'Community' Postmortem: Dan Harmon Talks 'Basic E-mail Security'

Every week, Community creator Dan Harmon will sit down with Yahoo TV to break down the best inside jokes, Easter eggs, and sight gags.

For this week’s installment, “Basic E-mail Security,” listen in on our discussion of why he doesn’t like to do topical humor, the anatomy of a running joke, and the juicy e-mails the North Korean hackers missed. Pull up a chair; there’s coffee and scotch in the corner.

There are a lot of dalmatian posters on the Dean’s wall in this episode. I’m not sure if there have always been that many or if it’s a new thing—
I don’t know if there’s an increase or a decrease of dalmatian posters. Of course, we went to the dalmatian place with the Dean a while ago. I didn’t want to philanderize that element, so after we took that to the most extreme place in Season 1, it just kind of became a background thing, and I sort of leave it up to the art department. So every once in a while, I’ll tell them, “OK, maybe a little too much dalmatian.”

Do running jokes like that pop fully formed in your head, or do they tend to be organic? A joke gets made, a writer picks up on it and later builds on it.
It’s definitely the latter. It’s always organic. Anything I’ve ever tried to preconceive, it always falls flat — and I can’t think of any examples, thank God. The successes are always organic. It starts with a joke that works by itself and then either a new writer coming in — or we — decide to expound on it later. Or the art department will expound on it. They’ll go, “Well, this is based on that joke that he made two years ago, so we thought it’d be funny if, in the background, there was a picture of so-and-so on the wall.” And you go, “Oh, that’s a great idea.” You play it on a case-by-case basis as you go.

Related: Hidden Gems on the Set of ‘Community’

Was there an episode like this in the works before The Interview? Or was it entirely based on that whole North Korea situation?
That was definitely a result of the story as it was breaking in the news, because that’s all anybody was talking about. Sometimes there’s an event so big that it is just going to knock out a week of writing work unless you can write about it in some way. We’re lucky with this one that it did sort of fit into the Community world.

Because of the nature of our schedule, we knew there wouldn’t be South Park episodes coming out for a while. Typically, in a situation like that, I would say we absolutely cannot go there: It’s too topical. We will be done working on it for six weeks, but it still won’t be airing for another eight weeks. And in that time, South Park will do three episodes about it, and we will look like the biggest hacks in the world. Because those guys are really fast and really good at that stuff.

I usually try to stay away from cultural, of-the-moment satire of things in the news. But our schedule was such that, well, South Park’s not even going to be on for a while, so I think we can safely do this e-mail thing. And we’re all Sony employees, so this is close to our hearts. Let’s just do it because it’s kind of perfect for Greendale and it’s a perfect way to do another of our “revealed secrets” episodes.

Did anybody in the production get their e-mails leaked?
Not as such. I mean, we all learned that Joel McHale got a discount on a Sony TV at one point. I actually had a hacker friend look into it because I was terrified. Based on things that were making headlines, I was thinking that things were going to go badly for me. Because if you go back four years, the e-mails between me and Sony, there’s got to be some pretty juicy stuff in there. So I had a hacker friend look into it and he said, “I found one mention of your name while the Yahoo deal was being made where they called you a ‘wild card’ and that’s it.” Between two suits at Sony just referring to me — as a third person — as a wild card part of the deal. And there was no more mention. That CEO of Sony — his TV inbox was apparently empty. I guess that’s where all the juicy stuff would have been. To, from, and about me.

Are you a little bit disappointed that the executives weren’t talking about you more? That you weren’t a bigger “wild card” threat?
No, it was a tremendous relief. I’ve had enough time in the spotlight. Had my fill of it!

Next week, we learn a lot more about what makes the Dean tick: Dalmatians are just the tip of the iceberg.

Community is released every Tuesday on Yahoo Screen.