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All it took was a few self-deprecating jokes in the Kaiser High School newspaper, and a star television writer was born.
Nahnatchka Khan, co-creator, co-executive producer and writer of “Young Rock,” starring island favorite Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, got her start to a successful career in television comedy writing humorous commentaries on adolescent and student life about 30 years ago when she was a student at Kaiser.
“My hair was so huge it looked like I had been electrocuted for 3 days,” she wrote in a 1990 column about getting her hair done before prom night. “There wouldn’t have been room for anyone else at the table except for me and my hair!”
The column got big responses from her fellow students, a validation that gave her a lot of confidence, and an interesting perspective on show business — that you didn’t have to be in front and on stage, that you could be behind-the-scenes and derive plenty of satisfaction from your work.
“People would come up to me at school and say, ‘Hey, I thought your thing was funny,’ ” said Khan in a phone call from Los Angeles, where she is now based. “It’s not like the theater where everyone’s together and would talk about it afterward. Everybody would have to read it, and if they liked it, they’d come find you.”
In a way, Khan’s sense of humor was inherited. Or at least it was all in the family. Her parents were Iranian emigrants who met in America and had settled for a time in Las Vegas. Her father was in sales and eventually moved to Hawaii, making her family one of the few to have moved from Hawaii’s “Ninth Island” to the original eight.
“Basically my dad would just sell whatever,” she said. “He was that type of guy who, say if we were talking and you were like, ‘I need a stereo,’ he would be like, ‘You want a stereo? … I got a stereo — I got a stereo right now, in my car.’ ”
“My mom would say when we would have parties and stuff, my mom was in charge of the food and the guests and everything, and my dad was in charge of music and jokes.”
Khan would go on to study at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. USC was holding a recruiting session on the islands, and Khan didn’t even want to go — “It was a Saturday” — but after reading through some of the school’s film curriculum, she determined that “this is kind of what I want to do.”
With no experience in acting or theater other than a few “bit parts” in school plays, she got into the prestigious film school, and eventually found herself looking for work in the TV and film business.
Fortunately, she was already in Los Angeles, where opportunities are plentiful if a bit unusual, especially for those willing to work hard.
“(Los Angeles) definitely feels like an industry town, as opposed to New York, where there’s business centers or Wall Street,” she said. “Here, if you meet somebody who’s not in the (film or TV) industry, it’s rare.”
One of her initial jobs in show business was as an extra in the audience of daytime talk shows, “which I didn’t even know was a ‘thing,’ ” she said. “They’d pay you $40 to sit in the audience at like, the ‘Ricki Lake’ show.”
She eventually got hired by Disney as a head writer for “Pepper Ann,” an animated show on United Paramount Network about a 12-year-old girl “with a vivid imagination.”
“I was really proud to have worked on that,” Khan said. “It’s fun to meet people now who watched that show. It’s like, ‘Omigawd, I loved that show.’ ”
She went on to create the ABC comedy, “Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23,” a show about a young woman who demands rent from her new roommate, then purposely misbehaves in an attempt to get the roommate to leave. “I wanted to write something on women who were unapologetic,” Khan said. “That was something I would want to watch.
“There’s so many different things that have to line up for a series to get on the air. So many great scripts are never shot, and so many great pilots that are shot don’t make it on the air. So I think the timing just worked out and I was lucky enough to be the right person at the right time for that one.”
While Khan’s shows have plenty of funny characters, they’ve veered from the “joke-punchline” formula of “Friends” or character-centric sitcoms like “Seinfeld.” Rather, they’ve been off-kilter comedies that bring head-tilting “hmmm” moments along with the laughs. Many have been family oriented, like the animated “American Dad!” and “Fresh Off the Boat,” which debuted in 2015 as the first network sitcom to feature an Asian American family in 21 years.
Her latest creation,“Young Rock,” airing Tuesdays on NBC, is another family-oriented show, but cloaked in Johnson’s larger-than-life personality and colorful past. It follows Johnson’s upbringing in a wrestling family as it moves from Hawaii to the mainland, and his career as a football player, and eventually a wrestler and movie star.
“He’s lived such a big life that he’s so open about and that we haven’t even touched yet,” Khan said of Johnson’s show. “There’s so many sections of his life, and he’s willing to go there and show people that his journey to where he is now — one of the most popular people on the planet — hasn’t been easy.”
Khan’s connection to the Rock goes beyond the fact that they both spent time in Hawaii. In the early 1970s, she and her brother Nick were big wrestling fans, chiefly because of Edward George Farhat, otherwise known as The Sheik, who was of Middle Eastern descent. A “villain” in the wrestling scene, he competed on the same circuit as Johnson’s father, Rocky. (Nick Khan is now president of World Wrestling Entertainment.)
That makes reminiscing with the Rock that much easier, Khan said. “We’ll talk about wrestling and then he tells us a story about — this season we’re following him in Nashville. He was like, ‘Did you know I lived in Nashville and I wanted to be a country-western singer for a second? And I’ll go, ‘No. I did not know that. Please tell me more about that.’
“This season we’re also getting to Dwayne’s journey in the ’90s, where he starts to get into the wrestling ring himself. There’s a whole new generation of wrestlers we’re going to meet when he’s a baby face, the new kid on the scene.”
Although Khan no longer has family in Hawaii, she still has warm feelings for the islands. There was no Persian community here — her ties to her ancestral culture came mostly in the form of visits from relatives from Iran, who would stay for months at a time — but she felt right at home in the melting pot of Honolulu.
“There’s such a wide array of cultures that are all coming together, they almost make up an ‘island culture,’ ” she said. “I felt excited about that. That blending of the lifestyle out there was something that I felt became a part of me, from the food to the music to the energy. Everybody’s just friendly, low-key.
“Even now, if I find myself in high-pressure situations, like on set or in production, and people are stressed out, I feel like I have that Hawaiian vibe a little bit, where it’s like, ‘Everything’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be OK. Everybody take it easy.’ I really credit it to my time in Hawaii.”
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