I know you think people will be interested in this
But they're not.
I've probably been working on this for two years.
Two years? I mean, usually I write a book in a couple of days.
It's a long time to spend on something
that means absolutely nothing.
But that's what I do,
that's what people want me to do,
is spend a lot of time wastefully,
so that I can then waste their time.
Comedy writing is
something you don't see people doing.
It's a secretive thing: I've never shown anybody
this stuff.
I feel a little funny about it right now,
to tell you the truth.
In comedy, what you do is you think of something
that you think is funny,
and then you go from there.
It's a fun thing to say,
"Pop Tart".
I like the first line
to be funny right away:
When I was a kid
and they invented the pop tart
the back of my head blew right off.
And that got the whole thing started,
that specific part of my head blew off.
Not just my head,
but just the back.
"It was the 60's and we had toast,
"we had orange juice that was frozen
"years in advance, that you had to
"hack away at with a knife
"to get a couple of drops and it felt like
"you're committing a murder
"before you got on your school bus."
Then I talk about shredded wheat, which
was like wrapping your lips
around a wood chipper.
"You'd have breakfast and then you had to take
"two days off for the scars to heal
"so you could speak again."
>> You always write on --
>> Always, yeah, yeah.
>> Have you ever tried to --
>> No
I don't like that cursor flash and
looking at me like,
"So?
What you got?" >> Do you have
a special pen?
Yes, the Bic clear-barrel blue
which I wrote every episode of Seinfeld,
the TV series, with that pen.
Larry and I used to write them longhand.
Oh, cause you can't be in this?
Aw, that's a drag!
That was good timing.
"So in the midst of that dark
"and hopeless moment,
"the Pop Tarts suddenly appear
"in the supermarket
"and we just stared at it
"like an alien spacecraft
"and we were like --
we were like, erhhh
"chimps in the dirt playing with sticks."
What makes that joke
is you get "chimps",
"dirt",
"playing" and "sticks".
In seven words: four of them are funny.
Chimps: chimps are funny.
Then there is the trying to figure out
as a kid, how did they know
that there would be a need for a frosted
fruit-filled heatable rectangle
in the same shape as the box it comes in,
and with the same nutrition
as the box it comes in.
In the midst of that darkness
and hopelessness the Kellogg's
Pop Tart appears
and they always laugh there
because that indicates "Oh he's telling
us a story".
Then my next joke that I want to get to
is "chimps in the dirt with sticks".
So now I'm looking for the connective tissue
that gives me that really tight,
smooth
link, like a jigsaw puzzle link.
And if it's too long, if it's just
that split second too long,
you will shave letters off of words.
You count syllables, you know,
to get it just --
it's more like song writing.
Then I had to figure out
how to end the thing
and that's the hardest part:
if you have a long bit,
the biggest laugh has to be at the end.
It has to be.
It can't be in the middle,
or the beginning.
And this was very daunting.
"Once this pop tart had
"come into the world,
"I didn't understand why we were still
"eating other kinds of food
"because this seemed to be
"definitely the new way: "two in the packet
"and two slots in the toaster.
"Why two, one is not enough,
"three is too many
"and they can't go stale
because they were never fresh."
"They can't go stale
because they were never fresh,"
that took a long time and it --
I know it sounds like nothing.
And it is nothing.
You know, in my world,
the wronger something feels,
the righter it is.
So, to waste this much time
on something this stupid is --
that felt good to me.
It's the exact opposite of what we do
here at the Times.
Which is, we spend appropriate amounts
of time on deserving subjects.
So I'm the exact opposite of that:
inappropriate and undeserving subjects.