Hi, I'm RJ from Tacoma, Washington. I'm Ray Vaughan from West Virginia. Hello. This is John from Brooklyn. The sound of young America is an independent production supported by listeners like me, like me, like me.

If you'd like to support the show as I did visit MaximumFund.org and click on donate.

I'm Jesse Thorne live on tape from my house in Los Angeles. It's the sound of young America from MaximumFund.org and PRI public radio international.

It's the sound of young America. I'm Jesse Thorne. My guest on the program Mike Sachs is a writer for Vanity Fair, among other outlets, and the author of the new book, and here's the kicker. Conversations with 21 top humor writers on their craft.

It consists of interviews with, when Mike says top humor writers, he's not kidding. Many of the greatest humor writers of the past 50 years or so, ranging from, say, Dan Mazer, who co-created Borat and Ali G, with Sasha Baron Cohen, all the way back to folks like Irving Brecker, who helped write many of the Marks Brothers greatest films.

If you're a comedy nerd like me, it's a heck of a read. Mike, welcome to the sound of young America. It's great to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me.

I once talked to a book agent and I asked her, well, what kind of book do you think I should write? She had told me that I should write a book.

And she said, well, you certainly can't write a book that's like your radio show because no one wants to read that book.

So on this radio show, one of the big things we do is interview comedians and comedy writers, probably a lot of folks who are more famous, if not more accomplished, than the folks on the cover of this book.

So I can only imagine that it must have been like a borderline ideological commitment on your part to put together this book. Why did you want to write it?

Well, there's nothing really out there like it, you know, the books that I grew up looking for when I was in the comedy as a kid, or mostly books about your show of shows and Saturday Night Live, which was great, but there's only so many books that can be written about that.

And when I looked into it further, I saw that there were no books with contemporary humor writers.

So this was a few years ago and I tried to get it published with through my agent with various publishers and they all said no.

And it was only because of a friend of mine, John Warner, who at that time was an editor at McSweeney's, that he was also an editor at an imprint at writer's digest books that he pushed it through. If it wasn't for him, this never would have been made.

Why was it important to you to talk to comedy writers?

Well, I grew up wanting to be a comedy writer myself and it was such a mysterious world. I never really read about, I was more interested in really the writers for Letterman than I was for Letterman himself.

The writing staff, when I was growing up in that show, was just top notch, was amazing. And I always used to look for articles about those people. Who were they? How did they get into that business? It was such a foreign world to me.

It was almost like something that would take place on the moon. I had no idea how to get from where I was to where they were.

I thought by talking to these people, it would sort of lessen the mystery about it.

Did you have preconceptions or ideas based on your career as a writer and sometimes as a humor writer about what these people would be like when you got to talk to them?

Well, I read so many interviews. I did so much research for each person up to 20 to 30 hours per person.

...