until I have no idea if it’s funny anymore … then I move on to mangle the next one.
Q: Are there more books in Barney Stinson’s future?
A: Fingers crossed! Hopefully without coming across as either a dissociated nut-bag or a pretentious literatus (too late!), writing “with” Barney is a ton of fun. There are a few life-changing revelations in this season of How I Met Your Mother, both for Barney and others, and I think there might be a couple book ideas that would naturally follow, especially since Barney seems to work through his psychological issues via prose. Oh, and I think the world is finally ready for a Barney Stinson cookbook.
Q: Was there any research involved with writing titles like The Bro Code and The Playbook?
A: Both of those books include segments in which Barney Stinson shares his uniquely distorted view of history. I found myself brushing up on the Trojan War, Napoleon, the Wright Brothers and so on just to make sure I was butchering them properly. I recall being upset that I couldn’t quite weave in Galileo‘s invention of the telescope with peeping in on the hot neighbor and getting caught by Mrs. Galilei (too long and involved for the chart I was using). As far as any biological or psychological science that supports Barney’s many claims about how bros behave and what women are looking for in a guy, well, all of that was shockingly research-free.
Q: Have you ever actually tried out the techniques In your latest release, The Playbook? If so, do they work and did you get an interesting story out of it?
A: Thankfully no. While I haven’t personally tested any of the plays I’m fairly optimistic that almost none of them would ever work… so in that sense it’s probably as effective as any other seduction book out there. Oh, snap! The interesting stories will come when guys forget this is a satire and actually give some of these schemes a whirl. Be strong, women! Don’t succumb to the alluring promise of a wish-granting penis!
Q: You and your colleagues have made “legendary” into a pop culture catch phrase on the television series, How I Met Your Mother; was it ever your intention to affect language and colloquial lexicon in this way?
A: Not at all. It was certainly our intention to portray Barney as an obnoxious and churlish scamp but we didn’t set out to unearth his “What’chu you talkin’ ’bout, Willis” or anything like that. In fact, at some point during season 4 we were accused of relying on catch phrases like “legendary” and “Suit up!” but when we went through our as-broadcast scripts we could only find two or three of each through roughly 70 episodes at the time. I think we’ve used it more recently in a meta fashion (characters other than Barney making fun of his catch phrases) but the writers’ room generally functions as a snarling watchdog if and when it seems like, even by accident, we’re trying to coin a phrase.
Q: Will there be any book projects that will only feature Matt Kuhn in the byline?
A: If Barney will let me, sure! I’ve got a couple of ill-formed notions that I’d like to work on during our show’s hiatus and of course there’s always my Great American Novel that promises to be an epic story of redemption that acutely reflects the cultural spirit of today’s citizenry or some garbage like that. It promises to be a bestseller. After I’m dead.