You’ve submitted more Shouts & Murmurs essays than you can remember. You write spec scripts for TV comedies all the time. You’re constantly releasing Vines, YouTube videos, and tweets. Your dream is to be hired as a full-time comedy writer.
But what does it really take? What are you doing wrong? What are you doing right? Of course, it’s about much more than being funny.
If you want to land a job in comedy, take the following advice from some of the top humor writers in the business.
Follow through with your ideas
According to Django Gold, a digital writer and producer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and former senior writer for The Onion, funny ideas alone aren’t going to get you anywhere.
“You have to remember that comedy is an industry like any other,” he says, “and that the people who run the show are in the business of creating products for their customers.”
You have to produce a funny commodity to gain any sort of attention. This can be a script, a filmed sketch or pilot, an essay, or a stand-up routine, says Gold.
“But it has to be something that a would-be employer can look at to determine whether you’ve got the right stuff,” he says.
For instance, Brandon Scott Wolf got heat from DateBrandonScottWolf.com, an online dating site parody that went viral. He also started a Twitter account called @HireMeSNL, where he posted monologue jokes every day for nine months. He ended up writing for Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update segment for three seasons, and is now a writer at Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris.
Even though he’s successful, Wolf says that behind the scenes, there is a lot of struggle involved.
“Aspiring and professional humor writers alike are going to fail,” he says. “A lot. I fail all of the time. It’s important to realize that failing is a necessary part of the creative process. Not every joke, script, or idea will work. Just remember to keep trying, learn from mistakes, and fail forward.”
Find a good manager
Sarah Afkami, who wrote for FX’s Wilfred and is a story editor on Comedy Central’s new show Legends of Chamberlain Heights, says she got her latest job thanks to her literary manager, Michael Pelmont at New Wave.
Gold says he started working at The Late Show because his manager alerted him about the job.
“Having a manager or agent is pretty much a prerequisite to learning about these types of job openings,” he says.
Managers are not only going to know about the opportunities, but they’ll also be there to encourage you and guide your career path.
“If you’re serious about writing comedy professionally you’ll eventually meet a producer, manager, or an agent that thinks you have talent,” says Wolf. “However that happens, make sure you have monologue jokes, sketches, original pilots, screenplays, an hour of stand-up, thousands of tweets, and a lot of ideas at the ready.”
Network like crazy
If you’re uncomfortable with going out there and talking to people, then humor writing is not for you. To succeed in any sort of job in entertainment, you have to network.
“You need to get your foot in the door somehow, which means at some point, you may need to ask a complete or more-or-less stranger for a favor,” says Gold. “That’s okay. The person you ask will most likely say ‘no’ or ignore you.”
When you’re writing your email, Gold recommends doing more than just telling a bunch or jokes. Also, don’t follow up your initial correspondence with several more insistent correspondences, “displaying varying degrees of entitlement.”
“Then we’ll be pissed,” Gold says. “So keep it to one polite, brief, considerate email. And don’t send that email to me.”
Write a ton
You don’t get funny or good at your job by writing infrequently. It’s crucial to write all the time, says stand-up comedian and writer for Someecards Myka Fox.
“I guess it’s too obvious to say to write a lot,” she says. “But that’s what worked for me. There was a two-week period I went through after a breakup and had no job, where all I did was take headlines from the news or clichés from a book and see if I could twist them into something with a punchline. Of course, that’s just a practice thing, like learning scales of a musical instrument. You can’t go around playing scales and expect people to pay you.”
If you don’t want to write about current news or the outside world, Afkami says you should look inward.
“Don’t be afraid to be real and use material from your life,” Afkami says. “The deeper you dig, the more relatable your story becomes.”
Everyone we spoke to says comedy writing is tough to break into. To make any sort of impression, you have to be extremely ambitious.
“There are a depressingly vast number of individuals out there who are competing for a small pool of jobs,” says Gold. “If you hope to stick out from this crowded field, you need to work harder than said field.”
Photo credit: Lauren Kallen