Comedy has always been about punching up.

It's a power struggle game comedy.

It's about taking your world back and reorganizing it so that you are not a powerless person in it.

That's what is so fun about it, is it's a real reorganization of stuff that bothers you.

You've defined the narrative, and once you define the narrative, you're not the victim of it anymore.

You've changed how anyone sees it.

So that's how great is that.

Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Downe. My guest, Merrill Marco,

is an Emmy Award-winning television writer and celebrated humorist. She's worked on shows ranging

from Sex and the City to Moonlighting, but is probably best known for her association with

the David Letterman Show, where she was the head writer from the show's inception in 1981 until the late 1980s.

She's also the author of nine books, most recently a graphic memoir called We Saw Scenery, the Early Diaries of Merrill Marco.

In this book, she draws from an enormous cache of diaries she kept from

approximately the fourth grade through her first year of college. By turns hilarious and

heartbreaking, the book has her older self looking back bemusedly and often cringingly at her

younger self and wondering about the nature of memory and why our brains store some experiences

in accessible places and hide others away where they're easily forgotten.

In this conversation, Merrill talks about the book, about growing up female and funny,

about harnessing that funniness into a career, and about working with and being the longtime

girlfriend of David Letterman.

She also talks about what it's like to pursue comedy in this era of heightened sensitivities

and the myth that you're not allowed to be funny anymore.

...