This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

If you listened to our show last year, you may have heard the voice of Elliot Kalin, who was my co-host for a series we did on the book, The Power Broker.

And as far as I'm concerned, Elliot was the perfect co-host. He's smart, knowledgeable, easy to talk to, and he's also very, very funny. Because when he's not moonlighting

at 99PI, Elliot is a professional comedy writer. And over the years, he has written comedy

in just about every medium there is. He worked for over a decade at The Daily Show with John Stewart,

where he eventually became the show's head writer. He did stand-up. He writes comic

books. And currently, he is the co-host of the original bad movie podcast, The Flop House,

and the showrunner for the forthcoming Netflix Ghostbusters animated series. We want to have

Elliot back on the show because he has now written a book of his own, not so much about his

career, but about his craft. He says,

when you write jokes for a living, it takes a lot more than just having a good sense of humor.

Instead, you have to have a system. The book is called joke farming, how to write comedy and other

nonsense. And he's here to talk about it with us. Elliot Kalin, it is so nice to have

you back. Thank you, Roman. It's great to be back. Thank you so much for having me on to promote a book that I make some money off of. After we did so much to put some money in Robert Caro's pockets, I appreciate my getting a shot at it. That's right. That's right. So let's get, you know, down to the basics, the very, very beginning.

You know, what on earth basics of very, very beginning.

You know, what on earth made you think that you could write jokes for a living?

The great thing about writing jokes for a living is that less that you need someone to tell you, you can do it.

And more of that no one can tell you not to do it.

And it helped that I grew up also watching television in the early 1990s when there was still a lot of stand-up comedy on television in particular.

Like you and I, I'm a little older than you, but there was this phase of like cable television where all of a sudden you saw somebody standing in from a brick wall, like as part of television, you know.

And now we live in a world where it feels like there's more comedy than not comedy.

So now it seems quaint, but it felt like there was so much comedy around that this was something you could do.

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