Vince Gilligan on Finding the Funny in ‘The X-Files’

When the general public looks back on The X-Files, they picture a dark and serious 1990s show about aliens and government conspiracies. But die-hard fans know that some of the series’ best episodes were a laugh riot. 

The show began to churn out a few episodes per season with a comic bent, beginning with the circus freaks episode “Humbug” in Season Two. And “Humbug” writer Darin Morgan, who also wrote a few funny episodes in Season Three, is generally credited with the comedic relief of the early seasons. Morgan, however, only wrote for the show for two seasons (although he returned in 2016 when the show was briefly revived). The writer responsible for the later funny episodes was Vince Gilligan.

Gilligan’s first largely comedic episode was “Small Potatoes,” a caper in which a pathetic man with a tail named Eddie Van Blundht impregnates several women in town by morphing into exact duplicates of their husbands. He also wrote the Cops parody “X-Cops,” the Rashomon-style vampire adventure “Bad Blood” and the episode in which Mulder switches bodies with an obnoxious “Man in Black” played by Michael McKean.

Today, of course, Gilligan is much better known for his more recent work: He is the creator of both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. But I recently spoke with him about his time as a writer for The X-Files, including keeping The X-Files funny flame alive and when Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny really got to flex their comedy muscles.

When you came onto The X-Files in Season Two, was the humor there yet?

Darin Morgan showed everybody that The X-Files could, indeed, be funny, but I tend to think that Glen Morgan and Jim Wong don’t get enough credit. Really, the first little whiffs of humor, as I recall, were in episodes written by them. They had some killer lines between Mulder and Scully in certain early episodes. 

Glenn brought in his younger brother Darin, who paved the way for the comedy in the show. If it hadn’t been for Darin, I don’t know that I could have sold Fox or (showrunner) Chris Carter on the idea, but Darin made it happen and I’m eternally grateful to him, as are legions of X-Files fans. I tend naturally toward wanting to write comedy — or, at least, have plenty of humor in otherwise dramatic episodes. So, it was definitely something I was attracted to doing.

How comfortable were David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson with doing comedy?

It’s a funny thing, I never really got to know either David or Gillian as well as I perhaps might’ve hoped to because they were busy on the set 14, 15 hours a day, and I was busy in my little cubbyhole, writing and rewriting episodes. But, from my casual observation of it, I think they enjoyed the comedic episodes. I certainly never heard otherwise.

They’re both very funny. They both have excellent comic timing. The other thing about it is that they were working really hard, and as great as The X-Files is, a lot of times they had to slog through a lot of scientific dialogue and when you’re working 14 hours a day and doing the heavy stuff and doing autopsies and looking at gory remains, and then you get some humor, it’s probably like a breath of fresh air.

Do you think the seeds were there from the start for the show to have some levity?

It could have gone the other way for sure. We had a sister show for a few years called Millennium that starred Lance Hendrickson and it was very well made, but the trouble with Millennium was it didn’t really have any humor.

Thinking back to the first episode of The X-Files, that episode was written by Chris Carter, my boss and, now that I think back on it, that first episode had some fun lines and funny moments. With Mulder and Scully, you love them both from the first moment you see them because Mulder doesn’t take himself too seriously — he knows how crazy some of his more out-there ideas are. And Scully, you got to root for her heart. You love these two characters.

So, to answer your question, I think the seeds were planted from the first episode for the show to have humor in it. The funny was amplified then later by Glen Morgan and Jim Wong, and then it went full bore funny with Darin Morgan, and the show benefited from that.

Your first turn at a more comedic episode was “Small Potatoes.” Was there anything about that episode in particular where you felt like you preferred to amplify the humor? 

I really enjoyed that one. I got to work for the first time with a director named Cliff Bole — he also directed “Bad Blood” — and I just loved him. David and Gillian also seemed to enjoy stretching their comedic muscles in that one. I got to be on the set the whole time up in Vancouver, and I had the best time. One of the most fun facts about "Small Potatoes" is the fact that Darin Morgan plays the bad guy, Eddie Van Blundht.

The bad guy, so to speak. He’s not that bad… He’s a little bad. He’s a little date-rapey. But we had a lot worse bad guys on The X-Files. Anyway, Darin Morgan, who isn’t really an actor and wouldn’t define himself as such, did a fantastic job in that role and it was just a pleasure writing dialogue for him.

One thing you do in that episode, and you do it also in “Dreamland,” was you have David Duchovny playing another guy in Mulder’s skin, pretending to be Mulder. 

All the credit for that goes to David Duchovny because he really enjoyed sinking his teeth into both those episodes. For “Small Potatoes,” he really liked Darin, and he got to play Darin, essentially. He got to play the Eddie Van Blundht character looking like he’s Fox Mulder. He had so much fun doing that, and it was a similar deal with him playing Michael McKean’s character in “Dreamland,” Morris Fletcher. And, of course, in “Dreamland” we did an homage to the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. I don’t think I was on the set as much on that one because at that point in my career on the show I was sort of locked in my office writing and rewriting scripts 14 hours a day. That was a bummer for me, but I know they had a good time on the set of “Dreamland” doing the Duck Soup mirror gag and that was so much fun to watch.

For lack of a better word, you also got to do some classic comedy “shtick” with the Rashomon episode “Bad Blood.” 

That’s one of my favorites I ever did, and it’s hard to pick a favorite because they all feel like your children. With “Bad Blood,” I got to be on the set the whole time and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I already knew David was funny because of “Small Potatoes” and whatnot, but in “Small Potatoes,” I had Gillian kind of playing it straight. In “Bad Blood,” for me, that was a revelation. Gillian got to be funny. She wasn’t just the straight man, so to speak. In that one, she got to play funny as well. I learned in that episode how spot-on her comedic timing is. She is hilarious in that episode — as is David. And it was an absolute pleasure having Luke Wilson.

Some of my favorite dialogue in “Bad Blood” is stuff I didn’t write. My favorite scene in “Bad Blood” is when David Duchovny and Luke Wilson were sitting in the cop car out by the cemetery and they just start riffing. Luke Wilson’s character is saying, “So the guy you’re looking for is kind of like Rain Man?” And David says, “No, not really.” And Luke goes, “Well that ol’ boy could count all those toothpicks.” All that dialogue in that sequence there, it was just David and Luke who came up with that. It makes me laugh so hard. I didn’t write a word of that.

Can we talk about “X-Cops” before I let you go?

“X-Cops” was a fun one, too. For David and Gillian, I think that was one of their favorite episodes, and I’m not tooting my own horn. I think it was one of their favorites because that was the shortest shooting time of any episode of The X-Files. The X-Files typically took between 13 and 21 days to shoot an episode. But “X-Cops” was shot on video, and it was done in these long oners. That episode was shot in five or six days.

That’s not what I set out to do, but that was a nice fringe benefit. I was just a big fan of Cops when it first went on the air on Fox back in the early 1990s, and I wanted to do a crossover. It took me a while to talk Chris Carter into it, but, God bless him, he finally said yes, and I was very appreciative.