A \'30 Rock\' Player Sells Himself to Science for \'The Lutz Experiment\'

October 10, 2012, 9:08 am

By DAVE ITZKOFF

To comedy fans, John Lutz is an unlikely cult figure â€" a performer at improv theaters and a former writer at “Saturday Night Live” who now plays an eponymous, endearingly silly sketch writer on “30 Rock.” “I don't have any title over there, except for Lutz,” he said recently. “They gave me my own name.”

To Jamil Zaki, an assistant professor in the psychology department of Stanford University, Mr. Lutz is something entirely different: “the perfect lab rat,” Dr. Zaki said.

The men are now collaborators on a new book tentatively titled “The Lutz Experiment,” which was recently acquired by the Free Press imprint of Simon & Schuster. It's a project they hope will make social psyc hology more accessible while it runs Mr. Lutz through a battery of experiments, teaches him a few lessons about himself and perhaps helps him conquer some long-held fears.

“I try to do things that scare me,” Mr. Lutz said in a telephone interview. “Even the idea of writing a book scared me. My wife had to be like, ‘I think you should do this â€" it would be really good for you.' But I've never done that before, and it's terrifying.”

After being introduced by mutual friends, it turned out that Mr. Lutz and Dr. Zaki had more in common than it might seem. Mr. Lutz received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Valparaiso University in Indiana and, according to Dr. Zaki, never lost his interest or insights in the field.

“You see him on ‘30 Rock' and he comes off as this total goofball, a little bit of a doofus, even,” Dr. Zaki said. “It's so strange to then meet him and see this incredibly well-spoken, thoughtfu l guy, in the same body.”

In dry runs that preceded their book proposal, they worked together on magazine articles in which Mr. Lutz played the role of human guinea pig: in an article for Men's Health, Mr. Lutz and his wife (and “30 Rock” co-star), Sue Galloway, were tested on the visible and invisible support that they provide each other.

And in an article for Wired magazine, Mr. Lutz addressed some deep-seated phobias using a strategy called reappraisal.

“When I was a kid,” Mr. Lutz said, “I watched ‘Night of the Living Dead' and was terrified that zombies were going to come through my window, because I lived on the first floor of our house. Now I'm not afraid that zombies are going to come and attack me, because I can look at the facts.”

For their book, Dr. Zaki said it was still to be determined what experiments he would run on Mr. Lutz, and even then, he could probably not tell his partner exactly what he would be getting into.

“So many of our studies depend on people not knowing the hypotheses ahead of time,” Dr. Zaki said. “I get to deploy him to these different, weird parts of the country. ‘Meet this person, and they'll bring you into a basement testing room.'”

If nothing else, Mr. Lutz said the book project was “totally different from my character on ‘30 Rock.'”

“It's a fun thing to do something where there's a little more thought going into it,” Mr. Lutz said, “rather than just knee-jerk reactions to eating pudding or dancing with a bra on.”