Question from a reader!

Todd Jackson writes to ask:

"Lots of people on TV gang up together to write funny stuff for their shows, often with mixed results. But often with great results (see Simpsons, Mr. Show, etc.) I always got the impression that writing funny by committee was the way to go... but obviously print resists this. Is this by nature of the medium or is it possible for a group mind to work well in print?"



Yes, Todd, it is possible for people to team-write print comedy successfully--see the National Lampoon High School Yearbook, or The Onion, or even this recent Daily Show book. What keeps this from happening more frequently is that the amounts of money at issue with any print project--both what publishers are willing to spend, and what they expect to make--are too small to support a team of writers. TV is big, big money. Print just ain't, anymore. Also, remember with a TV show, the well to fill is HUGE--with a show like SNL, the amount of comedy that has to be produced every week is too big, even for an obsessive joke-machine freak like myself.



In print, there is a type of texture that you can't get without team writing; compare the Barry Trotter books with Bored of the Rings. But there's a personal feeling, a unity, with a single author that team writing doesn't produce. I've enjoyed running a team (at the Yale Record) and would like to do it again in the future, but the economics of print have meant that I've had to write singly so far. And I must admit that I enjoy the auteurist aspect of it, where I can take more risks and go odder places than if I was part of a team. Team writing tends toward blandness, and devolution into a house style is always a danger. I'd argue that The Onion has fallen into that trap; in the beginning the writers had a lot of shared experience which gave them an unusual unity of viewpoint.



If you like The Simpsons, you really ought to check out National Lampoon magazine from 1970-75, and perhaps the Harvard Lampoon Big Book of College Life (co-edited by George Meyer). Both of those are excellent examples of team written comedy at a high level.