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Comedy Writing

Talking Shop with Some Female Late Night Writers at the WGA West Diversity Panel

by | September 22nd, 2011

Last Friday night, the WGA West brought together a bunch of funny ladies for yet another serious discussion on the issue of women in late night comedy. Nell Scovell, who has written for Vanity Fair about her experience writing for Late Night with David Letterman, moderated the panel that included former and current late night writers.

Unlike what happened at a similar panel of different women in late night writing last May, there was never any commentary about how the women were funny because they "wrote like men." However, there was discussion about the role that gender plays in the tone of the humor. Scovell pointed out [...]

Comedy Writing

How Streaming Video and DVR Raise the Bar for Sitcoms

by | July 6th, 2011

I have no clue when my favorite television shows are on. Despite loyally following five or six different half-hour comedies over the past season, I have never actually turned on a television to do so. In fact, I don’t even own a TV — like many of my manically busy and digitally-incubated young brethren, I am perfectly comfortable catching up with my favorite shows using downloaded episodes or streaming video. For those more traditional than I, DVR and TiVo contraptions allow viewers to easily circumvent the time constraints of live television while keeping close tabs on their darlings of the tube. For audiences, this means less life-planning around TV programming [...]

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