 Hello, everyone, out on the internet land. So feel free to tweet or to take pictures or anything like that. I do ask that if you ask questions, please ask them loudly so our online audience can hear them as well. We may be getting some questions via Twitter through the evening. So if you see me scurry up here to hand Jane a card, that means we've got a question from our online audience. If you'd like to ask a question, you should tweet at DramatistSkilled, hashtag new client. I think that's everything. So without any further ado, I'm very happy to introduce Spence Porter, who is my counterpart at Harvard with. Correct. Hey, Spence. Hi, everybody. I'm so glad you're here. I really love these joint events with the DramatistSkilled. And this one is going to be a lot of fun. Now, when Joe and I started talking about the event, we decided early on that the ideal interviewer would be a top stand-up comic. And we landed one of these. And this is why we love Spence. And let me add that she is not here to be funny tonight. Don't go looking at her. When is the joke happening? Where's the joke? She's here as interviewer. But the reason we wanted a stand-up comic was we wanted somebody with real understanding of what Joe's here to talk about. And OK, Jane was the 2004 brand winner of Ladies of Laughter. In 2007, she was the New York audience favorite at Last Comic Standing on NBC. And this is a weird progression. But in 2011, she was the commencement speaker at Wellesley, so it makes sense. How many careers taking on? And Joe has so many credits it would take all night to list them. So I'm going to only mention what's relevant for the subject tonight, which is from 1983 to 1990, who was a writer for David Letterman. Then from 1993 to 1995, he was the head writer for Jay Leno. And then he returned to David Letterman from 1995 to 2001 as writer and head writer. And he knows late night television. And let me also mention his book is available for purchase. There'll be a book signing after the interview. And of course, if there are any of you who really do not want to become fabulously successful in late night television, you should not feel under any pressure to buy the book. Buy the book. Buy the book. I'm speaking on behalf of his wife and children. And so now let's welcome Jane Condon and Joe Tuffin. Thank you. Woo! Thank you, Stan. Can I go first? Good, Jane. OK. Nice to meet you, Joe. Nice to meet you. Very nice to. I feel odd sitting down. I'm a stand up comic, but. We can stand up. Whenever you get the urge. No. I'll do it. Anyway, this is the book, Comedy Writing for Late Night TV. And I am so glad that Spence asked me to do this, because it's a book I might have read, but I definitely read. And I really learned a lot. Thank you. You know, it's a lot of things that comics think, but maybe we didn't put words to. And I thought there were really just three rules of comedy. The letter K is funny. The rule of three. And the third rule is there are no more rules, but you had like 12 joke maximizers. But we'll get to that. OK. What I wanted to say was just my upfront disclaimer. Just that it is a joint production of Harvard Wood and the Dramatist Guild. And I just want to tell all you Harvard Wood people, I myself, I did not go to Harvard College. OK. But I slept there. OK, so I just. Cool. Anyway, witness the offspring in the back. OK, so besides, you started at Letterman, Leno, Letterman. I slept at Wellesley. You slept at Wellesley. What a good boy. Thank you. But I guess what kind of astounded me was, and I can tell by reading the book that you really earned it, you have four Emmys. So I just, where are they in your house? And what does one do when one has an Emmy? That's all. The Emmys are in my office upstairs, just on the tops of bookshelves. Like Joe, I love you. Yeah, up in the safe place, where I won't knock them over. They're very delicate, the base. Oh, they're delicate? Yeah, well, you have to hold them properly, otherwise they can snap off the mold. How much do they weigh? Are they heavy or? Seven pounds maybe, something like that. Yeah, but there's a weak point down around the base. You always say it's like a baby. You have to support its head. Oh, oh, oh, so cute. So cute. The people are saying yes over here. The Simpsons writer, my recent wife, Denise, who have won several Emmys too, yes? Yeah, so that's all right. We got Emmy here, we got Emmy there, we got Jane in the middle. It's for group writing. I won those Emmys in the 80s for the Letterman show for late night with David Letterman, and we hit our stride. That's wonderful. Just every year, the writing staff as a whole won an Emmy, so it was a collective win for the whole staff. Well, no, don't be modest. Just take all the credit. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Isaac Newton said. Well, that's very nice. Let's start with your origin myth. Take us from zero to Letterman. Where are you from, parents? I have a kind of a weird story about how I got into writing and show business. It really started in high school, which is where I got really good grades, but that really was a problem because I was trying to brag, but I get good grades in math and science and also in English. I was really confused about what I wanted to do because I could do a lot of stuff, but the class I really enjoyed the most was English class. I think it was freshman year. We had an assignment where every night we had to write for 20 minutes in a journal, and I remember, I always look forward to that. Whatever we wanted to write, we could write as long as we wrote for 20 minutes, and that was the high point of my homework session, and so I should have paid attention to that and said, oh, maybe I should try doing that later on professionally, but I didn't. I majored in engineering and applied physics at Harvard, of course, it's an obvious thing. A lot of people in engineering going into comedy writing. You know, there are probably more people than you think than you might imagine with math backgrounds, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. And I think it has to do with, like Mike and I know, I think George Meyer was a math major, maybe, and there's at least one friend of mine who was on the Letterman show who was working on the Big Bang Theory, and I think he was a science major. So yeah, and I think it all has to do with solving problems and solving puzzles. Yeah. Writing a joke, I think, is like creating a puzzle. You're a craftsman. Yeah, you're crafting a puzzle that will accomplish something or a device that will accomplish something, in this case, making somebody laugh. Just like in engineering, you might write a computer program to do something, and I know that makes it sound really formulaic, but I think a lot of the same skills kind of overlap. No, I get it. I totally get it. And where are you from? I'm from Boston. So I went to Harvard, and that was where I first wrote comedy on a regular basis, was for the Harvard Lampoon. And so that was another exposure to comedy that I should have filed away, and I should have said, you know, I really enjoy doing this. Maybe I could do this professionally. But at the time, it wasn't a well-known career path. It wasn't something you go to Harvard, you're majoring in engineering, oh, I'm gonna write comedy. But there was a member of the Lampoon, Jim Downey, who was one of the early writers on Saturday Night Live. So he kind of showed everybody that this was something that you might do professionally. And after I graduated, I worked for a couple of years, went to Harvard Business School, got an MBA. So I'm moving further and further away. Engineering and MBA, this is a very interesting career path. Yeah, I just, eventually, it was just an opportunity presented itself. Jim Downey was working as head writer for Dave Letterman, and he and a bunch of other writers were gonna be leaving the show to work on another show, other shows. And he mentioned that there were gonna be these open writing slots. And he said, oh, if you've ever wanted to write, would you like to write a submission? So that's what I did. Right. So it was kind of, it was basically a contact that I made on the lampoon, who was my first entree. But also I had to write a writing sample, and I had to impress, eventually, Dave, that I might be capable of doing this. It sounds like the Steve Jobs speech, the Stanford commencement speech, where he said, you connect the dots afterwards of, oh, I had to do this, and then it went to that, and zigzag, but. Yeah, and I think another good thing about getting the MBA is it's a terrible reason to get an MBA, but I felt like it was sort of a safety net. But if it didn't work out, if this crazy idea writing for TV comedy didn't work out. But it really helped you with Jay Leno. Do you wanna tell them how sort of the branding marketing thing, it was interesting to me. Yeah, well, when I eventually, so I worked for Dave Letterman for six years at NBC on the 1230 show, eventually went out to California, worked out there for six years, and during that time I worked on a sketch show in living color, and then went into sitcoms, which is my goal of moving out there. I wanted to write story more instead of just the shorter form comedy. But then I found myself back in late night again. I worked for the Chevy Chase show, I was co-head writer of the Chevy Chase show, which is routinely listed on the worst shows of all time, TV guide, if I could say number 18 on the list of 50. But that was the job I had immediately before working for Jay on the Tonight Show. And at the time, the Tonight Show was really getting clobbered by Dave Letterman, who had moved from NBC to CBS when he didn't get the Tonight Show job, he didn't get to succeed Johnny Carson. So Dave came on the air at CBS and was really just really clobbering Jay, the Tonight Show and the ratings, and also critically. And about a year and a half into Jay taking over the Tonight Show, he, Chevy Chase show went belly up and I moved over to the Tonight Show, and that was really an opportunity to think as an MBA and say this is a competitive situation. I know, I thought that was so interesting. He has this whole chapter about Jay versus Dave in the late night wars, he was in the middle of it, but you start out as a financial analyst in the Columbia Pictures and you just look around and say, I can do this. Writing? Yeah, I mean, you were in, you had a foot in the door. I made a half step into show business. Yeah, I moved from, I was in marketing at general foods. I was marketing dog food because I thought that would be kind of a creative way to use my MBA. And it was a little bit, but not enough. So then I said, all right, I want to get inside, at least get inside an entertainment company. Went to Columbia and then from there to Dave Letterman. But I did have that way of looking at my marketing, my marketing background in my MBA gave me a way to look at something competitively. We're a show, we have a competitor. What can we do really well that he can't do as well? What does he do really well that we can't compete against? Right. And then it was just a matter of just rolling up our sleeves and saying, all right, how do we get this lost ground back, how do we fight our way back? And they did. Once you read this chapter, it was within two years. Well, Hugh Grant helped. Hugh Grant, yes, Hugh Grant, I make a marketing analogy there. Hugh Grant was our $2 coupon. Hugh Grant got a sampling. But we had to do the product improvement first. This is all cycle dog food. You have to improve the product and need to drop the high value coupon. Remind them of the Hugh Grant. Oh, the Hugh Grant story is. Jay Leno's line. Yeah, Hugh Grant was involved in this scandal where he picked up a prostitute on Hollywood Boulevard. And it was a big scandal. It was all over the news. And to his credit, he had been booked on Tonight Show with Jay Leno and didn't cancel. He knew he was going to be subjected to this intense media heat. So he gets on the show, he sits down, and Jay's first question is, what the hell were you thinking? Just a perfect way to sum up what everybody was thinking and just the perfect question. So predictably, the ratings that night were huge. A lot of people tuned in for that. They sampled the new kinds of comedy that we had started doing on the show that maybe they hadn't seen before because they saw Jay and left it for Dave or whatever. And so they sampled the show. And then we made sure that the comedy that week was strong. So that if they stuck around, they'd say, oh, this is a funny show. And it worked. At that point, we had a new studio that maybe they hadn't seen before. That was another key move. Jay moved out of Johnny's old studio and into a brand new studio that was much better set up for his way of performing, which is he likes to be close to the audience. He's a club performer. Does that make sense? Yeah, you like to see the people. Totally. I'm happy this is a small room, and people are close. This makes me very happy. You hate when you go into a situation where there's a dance floor. They're like, oh! Hello, hello, hello. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what I really learned the most from this book is when I think of late night TV writing, I really think of the monologue jokes. And I had no appreciation until reading this that it's monologue jokes plus desk pieces plus audience pieces plus field pieces. And each one is its own little genre. So if any of you are thinking of doing a late night submission packet, you really have to learn to excel in all of those sections. It's a form of comedy. And I call it short form comedy. Yes, you can learn how to write jokes if you're an expert at writing half hour sitcoms. But really, you don't get to write audience pieces if you're writing one hour dramas. Jimmy Fallon does a lot of audience games where he'll put audience games and also games with celebrities. And he creates them and they're very silly. You don't write those things on other shows. So this tells you how to do all that. But beyond that, I like to think it's a book, as I mentioned, about short form comedy. I call it comedy for late night TV. But if you've ever wanted to write and produce a commercial parody or do your own sketch and put it up on Funny or Die or put it up on your website or write monologue jokes for Twitter, write topical jokes for Twitter, or write a funny list for a magazine article, or do a funny prose and conspies, those are all examples of short form comedy. And I really think until now, a little plug for the book, I don't think there's been a book written about how to write that stuff. There really, this is a real addition. This is really, if you're a comedian or an improviser or a writer, even if you're a funny writer and you want to punch up the comedy, there's so much that's in there. I'm a slow reader and it was a fast read. Oh, thank you. So I really, I like you had one thing in there about why people laugh. Yeah. You had two. I found myself, the more I get into what I said, I have these guidelines and these little tricks and tips about how to make something funny. So I really felt like I needed to have a reason, like, well, so the sound K is funny, hard, stop consonants are funny, why? Why would that be? Why is it funny or two? You've probably heard, and on, I call it the laugh trigger, which is the most surprising word in a punch line. Why does that have to be at the end to make the laugh bigger? And so I did a little research. I went online and I'm going back to like Aristotle and Hobbes, the philosopher, trying to figure out like. Don't worry, there's not too much of that. No, no, it's only, it's a very short chapter. But it explains these two theories. There's the surprise theory of laughter and the superiority theory of laughter. And I found that those were the most useful theories to explain why all these tips and guidelines work. When I read this, like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, I knew surprise, I hadn't really put words to the superiority. We laugh, the superiority of laughter is we laugh when we feel superior to somebody, which is really like the dark side of comedy. It's the banana peel, you'll see these audience games on Jimmy Fallon's show where it's a trivia game and if you get the trivia question wrong, if one guy gets the trivia question wrong, his friend gets hair ripped off his chest by a professional waxer. It's called wax on, wax off. And that's just a clear example of superiority theory of laughter. I'm glad I'm not that guy. Yeah. I think it all starts with good jokes though. I mean, sort of the basic building block. So how do you make a good monologue joke, any tips? There's a whole chapter about that. And that's another example of a topic in comedy that I don't think has ever really been dealt with in that level of detail. Two things, I thought about how I write a joke and I say, okay, I think this is a funny joke. I think this would get a laugh. What did I do to make, to line up the words that way? Yeah, how did I get there? And then also I just read a lot of monologue jokes. And the late night shows all the monologue jokes, all the topical comedies, pretty much the same from show to show. And that's sort of an indicator that all these writers are basically using the same formulas. They're selecting the news items to make jokes about the same way. And so I just read, I read a ton of these jokes. You can find them online. They're all archived. You can go to search on late night jokes. And I reduced it to what I call six punch line makers. Six techniques for manipulating elements in the topic, in the news item, and also in pop culture, to put them together in basically a surprising way. I didn't realize there was so much logic to our profession. I know, here it is, yeah. He's like the Noam Chomsky doing the deep structure of it. But giving it words that I just really hadn't seen. I was just fascinated when I said, wait a second, is that what they're doing? Would you like to hear an example? Yeah, yeah, yeah, please, please. I brought some examples. Oh, good, good, good. Just to show you, this is from, the best of late night jokes. I got this off a website. Okay, here's an example. This is from, tonight show is starring Jimmy Fallon. Both President Obama and former President George W. Bush were interviewed on Face the Nation over the weekend. President Bush said there's a 50% chance his brother Jeb will run for president in 2016. Then he said, but there's an 80% chance he won't. And I blew the punchline, there's an 80% chance he won't. Okay, so that uses what I call punchline technique number three. Punchline technique number three is, ask a question about the topic and then answer it using an association of something in the topic. So in this case, both President Obama and former President Bush were interviewed at Face the Nation over the weekend. President Bush said there's a 50% chance his brother Jeb will run for president in 2016. So what is the chance that he won't is the question that you could ask. And you answer it using an association of President George W. Bush. And as we all know, the commonly accepted association, President George W. Bush is, he's an idiot. Now that doesn't have to be necessarily true, but it's something the audience accepts as true. And that's a general technique for punchlines. Your punchline has to say something the audience will accept. So that's punchline technique number three. We were talking about, I guess I was talking about how all the late night talk show writers seem to write the same way. Same night, one hour later. Here's late night with Seth Meyers. Oh, interesting. This weekend, George W. Bush said it's a toss up whether his brother Jeb will run for president in 2016. Bush said there's a 40 chance. What's the deal? A 40, 40 chance. Okay. Same principle, same association. George W. Bush is an idiot. In this case, I would say it's also punchline technique. So that's an example. I also, thanks. I found, I really liked your technique too. I think a lot of, I can only speak for the comedians, but we sort of wait for that big inspiration to happen, but you actually can nudge it. If you make, can you explain to them a little more about a list of associations? I just find that, that's like the best tool. It's a very common technique, yeah. For example, if you have a joke like the George W. Bush joke, it's a lot of the ways of constructing these punchlines involve free associating off what I call the handles of the topic, which are the one or two most distinctive elements in the topic, the things that make the topic newsworthy. And in this case, it's, oh, George W. Bush was on Face the Nation, and we all know he's very rich in associations. So you think of George W. Bush, what do you think of? You think of former president, you think of Texas, you think Iraq maybe, you think maybe Frat Boy, you think what late night audiences tend to think, because he's the go-to guy for not being very smart, you think he's an idiot. And that list of associations becomes the raw material for constructing punchlines. If you have two handles, each one has a list of associations. One technique involves linking the same association on two lists, and that's how you build the surprise into the punchline is the audience's brain makes a surprise connection between these two elements that you set up, and the surprise theory of laughter encourages them to laugh. And it's great when they're both topical, kind of, if you can get Ebola over to Bush or something. You do know what I mean, like. Or, let me give you another example. Oh, another just a different punchline maker. Punchline maker number two, if I can reduce this. Okay, this is from Conan. Scientists have discovered a virus that lowers the intelligence of people it infects. Okay, when you think of low intelligence, and you're thinking pop culture, any names, any suggestions? Ah, bingo. There's the punchline. Scientists have discovered a virus that lowers the intelligence of people it infects. The virus is called H1-Kardashian-1. Oh, nice, very nice. You've done it. Yeah, it's a late line. That's, there you go. Right there. So that's, in this case, the punchline maker is link the topic to pop culture. So you have your associations in your topic, but you also have everybody in pop culture. Right, right. Those are quite some pictures of her. I don't know if you've seen her. I have. Wow. I have. Wow. Never mind. Okay, so, just, okay. So I'm thinking of the late night submission packet. So we've talked a little bit about the monologue joke. Can you just talk a little bit about desk pieces like top 10 lists and what's not all about? Sure. Desk pieces tend to be what I call, and other people in late night writing call, joke baskets. A joke basket is a comedy piece that has a theme to it, but the jokes within that theme aren't connected to each other. They don't have any story element connecting them. So, for example, the top 10 list, all of the jokes on the top 10 list have to do with the topic, but they're not related to each other in any other way. Jimmy Fallon does thank you notes. They're all thank you notes, but there's no story element. Because they're, because it's a joke basket, the whole writing staff can write for it. Everybody can throw in jokes. They don't have to worry about them connecting in any story. So you tend to get a lot of possible jokes for a piece like that. And the jokes can be interchanged. They can be put in any possible order, any order at all. So that tends to make those pieces funny because everybody's contributing to them. Another good reason to do desk pieces, which are joke baskets, is they're refillable. Once you come up with the idea, thank you notes. Okay, once a week, we're gonna do thank you notes. We all know how to write them. We just write new jokes for thank you notes. So it's one less piece you have to create from scratch. So desk pieces are very, very valuable for late night talk shows. A lot of them do them. I think most of them do them. I don't think Jimmy Kimmel actually does desk pieces, but most of the shows do. And so that's why I recommend if you're preparing a submission packet, a sample for one of these late night shows that you include at least a couple pages of new desk piece ideas. I've talked to head writers along the way of these late night shows, and at least two of them independently have used the same expression. They're worth their weight in gold. A fresh new desk piece idea. A refillable cup. Yeah, because I think Jimmy Fallon also does pros and cons every week. So he's got two refillable pieces. That's two main comedy pieces he doesn't have to worry about. His head writer and then the writers don't have to worry about. Right. Easier to write a symphony when you have the structure. Yes, and one more point is desk pieces are basically, the jokes for them are written the same way you'd write a topical joke for monologue. So a monologue joke, you can think of that as the building block for many other comedy pieces on a show like this. So if you write a good solid topical monologue joke, you know how to craft it using that joke maximizers. You can write desk pieces. You can write a top 10 list. So there's that connection too. So let's see, so the audience piece, can you just elaborate a little bit? Sure, the audience piece is, you get into the semi-scripted area. It's where the host interacts with members of the audience and there's a scripted element to it and that the premise is scripted. Jay Leno used to do this piece where he'd go in the audience and the idea for the piece would be Midnight Confessions and you'd get three or four people in the audience who had just showed up at the show and they were cast from the line. The writers would find these stories and these people for Midnight Confessions would confess to things that they had never told anybody else before and just the lure of television. Why do people do these things? I don't know. People saying these embarrassing things for the first time on national television but they get to be on television and it takes a certain kind of host to be able to enjoy those pieces and do well. And to deal. It's crowd work, I guess you should call it. Yeah, it's crowd work at the highest level, I think. And then field pieces, can you talk about those? Field pieces also have a semi-scripted element in that the premise is scripted when, for example, when Jay Leno went out to do Jaywalking, the premise was he's gonna ask people on the street general interest questions that they really should know the answers to. It was unbelievable. Yeah. And the comedy comes in just seeing that the ridiculous incorrect dumb answers that people give. It was truly amazing. Going back a little bit to nuts and bolts, this was under how to edit a joke, but I loved your joke maximizers. Can you name some of them for the audience? Sure. End on the laugh trigger I mentioned. Right. Some of these you've probably heard before, the brevity, shorten as much as possible. When you're writing a joke, and this is an example of how I use the surprise theory of laughter to explain, why should shorter be funnier? Shorter is funnier because then the listener has less chance to get ahead of you and anticipate what the punchline is gonna be. So you really have to be just brutal about taking out every syllable. If you can use a one syllable word instead of a two syllable word, just put that in. Just to, so that joke just flies. And you were saying one way to check yourself is to say it out loud. Yes, because then you'll say, oh, I repeated that word or I don't really need to say that. I like number eight, wildly exaggerate. Wildly exaggerate, yeah. It's, I'll see if I can remember an example of that. Are there any on this? No, I've got a couple, one was shorter, four was clarity, eight is wildly exaggerate, nine was specific, 10 was rule of three. So I did know one of them. The rule of three, but I like to think I even refined that a little bit. It's not just any list of three is funny. It's, if you have a punchline, sometimes a way to make the punchline funnier is to turn the punchline into a list of three where the laugh triggers the third item. So just saying three things, alpha, bravo, delta is not funny. They have to be part of a punchline and it's a way to make an existing joke funnier. And tell them about priority when you are setting up even within just three, you do like strong at the big, yeah. It's, the way you do it is the first one in the list is not funny. The second one in the list is also not funny and the third one on the list takes a right turn. It's a surprise, it doesn't follow the pattern set by the first two and that's what punches the laugh. So it's a part of the mislead. It's extending the middle of the joke to mislead, get the audience thinking, continuing to think along the way. Down this road and take a left, yeah. Do you have a favorite joke you've written? I hate it when people say to me, tell me a joke. I really honestly hate it. So now I'm asking you. You know, let me tell you the joke that I wrote today. Oh, good. It's not necessarily my favorite. Do you tweet stuff every day? I do, every day. It keeps up your muscle. I try to tweet a topical joke. So follow him on a at Joe Toplin, right? At Joe Toplin, you know, follow me, I'll follow you back. Okay, here's my joke today. Not necessarily my favorite is my joke today. Kim Kardashian took nude photos and wants to break the internet. Based on the photo, she could break the internet if she sits on it. Okay. That is actually a great joke. That having just seen the photos. Five minutes, yeah. You were talking about the photos. Very well done. You have to watch the naked, you have to look at the naked photos of Kim Kardashian. If you're gonna write comedy, you have to do it. It's a requirement. You've gotta look at all that filth. Yeah, I know. It's not our fault. It's homework. It's just homework. It's better than problem sets and doing equations, isn't it? You're close at that, you can't unseal it. Yeah, yeah. I know. That's photoshopped. Anyway, do you have any joke you wish you had written? You know, like a friend's joke that you just really admire? So many, nothing. Let me just tell you one of my friends. Please, yeah. I'm always imitating my friends. We went to the same Catholic co-ed high school in Brockton, Mass. We all had very thick accents and I got mine teased out of me. But Christine Hurley still got the accent. She's married to a firefighter. She got five children. Or just say, she says, I was working as a waitress and I decided, you know, I just had it. I just couldn't do it anymore. So I go into my boss and I say, I quit. And he says, Christine, you can't quit because you have to give two weeks notice. And she said, all right, after two weeks, you might notice I'm not here. You know, I mean, I think when you're in the biz, you have a friend's material that you're just there like, you love it so much. Do you know? It made me wish I'd kept my accent, you know? Because it enhances it, right? It gives it a second level. Could you tell us one thing we don't know about Jay and one thing we don't know about Dave? I don't know if you ever want to work in late night again. Because you've really been on the inside. You know everything. Let's see, can I tell us about this? Sure, why not? Dave occasionally would smoke cigars and along the way he would periodically give up cigars because cigars are bad for you. And he did it once or twice and every time he did it, he would have these fabulous Cuban cigars that were in his storehouse. So he would go out to his assistant who would put the boxes of cigars on his desk and he would leave them and he would invite writers to take cigars. So I got some amazing Cuban cigars from Dave Letterman. Did it create a habit or can you smoke a regular cigar now? I did a lot of that. I did a lot of it in a lampoon. That was one of the things I learned to do in a lampoon. I've heard they have very rich food and... Yes, wonderful parties. I actually had a son on the business side. So we got to... So he's told you some stories, probably, up to the point where... Yeah, unfortunately, hopefully not a lot of stories, just the less I know, I think the better. How about when you're backstage? I guess what I've always wondered too is do you like write the jokes during the day? Do you actually watch the show or do you just kick back and have a Snickers in the privacy of your office? What do you do? Well, if I'm personally involved in a piece, I like to be in the studio. To see. Yeah, to see the reaction. Sometimes there was... I used to do this a lot on the Tonight Show, but even on late night, we would do this piece where we dropped stuff off a five-story tower. That was the piece. Oh, I... Dave goes with the five-story tower. Who ever thought of this dropping... This was a man who thought of this. The one would be there like, I got to clean it up. But... Yeah. Why do they drop punk? It's hilarious. But who thought of it? I can't even... I'm not exactly sure, but I think it might have been our outside prop master, Dan DeLoyer. Well, God bless them, because... Because he came in and said... It's amazing. Because George Meyer, I believe, and before I got to the show, he created crushing stuff with a steamroller. So it's just these little toys and these cans of beer and stuff just crushed with a steamroller. So it was an extension of that. Right, right, right. Like any comedy in late night, if it works, you do it again. Change it a little bit, do it again, until we get sick of it. So I was wondering, we were dropping stuff off a five-story tower and they were airing that piece. And so they were rolling the tape and during the show. And I went out to the studio and I was just watching the audience. I wanted to see, are they enjoying it? And they were just wrapped. They're looking up at the monitors, just loving it. I said, well, I guess they still enjoy it. So we'll keep doing it. So sometimes you need to see that audience reaction to know how well it's going over. On The Tonight Show, I did the same thing. If a piece was gonna play, I just wanted to hear the reaction. Hear the volume of the audience, yeah. So when you're backstage, do you have a favorite guest who was ever on one of the shows? Is there somebody who's just wonderful? The most? Well, there's a couple of guests like that. I always had fun with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He'd come on the show and he has such a, such an outsized comic personality persona. He's this muscle man and it was just, it was always fun to write. I would write these little cold opens. A cold open is a little scene or a sketch that is the first thing you see when the show starts before even the opening credits. And they have to be willing to do it too. You have to know. Yeah, you have the script and it usually goes to the talent department and they'll run it past the celebrity. So he was always up for anything. He always was very fun in anything that I ever wrote for him. And I got to hang out with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Are there any celebrities who just say, no, I'm not gonna do anything. I'm a straight person. I'm a dramatic actor. There actually is one story that I think I can tell now, but I can tell now, it's in my book. It involves Tony Perkins. Tony Perkins, Norman Bates and Psycho. We all know him as Norman Bates and Psycho. I thought that the audience might enjoy a cold open with Tony Perkins where he plays this Psycho character that Norman Bates backstage and he has an interaction with Dave in the makeup room. So I wrote the script, gave it to the talent department. They ran it past Tony Perkins. The next thing I know that morning is that the talent department person, the segment producer calls me on the phone and says, Tony Perkins is on the line. He wants to talk to you. And this never happens. The celebrity guest never called a writer unless there's something wrong. So Tony's on the line and he's very polite and doesn't raise his voice, but he's upset and annoyed that I wrote this Norman Bates thing for him. He's really on the show to promote his new movie. I think it was Crimes of Passion, this new passion project of his. And he really doesn't, he's annoyed that he doesn't understand why I don't appreciate that he's trying to change his image and move away from that. So I apologize for being so- The thing that built his house. Exactly. So I apologize to him. We don't do the cold open. A year and a half later, Psycho 4 directed by Tony Perkins. Starring Tony Perkins as Norman Bates. He's back, he's back doing his character again. So unfortunately I didn't get my little cold open in it. So that's good. He's an example of someone who took his project. Some people approach me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's very, when you're Jimmy Fallon show and you're doing a lot, you're working a lot with celebrities. Yeah, that's very important to get celebrities who will play along because a lot of them just wanna come on the show and chat and promote their project and just leave. So let's talk about some of the shows. Like just, I'll say the name of the host of the late night show and just say one word. We can do this another way too, but let's do it just quickly like. So Kimmel, one word. Uh, edgy. Edgy Ferguson. Affable. Conan. Smart. That's interesting. Leno. Everyman. Letterman. Quirky. Stewart. Smart. That's interesting. Fallon. Lovable. Yeah, Colbert. Smart. Oh, this is interesting. And Seth Meyers. And Seth Meyers. Smart. He's a writer. Does anyone see a theme here? But what's interesting to me is for none of them, did you say funny? I would have, when I did this to myself, I would have, I actually thought that was gonna be your answer for most of them. Just funny, funny, funny, funny. But I mean, I guess that goes without saying. That's the minimum common denominator is like you gotta be funny, but then how do you differentiate their styles? But I love that you said smart. I love that. Because it, yes, obviously they're all funny. That's why they're still on the air. But it, and in fact, I think they're all basically the same character. They all play. Yeah, you said the same, but different. Can you collaborate with? Yeah, they're all likeable, every man who poke fun at this. Playful, but irreverent. They're all basically playful, but irreverent. So the question is, is there any difference at all between them? And sometimes people, when I'm talking to people about writing a submission packet for a particular show, I'm saying, oh, they're all basically the same. But then I think about it and no, there are differences. I like the difference, the one, I should let you say it. But just certain hosts, they have slightly different ways of speaking. There are certain pieces that some hosts will do, comedy pieces that other hosts won't do. And you do have to figure that out if you're gonna write a tailored submission packet. I like how you said like, Leno comes from the standup world and Jimmy Fallon is more of a comic actor. And I thought that was just a very good little insight. And also Fallon does more musical stuff. And I think that's why he's being successful. He's kind of a new version of the old thing. Oh my goodness, same, but different. Yeah. You know, just like. Yeah, it's, I think they're all doing the same sort of comedy, just the emphasis. The emphasis are different from show to show. And any difference between a daytime talk show, comedy, say Ellen or Meda Thiera and late night. Just some, some of the minor differences in the personalities, the personas of the host, but otherwise it's the same sort of comedy. Ellen, Ellen does a lot of audience games, I think still. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And dances and goes around. Sure, a lot of musical stuff. I think she also does field pieces. We'll should take the camera out and do comedy pieces. So what's gonna happen when Colbert goes on the air? What do you think? How is it gonna shake out? I think he'll be real competition. I think he'll be amazing for Jimmy Fallon. But he's losing a conservative persona. Right, he's not gonna do the character. He said that. So that will be, you know. Yeah, it'll be interesting. My guess is he might wanna do maybe more, more detailed, he might go into topical comedy, comedy based on the news a little bit more than Jimmy Fallon does, because that's what Colbert has been doing for years. It's all about the news. Oh, right, right, right, right. So I think he'll probably take that with him. And I thought it was an interesting evolution in all of late night, maybe started by Stuart more of the video in the back illustrating thing, to the point where it's even in the monologues now, they insert video. Yeah, that's something that Jay was doing too. Oh, he was? He used to call them drop-ins, yeah. So he'd do the monologue. Jay would do an unusually long monologue. He'd have 30 jokes in the monologue, say. So to break it up, occasionally there would be a monologue joke with a visual punchline. It could be, and here's the book. And the prop guy would hand in the joke book. Or take a look at what they're doing over at the American Airlines. And it'll be the funny short video. So Jay did that too. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. They preceded, I was gonna say pre-deceased, but that's the wrong word. But I'm a little dyslexic. But, you know. And that was the term. Occasionally I'd be down in the morning talking to him. And he'd say, oh, how about this as a drop-in? And he'd suggest something probably based on one of the jokes that he read. And he thought, oh, this would be nice to actually see this prop or see that new ad. And we could do a doctored ad or something like that. Well, I just wanna take five more minutes with my asking you something. And then we're gonna open it to the audience because I know there are a lot of playwrights and writers here. But if you could, I think a lot of people, what they're looking for on the streaming video and people who shut up tonight is how to write an amazing submission packet. And I'm sorry, because I know this is like a huge chapter, but whatever advice you wanna give them. Well, there are different kinds of submission packets. I'll assume that people are- Let's say for late night. For a specific show? Yeah. Okay. The most important thing to do is just watch the show a lot. Do your research. So hopefully the show is a show you watch anyway. So you'll already have seen a lot of the episodes. You'll know what comedy, what sort of comedy pieces the show does. Does it do desk pieces? Does the show ever take the camera out of the studio? Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, I don't think they ever take the camera out of the studio. So you wouldn't wanna, if you're writing a submission packet, you wouldn't wanna say, oh, I'm gonna do field pieces because right now they are doing that sort of pieces. So study the show. Oh, that's interesting. You can also go online and just for, I think most of these shows, you can just go to Wikipedia and search on Conan's sketches or tonight's show is starring Jimmy Fallon's sketches and fans will have listed short descriptions of the sketches they do. So it's a very easy way to do research on what the show does. And then based on that, make a decision, okay, here's the sort of things, the sort of comedy pieces he does a lot of, I'm gonna do those types of comedy pieces. If he does audience games, in the case of Jimmy Fallon, I'm gonna write some audience games. If he does desk pieces like thank you notes, pros and cons, I'm gonna create some of those. And Joe lays this out in the appendix, which is very helpful. It gives you a roadmap of- Right, and I also have, which I think this book, I think this book is the only way you can get it formally. It's a generic submission packet, so it shows you how to format a submission. I think that was worth the price of the book alone. Oh, thank you. Actually, that was pretty amazing. I actually hadn't prepared that until I teach this at the People's Improv Theater and then in one of my early classes, one of the students asked the obvious question, well, can we actually see one of these submissions you're teaching us to write because we don't know what one looks like? And I said, sure. And then you have some tips in there about how to get it seen. That's another whole thing. Yes, it's two things. It's writing a great submission and then it's just figuring out who you can give it to, who might know somebody who can get it to somebody on the show, who might walk it over to the head writer. And that's where it's important to stay involved in the comedy community. So take improv classes, take sketch classes, do stand-up because some shows have writers who also do stand-up and they'll go into a club, they'll see you doing your stand-up. And I know this has happened and at least one person I heard of this happened to, she was doing stand-up, a writer from one of the late night shows saw her and invited her to submit a packet. Wow, that's great. So there's your opportunity. So just meet people who can and become friends with them. So when you do slip them your packet, it's not like opportunistic. It's, oh, hey, would you look at this and tell me what you think and then go from there. Yeah, this is great advice. So I think we'll open it up to the writers. Does anybody have a question back there? Is there any market or need for female writers in late night given that almost all of the hosts are male? And two, I write plays and musicals and I need like a part-time job to make money because these things do not. Are plays and musicals an acceptable background or respected background or a poo-poo background and I should really explore the comedy circuit for this type of work? First question, no, absolutely. Late night shows I believe just totally embarrassed that they don't have more women on their staff. So if you write a great submission for a show and a guy writes a great submission for the show and both packets are equal evidence that either writer could go on staff and immediately start turning out comedy that the show could put on the air, I think being a woman would give you an edge just for that reason that routinely you'll see articles in the various media about how few women are represented on the late night writing staffs and the staffs are very aware of that and they would welcome you with open arms assuming that you turn in a great submission packet. No, no, certainly plenty of the writers on the existing shows, on the shows now they've been with the show a while and yeah they're not, if I was working on those shows. No, no. So like you haven't aged out, like if you wanted to do it you could go back. I'd like to think I could, yeah. So funny is funny. I believe they respect the funny. Funny is funny, yeah. Because it's all about making the head writer's job easier. Oh, that's great, yeah, you're solving this problem. Yes, certainly when I was a head writer just, I don't care who you are, just put sheets of paper in the slots in my door where the assignments go and that's all I ask. And your second question was playwriting. I would say any writing that you've done like that is a credential. It shows you're a serious writer, you enjoy writing, you do writing, you've been doing it for a while and oh by the way I have this submission packet I wrote for you, Jimmy Fallon show, would you take a look at it? And people would say yeah this is a writer who knows how to put words together. Let's see if she can write for Jimmy Fallon and write the sort of comedy we're doing, but yeah I think that automatically would get you read. I know writers, it was a writer on a late show who was a, he wrote Broadway, he's written a Broadway show, at least one Broadway show, he went from there and he also works on the, he wrote numbers for the Tony Awards. He wrote one of those parody songs. And I know somebody got picked up just from their Twitter jokes. Somebody in Indiana or something. Yeah, all these little stories. A writer on Seth Meyers I think. He was, he had a Twitter feed and he tweeted jokes and somebody saw, somebody who was on the staff of Late Night with Seth Meyers saw the jokes, said hey these are funny jokes. Got in touch with a guy. He's now, I believe he's still on staff, but he turned out he was a 40 year old IT guy, lives in Indiana or someplace like that, has a family, and he was just, yeah thanks for, that's a great example. He was just hired on the basis of his writer. Did they still do faxes or is that old? I mean who has a fax machine? But I mean the concept. The concept of faxing is sometimes to supplement the monologue jokes that they get from their staff, their staff writers, some late night hosts may or may not accept outside submissions from a selected screen number of what they call faxers. In this case I'm sure they email or jokes in it. They get paid by the joke, I don't know for sure who's doing it now if any of them still are, but it's against Writers Guild rules, you can't, a Writers Guild signatory, yeah Writers Guild, a show that signed the Writers Guild minimum basic agreement cannot use the writing of a non Writers Guild member. That's a big, so that's why I'm saying I don't know who does it, if any of them do it. But it has happened in the past, they did get paid $75 a show I think was the going rate. You've had a question? Yeah, what is the integrity level of people submitting material, especially if it's very, very good, and especially if they are the kind of ideas that you see that have, really have legs? You mean the reader's integrity on the show? Yeah, the reader's integrity on the show. I mean it's definitely a problem in when it comes to pushing movies. It's a known problem. If you can't copyright an idea, you can't copyright it. It's a very high concept comedy idea for a film. One can change the female protagonist or the protagonist to the opposite and you can make this country, that country, and you know, a really high concept comedy idea for a film can be altered. And I just wonder, I mean it must be something that people are concerned about. If they do a fabulous packet with 65 jokes and 30 of them are ones that they already use and stand up and they bring down the house. It's gotta be a temptation level. I would hope that they wanna hire that writer because it could be the goose that lays the golden egg. But I just wonder what the folks are about that. I certainly understand that there are ideas that get barred in the future world where a writer will come in and pitch his or her take on a feature. This is how I'd write it, and that writer will leave and then the next writer will come in and pitch his or her take. And the producer will remember the first writer and say, well how about if you do this? And suddenly those ideas will work between. In late night, I've never seen that happen. It's, I think it's mostly because the writers, well stuff gets passed around and you wouldn't wanna be known as the writer who has to steal material. I think writers wanna get their own stuff on the air because that's how you're judged in late night is do you write stuff that gets on the air? And occasionally the shows, like occasionally a host will perform a joke on the show. And a fax or a freelancer will send a message to whoever coordinates the monologue and say, oh I saw my joke on the show. I was thrilled, please send me my $75. And as I just, I showed a little while ago with the two shows Seth Meyers and You Be Found basically doing the same joke. It's all the writers', so. Sometimes there's spontaneous combustion. That topic was just, that was just laying right there. So a lot of people gonna write a joke off of it. And the same techniques to create a joke off that topic. So I've never known it where there was an actual theft of a joke and then it wandered its way. It's such a huge no-no. It's, I mean, you can just really screw yourself in stand up if anybody gets any wind of it. And we, it's not quite the same as either of your fields that the movie thing that would drive me crazy because it is concept and yours. But in our field, like if we hear somebody else do a friend's joke, we often on their behalf will say, gee, did you know that so-and-so was doing the same thing? You might wanna work it out, meaning either you back off or my friend should back off. Or people make joint custody of jokes. I've seen that. Like you can do it any place outside New York, but I get New York. That's how, when we tend to be somewhat honorable. And then the other thing is we are, some people, less my favorite, but the operating assumption early on was the first one to get it to TV wins. I don't like that one, but, but the other thing that we always say too is just, you just, just write more. It's like put it in the rear view mirror. There are gonna be some, and you know what, rather than make yourself all dressed inside. I'm not talking high concept. What yours is really worth a lot of dinero, but like for a single joke. It's encouraging to hear that for instance, the shows themselves. Are pretty responsible. And I would say themselves, oh you know, we really don't need any new writers right now, but gee, those are, you know. Good ideas. And you know, like, we'll keep it in mind, but in the meantime, it's really great encouraging to hear that because it's really, you know, there's a lot of bad behavior in other parts of the business. I've never seen it happen. And frankly, if it did happen, just the fact that a writer's submission is actually getting read by somebody on the show, that's rare enough that if a joke, and I don't think a joke would ever get stolen, but if it did, that means the packet was read. And if the joke was good enough to be stolen, that packet will get remembered. And that writer may be top of the list when a slot opens up. So not that a joke would ever get stolen, but even if it were, I think that would be a small price of admission to get your stuff read. Yeah, a joke, five jokes is not a big deal. Yeah, a concept for a blockbuster feature film or something. Well, it's nice to know the head writer is a moral guy. Do you know what I mean? I think the tone starts at the top as with any kind of leadership, like, you know, you just sort of set the tone and the behavior. Right, always. Yeah, it comes from the top, even from the host even. If you have a relaxed host who is having fun, then the whole staff has fun. Yeah, yeah. Did you have a question? Yeah, I'm a writer and a performer, so I'm curious. Do many writers become performers or vice versa? And what do you think is the difference in personality between a writer for these shows and a performer on these shows? There are a lot of writer performers in late night. I think Conan is well known for having a lot of writer performers on his show. Brian Kiley. Yeah, yeah, just brilliant guys. And Seth Meyers too, I think, went out of his way to hire as writers people who also had performing experience because I think he anticipated doing what he did on Saturday Night Live, he did weekend updates, he'd be doing the news, but then the character would come in and sit next to him and they'd have a little sketch. So he wanted people on staff who could do that. More comfortable. Sure, performing and also writing. So doing double duty. So yeah, I think there's a definite opportunity for writer performers. The difference in personalities. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Do you want to be on camera or don't you? I would occasionally, actually pretty routinely, anytime there was a little bit part where they needed a security guard standing in the back of a little pre-tape or something, I just happened to fit the uniform and wardrobe. And I was the guy who would get tapped to be the cop or the security guard or the general or the SWAT member. But I didn't seek that out. It was just kind of, it was fun. But that's not what I was there for. I'd prefer to write lines for the people on camera. Ellen? How would you compare the experience of working with Jay Leno to working with Dave Lennon? Jay was, I think you could call Jay more of an extrovert maybe and Dave more of an introvert. So Jay during the day was a little more accessible if you wanted to drift in and pitch an idea or run something past them. It was a little easier to pitch ideas and have those impromptu meetings. Dave liked his day a little bit more structured. He liked to keep to himself a lot of the time. So it was a little harder. You had to sort of make an appointment to get in and pitch stuff. So I think that's probably the biggest difference. But it's both very funny guys, obviously. They were both on for decades and we're gonna miss Dave, kind of a change in our cultural landscape very soon. And certainly when Jay left also, that was a happy... But he's gonna come back, I get the feeling. Well, he does have a CNBC show now. It's a show that where he finally gets to fully indulge his love of cars. It's a car show. He has this very popular website, Jay's Garage. And so he's turned that into a, I think it's a weekly primetime show on CNBC. If you ever want to give yourself a treat, go see Jay Leno live because he does crowd work. Comedy is meant to be theater and to interact and the camera, he couldn't show that side of him and he's quite good at it. And yes, and his act, his stand-up act is really not what he did on Tonight Show. And I think it's just a matter of... On the Tonight Show, he understood that if you're hosting the Tonight Show, your job is to do the number one show on television in late night. And that means just appealing to a wide, wide audience. There was a quote that I read that was a quote of Johnny Carson's. And the quote was something like, Johnny said, there's New York and Los Angeles and there's every place in between. And if you're hosting the Tonight Show, you have to appeal to every place in between because that's where most of the viewers are. So that, if you're smart, oh, you say that's my audience, I'll do material to appeal to that audience. But now he's doing a stand-up and he can just be funny. He can just do stuff that he wants to do. Anybody else, yeah? You tailor your materials to different types of audience in different regions or different cultures. How do you ensure that he will translate across culture if I don't want to learn over 100 languages? Sure, that's probably more of a Jane question. She's the... It's very hard to get to the universals. That's like the goal of every comedian is to have those jokes that will work, no matter where, when, who, those are few and far between. I'm always customizing. I did show up in Boston last night. I got home at 1.15, oh my God. I like to be like Jay Leno, a comedy warrior. He used to drive the three hours down here to do five or 10 minutes and then drive back to Boston. That's dedication. I did that last night. I'm too old for this. But anyway, but... But you work in the local references, I guess. But pretty much, yeah, yeah, so like last night I opened with... I'm Jane, I'm originally from Brackton but I'm not gonna hurt you. It's a very tough town, I don't know if you're from up that way. So you try to think, you open up, in any situation we'll stand up, open up local. Just talk about anything in the room. The lights are so bright. We got a camera here. We got these things. Do you know what I mean? You just talk about whether anything that we all have in common, it's like Tip O'Neill said all politics is local, all comedy is local. Open local, invite them on your ride. And then do your act. If you go straight to, it's like going straight to sex with no foreplay. Well, that's a terrible analogy, I'm sorry, but I just thought of that, that's really awful. Well, that'll get the audience on your side. But it's just, you know, engage and just think of that one word connect up front. You know, sort of who are those people? I always walk an audience before I do a show. I wanna know, my first question when I get hired is who's the audience? It should be what's your budget? But I always say, who's the audience? And the American Heart Association called me and it's gonna give me a great amount of money. We're really a cancer family, but, you know, I could do lupus if I had to, you know. And I think it might have been Jay Leno who I read this about, and he would go into it and like he's doing a corporate engagement. He's gonna do stabber for a corporation. Right, totally up front, yeah. And again, it might not have been Jay, but he'll talk to somebody who knows the company. Who's the top salesman? Who's the guy that's been married the most? Who's the guy who's known as being a playboy? And he'll just, he'll have those jokes. Oh, that's fantastic, yeah. And he'll just plug those types into the joke and somebody has a customized joke for that particular company. Well, you just open about them. It's about them, and then you bring them to you. But I did a thing at Harvard and I'd never entertain in front of the President Drew Faus before. So I said to one of her staffers, one word quick about President Faus, to you. She said, pantsuit. So I go up and I say, and it was such a piddling little joke, but it was customized for them. I just said, it's so nice to be here tonight. So I have to have the President with us. Drew Faus, Faus being an old Indian, a Native American word. You have to say all Native American word meaning pantsuit. You know, so that was, and then she'd just written the book about the Civil War. It killed, right? Yeah, no. It was good. And then she'd written the book about the Civil War, a death in the Civil War. I'm like, wow, this is gonna be gangbusters. You know, just what a catchy title. Anyway, so it's like, wow, she's talking about me. She's talking about us. Yeah, if you do anything, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it can be just someone you see in the front doing something, something you saw coming in the room, something on your ride there. I always pre-interview. Like the Today Show, you know why you're so good or people are good on the Today Show? They pre-interview them. And for these shows, the producers call up and say, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you give a good answer about it, those are the questions that are put in front of Dave, right? That's right. It's all, a lot of times, the host will just take the suggested questions that have been prepared and just set them aside and just talk about what he or she is interested in. But yeah, there's always that safety blanket or that safety net of the pre-interview questions that elicit the humorous anecdotes that are gonna be the most entertaining. Yeah. You know, you wonder why they're hit ratios, so great, it's because they're pre-interviewed. Yeah. Kind of the fan thing first, if you have anything to do with Oswald Bates and Living Color, that I would love to hear about that. And but speaking of that as well, is like Oswald Bates was like so amazing the first time it was shown that Damon Waynes where he's talking nonsense. And at the end, it says, give to United Negro College, but I don't know how to explain the ways. Was that in the pilot? Because I did not work on the pilot. Oh my God. And I just worked on the first season, but I remember the sketch, yeah, it was very funny. In my mind, it's like a Gretta Garbo, it's like so incredible and it got used again and again and again and it didn't. I felt like it didn't know when to quit, when to quit that aside. And I wonder if you have that like, oh, let's do that thing again, you know it's getting stale and it's sort of spoiling the whole, it's like, oh, the salt is really good on the dish, but we just keep adding more salt. It's very tempting to keep repeating a joke. Yeah, when do you know to move on? When the audience stops laughing. And if it's the easy answer, if the audience still seems to be enjoying it, then there's a temptation to keep doing it. If people are still laughing at Chris Christie's fat jokes, then the host is gonna keep doing them. That's why not, the audience seems to be enjoying them, even though I personally think that's a little bit worn out, that particular joke. It's just because it's such a volume operation, trying to write enough comedy to fill the show that the last thing you're looking for is reasons to throw out stuff that is still working. Some shows I'm sure have higher standards than let's say, the writers themselves will say, we're not gonna do this anymore. But in general, there's enough opportunity to do new stuff that you can also do the stuff that's still working, which you've done a while. Like George W. Bush's dumb jokes, which we're on. Chris Christie is fat. It's that one adjective often that gives you the handle, right? Yeah, fat. It's short. I think that's one of my punchline makers, right? Number one, brevity, keep it as short as possible. So one syllable words are gonna be fun here. Anybody else? We gotta wrap it. Yeah, just one more. And nobody. In the back, in the back. In the back? Oh, sorry. Oh, good question. That's a good question. I think it depends on what sort of writing you're interested in. For Late Night? I think most of the Late Night shows are in New York now. I think there are five. There's Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Colbert for now, John Stewart, and Dave. That's five, right? Any more? I think, isn't Larry Wolmore's new show? He's gonna have a new show. Replacing, he's replacing Stephen Colbert when Stephen Colbert takes over the Late Show. I'm almost positive he's gonna be in New York. So who's in LA? Jimmy Kimmel, Craig Ferguson, who is gonna be replaced by James Corden, a British guy, and I think they're gonna be producing that out there. So that's two shows out there and six, and Cohen and Wright, three. So three out there, six here. I guess it depends. But more sitcoms out there, maybe? But yeah, definitely more sitcoms and one-hour shows out there. So I would say LA, if that's what you're interested in, but New York, if you're interested in Late Night, unless you have total flexibility and you have your heart set on Jimmy Kimmel or Cohen and or James Corden, then by all means write a submission tailored for one of those shows. And if you get a chance, move out, if you can. One has sunshine. One has sunshine and the weather's beautiful, it's fantastic. It's all about show business if you're in LA. It's, there's no getting away from it. It's just, it's part of the culture from top to bottom pretty much. And that's different in New York. In New York there are people who do all sorts of things and it's not all about show business. So if you wanna live show business 24 hours a day or come as close to that as possible, I would say LA is better for that. If you wanna do show business in a context of people who are doing other stuff, I would say New York. We, my family moved to LA to work on sitcoms and eventually Tonight Show. We were there for six years. Eventually we moved back and it was basically a lifestyle thing. I grew up in Boston and I just liked the East Coast lifestyle better. We have two sons and we were gonna get into schools and I wanted to, we both wanted to send our sons to East Coast schools just cause that's how I grew up and I thought the educational level was a little easier to get here. The education we wanted to give our kids. So that was why we came back. Can we have a round of applause for Joe? All right, thank you. Oh, this is present and he'll sign it. This is present. It's so bright over there. If you have anybody in creative. Thank you, Jamie. This was my friend. Thank you very much. I don't.