I guess the best advice I ever got or anyone could get for doing a talk show, though it has not been easy very often, was from Jack Paar, who said, ‘Kid, don’t make it an interview. Interviews have clipboards, and you’re like David Frost. Make it a conversation.’
I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-’60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn’t the night before.
Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that’s too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.
You have to be on TV a surprisingly long time before you’re stopped on the street. Then, when you are, you get a lot of, ‘Hey, you’re great! What’s your name again?’
The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I’m not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.
Comedians are sometimes resentful of their writers. Probably because it’s hard for giant egos to admit you need anyone but yourself to be what you are.
Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.
There are online forms you can fill out to send to your lawmakers, demanding that nothing – nothing at all or in any way – be done about any guns whatever, anywhere.
