First of all, thank you. I’m glad that the question is phrased so that it’s assumed that I write
funny stuff everyday. I appreciate that. I think if you do it and if you write for a strip show,
which is what Letterman is, a show that’s on 5 days a week, you don’t think about it in terms of
funny. If I ever thought about what I had to do at the beginning of everyday, I don’t think I could
do it. With comedy writing, especially writing on a daily basis, it’s a muscle that you work and,
if you keep working it, you can do it. What Woody Allen once said about joke writing is, if you
can do it, there’s nothing to it. And I believe that. Mostly, with the Letterman Show, I’ve been a
monologue writer. I just write jokes for the most part, though I work on some other stuff on the
show. When I first started the show in 1991 and they told me I have to write 15 jokes a day I
thought, how am I going to do this? I just tried to get through that day. And then within about 6
months, I wasn’t writing 15 jokes a day; I was writing 25 or 30. It got to the point where I was
writing 50 or 60 jokes a day. And they’re not all great. Actually, very few of them are great, but
that’s the thing about comedy is that you have to write a lot. You have to make mounds and
mounds of coleslaw to get one good serving. That’s what we do on The Letterman Show. We
just create a lot of content and ideally the best content gets on the show.
Here’s the thing about The Late Show With David Letterman, the writers and Dave Letterman.
We write a lot of stuff that’s funny. We write a lot of stuff that’s pretty good. We write a lot of
stuff that’s lame. But invariably, night after night, the funniest moments in the show are Dave
reacting in real time to his surroundings. It’s something that you can not write in preparation for
the show. When Dave comes out at the beginning of the night, the writer’s job is to put him in a
situation where, if he needs it, it’s there you know the monologue is there if he needs it, the top
10 is there if he needs it, couple of good tape pieces are there if he needs it, and then he can just
relax and just react in the moment. I have a friend, Kelly Rogers, who I started with, who was a
great comic that people don’t know about. And Kelly Rogers said something so profound. He
said your act is for the nights when you’re not funny. That’s what the writers supply to Dave.
They supply him an act for those nights when he doesn’t feel funny and I have yet to see a night
like that.