Funny on Purpose

But at a certain point, you find yourself at twenty-eight, and your wife leaves you for another guy, and they get married, and that kind of throws you off the rails. The next thing you know, you’re onstage, and there’s urgency. You’ve gotten a taste of pain, you’ve gotten a taste of loss, and you see what you’re fighting for.

I can’t work at night, so I really have to start at 8 o’clock and just work through till lunch. Other than that—it’s a bit like being a shopkeeper. You show up and just wait for the customers to come around. The customers are the sketches and the comedy. That’s what it feels like.

It’s a great idea to have multiple scripts ready to go before you go out trying to sell even one.

. SLEEP ON IT Your brain needs a break every once in a while to run some equations while you’re asleep or daydreaming. I like to email myself a pdf copy of whatever I’m working on at the end of the night and not open it

till the next morning. I find reading a script eight hours later in an email adds an extra layer of distance that can help me assess it with more objective eyes.

TV writing is not for everyone and is rarely as glamorous as the Instagram feeds or Emmy broadcasts would have you believe. Once you are in, though, it’s easier and easier to get more work, and the more experience you have, the more money you make. And what is comedy writing about if it’s not about getting those motherfucking Benjamins?

3. MAKE YOUR BED This small habit reminds you, and anyone who may wander into your room for God knows what reason, that you still take pride in being a human being. It actually does make a difference when you look around in frustration and self-loathing to find one thing that’s clean and orderly. Please trust me on this one.

4. EXERCISE BEFORE YOU WRITE It doesn’t take much. I usually do a set of thirty push-ups and some of those godforsaken body squats. Then my blood is flowing and I feel a sense of accomplishment already. Even stretching is something.

5. CHANGE LOCATIONS While habit is important to writing, so, too, is breaking it. If you’re hitting a wall, go and write somewhere else. Moving the seven feet from my desk to my bed can refresh my eyeballs and downshift my brain to a more relaxed mode where new possibilities arise. It’s important, however, not to change locations in the middle of a streak. This is a common impulse from some deep reptilian spiral of your psyche that would prefer to be basking on a rock than doing good mental work, and it can be devastating to momentum.

6. REWARD YOURSELF Because human beings are no more complicated than dogs who eat their own feces and only learn through a simplistic work-and-reward system, you probably do this already. You have to be your own dominatrix, though, so be strict: If your goal is to write until 10 pm, then sit in front of your computer and write until 10 pm. If it’s to write two thousand words, then write every one of those two thousand words, you worthless, dirty worm. Then, and only then, can you have your reward.