Episode 1 | David Javerbaum

This is the How to Write Funny Podcast. I'm Scott Dickers, speaking today with David Javerbaum, a prolific comedy writer who has won the Thurber Prize for American Humor twice, several Emmys, a Grammy, and been nominated for a Tony. So, David, I know you do a lot of things in comedy. Can you just sort of give us a general idea of the main areas of comedy where you work? Well, I guess they cluster around two areas. One of them has been, I guess, what's now a fairly traditional route of television variety writing. So that would be centered by my work at The Daily Show, where I worked for 11 years. And I work at The James Corden Show, The Late Late Show with James Corden. And so writing material for those kind of things. And then the second would be musical theater stuff, because I have it.

graduate degree for some odd reason from nyu and musical theater composition and so i've written a lot of lyrics and things both for television and for the stage um so those are the two main areas and then the last few years i've emerged in a third area which is tweeting which is the area that pays even less than musical theater right yeah you do a lot of work on twitter and not get paid yes you can do infinite amount of but you have an incredible amount of followers on your twitter feed and nobody really knows it's you i mean it's out there if somebody digs into it but it's not like your name and face is all over yeah i i'm behind the tweet of god which now has almost two million followers and in the last few months i've been i've been emerging from the mask because Uh, my play, which is kind of based on the Twitter feed is now opening on Broadway and I'm not getting any younger. And I, you know, I would like some publicity and some attention. I do have some ambition and I hope people aren't disappointed that it isn't actually God behind the Twitter account. Yeah. So, uh, have you run into any trouble with that? Uh, people thinking, Hey, who are you? You ain't God. Not as much as I'd like. I would like more of that, but some of that would be good for business. Some of that would be great for business, but I did it first.

But at this point, I don't get a lot of those people. And when I do, there are crackpots that nobody follows and nobody listens to. And it doesn't even really count. And it all happens in the Twitter sphere. It doesn't happen outside of that. So far, it's only happened in the Twitter sphere. That's correct. Got it. So how did you get there? How did you get? Let's go back to at least your Harvard days. Sure. Because obviously that at the time and before then was a very known route to comedy. Yes. Going to Harvard, getting on the Lampoon. But how did that happen for you? Yeah, the Harvard, both of the two main routes I pursued started at Harvard because I was on the Lampoon.

which as if you're in the comedy world, you know, it's sort of the traditional sort of eye rolling beginning to many a comedy career is being on the Harvard Lampoon, which I was. But I was also involved in a hasty pudding theatrical organization, which is a group that puts on an original student written musical every year. And I wrote two of those and I found that I really enjoyed it, really liked it. And that's the first time you had written musical theater. Yes. Had you been interested in it prior to that? A little. Just from seeing plays yourself? Yeah, just from seeing some singing, but I really enjoyed and still enjoy writing it. The process of writing it is a...

you know, Sondheim has commented on this, it's very intricate sort of puzzle construction. Sure. And that's really interesting to me and I really enjoy that both at a micro level of a song and the macro level of an entire show. Do you start with the lyric or do you start with the tune? It depends. More often than not, it's the lyric, especially if it's a comedy lyric, because the joke has to be, you know, in that case, the lyric comes first. If it's a more serious song, which, believe it or not, I have written, you know, then it's going to be often emotion-based and often the music should come first. That makes good sense. You'd be so constricted comedy-wise if they'd already written the music. Your parameters of how to make that joke work are just tighter. Yeah, yeah. And I work with Adam Schlesinger quite a bit. He's a great music songwriter, producer.

composer, everything in music-er, and I've written a lot of songs with him, and he understands more than anyone the nature of writing music for comedy in that the joke has to come first. Usually the joke is in the lyric. It can also be in the performance. It can also be in the music sometimes. Sure. Do you have a part to play in that as well? Yes. Yes, I have a part to play in the music. He plays a funny pause here and then a ding here or whatever. Yes, and he plays a part in the lyric. Interesting. Very much. Yeah, it's a collaboration like any other collaboration. So you have to know verse and stuff in doing this, right? You have to kind of know how to time out.

a song yeah yeah i don't learn that well i i have a very good uh i think in a musical sense and ear for rhythm and and language and that kind of thing and i think had i been more diligent taking piano lessons as a child uh i might well have been able to compose as it is uh i am not a composer not really so when i write something a lyric i'll sort of come up with a meter and a beat and a sense of the general musical tone that i think it could be but then that might be adjusted later when the music is always adjusted later yeah and very often for adam like i'll if i write a lyric first which isn't always the case but if i write a lyric first i'll say so i'll sing him a ghost track of what i'm hearing and i'll sing it to him and then ask him to please burn that i mean burn destroy the destroy because it's awful i can't really say um and he has a sense of the kind of tune that i'm going for um and but then i give him free reign because he's a great composer and i you know it's not what i do so often his ideas are are better but if we disagree then we just talk and hash it out and the usual collaboration you have with any collaborator Cool. So Hasty Pudding's been around for a long time. It's like male students dressing up like women. Yeah, it's been around since the 1800s. And it's this tradition of a drag musical of an all-male cast, some of whom, and eventually all of whom, dress as women and play female parts, which of course is what he did in Shakespeare's time. And...

It's very silly, very frothy. And it's a great theatrical tradition of a lot of silliness. I think it touches on Aristophanes, it touches on something rotten, which is on Broadway right now. And it was a great training ground. Having to write songs for it and having to work within the parameters, which at the time that I was writing, I was putting shows with one and then two other people. The parameters for writing them were very strict. You had to have exactly 16 characters. You had to have eight men, eight women.

They have to be roughly equal in size. They had a system after 100-some years. That system's constantly evolving. I think right now it's totally different from what it was when I was in undergrad. But what it was at the time was, for me, really helpful. And it really forced me, you know, as everyone always says, working inside a box is a great way to get to write on the walls of the box. If you have no box, there's no walls to write on. Yeah, it can be really frustrating when there are no actual parameters. Yeah, exactly. The blank piece of paper is always the scariest.

Writing comedy lyrics is an excellent example of that because there are so many very strict parameters. Like you said, it's almost like a puzzle. Yeah, well, when you start, like everything else, there's nothing. So what you have to immediately do is create parameters for yourself, what I always do. And you do that by, first of all, you come up with, in most cases, what the joke is, what the central thread. For a comedy song, there should be one underlying joke. I mean, one of the thousands of wonderful things about the Book of Mormon is that every single song, there's one central joke. There's one joke, and everything, and it's not just one, I mean that in a good sense, not a bad sense, there's one central joke, and then all the jokes are sort of branches off that main link. Were you involved in that show? I wish I were.

it's a great show it's so funny yeah it's great so well done yeah uh but those guys are uh sort of cut from the same cloth they do a lot of music on their tv show and matt and trey are huge musical theater i think i think probably try more but but yeah yeah they're they're huge and i think a lot of people i think a lot of hipster comedy people who uh would see to be the opposite of that spectrum really do secretly like it and when they do things that are ironic and they'll say you know they'll do sketches often about like a terrible musical like that counts that's that counts like that that that's not uh You know, that's still an adoration of musical theater, even if you're mocking it. Yeah, no, there's a part of the comedy brain that really wants to do songs and music. And I think it is all those, like the puzzle piece sort of thing. And that's something I want to get back to with you. So before Hasty Pudding, before Harvard, you were just a really sort of Mensa IQ level kid, right? I don't know what my... I was never in Mensa. I mean, yeah, I was a smart kid. You did very well in your ACT. I was a smart kid. I did very well in my...

Boy, ACTs, boy, your Midwest background is showing. Oh, is it SATs? SATs on the East and the West Coast. Got it. ACT is in flyover country. Yeah, yeah. That's where I live. I know, no, no, no. Yeah, SATs. Yeah, I did well. I did well in school. And so you're just prime pickings for Harvard. You live in the area. You do extremely well. Actually, as a white Jew from New Jersey, I was in no way prime pickings for Harvard at that point. Because they were trying to be diverse? They are, yeah. And they still are. Yeah, they struggle very hard with that. And they still should be trying to be diverse.

I managed to overcome my lack of obstacles. Right, but you had that kind of brain that really, that often goes into comedy that's very high-functioning, very intelligent. You're good with like math problems and puzzles. And so the idea of writing... I was really attracted to them, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So the idea of that kind of work really appeals to you just from the get-go. And so when you find something on the Hasty Pudding show, obviously you do two of them. So that's one a year for two years? Is that how you do it? It was one a year and we did one in 1992. And then we wrote one for 93 that didn't get chosen. So we rewrote it and got done in 94. So...

I hear what you're saying. So I didn't realize they had auditions that you... At the time, and again, I don't know if it's still the case, but at the time, people who wanted to write it wrote an entire script over the summer. And then they only chose one. And that's the lyrics as well? Yes, the whole thing. And if they don't get chosen, it's not like you can reuse it. That's it. And do you still have your rejected script? Well, no, it wound up getting done. Oh, the same show got done. Yeah, we resubmit it and it got done. So both the scripts that we wrote were produced and they were great. The second one, I think, was a lot better than the first, which is as it should be. I think they hold up.

I don't know if the phrase hold up applies to a pudding show, but I am proud of that stuff. I mean, I think that stuff that I did was really good for a young'un who had no experience. And so you said you learned a lot in there. What specifically did you learn about writing lyrics and doing comedy on stage? Just that I learned, I began to explore the things you can do with language and rhythm in a lyric and the way you can combine them with music to really make a joke land extra hard. You know, as you know, we were talking about this before this started, like there's a, you know, there's a mathematics to it or something that feels mathematical in the way that Bach's music feels mathematical. And I said before I wouldn't get retentious, and now here I am talking about Bach.

But, um, but yeah, I think, I think one of the things that comedy people either have innately or develop over time is that capacity to measure that metric of comedy. And I think that's one of the things that appeals about comedy is that it's, it's, it is measurable. That is more funny. That is less funny. That is an eight funny. That is a six funny. We can make that into a nine funny. Whereas at least for me, and I think for most people, like if you're writing a great drama, what is an eight drama line? What is a six drama line? I mean, that's not to mean drama, I think it's to mean comedy, but, um, it just, it's a measurable thing. I think the thing is most comparable to it. I think, I think I heard, uh,

I think it was Jordan Peele talking about this, is horror. That's what comedy is most like, is horror. Because you can make something more scary or less scary. I mean, there's one central thing you're trying to do, and you can adjust it one way or the other to make it scarier or funnier. Yeah, I think in drama, it's possible to look at something and say, you know, could there be more at stake? Could there be more dramatic irony? Oh, definitely. And even adding humor can make a dramatic moment more powerful. Yes. I think there probably is. I mean, you and I don't work in drama, but as you said, you know, when you do enough comedy, you touch on the drama in the drama sphere once in a while. Yeah. I'm sure people who are in there all the time probably do think of it as a formula. And if I did drama or...

More to the point, if I were innately inclined or born with the ability to do drama, I would be, by definition, more sensitive to that metric. And I would be able to feel something. I would be able to say, oh, yeah, that is more of this. But I'm not. Well, let's follow that track for just a second, because a lot of people in comedy ultimately want to be in drama. Like it's taken more seriously. Woody Allen. Woody Allen is the classic track of that. And has that ever appealed to you? Like, ah, this comedy stuff is silly. It's for kids. It is appealed to me, but not because of that. I don't feel like it's like I have no shame about being doing comedy whatsoever.

I think you can express anything you want to express or anything I want to express in comedy and irony. And I have, I in no way feel it's the lesser art form. I just, however, I do like doing different things. I do like exploring just, you know, what I can do or maybe what I can't do. And so for that reason, I have tried on occasion to explore things that were not comedic just to see what it was like. Interesting. Yeah, I think a lot of that comes from, well, let's look at the Woody Allen example again. His earlier, funnier movies, as he calls them. There was a lot of slapstick and a lot of, you know, big puffy pants and stuff like that, that, you know.

Really is, you're laughing at it because it's so stupid. And I'm a huge fan of that kind of madcap humor. I think it's powerful when it comes to really squeezing the laughs out of people. And it's timeless. It is timeless. So that's the kind of humor specifically, I think, that isn't taken seriously in the larger world. Like nobody's giving out awards to Woody Allen for doing Sleeper or for Eddie Murphy for dressing up like the Nutty Professor. Even though those are two examples of like really spectacular comedy work.

It's funny. I've been involved in, I was involved in the first comedy awards, which was on Comedy Central. I was at a writer for those in 2011, which was the first, which is like one of like dozens of attempts to create comedy awards. I remember that attempt. And it, like all those attempts, they fail ultimately because they're only going to award the more serious work. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's something innately.

unawardy about comedy. Yeah. Yeah. I often tell people that I think Eddie Murphy should have won the Academy Award for The Nutty Professor 2, The Clumps, because he played all the characters. And at one point in the movie, I forgot that it was him. Yeah. And there was a love story between the grandparents that worked. Yeah. And like, not only is he playing all the characters and he's doing an amazing job, but I care. And it's funny. Yeah. And I've forgotten that it's him. And he's in makeup seven hours every day before he does this. Yeah. The caliber of work.

there is just almost incalculable. Nobody cares. He's not even going to get on. You know, somebody like Sean Penn is going to play a developmentally disabled person and he's going to get the Oscar. I think maybe I'm just thinking this now and maybe it's a horrible theory, but I think to acknowledge that a comedy like that, like Eddie Murphy is like the best work of the year would be to somehow acknowledge that life is really stupid, that life is a pointless, stupid exercise that has no meaning, which I believe. Yeah, no, that is a really good point because I think that's what comedians are here to tell people, but they tell them in a safe way.

environment where you're laughing at it right if people actually did accept that truth right it would be too grim right to accept so you're right they can't no life needs to be about people with horrible diseases overcoming those diseases to triumph because life is very serious and that's it's an existential need that humans maybe have individually or collectively to to do that and so that's maybe why you can't award best actor to Eddie Murphy for the clumps for the clumps because that is to say you know what life is just a stupid thing only when that's mixed with some sort of horrible tragedy like life is beautiful is a great example yes So, all right, well, let's go back to, let's go back to Harvard. We talked a lot about your hasty pudding experience and what you learned there. What about the Harvard Lampoon? What did you learn there about prose comedy, if anything, or working in a comedy room? Well, the Harvard Lampoon at the time, it felt to me more like a social organization or even more of a...

a stance than it did an actual humor publication. What was the stance? The stance is we are funny. We know we're funny. And if you don't find us funny, then fuck you. Interesting. At the time, that's how I perceived it. I don't think it's that way now. I don't think it is. I don't think it's that way now. But it just, it felt to me more like, more like that. And they only came out with five issues a year. And, you know, they were literally sophomoric, but that's what you expect from any college publication, even Harvard publication. I mean, they're all kind of silly. Yeah. But there were really funny people on it.

They were really funny people. I mean, people like Josh Lieb and Brian Kelly and Dave Mandel and Alec Berg and Jeff Schaefer, all of whom have gone on to do incredible things in the world of comedy. Did you guys work together on things or did you just go off and write your piece and then put them all together? Basically, you go off and write your piece and then put them all together. And that was right... I graduated in 93. So I seem to recall the first issues of The Onion coming into our mailbox right around then. We sent them to the Harvard Lampoon on purpose. Yes, on purpose. That's right. You told me that later when I got to know you.

And I remember, I don't think, I mean, just thinking, what is this? Who are these people who would dare challenge the mighty Harvard Lampoon? Right. Yeah. Funny. So then when you get out of Harvard...

it seems like you made a pretty smooth transition to the comedy business. That's incorrect. It isn't correct. That's not correct. That was the impression that I got. How did that, how did that go for you? I graduated, as I graduated Harvard, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I still really don't, but I'm doing it anyway. And I applied, having enjoyed writing the Pasty Pudding show, I applied for this program I heard about called the NYU Tisch School of the Arts School for, Graduate School for Musical Theater Composition, which was to learn how to write musicals. It was the only MFA program of its kind in the world. So I applied and I got in. Originally, I was dual enrolled in that and playwriting program there.

But I decided to go for the lesser of the commercial possibilities and actually go for musical theater. Wise. Yeah, wise, yeah. I went there for two years. That was a great experience. That's where I really began to learn how to collaborate, which I really had no idea how to do before that. Was it project-based? It was project-based. Again, I'll just talk about what it was when I was there. I spent the first year sort of rotating every lyricist with every composer and working on various individual songs and drills and stuff while learning about the history of musical theater. And then the second year, you were at a musical with a partner. And it was great. It was a really great experience in learning how to work with other people and manage egos and manage your own ego, which is the most important thing. So they deconstructed it for you in that regard?

Had you think consciously about the process? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I don't know if it was intentional or not, but yeah, and you begin to think about the process and the fact that the process is ultimately the more important thing. And it really is like, it's the exact equivalent of, you know, the Zen teaching of it's the journey after destination. I mean, it's, you know, it's the process of coming up with the joke and not the joke. I mean, it's the same thing. That's interesting to hear you say that because that has not been my experience personally. I'm curious to know how that works for you. Let's say the process is great and you have a lot of fun in the room and everybody gets along, but the joke bombs. Like, is that okay? Or do you think having a good process leads to necessarily a better joke?

I think having a good process ought to lead to a better joke. But does it always? No, it doesn't always. But it's a probability thing. I'm not a big baseball fan, but I find that baseball is far and away the best analogy for it. I use that for comedy as well. Yeah, I mean, it really is. It's a cliche, but it's true. You just go off to the plate and you swing and you swing and you swing and you have strikeouts and you have singles and you have home runs. And if you get better at it, your proportion of those things becomes more favorable, but you still strike out.

And the thing about comedy, like you said, you start to know, you start to see the code, and you do get better at it. Yeah. Where you can tell, well, this one's probably going to work, and this one will work better if we do this. Yes, but it never gets perfect. I mean, I've tweeted over 10,000 tweets, and I...

sometimes often we'll think this is a good one and it's not and i say it's not i mean it's it's a metric on twitter you can really tell because how many retweets you get like that's a that's a pretty fair estimation it's laughs in a room yeah it's laughs it's laughs in a room the retweets and the faves yeah the retweets and the face and there's ones what i you know they're ones i definitely know that they're not funny but they're they speak to the moment and i get a lot of retweets um but anyway we run back to my process and we'll come back to how i got started in comedy i was in two i went to you for two years And then I had nothing to do. I mean, you don't graduate musical theater writing school and you say, hey, we have a great job for you in the, you know, as a first year musical theater writer in musical theater, Inc. Right. That doesn't really happen. And did you go pounding on doors on Broadway? I temped. I was temping for three years. Just, you know, I could type very fast. So I got secretarial jobs. It's often second and third shift. And that for me is what constitutes my hardworking days of.

dues paying of dues paying so i try to glorify them which was possible but i was doing that for two or three years and i happened through circumstance to know ben carlin because ben uh was someone i've met in my high school years and ben was my age and he had gone to wisconsin and he had graduated wisconsin and then gone on to start working for this paper called the onion uh which of which he was the editor and you were the i don't know what you were at the time editor-in-chief we didn't have titles yeah and it was just becoming well known and i really liked it and he invited me he said i know you live in new york are you interested in writing for it i said sure so i began writing headlines and uh some articles for it clinton blown away By flavor, yeah. The first headline I had was Clinton assassinated by flavor. And it was just talking about how Clinton enjoyed the taste of his chewing gum and using it in terms of assassination to discuss it. I can't find that online. I've looked for that online. Only like post 96, 97 is online. I think that was right on the cusp. Yeah, right on the cusp. Because I do have other things that are still online, which I'm proud of. But yeah, so I did that for two or three years. And that was great. That was fun. Technically, my first paying job in comedy. I say technically because you know what that paid. Yes, I do. Sadly. Yeah, I wasn't able to cease temping from that.

But that ultimately proved to be a happy circumstance because as The Onion became more successful, it got representation. And David Miner from Three Arts Entertainment became The Onion's manager. And he became my manager personally through becoming The Onion's manager. And he got me my first actual paying job, which was at Letterman in 98. And that's how I started in the field as a comedy professional. And how was working for Letterman? It sucked. It really sucked. It was a nine to five cubicle farm type job? No, it was an 11. It was a 10 to 11.

cubicle farm. Okay. Yeah. So it was a 10 a.m. Brutal hours. Nice people. Very nice people. But brutal hours and the mood in the office, which is set by the boss, David Letterman. I know everyone's waxing nostalgic for him at the moment, but it was a terrible place to work. It was really not a good place to work for writers. He had a little respect for writers. I talked to him twice in the year I was there. And you're just cranking out. And you're cranking out jokes that you know will never make it to the air. I mean.

It was my first job, but I knew that like, okay, you know, if you're writing jokes and there's like a 1% chance that you can make the air, then I'll try. But if it's a 0% chance, then no, I don't want to do it. How many jokes did you get on the air during that time? Oh, I don't know. You know, the best part of the day for me was the top 10 list because at least I was writing jokes. I was writing actual jokes that were words that formed jokes. And they would get shows on the radio. I don't know, maybe like one, a list or something for that time. And that was fun, but...

You know, it just wasn't a rewarding experience. It was my first experience. Are you working alone, essentially? I was working alone, yeah. I had my own little cubicle there. Did they discourage people working together? No, they didn't discourage people working together necessarily, but it didn't necessarily make things any better. Right. And plus, some people already came and partnered. Like, there was a writing team, Carter and Craig, who went on to create How I Met Your Mother. Great, great, great guys. And there were the Stenkel Brothers, who obviously were a team, and they went on to become the EPs of the show, but also great guys. People had natural teams already. But it was really unpleasant, and I just can't tell you.

I just learned a lot of things about what I don't want to do and how I don't want to write a show. And I was there for almost a year. And, you know, you get picked up every 13 weeks. And I got picked up and picked up. And I was surprised, actually, I got picked up. I was kind of surprised. I think maybe Dave Miner's been a good word for me. But halfway through my fourth 13-week session, I quit.

I had nowhere to go. I didn't have another job. You know, I was working on a musical that I was enjoying on the side, but it wasn't paying me anything, obviously. But I just, I can't, I can't do this anymore. It's just not, I don't want to do this. So the whole process has to be fun thing was not working. I was not playing. No. It's all about the process. The process sucked. The job sucked. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's four possibilities. The process could be good or bad and the result can be good or bad. You know, those are the four quadrants. Yeah. And I felt like both were bad in that, in that case. Right. So I, I, I feel.

I know everyone's nostalgic for Dave. And on air, Dave is great. And everyone, you know, we can all tip our hat to everything that he accomplished. But it was not a pleasant place to work when I was there. And from what I understand, it became worse after I left. Not after I left, but it just got worse. Wow. Yeah. And so you're bouncing around, you're not doing much. Bouncing around, not doing much, working on my musical. I had enough saved up from Dave that I didn't have the temp again, but not doing much. But then shortly, I think a few months passed.

And lo and behold, Ben Cullen, my old friend who had worked at The Onion, was hired as the head writer at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which I just hired Jon Stewart. And once again, Ben was nice enough to ask me if I was interested in working there. And he was in New York. And I said, absolutely. So I came in and I began working there in July 99. And I was there for 11 years. And that was obviously a much, much, much more pleasant experience. Completely pleasant. Beyond pleasant. Yeah, because from what I understand, Ben really reformed.

the staff, even from what it was under Craig Kilbourne, so that the hours were better and it was just a better environment. Ben's a very good manager. Yeah, John and Ben. Yeah, yeah. Ben is a very good manager. He's a very efficient manager. And yeah, a lot of people in that first year or two from the writers, the holdovers from the Craig Kilbourne era, one way or another, quit or were fired. And you look back in the long run and it's absolutely what had to happen.

I actually just got a very unpleasant, had a very unpleasant exchange with one of those writers yesterday who reached out to me on Twitter just to tell me that I had scabbed during the writer's strike in 2010, which is not true. I was not scabbing. I was an EP at the time, so therefore I was not a writer at the time and I was obliged to come in to work. But he's one of those really bitter Michael Moore liberals who hate everything and love humanity in general and hate people in specific. Who's not going to forget any... Who doesn't forget any slight...

Exactly. Everything is a grievance. Nothing is good. Nothing is worthy. Sounds delightful. Yeah. And, you know, there's no sense of, well, maybe, maybe the problem is not what's through the windshield, but the windshield, you know? Right. So you're suddenly thrust into this treadmill of a daily. Of a daily show. And that was terrific to be thrust into a daily. I mean, I learned so much there. It was, it was a wonderful thing. One thing and from John and from the experience, I think the most important thing, but one of the more important things that I learned was just a matter of just having so many of your jokes killed.

you know, and seeing them killed, and unlike at Dave, seeing why they were killed, seeing why they didn't work, seeing why things didn't make it to the air or made it to rehearsal when I got in rehearsal. You were more a part of that process than at Dave. You saw it. Yeah, I mean, I became more and more so as I rose through the ranks, but yes, and this is a great, I think this is a great anecdote that illustrates the evolution. When I first got there, there's a filing cabinet in my office, which I share with somebody else, and every time we get the script for the rehearsal script, I would go through with a highlighter and highlight my jokes.

And then I'd put it in the filing cabinet. Why? Because presumably a hundred years from now, when there's a David Javerbaum museum, people are going to look through it and read the jokes that I wrote. They're going to know which jokes. And think, wow, he wrote that joke. Like what an asshole. Like what an asshole. So.

that so that's that was the before picture and then the after picture is you realize your jokes aren't your babies you know i have kids now and they're actually my babies jokes are just jokes you know and that's what i mean like it's the process and not the result like you know ultimately the result hopefully is good but even if it even if it is good it's the sort of um uh crystallized, distilled essence of the process that led to it. That is such a healthy attitude. Yeah. And you haven't always had that. No, not at all. No, that's what I'm telling you. Like I learned that at The Daily Show. And then I killed other jokes. And I became a head writer and EP. And I killed a lot of other people's jokes. And that's what you do. And you go, oh, their jokes aren't sacred either. And nobody's jokes are sacred. And it was a great opportunity to get to do that because I think there's, I don't know, for me, there would have been no other way to learn that except for that. When I was a kid, I used to write, I remember one time I wrote a story, you know, that I thought was great. Obviously it wasn't. I showed it to my mom and my mom.

had an idea to make it better. And I said, well, that's a great idea, but now I can't use it because it's yours. Again, what an asshole. Like, what an asshole. You know, so collaboration is something that I really...

have developed over the years and i'm because i didn't have that skill innately i'm very proud that i've learned how to do it pretty well yeah no that is a great skill and then to be able to be an ep and to kill other people's jokes but no ultimately because of what you had gone through that this is helping them this is this is helping the show be better it's helping them be better as writers because they're learning what doesn't work it can be hard for a lot of people who take a leadership position in a writer's room telling people no your joke that joke doesn't work yeah and i am and i wasn't remain conflict diverse i don't like i don't i don't actually enjoy getting people's faces and saying no for the most part or it makes me uncomfortable and you don't like a writer with a strong personality coming to you and saying hey why'd you cut my joke no and we exactly and there were some of those at the beginning and like i said they got because they had to go um you know The front man at the show, be it John or even Dave, has the right, or not even the right, of necessity, he has to set the tone. He has to be the person for whom you write. That's what you are obliged to do. I do it now for James Corden, which is a pleasure. And it's his show. If you want to do your own show, and I did, ultimately you have to do that on your own, which is a large reason why I ultimately left. You want to do your own thing. But if you're being paid by someone else to make that show better, you have to work to make him and his show better. So The Daily Show obviously does get better and it becomes a phenomenon.

Um, and you start packing up Emmys. Let's talk about America, the book, uh, which spawned from all of that. Yeah, that was fantastic. That was a process. I know John and Ben really got that ball rolling. Um, I'm not sure if they approached a publisher or vice versa. Um, but that got started and then I was drawn, you know, I was, I wasn't the head writer. Maybe at the very beginning I wasn't a head writer, but then I became head writer in 03 and that's when we started working on the book. And that was a massive management effort. Time management. Time management. And, um, you know, looking back.

all the writers contributed. You know, I wrote a lot, Ben wrote a lot, John wrote a lot. Ben did an amazing job of managing that process because you can imagine how many different tentacles are reaching out and doing it while putting on the show. Having managed that process myself on Onion Books and doing it horribly, I can appreciate what Ben probably brought to that process. By the way, go back to the Onion Books. I mean, I heard them century. You remember the role I played in the art of the century. Like me and my friend Shipper, the guy who wrote the putting shows with, he was the one who went to a publisher.

And the publisher made, I think, the first offer to say, oh, yeah, we'd love to do that book. And then I think you took it from there. I remember you didn't live in Madison, Wisconsin, where we were, but you came out to visit. Right. We were talking about that project. And yeah, it was the right time. And you had the insight to know this is the right time and this is the right idea, like a book of front pages from The Onion. Yeah. And yeah, we just took that ball and ran with it. And then you became a writer and contributor to it as well. Yeah, that was great. And that was the first book that I worked on. But in America, the book I really, really, really worked on. Right. Because Artem Century was like, we were working on that, I think, 97, 98. Yes. When you were sort of in your temp.

period that's right that's right right and then so you had already gone through the process of working on a major comedy book yeah when we were doing it we didn't think it was major but then you know it did well and so now you're on america the book so yeah we did america the book and we just filled it with color and illustrations and charts and things that people who jokes per square inch yeah just jokes per square inch which is you know something the onion books have done i have the techlopedia that you guys did in my bathroom i mean and that's my bathroom reading it's never that and the atlas i have to say i cannot the atlas like i is is unbelievable in this sense i cannot believe there are that many jokes in a book. It really is astonishing. The Atlas is just like, it's like, it's Finnegan's wake. I remember you saying that about, yeah, I mean, I edited that book, so it's kind of a blur to me, but I can't agree with you on the encyclopedia. It's just got that, we always tried to heighten that jokes per square inch quotient. Yes. And, you know, the encyclopedia does a great job of that. And it's one of these endlessly giving books that just, it makes a great bathroom reader because it could be in there for years and you'll always discover new funny things. And the Atlas too, you had like,

40 or, I mean, 50 plus jokes for every country on Earth. Like, not just America, but like, you know, Burundi. It's insane. It's, like I said, it's a blur, but... I can imagine. It was all about, and you weren't involved in that, but you were busy on The Daily Show. No, but I saw it and it filled me with envy, like, oh my God, I am in awe that these things have been produced by mankind. Yeah, I sort of run those books. I don't know, it'd be great to hear you explain how Ben managed America, the book, and I presume he did Earth? No, no, no, by then Ben had left the show, and Earth, I managed that. Oh, okay, I'd love to hear about that.

The Onions, Our Dumb World, it was, I managed it kind of like Ulysses S. Grant managed the Civil War. Like, I didn't care how many of my own troops I had to kill as long as we achieved victory. And it was a dirty, messy process that we're just forging forward, you know, over bodies and blood and packing this thing full of jokes. But I always imagined America the book and certainly Earth being a much cleaner, efficient process. Am I imagining things or? I mean, I don't know what the standard of comparison is. I mean, I've experienced that. No, I mean, it was messy. It was crawling. We had moments of great tension. At least one I can remember.

You know, it was a pain in the butt. There were really long nights. And again, it wasn't the only thing we were working on. I guess the same with the Onion books. And so we had to balance that. We had to figure out, you know, first you get the macro, what's the whole book about? What are the chapters? What are the pages on each chapter? Like, what are some ideas we have? What could be whole page joke topics? What's an individual joke? And we just kind of made it up as we went along, I think, in a good way, in a way that you don't know what you're supposed to be doing, so you just kind of figure it out. But there was just a whole bunch of management stuff, and I was able to focus a little more on the writing.

of it and ben really did a great job of managing just the the i think a lot of writing as well in fact i did a lot of writing together but um just a whole uh endless paper stream of of submissions and not just from the writers but from the publisher and from the illustrator and from everybody else who's involved in the book you know it's a production right and um how did you deal with the staff was it uh did you break the staff into the staff is primarily the show the staff is primarily the book or was it all mixed it was all mixed everybody was doing both we didn't have that uh everyone was involved So we're getting back to what you talked about earlier about when you first approach comedy, you kind of want to know what the parameters are. And my first thing is always I want to know what the context is. What's this going to be? What medium is it in? How are people going to be discovering it or whatever? And that's like the first step. Tell us about the germination of the idea of America the book as a textbook. Whose idea was that and how did that come about? I think that was John's. It certainly wasn't mine. I think it was John's or Ben's, but it was probably John's. It's a great original parody book idea. Yeah, I mean, it's a parody of a textbook. I know we weren't the first parody of a textbook.

Probably not, but it was the first big comedy book. Maybe the first big comedy book that was successful, but it probably wasn't the first stab at it. But it was a natural thing. We were at The Daily Show. We made jokes about America. That was what we did on the show. It was a natural thing. Well, if you like our show, that would be the first thing to write. It's where we live. And it's so hard with publishers, too, when you explain to them, okay, we want this to be bound like a textbook. I'm sure you guys had this conversation. The publisher's like, oh, no, no, we want to have a jacket because it's going to be a major book. And you actually have to explain to them, no, no, no, you don't understand. It's a parody. It has to be this way. Yeah, exactly. And Ben had a lot of those conversations. John and Ben had a lot of those conversations. We had a great publisher with Grand Central Publishing with Jamie Robb

Paul Sher from Pentagram to the illustrations. And everything was just a very fortunate, blessed situation. And everybody worked together pretty well. And we had a lot of jokes. And we got structured for that. Remember, like, the last week or two before the deadline, we spent writing the last chapter, which was other countries around the other world. Yeah, because we felt like, well, we've really been hard on America. Maybe we should be hard on everybody else, too. So we added a last-minute section that insulted everybody else in the world so no one else would feel left out. That's great. And I want to...

specify something that I think is just some really interesting comedy trivia. You guys won the Thurber Prize for American Humor for America the Book, and The Onion won a few years earlier for Our Dump Century. And when the Thurber House called me to tell me that we had won that award, they said that one of the things about this award is they never give it to the same person twice. But they did when they gave it to America the Book because you had won it for Our Dump Century and again for America the Book. Part of a team, but still, it's you. I don't consider myself to have won the Thurber Prize for Our Dump Century. Well, you wrote a lot of jokes and wrote a lot of stories for that book. I did. I did.

And I think the original idea of the book was yours as well. The original idea of the book was mine, yes. Well, thank you. I guess I had... Yeah, I never thought of it. So someone needs to call the Thurberhausen. Well, I only have one Thurberhausen. Take away one of your... So, you know, when the inevitable downfall comes to me to sell it if I crack, I'm not going to be able to get double the value. Okay, so after Ben leaves, you become the EP of The Daily Show. Yeah. And do you change things up? You run things pretty smoothly there for a few years? If I ain't broke, don't fix it. You know, the show's constantly evolving. It's constantly, you know, and it's evolved a great deal. Are you involved in Colbert?

What I've done for Colbert, I wasn't involved in starting his show. I did write the songs along with Adam Flessinger for the Colbert Christmas special, which I'm very, very proud of. And that was pretty much all I did for the Colbert show. Okay. Obviously that show was, it remains terrific and I can't wait to see him on CBS. Absolutely. So, and you had a musical debut in that time. Yes, Cry Baby. I wrote basically the lyrics for that and Adam wrote the music and Tommy and Mark O'Donnell wrote the book for Hairspray, wrote it and Cry Baby was another John Waters movie adaptation and John Waters was involved in adapting that one as well and I got to meet him. He's the nicest, sweetest guy. So he worked on the script? No, no, he kept the script. He was just involved and sort of was there sort of as our general spirit. I see.

It was a great process. It was a typical Broadway process. You write it. You have workshops. You run out of town. In our case, we went to La Jolla, California. I lived there for a month or two. Took time off from The Daily Show. Oh, I didn't realize they did that. They go somewhere random and test it. Not random. It's a few places that are usually gone to. La Jolla being one of them. Places that they believe scientifically represent the Broadway audience? Yeah, traditionally. You go out of town and you hone it and you make it better. Ideally, you bring it to Broadway. Makes sense. And I thought the show was great. I was really proud of it. Many reviewers disagreed, including the one who matters. There's one? Well, the New York Times is the one that really kind of matters. And it closed after two months, unfortunately.

But it was a really good show, a really good experience, and I would do it again. Yeah, so I don't know how things work in Broadway theater. Like I do. I barely know how things work in Broadway theater. Well, but I'm sure there is a way that they work. When you have a show like that that is considered a failure, I don't know, is that considered a flop? Borderline flop, yeah. Okay, when that happens, what does that do to your career as a lyricist? Oh, I don't think it hurt my career. Okay, great. I mean, you know, it depends on the circumstances, but nobody thought, like, I think just people thought the show wasn't necessary or didn't have a...

a point of view or something or i'm i don't know but it was it was fine okay so um and you were excited to get back into it and you're doing a show now which i want to hear about but did you do anything in between yeah well in the intervening time i did after crybaby some people did like it so in 2011 i got a call out of the blue from the producers of the tonys and they were doing it with neil patrick harris for the second straight year and neil had seen crybaby and liked it he was a broadway fan and actor and he wanted me and adam to write an opening song for the tonys and i leapt at that chance obviously and so you talk about context and so We had a meeting and he said, you know, come up with some ideas. And I thought, okay, the context is the Tony's opening number. Neil Patrick Harris specifically is the host of it. I want to do something that is going to get attention. I want to do something that will set the mood for the night. I want to do something that is pro-theater because theater, I think unlike movies and television, cannot long sustain prolonged satirical attacks on it because its position is unfortunately so tenuous. Yeah, it's an oppressed group. Yeah, it's an oppressed group. You can't hit an oppressed group. Yeah, you can't hit an oppressed group. You want to give them a pep rally. And you also want to make the room feel like a community.

And in a stroke of inspiration, I just thought, what if we just did a song called Broadway's Not Just for Gays Anymore? And I pitched it to Neil, who loved it. Neil loved the idea. And I thought, and I wouldn't pitch that to anybody else. But Neil being the allegedly straight gay guy was the perfect guy to pitch that to. And so Adam and I wrote this song that Neil made infinitely better with suggestions and then through choreography and then through performance called Probably Not Just For Gays Anymore. And it's really one of the best things I've ever worked on. And it came out just absolutely tremendous. And I think people still talk about it. That's great. And it was great. And you parlayed that into writing more for the Tony Awards. Yeah, I wrote two more songs for the Tonys next year. The following year, I wrote a song for the Emmys for Neil.

And didn't you write on the Oscars as well? I wrote two Oscars with John when John hosted, both times John hosted. I also wound up being the ghostwriter for Neil's memoir, autobiography that came out last year. I did not know that. Which was a choose your own autobiography. That was his idea, his brilliant idea of having it be a thing where you choose the adventure of Neil's life that you go on. It was tremendous. Delightful. So tell us about the new show based on the tweet of God. The new show is called An Act of God, which is what it is, 90 Minutes of God. And...

It is, it's not, it's only peripherally based on the Twitter account. However, I like telling people that it's the first Broadway show based on Twitter account because it's so funny to say that. So I say that. I think it's a great hook. Yeah, it's a great hook and it's not false. But it's based more on the book that the Twitter account was created to promote than the Twitter account, although there are certainly excerpts from both of those things in there. But it's also more than half of it, more than three quarters of it really, is newly written and is designed to...

present a theatrical experience. Because as you said, context is everything. I always like to try to write for the context. You know, and that's the first thing. And it's a theater show. So it's not just a guy sitting there reading tweets for 90 minutes and then saying bazinga as a few haters on the tweet of God have suggested that the show will be. It's actually not that. It was that until a week ago. And then we decided, no, let's not have it just be tweets and bazinga. Yeah, that would not work. Let's talk about the Twitter feed for just a little bit. Twitter obviously is a great format for comedy. And it's a great place for people to, and a lot of people have, gotten discovered through Twitter.

starting a crazy funny Twitter feed on the flip side a lot of people will start a Twitter feed like Albert Brooks didn't like it sounds like you did when the publisher is like hey you're doing this book you better start a Twitter feed so you can promote it and then yours through some wonderful twist of fate, just became incredibly popular and became its own thing. I think publishers, I don't know, but my surmise would be the publishers now, as opposed to a few years ago, realize that starting a Twitter feed is not actually going to help you sell many books. And at this point, most people already have the Twitter feed set up anyway. Yeah, the power of that Twitter following is very illusory, I believe. Yes, yes. It's tremendously satisfying for me. It's tremendously time-sucking for me. It's tremendously...

non-lucrative for me and for everybody and i'm just so tickled pink that through circumstance i'm going to be able to at least somewhat monetize my twitter account um because almost no one gets to do that or they do that in these very vague ways well it raises your profile or they get an opportunity to get an opportunity to write and you know those those are real things but i'm i'm monetizing it or attempting to in in a very real way um i think not since shit my dad says has a twitter account uh made this bold an attempt to uh to reach the heart of the American people, or at least the Broadway ticket goer. Yeah, and I wish you all the best with it. Thank you. Break a leg. I don't know what they're supposed to say on Broadway. It's still break a leg. Great. And thanks for taking the time. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the How to Write Funny podcast. For more comedy writing resources, visit howtorightfunny.com.