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This is not a live show, not spontaneous improvision by children, they have scripts written by professionals, so it is a staged and directed play just like a small movie, everything they said was intentionally designed, not children's innocent comments. The group of script writters hired by them include:
Gary Greenberg, Writer;
Molly McNearney, Writer;
Tony Barbieri, Writer;
Jonathan Bines, Writer;
Sal Iacono, Writer;
Jimmy Kimmel, Writer;
Rick Rosner, Writer;
Danny Ricker, Writer;
Eric Immerman, Writer;
Jeff Loveness, Writer;
Josh Halloway, Writer;
Bess Kalb, Writer;
Joelle Boucai, Writer;
Bryan Paulk, Writer
http://www.emmys.com/shows/jimmy-kimmel-live
What It's Like to Write For a Late Night Talk Show
http://splitsider.com/2013/10/what-its-like-to-write-for-a-late
Comedy is an industry. For every performer on stage, there are hundreds of
people working behind-the-scenes. These creative and business jobs, which
exist in all disciplines and levels of comedy, collectively make up the
comedy scene. In this column, we're looking a comedy jobs that are less
visible than that of a performer, and talking to the people who do those
jobs about what they do, how they got there, and how that job has affected
their perspective on comedy.
The past year has brought a crop of new late night talk shows to television,
and that means more opportunities for late night writers. One of the most
sought after comedy writing jobs in the industry, there’s no set route to
becoming a late night writer. Many develop their voices in standup, sketch,
and acting, while others hone their skills in online videos. The Daily Show
’s Elliot Kalan began as an intern at the show, serving as a production
assistant before applying for his writing job, while Jimmy Kimmel Live head
writer Molly McNearney began as an assistant to the show's executive
producer.
The practical path to becoming a comedy writer is much the same as most
writing jobs. "The best piece of advice I have, and it's the simplest, is
just to write," McNearney told Splitsider. "I think a lot of people say they
want to be a writer, but you actually look at their day, and they're not
writing." Being deeply involved the comedy scene, or already working for a
show, are the best ways to find out about job openings, and from there, the
next step is writing a packet of jokes that are appropriate for that
particular show. Nikki and Sara Live co-host Sara Schaefer's tips on looking
for a late night job and actually applying for the gig provide great
insight into the application process.
For a creative job, working on a late night show is fairly structured. But
each show, whether weekly or daily, requires it own specific organization
and routine. On TBS’s Conan, for instance, the show’s writers are divided
into separate teams of monologue and sketch writers. “Our day is a series
of deadlines for turning in what we term "batches" of jokes (because we're
Keebler Elves) and meetings with our team and Conan to winnow down the joke-
herd,” said Rob Kutner, a monologue writer at the show. On the sketch side,
the ideas can be so last minute that "by 11 o'clock, there's a few ideas,"
said writer/director Scott Gairdner. "Writers are dispatched to work on some
of those ideas, and hopefully you have some version of it somehow
miraculously together by 1:30, when the rehearsal starts."
It’s a very different style at ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live. “Every writer is
responsible for writing monologue jokes,” McNearney said, adding that, “
most nights, each writer usually has an assignment for a celebrity guest
coming on the show who wants to do a comedy bit [...] I would say Jimmy
Kimmel Live is known in the industry for putting together really smart,
funny pieces for their guests.” That show also employs four Clip
Researchers, who’s sole job is to watch TV and pull clips.
Over at Comedy Central, The Daily Show writers are responsible for
monitoring their relevant television channels. “When you’re not working on
a particular assignment, you’re watching the news and looking on the
internet for stories to pitch, or angles to pitch on stories on larger news
stories,” said Kalan. “So we all know that there is a government shut down
happening right now, so you wouldn’t write a pitch that was like, ‘Hey,
we should write about the government shut down!’ But if you came up of an
angle for it, you would pitch it.” And each show’s focus determines the
basic research; at MTV’s pop culture heavy Nikki and Sara Live, says writer
Emmy Blotnick, “we meet in the morning to talk about whatever things Miley
Cyrus has dry humped, and then we usually break off and start putting
scripts together for different parts of the show.”
And writing for a regular television show is not quite as free-wheeling as
many imagine. “Working here as a writer is not everybody sitting in one
room and tossing out crazy ideas at each other,” Kalan said. “I think
there’s this feeling that comedy writing works the same way that it did
during The Show of Shows, where they where just sitting in a room acting out
characters and making stuff up.” Gairdner agreed. “I think a lot of
people would be surprised at how much it is less sitting in a room and
joking and figuring out ideas and more sending out emails, telling people
how big the green screen needs to be and that kind of thing.” The biggest
misconception, according to The Daily show’s Zhubin Parang, is “probably
the 30 Rock-suggested idea that we're all schlumpy early-20 slackers who pee
in jars. Most of us are married, and we're generally all social, put-
together people. I've got a plant on my desk and everything.”
Inevitably, working long hours on comedy will change a writer’s perspective
on the genre. “I'm a tougher comedy audience – some might say ‘a dick’,
” said Kutner. “You see and hear so many types and just so MUCH funny all
day long, it takes something just way more insane to really tickle me. And
because of the factory-like nature of what we do, I've usually had my fill
of comedy by days' end.”
But churning out material at such a rate invariably improves its quality in
the long run. “The more you write, especially the more you write comedy,
the less it becomes like this mysterious process that you’re trying to
capture,” Kalan said. “After years of doing it professionally, instead of
staring at it and hoping for some inspiration, it becomes much more of a
systematic process than, ‘Oh well. I guess I’ll sit here until the back of
my brain thinks of something and tells me what it is.’”
“The big thing I've learned is the importance of hard jokes,” said Parang.
“I think in improv and sketch comedy, especially the kind done around New
York, there's a tendency to be intellectual and absurd, which plays well
with the hard-core comedy audiences here (including me), but TV moves way
too fast for that. You need to hit jokes hard and often, and not just trust
that a general comedic concept will be enough to power a segment.”
“I got my start making videos on YouTube,” said Gairdner, who works
primarily on video sketches for Conan. “My speed was approximately one
three-minute video every two months, because I would agonize over every
choice. But now, having made a lot of things for YouTube and a lot of things
for Conan, I've started to get a better perspective on what are the
important fights to fight and what things to let go.”
Although late night talk shows are are amongst the oldest, and in many ways,
most stable formats on television, they have have also had to adapt swiftly
to the new media landscape. For one thing, late night shows no longer exist
exclusively in their time slots. "12:30 late night is not a 12:30 show
anymore,” former Late Night with Jimmy Fallon writer Anthony Jeselnik told
Splitsider last year. “It’s a 24-hour show now, because everything is
online the next day.” And shows now must contend with more competition on
television and the Internet. “I'm envious of people who got to work on
these shows 20 years ago, when there were a quarter as many of these shows,
and there weren't all of these websites too, because you're just constantly
competing against other shows and them getting to the idea first,” said
Gairdner. “Topicality and the shelf life of parody targets is getting
slimmer and slimmer because there a thousand of these shows, all waiting to
jump on something and parody it.”
For many writers, that breakneck schedule is both the best and worst part of
the gig. "It is a real grind, but every day is a new day," said McNearney.
"Your successes are short lived, but then so are your failures. So you can
have a great bit on the show and you can really enjoy it for about an hour
and then you have to start thinking about tomorrow's show. But if you didn't
do that well, that's also short lived and you have the next day to prove
yourself."
"Every job is a job and it stops being magical after a moment," said Kalan.
"And you have to remind yourself like, no, this is really amazing. Things
that seem magical or impossible to you become mundane reality. You lose
perspective and you get lost in the non-amazing parts of things and you
forget how amazing comedy is or how lucky anyone who gets to do it is."
Elise Czajkowski is an Associate Editor at Splitsider. She promises to start
tweeting more.
Photo via Getty. |
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发表于 2013-10-28 13:01
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发表于 2013-10-28 14:26
