The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/comedy-episode).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 619 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, what is comedy? How do jokes work? And how does the comedy business work? I guarantee we will not definitively answer any of these questions, but we’ll make a valiant stab at it with two terrific guests.
First, Greg Iwinski. Greg is an Emmy-winning writer whose credits include The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and Game Theory with Bomani Jones. He was a member of this year’s WGA Negotiating Committee. And if you are a writer working in late-night, trust me, you seriously owe him a beer. Welcome to the podcast, Greg.
**Greg Iwinski:** Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.
**John:** Next up, Jesse David Fox is a senior editor at Vulture, where he covers comedy and hosts the podcast Good One: A Podcast About Jokes. His new book, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work, is out now. Welcome, Jesse.
**Jesse David Fox:** Hello. Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor.
**John:** I wanted to talk with you guys about this, because we get so many questions from writers on this podcast. Yes, I guess the name gave us away, Scriptnotes. We’re mostly about scripted stuff. But the general kind of question is like, “I’m a funny person, or I know a very funny person. What is the thing that that funny person should do with their funniness to get them a career?” We can certainly pop through that as a way in.
But also, we don’t talk very much about stand-up. We don’t talk very much about late-night, sketch comedy. Those are not things that are generally in our wheelhouse. You guys are the experts here, so I want to get through all of that stuff, if we could.
In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I would love to talk about the source of all comedy for people of a certain age, which is The Simpsons. I would just like to talk about The Simpsons as it influenced us growing up if that’s all right.
**Jesse:** Yes.
**Greg:** Yeah.
**Jesse:** It is with me.
**John:** Hooray. Let’s just start with a broad, general, academic kind of question here. What do we even mean by comedy? Jesse, in your book, you talk about, in a very general sense, comedy is anything two or more people think is funny. But when you were setting out to write Comedy Book, what did you want to define as your parameters for comedy? What were you thinking about when it comes to the term comedy?
**Jesse:** I think I start with something that extends from a performed comedic work, so to delineate from humor writing and stuff like that. To me, the seeds of comedy are something that is performed, and as a result, there is some sort of interplay with an audience. It doesn’t have to be a live audience in the purest sense, insomuch as I still think sitcoms count as comedy, but it’s rooted in performers and the relationship to an audience that hypothetically could laugh. Maybe that’s a good way of describing it.
When I narrowed it down, I think my focus was the last 40 years, just because in those 40 years we saw an ascent of comedy, in terms of just how popular it was and how seriously it was taken. Then it’s just finding examples that felt like it fit the sort of ideas I want to discuss. Largely now with stand-up, just because stand-up is such a distilled version of the sort of comedian-audience relationship, but everything I explore applies to comedic movies and sketch and now TikToks and whatever is the future of trying to make people laugh.
**John:** Now, Greg, you’re a writer working in comedy, but do you have any background in stand-up? What do you think about the relationship between stand-up, performing in front of an audience, and the kind of writing that you’re doing, where you have a host delivering jokes that you’re writing? What is the relationship there?
**Greg:** They say there’s two ways into late-night. One is to go to an Ivy League school, and the other is to be a Chicago dirtbag. I took the second path. I was at Second City and IO, doing stuff five, six nights a week, working in front of audiences, trying to make people laugh, because I think what delineates between humor or dramedy or any of these things and real comedy is that comedy is designed to make someone laugh. Maybe it’s the person actually performing, or maybe it’s the audience, or maybe it’s both, but it’s all about getting that laugh.
That skill, whether you’re doing it at as an improviser, as a sketch performer, doing characters, or as a stand-up, what you’re learning is that I very quickly have to work material into something that can get a laugh, because a laugh, it’s not like, “Oh, I saw this dramatic film, and I’m pondering, and I’m thinking.” A laugh is an involuntary physical response. It is a sound that lets you know you did your job. If you can get a laugh, if you can make them laugh, then you did your job. It’s very on-off in comedy.
Honing those skills in stand-up or on stage somewhere becomes very helpful when you’re doing late-night, because you maybe have one rehearsal an hour and a half before you tape, but in reality you’ve got to put stuff up there that you know has a solid chance of making a big chunk of the audience laugh, and the host as well.
**John:** Now, in your definition of comedy is something that makes you laugh, there’s actually a laugh-out-loud quality to it, that separates off a lot of things that are currently called comedies, that are not necessarily meant to be laugh out loud. There’s a lot of shows like The Bear or other things that are listed as comedies, but they’re not comedies in the way that we’re talking about them, where the goal is to get an actual laugh out of an audience member.
Jesse, when you were putting out the edges for your book and what you want to talk about, what do you do with these other things that are considered comedies broadly but are not necessarily ha-ha funny?
**Jesse:** Sure, yes. I already foresee a point of conflict between Greg and I. I believe those shows as comedies. I came up with this term called post-comedy. It really doesn’t mean anything. It just simply means comedy that follows comedic structures, but without the primary goal necessarily operating around laughter, which doesn’t mean there can’t be laughter. It’s just not operated around that same way.
As I think of comedy, I think of it less as an on-off and more as a state one is in, and jokes are a way of entering that state. It’s rooted in this idea of play theory, which posits essentially we laugh in a way not dissimilar to the way chimpanzees and other animals laugh. It’s a matter of a mix of safety and having fun and blah, blah, with people you trust and like.
My theory is there is a lot of comedies that operate that way, insomuch as they put you in that place, where you are in a more playful state and you’re open certain ways, but they do not offer you the relief or release that you would expect from a comedic work. They elevate your body to be in a playful state, but they do not find places to laugh. They play with tension in certain ways. They play with mood. They play with vibe, to talk as a young person might talk about it. But they’re not giving you the same relief.
I think The Bear’s an interesting example, because there’s a lot of things textually that make it look like a comedy. It’s short. A lot of the cast members are people from background of comedic work. It just did not want to offer relief because of the message they’re trying to send about this nature of working in a restaurant. But there is something, at least to how I view it, that still feels like a comedy does. But I am aware that it doesn’t sound like a comedy does to a lot of people.
The way I think of it is, there are a lot of shows that have… If you just push joke density – let’s say you have 30 Rock on one end and The Bear on the other end – it’s just spreading out the distance between laugh moments. If you spread that long enough, essentially it just stays in the tense moment before a laugh. That’s how I think of those shows. I don’t think of them as dramedies, because I don’t think they operate as dramedies in the same way as some dramatic-y comedy movies do or even some HBO dramedies might.
But I am aware that a lot of comedians resent the success of these shows. I do understand that resentment, because these shows end up getting a disproportionate amount of attention. But I still think of them as comedies.
**John:** Greg, I don’t want to unfairly box you into the it has to get a laugh for comedy. I’ll give you a chance to clarify anything around there. But also maybe talk a little bit about, there’s that expectation that you got to continue to have laughter in a late-night show. Even a John Oliver segment that gets very deep into the weeds on a thing still has to have jokes in it, or else it doesn’t feel like it’s progressing. Any color around that you want to provide?
**Greg:** It’s interesting, because we’re in a situation now where you take comedic premises, you take absurd, surreal situations, and then you work on them dramatically. The situation is strong enough that then we go, “Oh, that’s kind of comedic.”
Really, whether it’s a dramedy, it’s the kind of thing that coastal reviewers are going to say is very gripping and interesting, it’s kind of like going to see Siegfried and Roy, and they never actually do a magic trick. They lead up to it, and they tease it, and they edge that we’re going to get there, but there’s never actually any payoff. The payoff is the hard part. If we’re going to call it a comedy, the joke is the hard part. We can all write setups. I do think that there’s some frustration, because a comedy without jokes is like a restaurant without food. We came here for the jokes.
That’s one of the things that I love about late-night comedy is that it is unrelenting in the demand for jokes, whether you’re at a place like Late Show, where you wake up… When you leave Late Show as a writer at 5:30 or 6:00 p.m., you’re already thinking about the next three to five jokes you have to pitch at 8:30 in the morning. What is in the news? What did we miss? What didn’t we get? What’s going to happen overnight? What are the jokes I’m going to pitch in the morning? It is a machine that needs jokes.
When you’re at Last Week Tonight, and you’re deep into a script on homelessness or child hunger or something like that that is so dark, you are still going, “There have to be jokes.” Why we are here is the jokes. That kind of joke-centered focus, I think with a lot of comedians, it’s so hard, you work so long, and it is so objective it becomes the main thing. Like I said, it’s the food in the restaurant.
**John:** You become joke machines. Let’s talk about how those jokes work. Can you give us a sense of, on a late-night show, so Late Show or Jon Stewart back in the day or John Oliver, are there basic categories and classes of jokes? Once you’ve done this for a few years, do you recognize what the essential patterns of jokes would need to be?
**Greg:** You do in some ways. It’s also going to be different for every show, because Carson did not have the same rhythm as Leno, as Letterman. You know that there are ways they’re not going to say it, things they’re not going to say, celebrities they won’t talk about. You start to learn the rules that way.
In terms of jokes, there’s a lot of times that we put TK. I brought this up on the Negotiating Committee. We made a late-night show. The late-night writers of television made a late-night show during the strike called Contract TK. That’s our journalism stolen placeholder for something will go here at some point. You go, “Mitch McConnell, who looks like TK, TK, TK,” and you’re like, “I’ll come back to it,” and it’ll be like something melty-faced or something old, or he looks really tired, he saw a ghost. I can come back to the joke later, but a lot of times you build the structure first, especially on a long-form piece. You build the argument. You build those pieces. Then you come back in and you go, “Okay, yeah.”
The part that you get faster at is what I call the late-night writers brain machine, which is you take in a news story, you disassemble it, you find the part that is most ridiculous, and then that’s where you’re going to tell jokes. That might not be the saddest or most newsworthy part, but you’re going to find that part to hit. Then you are just going to go to town on it. The ability and the speed at doing that, that’s where you get faster and faster and faster, so that then when it’s 4:30 p.m. and some crazy news story’s happened, you can hit them fast enough, because you’re all sitting in a room going, “Oh wait, this is the part that’s weird. This is the part that’s ridiculous. This is the part we’re going to make fun of.”
**John:** Greg, in those rooms, as you’re trying to sort through what the monologue is going to be, how much of the time is spent figuring out the general, like, these are the areas, this is how we poke at the story, versus, here are four different punchlines or way to tell the joke? What is the split between the concept area and the execution?
**Greg:** That changes so much show to show, but also time to time. When you have the time to refine the argument, refine the information, you can do that two or three times before it goes to air. When you’re doing a live show, like when you’re doing the State of the Union, and you’re all sitting there typing, and you know that as soon as you’re done, the show’s going to start, it’s a lot more, let’s just get the information down, let’s just get the basic information out.
What becomes most important in those setups is, what is the least amount of words we can convey the absolute, essential information happening? “You need to know that the new Speaker of the House believes this and this and this.” They set it here. We’re going to show you a quote. Then we have jokes. How quickly can we do that? How quickly can we talk about, Tim Scott dropped out, what else you need to know about him? It’s just compressing that or the setup to be as short as possible and giving you the only things you need to know for the punchline, not even all the information you need to know for the actual story, just a piece at a time, getting that information out there.
**John:** Now, Jesse, Greg is writing jokes that are going to be told exactly once, and then they disappear. But most of the comics you talk about in this book – and we had Mike Birbiglia on the show, so we know this from his experience too – they are continuously workshopping material. They’re working it, working it, working it in front of audiences to see what actually works. They’re testing their material again and again. It seems like such a vastly different way to figure out what is funny. Can you talk through about that process and what you see and the differences that different comedians approach that part of it?
**Greg:** The basic idea of my podcast… I talk to not just stand-ups. Especially when I was talking to stand-ups… I would always hear, on other podcasts, comedians say something like they write on stage. Then that would be the end of the conversation. They go, “You write on stage?” “Yeah, I write on stage.” Then they move on.
I had a suspicion that what that meant, meant something completely different to everybody. They never said it out loud, because it’s vulnerable to reveal your basic little process. It really is. I’ve interviewed let’s say 200 comedians, and the definition of writing on stage is different.
The most basic is, most comedians after a certain level have an idea of what is a funny area to be in to tell a joke. They might have a sense of the juxtaposition. They might just know that they saw something that triggered something, and they go up somewhere between with nothing at all but the premise of a joke in that area, to, “I’m going to tell a story, and I don’t know what’s funny about the story, but I know there’s something to this story.”
They might go up with just, “I feel like talking about airplane food,” to use a hack example. A comedian might be like, “People haven’t written a new joke about airplane food in a really long time, but I have this different experience about airplane food. But I don’t know what’s funny about it,” because ultimately, funniness is determined by a relationship between the audience and the comedian. They’ll throw out an idea, and they’ll get some sort of response. Based on that response, the comedian will go to like, “Oh, let me keep on going down that road,” or, “Let me go this way.”
The most extreme example is a guy like Chris Rock who, as I write about in the book, will bomb for months before he starts really writing his material. I talk about one time I saw him bomb, I’d say six years ago, where he dropped into a show that he was not announced for. He came on with his coat on. He didn’t make eye contact with the audience. He talked in a monotone, soft-spoken. He just said things out loud, see if there was a response. If there was, he then would talk over the laugh, as to not allow the next thing he said to ride off the momentum of the first thing. All he is doing is really essentially acting like a pollster and polling the audience.
Once they have that sense, they know, okay, there’s something there. Then they keep on talking about it and talking about it. Some tape record their sets and then listen back. Some tape record their sets and then don’t listen back, but something about tape recording helps. Maybe some of them will eventually then go to a computer and type it down, but I’d say that’s maybe 10%.
For the most part, it’s just over the course of months, and then maybe years, it is like the sort of ocean smoothing of a rock. They just end up where it needs to be, ready for a special. It always starts with just a thing that barely even resembles what you think of as a joke.
**John:** This afternoon, I was scrolling through Instagram as I’m wont to do, and the algorithm fed me a reel from this stand-up comic I’d never seen before. The joke was funny. It was well-told. I was like, “Oh, that’s really good.” I clicked through and saw his profile, saw all his other reels. Most of the jokes were really good. I ended up following him.
Deep down in there, I got to him telling the same joke earlier, and it was a worse version of the same joke. It was really fascinating to see, oh, that joke evolved from that bad form to this more optimized form, and so now he’s telling the most optimized form of it, which is great. That feels natural.
At the same time though, some comedians you worry get stuck there, and they never go on and write the next thing. It’s so different from what Greg is doing on a late-night show, where he’s writing a joke to be told once. They are writing these jokes that they are going to theoretically tell 50, 100 times. At a certain point, they need to probably stop telling that joke, because they burned out that joke.
**Jesse:** They’re also burning out the trick. This is the secret of it I think that a lot of comedians realize is what actually gets lost is the comedians themselves interested in the joke. That’s why a lot of comedians will keep on playing with an idea, just because the performance is really the thing most audiences are laughing at. It’s really the presence, that a comedian’s in it, that they actually still believe in the things that they’re saying.
That is why a comedian will keep on iterating on it is less because there’s some magical level it’ll reach to be perfect. It’s more like no joke will ever be fully done. You just eventually have to record it while you still care about it. At least that is how it’s been for let’s say comedians under 45 or 50.
I think there is still some older comedians that have a sort of old-school, “I love doing my act, and because it’s my act, I love doing it.” But most comedians of the last let’s say three generations, especially since we’ve moved into a time where specials are commonplace, it really is a matter of the singer and not the song, a lot of it. I think the song is the way in for people, but really the audience is laughing because of some sort of connection between the comedian. It’s not unlike a sitcom, where a lot of sitcom jokes are not setup punchline jokes, but a thing that is true to that character being funny in the way that character would be. A lot of stand-ups are essentially working towards that as well.
**Greg:** I want to agree with what Jesse said, in that even in the Second City model of being a sketch review, you’ve got a two-hour sketch review, you do it eight times a week, but the way that you build those sketches is that you improvise them on stage in front of an audience every night. Every night, you’re slowly tweaking and tweaking and changing. Then you know this gets a laugh, great, if we say it a little bit differently.
It becomes that kind of refining process, where you want to get something essentially as close to perfect as you can. Then those become these famous archive scenes, when Chris Farley’s doing Matt Foley at Second City, and Brian Stack is there, and Kevin Dorff and Tina Fey, and they’re working on these amazing scenes that you then take out and tour with.
But even then, I think Jesse hits on something, which is that it is such a challenge to walk out in front of a room of strangers and make them laugh. I think that comedians get deranged. I was at a party with comedians once. We’re just in a bar. They have a stage. I just realized that all of us would just walk up there, because that’s where you would feel normal. Then you turn to your regular friend, and they’re like, “No, I don’t want to do that. I’m not interested in going and drawing attention to myself.” We’re like, “If there’s a microphone and a stage, we’ll go do it.”
The challenge of getting people to laugh is thrilling. When it works, it feels so good. But if you already have it figured out, and it’s guaranteed, because the piece is so polished, you get bored with it. That’s why I think both for somebody in my level, where if you just have a joke that you get sick of, you get sick of it because you’re like, “Okay, now I’m going to challenge myself with something else,” but even listening to Jesse’s podcast, the huge guys, like Rock, like Eddie Murphy, you hear them talk about the thrill going away, because all they have to do is walk out and read the phone book, and they’re going to crush. That takes away the excitement and the challenge.
**John:** I want to go back to our hypothetical of, okay, you are a funny person. You’re trying to figure out how to use your funny in your life. You’re starting off in a career potentially. The Second City, the Chicago dirtbag is one way to go. Harvard is a way to go, if you can go to Harvard.
Are there fundamental differences between the kind of writing you’re doing for sketch, for stand-up, for late-night, for sitcoms? Could a person thrive in any one of those things, or is there going to be something that they are probably better suited to?
Greg, let me start with you. What’s been your experience? Do you find that the people who are writing on these late-night shows could write any kind of funny thing, or is there really a specific skillset that they are designed for?
**Greg:** I think there are always those diamonds in the rough, who the process of thinking of a joke and getting it there, there’s those rare late-night writers that, they can just do it so fast. Their first pitch is a finished pitch. That’s amazing. There are late-night writers who have written sitcoms and keep writing sitcoms. There’s ones who do humor writing. There’s people who have been political speech writers, all sorts of things.
I think that when you’re getting into comedy, the real key is are you able to articulate what’s funny to you to another person, where they relate to it, and they laugh at it. I think that late-night writers, sitcom writers, comedy movie writers, all of them, you are really using a very similar skill. The only thing that changes is the time you have.
The thing I’ve seen the most in funny people is there are people who incredibly funny, who would crush at late-night. They don’t want to wake up every day or every week and start over, so they don’t want to do late-night. That’s totally fine, because it is ephemeral, in a way where you’ve written at a place for two, three, four years, and people go, “What did you do?” and you go, “I did the show. I don’t really have anything to show you. I just did the show.”
**John:** Jesse, from your experience, do you feel like the people who are coming on your podcast, who are very funny people, could they do anything in the comedy space, or are they best suited for one area?
**Jesse:** I think it really goes down to the specific individual. There’s so many different temperaments. Some could not thrive in an office, because they’re comedians, and they’ve never had to wake up before 1:00 p.m., or they’re comedians and they are loners, and the idea of being collaborative wouldn’t work for them, or they’re comedians and they want all the attention so they can’t write for somebody else.
There are people who can go all up and down the spectrum in a way that’s really interesting, where there are late-night writers who will go on to become sitcom writers, there are late-night writers who become feature writers, and there are also their colleagues that they have. They then are content and able to just knock out monologue jokes every day, because then there’s almost a zen practice to it.
I think it really is less so a matter of artistic ability as it is a practical, functional ability. What workplace do your creative juices thrive the best in? What are you content with? You want a steady job, like late-night often is, and you want your comedy to be not… You don’t want to have to worry about it making money. You’re like, “I want to make my specific comedy. It’s niche. I don’t want to have to worry about it being more popular. Let me get a job where it’s every day a week,” blah blah blah. It really is just a matter of work-life balance and work-creative life balance than it is necessarily creative leanings.
But that to say, everyone has a thing that they’re going to be better at than worse at. It really is a matter of figuring out what that is and try things. I think most late-night writers have written a pilot, and they know what it feels like to have written a pilot.
One of the best examples is Seth Meyers himself. Seth Meyers was cast on SNL to be a cast member, realized he was more adept at writing for other people than performing himself. Then he was like, “Oh, I can be myself. I can write late. I can write monologue jokes, so I’ll do that and also be a writer.” He was given a feature deal with some studio. He could not sit down and write a movie. The idea of writing a full movie was beyond him. He’s like, “I can’t do that.” When he left, he wasn’t like, “I’m going to write a feature.” “I’m going to do what I can do,” which is do late-night, which is a combination of those things. He could do Documentary Now, because it’s an extension of sketch. It’s an interesting temperament thing. As I said, if comedy is a state, in a way that dramedy isn’t the same way – you have to be able to be playful – then it’s like, where are you comfortable?
**John:** Going back to our hypothetical person who is funny, the funniest person in their office, and thinking about, “I want to do this as a career. What do I do next?” I think the classic advice Craig and I would always give is you need to figure out, are you fundamentally a writer? Are you a person who wants to write stuff for other people to do, or do you want to perform yourself?
That’s why we say if you’re in a place that has the equivalent of Groundlings or Second City, where you can take those classes and can see whether you can actually be funny in front of a crowd, you can do that. You can build up your chops that way and your network around it.
Greg, you’re probably a person who can help me out with this. What is that next step? Let’s say they’ve gone through, and they’ve done Second City stuff. They’ve probably put together a packet to send out to shows. What is the process for getting hired into a show like that?
**Greg:** There’s a couple things. One is that you make connections. I don’t mean networking connections, but the friends that you make, because you find other people obsessed with comedy. I think in the stand-up scene, there’s the guys you came up with, the girls you came up with, the people that you start with when you’re all just taking a big risk. Knowing them helps a lot, because if they’re ahead of you, then you learn tribulations from them and what to avoid and how it’s going. Also, those are people who can help you out and recommend you.
If you are already taking the classes, you’re already learning that, the thing is that you’ve got to make stuff. I’m a little older. I was at Second City in the early 2010s. I think that there’s this belief and this pressure to say, “I’ve got to make comedy. I’ve got to put it online, on social media, and it’s got to be really popular. It’s got to become my thing.” I would actually disagree, because I think that it’s great for you…
You talked about the comic who had the newer version and the older version of his joke on his Instagram. That kills me, because you should be able to get better in relative obscurity. In those beginning years, when you’re just getting better, you don’t have to share that with anyone. The audience that you’re with is enough.
Go try that stuff out. What’s nice is you can try it. Maybe you’re in a storytelling show. Maybe you’re doing stand-up. Maybe you find a sketch team you’re on, whatever you’re doing. Start making things, just so that part becomes normal, the grinding it out and making it and doing it. In the same way that if I say, “We’ve got to write a two-minute monologue, and we’ve got to write it the next couple hours,” that you have written enough stuff that those jokes feel normal to you. Start to get the skills and build that.
It’s not about becoming popular or viral or any of that. It’s starting to learn the skills, most importantly, the skill of actually getting your work out in front of audiences, so you start to feel what’s right and what’s wrong, because I think there are a couple ways.
If you’re starting out in comedy, and you try a joke, and it dies, you will know if it died because it just wasn’t funny, or it died because this audience wasn’t put in the right mental place to laugh at it, or you told it wrong, you paused in the wrong place, a waitress dropped a drink. You start doing it over and over, and you start to learn why things work and they don’t. That’s going to be the most important skill that you learn outside of the school model. There are a lot of ways to do that, but I think they all involve going out and taking your stuff and making it and putting it in front of people.
**John:** The counterpoint to that would be that this generation would say putting it in front of people is actually putting it online. It’s putting it on Instagram. That’s where my audience actually is is that group. By putting stuff out every day, I’m seeing what’s working, what’s not working. It doesn’t have that direct, real, live feedback, but you can find a very specific audience that may not come to that comedy show. There’s a sense of you can find people who are into that niche thing that you are talking about and be able to build off from that.
I’m going to refer back to Ru Paul’s Drag Race. One of the ongoing things that happens on Ru Paul’s Drag Race is that you have these queens who have come up in the actual bars and really know how to perform in front of a live audience. You have Instagram queens, who are incredibly gorgeous on Instagram and funny on Instagram in their own special way, but really flounder in front of a live audience. One may be right or wrong, but they’re just different ways of building out who they think their audience is and how they think they should be able to reach their audience.
**Greg:** That’s very true. I would definitely not say that all of those people are wrong. That may be the way that you find it now. It’s one of those things where the generational shift of going digital happened as I was not looking to do that. I definitely don’t want to say that all of them are wrong for going online. I just think that you’ll look back on your stuff in five years and think about how much better you are, and you have the right to not have that hanging out in the internet, over you.
**John:** The nice thing is on your own Instagram you can delete stuff, but the stuff that’s out there for other people could be posted. Jesse, it occurs to me that a thing you must’ve talked with your guests about is this phenomenon of recording in rooms and how much of the work that’s in progress gets documented, that you don’t have the ability to do things privately. Is that a thing that stand-ups are worried about?
**Jesse:** I think it’s generational. Let’s say Gen X comedians and let’s say young Baby Boomers. Anything older than that, I don’t even think any of this is on their radar. They are really concerned about their material being released, being filmed and put online before it’s done. That was a big concern. Chris Rock et al became obsessed with the idea of his material being leaked early. Then it became this idea, audiences don’t want to hear jokes they’ve heard before was a popular truism.
Then what I’ve noticed – this is extremely recent, I would say within the last four years, this is a radical shift – is that audiences are starting not to care if they heard a joke before. This is just the nature of fandom being built through social media, which is not only do they not care; a lot of times they invited their friends to a show by sending them a clip or being like, “Oh, they have this joke.” It’s almost not fully understanding the rules.
They’re going to hear a joke they’ve heard before, which to me actually feels kind of like how I go to see comedy. I love the process of people writing comedy, so I don’t mind if I’ve seen a joke before. Now you’re having audiences do that. No, they’re not necessarily doing it because they love craft. They’re like, “That’s the comedian that has that joke.”
In general, that dovetails to, I think, a young Millennial and definitely Gen Z trait, which is they don’t necessarily delineate between good and bad posting. It is just you post. If anything, over-curation is… I don’t want to use slangs that they use that are probably already corny, but over-curation of your feed is corny to them. It’s more interesting to have a bad joke and a different joke. I think that will radically change the process.
I think the thing that should be noted – and I think the Drag Race example is really useful – is the problem with Instagram cleans is not that they’re on Instagram. It’s that the show demands them to act and perform stand-up comedy. That’s the thing. That’s not unlike comedy now, which is you can build a huge fan base online, and that will be fine, unless you’re then trying to pivot that into a career where you’re doing something with live entertainment.
I think there is a growing pain that’ll often happen to digital-only comedians when they have to write for a comedian in a live setting. You definitely see it when you see digital-only comedians start performing stand-up for the first time. It’s almost like an Uncanny Valley quality in reverse. That is the testament of doing things live.
I think as we get further away from the pandemic – and a whole generation of comedians didn’t move to Chicago right out of college, but started posting things on TikTok – I think you’ll see a lot of those people start doing live things again, just because they realize most careers are going to be through that. It’s really hard to be an artist in the same way online only, if you don’t want an influencer’s career.
**John:** Greg, talking about the feedback of an audience and performing stuff in front of an audience, during the pandemic all these late-night shows were just in their attic or just on a white room set. It was really strange watching those shows and seeing those jokes happen without the laughter behind them. Has that changed anything you think in how late-night shows are going post-pandemic, or are we back to an earlier way stuff used to work?
**Greg:** I think some shows have changed a lot. I think Seth has been pretty open about… He doesn’t wear a tie now in the show. They write the show a little bit more for themselves than they did before. I think for each show, it seems like it was a different thing.
I was at Last Week Tonight during the pandemic. One of the funniest areas is that if you don’t have an audience, and you’re trying to get as much information into the 30 minutes HBO gives you as possible, you can actually say more stuff if there’s no audience laughing. I don’t know if that’s a good thing for the show, but when the audience comes back, you’re like, “Oh man, we just lost 15 seconds.” I think it was different. It makes it surreal.
You do have to make it for some audience. I think the way you look at corrections that Seth does, I think when you’re working at a late-night show in the pandemic, you’re making it for the crew. You’re making it for the other writers there. You’re trying to make someone laugh. It can’t just be out into emptiness with no reaction. It’s that if you can get somebody out there laughing, if we’re laughing in the writers’ room, if we’re laughing in the background, you feel like you’ve done something, because yeah, that sterile place, it makes it really hard to know if you’re hitting it.
**John:** Now, Greg, one of the things you were so instrumental with in the strike and leading up to the strike, these negotiations, was making it really clear to us what was at stake in late-night, basically that if we did not make serious gains here, the future of comedy variety talk shows was in danger, in part because the move to streaming had really disrupted anything.
The great example you were able to provide us was, The Amber Ruffin Show shoots on the same set as Seth Myers, and yet those writers do not have nearly the same protections, or did not have nearly the same protections, because it was a streaming show rather than a broadcast show. But Amber Ruffin I believe is the only Black comedy variety host on the air right now. Is that right?
**Greg:** Yeah. I’m not sure where the show is at, because I don’t think it’s been on in a while. But Ziwe was canceled. The Sam Jay show hasn’t been on. Bomani got canceled.
**Jesse:** That was canceled. Desus and Mero ended.
**Greg:** Desus and Mero ended Desus and Mero. But most of them, yeah, have been canceled, or at least aren’t on the air now, so no, there’s not a lot of Black hosting.
**John:** I want to talk for a moment about comedy and race, because I feel like one of the breakthrough qualities of comedy is ability to have conversations about things that you otherwise wouldn’t have those conversations, and actually have Black people telling stories authentically in front of an audience. I think back to Richard Pryor or Bill Cosby, even, or Chris Rock, the ground-breakers in that space. Do we have a sense of where this can happen next and what the new opportunities are here? Because if you are a young, Black, funny person and are looking for where to direct your energies, where would you go?
**Greg:** I will say for me – and I think I was open with this to everyone – but as someone who, I want to be a Black late-night host, I’ve talked a lot with other Black comedians, and I think there’s this idea a lot of times when they go, “This is a Black late-night show. We’ve got to reinvent the format.” Then everything changes about the show. It might not work, and then it gets canceled.
My opinion is that if we take young people of color, young people who are not cis, young people who are just outside the norm of the Jimmys and the Stephens, and you give them a traditional show, that has transformed the show, because of what you’re saying, because we have to have a conversation in comedy about what do we laugh at and why do we laugh at it. Because I think what we realize when you get into news comedy – and I’ve experienced this a lot in rooms that are mostly white – is what makes us too sad to talk about, what makes us think we can’t turn it funny, those lines are very different for people of different races, different genders. What outrages us enough that we feel like we have to talk about it? That’s different based on who the people are.
One of the things that frustrates me so much about late-night now is that there are these big, moving political pieces that will talk about something like the death of Black men at the hands of police, and the thesis at the end of the piece is, “There’s a systemic problem with police,” whereas if a Black voice is doing that episode, the first line of the episode is, “We all know there’s a systemic issue with police.” Now we can go 30 minutes past that and laugh and talk about very different things.
Whenever that happens that somebody gets that desk who is different, I think what will be most successful and I think will invite people who are maybe even straight white guys into the conversation is being able to articulate, “This is what hurts me and bugs me and upsets me and my community, and we’re going to laugh at it too, to show that it doesn’t break us, it doesn’t make us too sad, it’s not going to dissuade us.”
I apologize for getting a little soapboxy about late-night. I love it so much. What late-night is meant to provide is catharsis. We watch the news. We intake the news on Twitter. We’re so nervous. We’re so frustrated. We feel powerless and made. Late-night isn’t going to fix it, but it’s going to let you go to sleep, because we’re going to laugh about it a little bit.
The question we have to ask when we’re picking new hosts and moving generationally forward is, who’s going to get to laugh at the bad news? What people in America, what kind of Americans are going to get to turn on the TV, see the news that affects them, and will get to laugh at it? I think the more we expand that circle, the better the shows are going to be.
**Jesse:** A lot of this is also a race maybe against or a race with where content is going generally. The thing about late-night shows is that we are losing late-night shows generally. I think the networks are showing less and less interest in them, especially nightly ones, just because of the cost and blah, blah, blah.
Then I think that feeds into the… Late-night as it exists is such a broadcast concept. It’s very top-down and meant to be big tent. Now, who is in that big tent is still up for debate, obviously. That is not how content is being consumed. It’s definitely not how comedy’s being consumed.
You have now more comedians who are more popular than any time ever. Black comedians, white comedians, female comedians, Hispanic comedians, all these different comedians are playing larger venues than the biggest comedians that you can ever imagine from the ’80s, but their access to what we think of as the mainstream will be less and less. That’s partly because what we think of the mainstream is being diminished further and further. I don’t know if there’s going to be another giant comedic movie star after Kevin Hart. I think he might be the last one. Instead, you will have just distinct groups. You might not even know it.
The 85 South Show, which is an extremely popular comedic podcast that grew out of three people who were on Wild ‘N Out, they’re selling large venues. They’re probably going to be able to create their own ecosystem of content that appeals to Black audiences, if that’s all they’re trying to appeal to.
That idea of crossing over, the necessity of crossing over, whatever that means, again, will also be diminished, because that’s just how people are consuming things. The algorithm is finding things they want. You don’t need the mainstream to essentially be like, “You must watch this,” because if you’re doing a thing that any group of people will like, they’ll probably find it, just because it feeds into whatever these algorithms are doing. Now, I have no sense of the inherent bias of those.
That’s where it’s going to be the future is heading, in terms of, I don’t know how to predict access to things, because I don’t know if there’s going to be another comedic movie released in cinema in my lifetime, to be honest, after this year’s releases.
**John:** By comedic movie, in your book you talk about the Adam Sandler movie, like, this is just a straight-out comedy.
**Jesse:** Yeah. Big joke comedy made for a wide audience, big laugh comedy, I just don’t imagine a major studio releasing that, giving it a summer release in the same way. I think there are a couple they tried this summer. None of them were giant, outside-the-box hits. They seem to be doing better on Netflix. It’s sad. I want to make it clear that I hate that this is the case. Even Kevin Hart makes his movies for the streamers. Unless something radically changes, it’s hard to predict the future in that regard. I do think people will be able to access, to make their own things, and will have large audiences. It’s just the idea of even thinking about it in the same way is hard to imagine.
**John:** On the topic of making their own things, we have three podcast hosts here on this show. Obviously, there’s a lot of comedic podcasts that draw big audiences. There’s YouTube shows that draw big audiences. While we may lose the mainstream seat at a big network for a late-night show, it’s clearly possible to build your audience in other ways and get them out there. In some degrees, that is a win is that you have access to an audience. Just the challenge of that audience finding you.
**Jesse:** Yeah, I think 100%. If I told you the amount of comedians that have played Madison Square Garden in the last few years, I’m sure you would not recognize a lot of these names. It’s like Andrew Schulz. He’s white, but he built his audience through a combination of YouTube and podcasts and Patreon, and he can fill Madison Square Garden, at least one show. That is much, much, much, much, much more common.
The idea of a person becoming big tour successful from just being famous is just not happening anymore. It’s definitely you’re building fan bases bottom-up or you’re building them through TikTok reels. You can make quite a living, really quite a living. Just the idea of making an Adam Sandler type living… I think that’s an industry-wide trend. There’s fewer Adam Sandlers across all types of things. There’s fewer movie stars and that type of thing.
The difference is, comedy, because of the cheapness, I think a lot of times you can really easily put on a comedy show. You can really easy make a comedic podcast, opposed to whatever a dramatic podcast is. You could pivot. Comedians pivot really easily. There is a middle class that is being established of people that are making livings all by themselves without really the need of a major platform, other than maybe YouTube, which is where they’ll put all their specials.
**Greg:** I think part of the issue is so much is up in the air, I think even at a bigger scale than Jesse’s saying. Will there still be vertical integration? Will any of these streamers still exist? Will the streaming model be what they use? What will theaters do to stay relevant? What will happen to the broadcast networks? How will people get them? What will AVOD and FAST do? All of this stuff is so up in the air.
One of the benefits of being a comedian, unless you’re the host, is that you don’t ever really care about ratings. When people talk about late-night shows that are the most popular, like Conan – his show is huge – it was not a ratings smash. It was not blowing Leno out of the water. You got maybe half a percent or 1% of America to watch your show every night. It just turned out that most of that 1% became comedy writers.
It was kind of like the conversations we would have with members, I think, on the picket lines, which is, “We cannot control how the industry moves, how it shapes jobs, how it changes that. What we can do is try to make sure, as the Guild, that those are good jobs and that they pay well.” I think that we’ll do that as things change.
But in my opinion – and maybe I’m just an old, cranky man – there are always going to be screens, and there are always going to be companies who need to pay you to put something on those screens. Throughout most of screenwriting history, the Guild has been there to make sure that those screens had good jobs behind them. I think that that will continue whether it is a social media company or projected into AR or it comes out of some watch you wear or whatever else. I think we will be there. Even us looking at trying again to protect the writers in video games, that when stories are told, when audiences are reached out to, that we’ll try to be there. I don’t know why I’m doing a PSA for the Guild on this podcast. But I do think it will be disrupted. I’m not as worried about the disruption. That’s what I would say.
**John:** Bringing it back to our theoretical person who’s entering the industry right now, I guess our center advice would be here to look for ways that are interesting to get yourself in front of an audience, be that a physical audience in a space or some kind of online audience who can give you continuous feedback on your stuff that you think is funny, to see whether more than just you think it’s funny. We value the ha ha funny, but it’s not the only kind of funny that’s out there. What else should we tell this theoretical listener?
**Jesse:** I just want to say that there’s a person out there who, I can imagine them hearing that and go, “I don’t want to perform. That is scary to me. I’m not charismatic, but I like writing funny things.” I want to make sure that we try to figure out how to help that person, because I do think that is maybe the hardest thing to do is to break into comedy as just a writer, when you did not go to Harvard, NYU, or let’s say Emerson, and you’re not a performer. You just are not, for whatever reason. I have some thoughts. But I want to ask, Greg, if you knew people like that and how they pursued it.
**Greg:** Yeah. I went to Second City only to write and then ended up becoming an improviser as well, just because I got swept up in it. I had friends who remained writers. I think for them, a lot of what you saw was, “I’m always submitting to McSweeney’s. I’m always trying to get into the New Yorker.” They were treating their tweets – this is a different era of Twitter – but they were treating it like a writers’ room, putting up good jokes that they had worked on that night.
Whether it is Instagram or TikTok or whatever, try to use that good writing in these small spaces, even if it’s just words, or maybe you’re not on camera, so there are things around your house or whatever. It’s drilling into the idea of, show us the thing that only you can do. Show us the voice that you have and who you are. That doesn’t require you to necessarily be on camera. Maybe you find a sketch team, or you find friends who want to perform your stuff, who you think are funny.
That’s one of the beautiful things about social media is now we’re in a place where you can find a comedic performer who doesn’t write, and you’re a writer who doesn’t perform, and you could DM and say, “Hey, I like your stuff. You like my stuff. Do you want to make some stuff together?” You could build that community that way.
I would bring it back to, again, doing the thing only you can do. During the 2016 election, I was not writing. I had gotten one NBC fellowship but nothing else. I was in LA. They didn’t like political comedy in LA. They like entertainment comedy. I was very into political comedy. I made a 30-minute monologue podcast every week of the election cycle for the 2016 election. No one asked me to. Nobody wanted me to. But I was like, “This is something I can do. I can write a Last Week Tonight audio episode, pull the clips in, make the clips, make the argument, get the jokes. I can do this.” The first job I got, they mentioned the podcast in the interview.
**John:** Great.
**Greg:** I think that’s the thing is, show us the thing only you can do. I think of these two guys who are on Instagram. They’re probably on TikTok, but I’m old. I’m only on Instagram. These two brothers from Australia. What they do is they incredibly overact a reenactment of sports announcers calls. Half the screen is the sporting event, and half the screen is them, and they’re just going nuts. It’s so good and original and funny. That’s them showing the thing they can do. Now you’re like, “Great. I like these guys. I’ll follow them. I’ll see what else they’re doing.” It draws you in. When you can do that, that’s the key, even if you’re just writing.
**John:** This is some good advice. Thank you both very much for all this. It is time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our audience. Jesse, do you have something to recommend?
**Jesse:** It’s a thing on the TV show Julia, but I don’t know when that episode airs. I’ve watched a screener. Can I talk vaguely about something that happens on the show?
**John:** You can talk vaguely about Julia. Several points of connection. Chris Keyser, WGA negotiator, is one of the people behind that show. Rachel Bloom is on that show. Tell us about Julia.
**Jesse:** The second season of Julia does something, I think in the second episode or the third episode, which is completely boldly makes up things in her life that are not true, that are just interesting to see happen with the characters. It’s a thing that you might see in historical fiction, let’s say in books, but you don’t really see it on TV, where they would not take these huge swings and these conspiracy theory things.
With the first season of Julia, I was confused with where the line was in terms of what they’re making up and which characters they’re inventing. In some ways, the problem was it was this gap between true but not 100% true that makes it kind of fuzzy. Now if you take huge swings, then it’s much more like the fun of fanfiction.
I found this decision that happens with one of the characters that’s not Julia, that is so bold that I DMed all my coworkers, “Have you watched this episode of Julia yet? Isn’t it absurd?” They’re like, “I can’t think of another show that’s done it.”
I think that’s cool, because I find the fact checking of these type of shows to be corny. It’s like, we’re just using it as a jumping-off point. It’s based in a reality. If you want to know what their life is like, read other things. I found this to be a bold step forward in these type of shows, where it’s just like, yeah, it’s going to be about Julia, but we’re going to have fun here, because we’re making a TV show.
**John:** That’s great. It reminds me of every adaptation of a book. Everyone’s like, “How can you change that thing from the book?” It’s like, because we changed the thing from the book, because it’s not a book anymore. That book is still on a shelf. Julia Child’s real life is still out there. As long as we’re not hurting somebody or going to get sued by some living person who’s going to come after us, I say go for it. Greg, what do you have for us?
**Greg:** I’m a big fan of women in aviation. My great-grandmother was in the Women’s Air Corps. Also, my wife is a flight attendant. There is a book that I read this year called The Great Stewardess Rebellion, by Nell McShane Wulfhart. It is a telling of how the almost 100,000 women in America working as flight attendants went from being these objectified, no labor representation, totally taken advantage of workers in this workforce, and then, out of pure self-directed power, created unions, fought back against companies, created working standards, even up until today.
It’s an incredible labor story in a very unique workplace. I think we see so many stories now, and I feel like you think of the SAG and WGA strikes, you think of coal miners and truck drivers. This is such an interesting one because of the incredible entrenched sexism in this labor fight, that even the job itself… You have old American Airlines ads that say, “Do you want coffee, tea, or me?” That’s the flight attendant asking that. Fighting against something that’s so structurally built against them and just about how these regular women that were regular flight attendants believed in labor power and banded together and changed it into an industry where you could have a kid and have a life and have a career and not get pinched by a passenger. It’s a shout-out to my wife as well. But the book is really fantastic.
**John:** That’s great. You should follow Greg on social media, and you’ll also see the ongoing fight and the upcoming bigger fight with American Airlines and their flight attendants there. It’s also the history of flight attendants’ unions. The Alaska battle, which was in the ’80s, I guess, was so fascinating. That was one of the first examples of a chaos means of striking, which was just so fascinating to see what happened there. Suddenly, you had Alaska Airlines management having to learn how to be flight attendants. It’s wild.
**Greg:** It’s an amazing workplace.
**John:** My One Cool Thing is an album, a comedy album, which is very appropriate for this podcast. It’s Matt Rogers’s Have You Heard of Christmas. You’ve heard of Matt Rogers, for sure. Matt Rogers was a guest host on Episode 575 of Scriptnotes. He’s also the cohost of the Las Culturistas podcast, which is terrific. He did a live show called Have You Heard of Christmas that became a comedy special, Have You Heard of Christmas on Showtime last year. It is now an album, which is the progress of how these things work. It is an album you can listen to on all the streaming services. There’s even a vinyl you can buy.
What I love about this… I love all the songs. I was familiar with most of them. There’s some new ones too. The one I want to single out – and we’ll put a link in the show notes to the song and also to the video – is called Everything You Want. What I love about it, it is a really good song. He pushes back the reveal of the joke pretty much as far as you can, to where it gets to like, “Oh, this is why it’s a comedy song.” I just love it. Matt Rogers is so, so talented. Take a listen to that, Have You Heard of Christmas by Matt Rogers.
**Jesse:** Because he has a full album, you’re doing an array of pacing of joke structures. You have some where you know what it is right away. He’s playing a character. You’re like, “Cool, every line he says is as Martha May Who,” or you’ll have one where it’s a big twist at the end, and you don’t actually know what the comedic premise is. It’s just a good song. That’s because he’s a sketch nerd who’s been doing sketch for so long. He uses all these different ways to get at it, so you can listen to a full album and laugh in a lot of different ways.
**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to the album, but also to the video for Everything You Want, which is the big new track off of it.
**Jesse:** It doesn’t even have to be about Christmas. I do think he’s like, “Oh, and it happened on Christmas, this story, or maybe it didn’t.” There’s a certain sort of self-awareness to that too. I love Matt. I think it’s one of the funniest things. If you’re in the city, he’s doing this show. I really recommend it.
**John:** Yeah, it’s great. Greg and Jesse, thank you so much for being on the show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jonathan Petkau. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.
You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on The Simpsons.
Jesse David Fox, thank you again for being on the podcast. It was great to talk through comedy with you. People who want more should check out your book, Comedy Book. It is available in bookstores everywhere. It’s a terrific overview of the last 40 years of comedy and how we got to this place.
Greg Iwinski, you can find you on all the social medias, because you are so good at that, @garyjackson, for some reason. We’ll check that out, @garyjackson.
**Greg:** Thanks.
**Jesse:** Thank you so much. It was a joy.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** I know this because it was in Jesse’s book, but I also suspect this is true for Greg, is The Simpsons was a foundational aspect to your thinking about comedy and what is funny and how does funny work. Is that true for both of you?
**Jesse:** 100%. I think the thing that I realized is, why The Simpsons is so powerful is that it, especially at that moment, was a culmination of especially Western culture up to that point. By watching it, you’re sort of getting a download from the matrix of like, this is what we as a culture have been creating. Both what I find funny but also how I see the world was so shaped by that show.
**John:** Greg, did that have an impact on you?
**Greg:** Yeah. I grew up and I was homeschooled. I had Crunchy Con parents growing up in Arizona. We weren’t allowed to watch The Simpsons, because it was disrespectful to your parents, and they would choke each other. Then we were allowed to watch The Simpsons, because my dad watched it and laughed hard enough that then we just started watching it. That was a transformational thing for me to see. The jokes won. The jokes were good enough, they won. That became a huge show in our house. That was before you could get them on digital and watch them again. You just had to watch it when it was on.
The Simpsons was huge, again, in the idea of those hard jokes that you remember for the rest of your life. I’ve been able to meet some Simpsons writers that I met 20 years later, 25 years later, and I remember a joke they wrote in one episode because it made such an impact. Huge show for me.
**Jesse:** I’ll say there’s a joke from I think Season 5 or 6 that is such a big swing that it made something unlock in my brain, and I realized someone must’ve written that joke. I conceived of what a comedy writer must be from just seeing that joke. Then one day, I was interviewing a few of the showrunners, and he was like, “Oh, I remember who wrote every single joke.” I said that joke, and he goes, “I have no idea who did that.” I was like, “Thanks.”
**John:** My recollection of The Simpsons, of course it was on before I moved to Los Angeles, but in my apartment in Los Angeles, it was on at 5:30 in the afternoon on one of the stations, probably Fox. I would watch it every day at 5:30. A neighbor said, “Oh, I can always hear you laughing.” Basically, I was laughing so loud that people, with my windows closed, could hear me laughing every day. They liked that I was laughing every day. It was genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. I would laugh multiple times in an episode.
Looking back at it now with bigger comedic eyes and seeing what they’re doing, it was out of that Harvard school rather than the Chicago school. It was that Harvard school, where they could tell some really intellectual joke, but was always willing to go lowbrow simultaneously. That highbrow-lowbrow mix was so different than what I was getting from anyplace else, that combination of elements. Simpsons at its best was just remarkable.
**Jesse:** I think Matt Groening… It’s a quote that I found afterwards, because I wrote a story about The Simpsons last spring, about how it’s having this renaissance, which was a fan term. But then I presented that term to all the people involved, and they all agreed, which was a passive acknowledgement of the dark ages. But Matt Groening, there was a quote that was essentially like, “The goal was we wanted to have as many points people latch onto,” and their way was to have as many different types of comedy as possible.
If you liked highbrow jokes, you had that. You’d be like, “I watch this show, and there’s other type of jokes, and I’m fine with it when he strangles Bart or whatever, but that’s what I watch it for.” I’m watching it as a 9-year-old or a 10-year-old. I don’t know who Susan Sontag is. I’m just like, “That person talks funny.” Then I grow up into it. I am fortunate it was so good, because it was just the thing that I was going to watch anyway. That was all a pretty savvy decision.
The thing that really allowed it to mature, especially during its golden age, was it would keep on having new writing staffs and younger writing staffs and eventually more diverse writing staffs, but very eventually. As a result, this palette expanded. Then what are the rules of what counts as a Simpsons joke is now as expansive of a palette as maybe anything in television history.
**John:** I’ve been able to go into a Simpsons room two or three times, at least once in person with the whole crew there, and it’s a giant, giant room, and then once on Zoom where you’re scrolling through multiple screens just to see everybody in that room.
It is crazy to see a whole generation that has basically only done The Simpsons. Matt Selman’s been on the show once or twice, and he’s an executive producer on the show. His only job in Hollywood has been on The Simpsons. His whole life is in there. Yet The Simpsons can hold so much, because every kind of comedy can fit inside The Simpsons.
You talk about a renaissance. I guess this is referring to the more recent seasons. There’s been some really great episodes in there. They’re not all hits and winners, but there’s some really solid achievements in there.
**Jesse:** These last, I think, three or four seasons, since they changed the structure of how the show was made… The main thing that Matt brought when he was given more power as an executive producer was he had this idea of a co-showrunner system, which essentially, a bunch of the senior writers got four episodes a season for them to co-run, which then allowed the show to have as much focus and investment as you saw back in the early days, when they did it by working 150 hours a week or whatever. Now there’s such a wide range. You’ll have episodes co-ran by Carolyn Omine that are so heartbreakingly sensitive, while also formally so inventive. You have more absurd in construction, in different ways, Brian Kelley episodes.
It really is a willingness to push the boundaries of especially the canon. I think Matt is a big anti-canon thing about The Simpsons, like, “We write for The Simpsons because there’s no rules, so let’s have there be no rules again.” That alone, plus hiring a lot of young writers, has resulted in them being like, “Oh, wait, this really is a playground that has so much more we can do with it.”
Look, I can recommend 10, 15 episodes from the last three years that are just as good as what we think of as great episodes. Lisa the Boy Scout is really one of the funniest episodes this show has done. Then there’s this episode where Lisa becomes a fan of a Taylor Swift type person, and it’s a parody of stan culture. It has an ending that is really one of the most touching things in the history of the show.
**John:** Greg, it occurs to me that sometimes the process of coming up with a Simpsons episode is probably not that dissimilar to a Last Week with John Oliver, in the sense of, “Here is the general story area. What are all the pieces in this area that we want to dig into and explore?”
**Greg:** Yeah. I think there’s a big similarity in any show, I think, where you get a bunch of joke-writers and you throw them into one big place and let them go. I think that that’s part of the sensibility of The Simpsons that drew me in as a young person, that also drew me into late-night, is that I think especially in the beginning, you felt like, “Wow, I can’t believe that they got to do this. I can’t believe that this got to be on TV.” That I think drew me and a lot of people into joke-writing, was you thought, “Oh wow, they let you really goof around and say stuff you might not be able to say and just be an idiot.”
I think you feel that when you talk to Simpsons people, that it’s that churn of jokes, so that you’re never seeing a joke in The Simpsons that was the first idea, that was like, “That was it. We’re never going to touch it.” 30 Rock is a very similar show to that, where it’s, “We’ve turned the joke over so many times that we’ve really polished every single joke,” which I love about it, because I think that energy of that writers’ room, comedy is so collaborative, that energy comes through the screen.
**John:** For sure. We could talk about The Simpsons for another 50 hours, but we shall not. Greg and Jesse, thank you so much.
**Jesse:** Thank you again so much.
**Greg:** Thank you, John.
**Jesse:** I’m glad to get a bonus Simpsons conversation in.
Links:
* [Greg Iwinski](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8660569/) on [Twitter](https://x.com/garyJackson) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/garyjackson/)
* [Jesse David Fox](https://www.vulture.com/author/jesse-david-fox/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/jessedavidfox/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/JesseDavidFox)
* [Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374604721/comedybook) by Jesse David Fox
* [Good One: Podcast About Jokes](https://podcasts.voxmedia.com/show/good-one) by Jesse David Fox
* [Julia](https://www.max.com/shows/julia/9fab087a-73f8-4e08-b778-bd502697295e) on MAX
* [The Great Stewardess Rebellion](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/636297/the-great-stewardess-rebellion-by-nell-mcshane-wulfhart/) by Nell McShane Wulfhart
* [Everything You Want (ft. MUNA)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQvcDLUFaS8) – Matt Rogers, from his album [Have You Heard of Christmas?](https://shop.capitolmusic.com/collections/matt-rogers/products/matt-rogers-have-you-heard-of-christmas-lp)
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