Okay, you ready to start this show?

Your host to the evening is a really funny dude.

I forgot his last name, but I've seen him before and he's really funny.

Give it up for Mike.

Coming to you live on tape from week 82 of quarantine. from my 8 year old son's bedroom at my palatial home in rapidly gentrifying Culver City adjacent California boasting completely obstructed views of absolutely nothing.

This is the Tully show.

I am your host Mike Tully.

Joining me today, a writer who has enjoyed a varied and enviable career on stage in print and on camera

perhaps most notably as co-creator of its Gary Shanling show and as one for the original writers for Saturday Night Live.

His latest book is the memoir Laugh Lines, My Life Helping Funny People Be Funier,

released earlier this year and on sale now as an audio book.

Hello and welcome Ellen Zweibel.

How you doing, Mike?

Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for coming by.

This book is right in my wheelhouse. First of all, I'm like everybody a big Saturday Night Live fan. I loved it's Gary Shanling show and I also love how it represents an era of show business that I feel like is a bygone era of show business. I love

Borsch Belt and I don't I'm still not even really clear on what the Friars Club is I just

know I really like it. You know it's interesting. One of the reasons I wrote the book was I realize that I may be one of the few, if not only people who wrote for all these different eras of comedy over the

last 45-ish years starting with the with the Bosch belt where I got $7 a joke, writing for those

comedians up there. Then S&L and Shanling, which was the first cable comedy to be

nominated for an Emmy and the work I did with Billy

Crystal on Broadway so it's been varied and it's a lot of wonderful very

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