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Writer in a Jar: Interview with Jason Reich Jason Reich -- 10/18/2004  Jason Reich is a two-time Emmy Award-winning writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He is also an occasional sketch and standup comedian whose writing has appeared in Newsday, Jest magazine and on BlackTable.com. Luckily for Salt, he took a break from hard-hitting news to answer questions from Catherine in the installment of the “Writers in a Jar” email interview series. How and when did you realize that you were interested in writing? What previous writing experience did you have before you started working on The Daily Show? I had always enjoyed writing, and in school I knew it was one of my strengths. My first exposure to anything resembling structured comedy writing was in college, when I worked with a sketch group. I loved putting those shows together, and I realized that I had a pretty good understanding of the rhythms of comedy, but I never thought much about doing it for a career. Then one summer I took an internship at a now long-cancelled HBO comedy series and got to work closely with the staff writers there, seeing their process, watching their rewrites, and for the first time getting to see how a TV show actually gets written and produced. It was the first time I think I really said, yeah, that’s what I want to do. How did you get your current job? When this HBO show ended, my supervisors all went off to different jobs, and one of them landed at The Daily Show. She was generous enough to give me a call when they were looking for a writers’ assistant, and I was lucky enough to be unemployed at the time. I went in and interviewed, and got the assistant job. Then, maybe six months to a year into that job, I slowly started getting invited to pitch material and write a few small segments. Those went well, so gradually I was given more and more responsibility and was writing more and more of the show, until after about 2 ˝ years, they decided to promote me to staff writer. Describe a typical day at the office. The writers first meet at 9:30. In that meeting, we scan the newspapers and talk about the day’s big stories. We also watch a video feed that we get from AP that has footage of most of the big news items. Typically, we’ll choose two major stories that seem to be dominating the news, and use those as the basis for our “headline” jokes. We’ll also pitch any ideas we might have for correspondent pieces or produced segments. Once the stories are picked, each writer is assigned a topic, and we go back to our offices and, basically, just get going. Headline jokes are turned in at 1pm; longer, more produced pieces get worked on in the afternoon. All that material eventually becomes the show script, which for the rest of the day gets tweaked and rewritten by the writers, the head writer, and Jon. At 5:15 we rehearse the show, at 6 we tape it, and then we go home. And start drinking. What is your writing process like? How do you come up with new material every single day? end of page 1 [ 1 ] read more ... [ 2 ][ 3 ][ 4 ] |
