Production
"Humbug" was written by Darin Morgan; it was his first script for the series. Earlier in the second season, he appeared in the second episode "The Host" as the Flukeman. He also helped his brother Glen Morgan—already a regular writer on The X-Files—with the script for the following episode, "Blood". Series creator Chris Carter offered Darin Morgan a permanent place on The X-Files writing team, which he reluctantly accepted. Morgan said he was uncomfortable initially, stating "One of the reasons I was uncomfortable joining the staff is that I'm a comedy writer and this isn't a comedy show, so I was trying more or less to have an episode with a little bit of humor, without telling anybody what I was doing." Glen suggested that he write an episode about sideshow freaks. Before writing the episode Darin Morgan watched a tape of Jim Rose's circus sideshow and subsequently cast Rose and The Enigma as Dr. Blockhead and The Conundrum, respectively. Other guest stars were Twin Peaks regular Michael J. Anderson as Mr. Nutt and Vincent Schiavelli as Lanny.
Morgan's script turned out to be the most comedic episode of the series so far. The departure from The X-Files' usual style made some of the crew, including director Kim Manners, uncomfortable, and some of the more explicitly comic scenes were cut. After "Humbug", Morgan went on to write three more comedy-infused stories for the show: "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose", "War of the Coprophages" and "Jose Chung's From Outer Space". David Duchovny later commented, "what I loved about his scripts was that he seemed to be trying to destroy the show."
Read more about this topic: Humbug (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
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—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“Perestroika basically is creating material incentives for the individual. Some of the comrades deny that, but I can’t see it any other way. In that sense human nature kinda goes backwards. It’s a step backwards. You have to realize the people weren’t quite ready for a socialist production system.”
—Gus Hall (b. 1910)