244 | Brent Forrester's (The Office, The Simpsons) Comedy Writing Masterclass

TAKE BRENT'S CLASS: https://www.brentforrester.com/webinar

Brent Forrester wasn't naturally funny, and he's the first person to admit it. And yet, when Brent was in his early 20s, he studied comedy like a science, and it’s fostered one of the most successful comedy writing careers of anyone working today. Listen to some of Brent's inside tips when it comes to cracking the code on comedy. And focus on plosives. Always plosives.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Lorien: Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Lorien McKenna, and today we're excited to welcome Brent Forrester to the show who has an incredible comedy career. Brent won his first comedy writing Emmy at age 25 for his work on the Ben Stiller Show. He wrote for The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and was a writer, producer, and director at NBC's The Office for seven seasons.

He's written for Late Night with Conan O'Brien, HBO's Mr. Show, and The Larry Sanders Show, and he continues to work as head writer on Netflix shows like Judd Apatow's Love and Steve Carell's Space Force, along with Amazon shows like Greg Daniels' Upload and People of Earth. Yeah, we're gonna talk about comedy, but before we do that, we are going to talk about our weeks or what we like to call adventures in screenwriting.

So usually when I do this I talk about how my week is okay, up and down and bad and good. So today I thought I would come out strong with something really amazing that happened, which is last night I cut seven hours of sleep in a row. Which is amazing for me because I am not sleeping because of, life and menopause and life and career and the industry right now. But I was like, seven hours of sleep in a row, I will take it.

Brent: Wow.

Lorien: So, and then I've also been writing a lot for the time I have. And so, but what's happening is I'm working on a feature and it's broad and big and I'm trying to be as funny as I can and like, it's so funny and I'm laughing out loud and I am like entertaining myself and I'm pitching to my husband and then I just go to bed. I'm like, yes. I'm like, I'm doing it. And then I look at my, some of my writing the next day and I'm like, why did I think it was funny? Kinda like that I guess you had to be there kind of way. Like somehow I'm not in on the joke anymore? Even though it's just the next day. And then all those voices are like it's broken. You gotta stop and abandon it. And I'm having to really flex this muscle of like, stay the fuck in it. And it is so hard 'cause it's so easy for me to go, I'll just go work on one of these other three TV pitches I have or pay my taxes or something else. And I am forcing myself to stay in it.

And then I get right back in it and I'm like, so funny. And this is so great. And then it's like this epic repeating pattern and it is exhausting. And it makes me, this is why it's physically exhausting to write even though I'm just sitting somehow. 'Cause it's like all the internal stuff is like churning so hard. And it's hard to do this right now, working so hard, when these are all on spec for me, right? Like I'm writing this feature to like, I wanna prove that I have this big broad comedy voice and I can write ensemble and action. Which is totally outside my usual jam.

And then I'm also working on these TV specs. But it's still, pitches, right? So it's still like, it's for free, essentially. I have a pitch set up for a show that I'm really excited about, but it's hard to keep my motivation going.

Brent: Yes.

Lorien: Right now in the industry, when I keep hearing nobody's buying anything. Nobody's buying anything. It's like, but I'll be the one.

Brent: Sure!

Lorien: But I'll be the one, but it's still rough and it's just this mental game of perseverance and really hoping I get sleep tonight, too.

Brent: Good. Well, the story you're telling is one that every writer can relate to. 100% of all writers who have aspired to write probably anything, but certainly for the entertainment industry, have experienced what you're doing. And it's worth acknowledging, we are entrepreneurs and all entrepreneurs have to do this very, very difficult thing, which is to put in a lot of time on something that we don't know whether it will sell or not.

And in fact, most things that we put that time into do not sell. How do we keep pushing this rock up the hill? Well, I would say number one thing for me is you take solace in the fact that there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of us around the world. But not an infinite number, we're still a tiny percentage. But there's an army of us and we can always take solace from each other. So I love hearing your story just because it reminds me that we're all in it together that way. Whether you're at the beginning, at the end, or somewhere in the middle, we're all going through that.

So good for you. It's amazing that you continue to get your spirits up. And doing it alone is hard. The big thing for me is if I can get any kind of social element to the writing, it really cuts the edge off those ups and downs. Your ups are real, people. If you're writing and you make yourself laugh, that is rare and it's great. You're onto something. Okay. It's real. Okay.

Now that experience of the next day, what was I thinking? That happens more when you're writing alone. Those kind of like, ugh, lurches from, how could I have thought it was great? And now it doesn't-- you don't lurch as much when you're working with friends. And so I do recommend that, if nothing else, get a fricking writer's group. You probably have one, but connect with your fellow writers. And I push a lot of oral storytelling on writers, whether they're in my writing room or in the classes I lead, I push 'em to connect with each other and it really works for that psychological aspect. You're never gonna feel despair, you will feel the opposite. You will feel like, God dammit, I fucking love being a writer. Because of this! Because of the pain and the struggle and this thing that only we can understand. How can something have been laughed out loud yesterday and now I don't know if I should even continue?

Lorien: Right.

Brent: Only writers know that. Only artists know that. And boy do we know it, and so let's celebrate it together.

Lorien: Yeah, I miss being in the room. My fear about like talking through things that-- I mean, yes, I totally agree. I like to do this 'cause that's when I start pitching something and I realize, wait, there are no stakes.

Wait, what's the plot again? So you catch these things when you're pitching it out loud and you figure out what-- I was so excited about this thing but I got distracted. With this feature I'm still so in the muck of churning out and through the outline that I feel like if I talk to someone about it, that I'll get so distracted about talking about it and then I'll just be talking about it instead of doing the work.

And right now I have to feel, I feel like I have to stay in it before I bring it out to the outside world. 'Cause I can do that. I'll be like, oh, it's so great, and I start talking about all the things I'm doing and then I'm like, wait a minute.

So for me, it's like an exercise right now and it's really hard. Really, really hard. And I'm trying to stay in it until I have something solid and then I can start, is this funny

to you? Yeah.

Brent: No, it sounds like what you're bringing to the game is you have discipline and you put writing sessions on your calendar and if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you eventually get there.

Most people will drop out on a long project. And screenplays are long relative to half hour pilots. I've learned that the hard way and it looks like you have two. I mean, you're writing a screenplay, you're writing four original pilots back to back, or maybe five depending on the length of your screenplay. So it's just much harder. Good for you if you have the endurance, it's like running a marathon relative to a 5K.

Lorien: Well, so meanwhile I'm writing TV pitches 'cause those things come to me much more easily, and it's like, I'll just pitch that show. Anyway so how was your week?

Brent: The ups and downs. The downs are more interesting than the ups and my reaction to the downs, I think. I mean, the good news is for me I have a pitch, that the networks will still see me for a pitch. I take this as a huge win. My credentials are good, right? You've heard my credentials, but it doesn't mean they last forever. And there are people my age who can't get in the room to pitch. So, CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC will all hear me pitch at the end of April, middle of April, 20, 21st, 22nd. That's huge. What a win for me. Okay, great. I have a workplace show I'm going out with.

Now I have a second position workplace show that's even more interesting than the first position. I've been pitching it to friends. I've made a full deck of it. It's a workplace show in a historical reenactors tourist site where they pretend to be George Washington.

Lorien: Oh, I love it.

Brent: I've centered it around a guy who plays Thomas Jefferson and his best friend, the guy who plays Jupiter Evans, who was famously the man servant of Jefferson. I poured my heart into this, was just about to start writing the script, had outlined it. And then I hear from a friend, oh, Trey Parker of South Park just finished shooting a movie version of this. Where it's a slave reenactor, as he calls it, at a living history site.

And I had to face the truth that this project of mine is done. It is done, man. This movie's coming out July 4th.

Lorien: Yeah.

Brent: Novelty of my premise is over. Okay. I mean, it was painful to people who knew me when I told them, that's how painful that is for us, right? But I just decided to embrace the tragedy. Just be like, hey, I'm strong. I've been through this before. Don't run from it, just experience the fact that this is probably dead. Now what? And how I reacted was I just kept asking myself, what is so painful to lose here? What's so painful is I was in love with this relationship between these two middle-aged dudes, a black guy and a white guy who were best friends.

And I decided to keep that in a new premise. Right. That was the first brilliant move I made. And then a few other things. I had this fantasy of I wanna run a writing staff that's fully diverse. Like DEI is apparently dead, so, well, whatever. I mean, I, I'm not kidding.

That was, I realized how when I lost this project, that I had lost this thing that was important to me. The vision of getting a bunch of my old Simpsons writers friends and training up some less privileged writers in a multiracial cast, multiracial writing staff. It was painful to watch that die.

And I thought, why does it have to die? I can have another project and keep everything I like except my premise. So the lessons of a painful experience are for me what did you lose? Can you hone in on what matters to you through experiencing the tragedy of what you've lost? That's my week.

Lorien: I think that's such a great perspective 'cause that happens to all of us. Right. We either didn't move as quickly as we should have on our project, or we weren't aware of it, and a lot of emerging writers come up against this. They have this great idea and this great thing, and then somebody bigger, more established is doing it and what to do with it.

And I think it's, how similar is it, right? Like really? But also what can you take from it? What do you lose? What was the most important thing to you in the project? Which is the same thing you have to ask yourself and know during any project, especially when things get hard.

Right. What is this actually about and keep that the center of it. And so I think that's such a great, healthy response. Although it's still hard and sucks. You're still allowed to have the like, God damnit! Fuck. Right?

Brent: Yes. Yes. Yeah. I'm experiencing the thing you are afraid of when you are working on spec. Is that you'll put a lot of time to something and it'll go nowhere. I just had that this week. I had so much time. And yet I am not overly suffering. I had one day of pain and now I'm on to the next thing. And I believe I'm in that wonderful thing they call the abundance mindset, where I truly believe and am experiencing the fact that I can come up with something else very quickly that I like almost as much.

So I haven't really lost that much, and it's allowing me to be nimble and adapt to what people actually wanna buy from me.

Lorien: Yeah. Having multiple projects is good for that, and not getting stuck on one thing, which is what can happen. There's that balance of how much am I focusing on this? Where am I spending my time? And it's an unknowable answer. I don't know. I'm just winging it. I think we all are right?

Like, what's happening today. I got a pitch, I've been working on a show for three years. This IP, it's animated, and I was ready to take it out right before the strike, and then we couldn't. And then I pitched it again somewhere recently and now I have three pitches coming up. And this will be it.

Like these are the last-- I hope it's not it. I love this project so much. Right? It's that, like, this is everything. So I'm asking myself if it doesn't go, what am I losing? And so how can I take that? That's helping me actually. Thank you.

Brent: Good. Well, keep it until you actually have crossed that, that line.

Lorien: Oh, I have to prepare. I have to prepare for the bad situation.

Brent: Oh, you do? Okay.

Lorien: I have to. I'm always looking up in the sky for the big black boot to come crush me in the face. Like when we went on lockdown for the pandemic, I was like, well, here it is, I've been expecting this.

Brent: Oh, interesting. Okay.

Lorien: I'm one of those. I knew we were gonna get here. It's happened.

Brent: Ah, okay. Interesting. McKenna, you remind me of some of my great Jewish writer friends who suffer from the PTSD culturally passed down from the Holocaust, but you got some.

Lorien: My maiden name is Rifkin.

Brent: Ah, there we go.

Lorien: If that helps you at all. But I'm glad it comes through.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah. Well, welcome. Well, good for you, you've got cultural PTSD and I hope it, I hope it works for you.

Lorien: We'll see. Okay, so let's talk about comedy. Okay. So, we've always heard this thing about dialogue, right? You either have it or you don't. And I have, I think it's craft as much as anything else, right? Some people have an affinity for it, an ear for it, but other people need to develop the craft of it and develop tools and skills. I suspect you feel similarly about comedy? But tell me about your approach to the craft of comedy.

Brent: The craft of comedy. There's a few things that you need to know about me as a comedy writer. I am a living example of the fact that comedy writing can be learned, even though it is often presented as this magical art form that cannot be taught. You're either born with it or not. Of course the people want you to believe that.

But it is true that you can learn to be a comedy writer for sure. I did not start out as a funny person. Nobody ever said that I was funny growing up. I was trying to be a short story writer, graduated from college, and then discovered that there was no economy in short story writing. And I pivoted. I had done no training in anything except taken writing classes.

And then I thought, well, is there any way to support myself as a writer? I took an internship as a journalist, would've become a journalist. I took a class in soap opera writing, and I would've become a soap opera writer. Thankfully, I had no connections in soap opera writing. I had no connections anywhere. Except one, which was my friend's mom was a comedy writer.

And she became my first mentor. I lucked into Susan Harris, the creator of The Golden Girls, as my first mentor.

Lorien: Swoon. Swoon.

Brent: Yeah, baby. Yeah, yeah. One of the greats. One of the greats. And she was my entrée into this art form. I really had not even watched television until after college. My mom hated TV and wouldn't have one in the house. So, there we go. There you go.

Lorien: My best revenge was being a TV writer.

Brent: Right? Well, there you go. Maybe like me you fell for books and became a writer, that's what happened to me. And then I made this pivot, so. It was only after college I even started watching television. This is just a way of saying, hey, if you have watched television, you got more of a advantage than me in writing TV. Susan gave me my first great lesson in comedy writing.

She read my fruddy Murphy Brown spec and said, "three things, Forrester. One: silly isn't funny." That was brutal to learn that. She said write the way people talk, meaning all of my dialogue was contrived. And then she said, the great one, write about what is difficult for you, even painful and trust that it will come out funny.

That was a lesson that Susan intuitived, no one even taught her that. And that's how this secretary raising a child on her own, became one of the greatest comedy writers of her age. Intuitively she knew that, she wrote a spec script that Garry Marshall saw, the guy who created Mork & Mindy, and Laverne & Shirley, and Happy Days. He saw Susan Harris' first spec script and said, who is Susan Harris? She writes dialogue better than all of these guys. And put her on his staff of Love, American Style.

And all the other writers who are all men said, argh, this is a mistake, Garry. Susan's gonna blow it when you give her a script. And he goes, if her script comes in bad, I'll rewrite it myself. And her script was so good, they gave her five more that season.

 Self-taught fricking genius and that was her secret. Write about what is difficult for you, even painful and trust it will come out funny. Never heard a better piece of advice. That's always been the guide for me.

Lorien: That's great. So, you worked with her? Did you work with her?

Brent: Yeah. I figured out what she was trying to teach me and I wrote a spec episode of Blossom that was built on the pain I was feeling around living with my older brother, who, unlike me, was sort of unambitious and I was ashamed of my brother. And it's still painful to talk about.

And I put all that pain into an episode of Blossom. Where Blossom's brother comes to work at the cafeteria and she's ashamed. And Susan gave me a job, she gave me a job as a writer on a show called Nurses. A crappy multicam. I was there six months. The entire staff was fired, me included, because the ratings were so low.

And they put all of, Susan had like five shows at the time. She put all of her good writers from another show called Good & Evil and put them on Nurses. And we all were all out of work again. I had to then break into TV a second time. And that was when I really hunkered down, really started watching TV. Watched a lot of Roseanne for about a year and just kept analyzing Roseanne.

Every time a punchline would make me laugh, I'd write it down and try to break it down like a little scientist and figure out what is comedy? What is comedy? What's the structure? And so that's when the comedy science began. After a year I had a spec script that was a showcase of all of my little joke writing techniques in Roseanne form.

A spec Roseanne that I got into the hands of another unemployed writer named Maya Forbes. Maya came straight from Harvard Lampoon to Hollywood, and she was having a hot year. CAA represented her. She got hired on this show, The Larry Sanders Show. But along the way, she had an audition at this show called The Ben Stiller Show.

She said, I'm passing on Ben Stiller, but Ben Stiller and his producing partner, Judd Apatow said, well, anybody else out there who's got a good spec script? And she said, look at this guy Brent Forrester, he's got a good Roseanne. And that Roseanne spec got me on that staff. And that was really where my career began to take off because I was in with a lot of good writers.

Bob Odenkirk ran the show. He was the guy who'd go on to be Better call Saul. Right. Ben, Judd Apatow, Janeane Garofalo, tastemaker of her time. And David Cross, another of the underground LA comics. He actually came from Boston, but they were all kind of making their way in the underground LA comedy scene.

Lorien: That's awesome. In this earlier part of your career, like the beginning and then breaking in, what was like a really amazing day?

Brent: You're talking between the two, when I had a year of just writing spec work? It was difficult. Is that what you're looking at, that period?

Lorien: Well, just when you're thinking about your early life as a writer. What would it, what was , like now you have a different kind of great day.

Brent: Yeah.

Lorien: What would've been a great day? You're in your twenties. You've been in it, you're out of it. You're back in it.

Brent: When I finally got on the staff of the Ben Stiller Show that was amazing because it was a group of young writers who seemed to have the keys to the kingdom.

Before that writing on my own, living in Park La Brea, that weird, gentrified housing complex in West Hollywood. What was a great day? I don't know. I was very nervous, the way you talk about it. I really had to push myself every day to write, and it was hard.

It was stressful because of what you talk about, the uncertainty. You're working as hard as you can, but you don't know if it's going anywhere. That's a very difficult thing to do.

Lorien: Yeah. Do you, has that gone away for you?

Brent: Not entirely. No, not at all. Not at all. There's a huge amount of it that still accompanies this process because I'm at the stage now where I've done all the writing jobs all the way up through running other people's shows. And so for me, the brass ring is create my own show. And that does put me back, a little bit more as a entrepreneur. I've gotta come up with a show, come up with a pitch, work my ass off, not knowing whether it will pay off. And I'm telling you, it's the same amount of hustle. Okay. So I, I said the good part of my week is that CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox wanna see me.

To get there I had to do a pitch, and the pitch was what I did to get an actor to do it with me. Okay. The number of practice pitches I did in order to get that actor, sixty. Six zero. I did them all on Zoom. Every single one of those pitches was with a different human being. I teach a class, so I have like 3000 students I've met, and I just reached out and said, anybody wanna hear a pitch?

Hundreds of them raise their hands. So I had this energy stream of people who would listen to me. Yeah. I was nervous before every one of those pitches. And I pushed myself to do it 60 times. Wow. That's my answer to like, do I still feel that? Yeah. What's driving me? It's the same energy.

Lorien: Yeah. When we were pitching in person, I have a lot of nervous energy before a pitch. Back then it was person, right? So you had to like, get dressed and find parking and do the whole thing. I can tell you who has the best bathroom in Hollywood. And it is Hulu. Because for a lot of reason, but mostly they play really loud rock and roll music in their bathrooms, and the doors fully close.

Click, bottom top to bottom. So Netflix is awesome. Love a Netflix bathroom, right? But like, I'm sorry but it's the rock and roll music that Hulu was playing. This is back pre pandemic, but like for me, that was like, yes, thank you so much.

Brent: That's funny.

Lorien: That's my-- anyway, so I get it. The thing about selling a show, right? You pitch, you practice, you pitch, you practice. They're like, great. Write the pilot. And you're like, yes, I did it. I sold the pilot, run my own show. And then you write the pilot and they're like. That's happened to me five times.

Brent: Wow. Okay. Because you're a veteran. Amazing. Amazing.

Lorien: But it's still like, I love these shows and these characters and I worked on them and like I could see it happening and I'm gonna move to New York and run this show, and I, you know, and then it's like, ugh. So it's like this success in a way, but it's also this not a success. I don't know if it's a failure, but like my show didn't go. It's hard. And I'm right back in it every day.

Brent: You need to reframe those as successes. Those are huge successes. To get a pilot sold is huge. The common denominator of all artists is a need for validation. Of our talent. And it's so important to get that validation, but you've gotten the validation and it's been insufficiently satisfying for you.

That's good. That just means you gotta keep going and you need more validation. I think that's common. I feel like for artists, it's important to remember that other people making our work is not the only kind of validation or even necessarily the most important. When you're a young artist, that. You talk about like the Ben Stiller show, hanging with Dave Cross when he was 29. It was quite obvious that what mattered was a certain kind of quality of what you were doing. And the rejection of the industry and the masses was often a feather in your cap. So I feel it's valuable to keep that in mind.

Let me ask you something, Lorien. Do you make any short content that you shoot and edit on your phone? And or any stuff that you could put on a stage? Tell me about that aspect of your life as an artist.

Lorien: Oh, that's so funny. My therapist last week was like, why don't you take one of your scripts and put it on TikTok? I'm like, I don't know how to TikTok. But like she had the same thing, like how to get your work out there. And yeah, I have a play and I have always been working on a one woman show. I've been in rehearsal for it my whole life, right? But no, nothing. I don't have time for that right now. What I'm working on right now, why? Tell me why.

Brent: Why am I asking this? Because if you embrace this reality that we as artists are seeking validation, I think that getting that validation with some immediacy from time to time is very valuable. And motivational.

Lorien: A little dopamine hit.

Brent: Yeah. Yes. The reality of validation. If you make something and you show it to some people whose taste you respect, and they go, that's great. That's real to you. And it's important to get that from time to time. I think it's also super valuable strategically to have stuff that you can show people. So I'm encouraging all artists to remember.

Lorien: That's a good idea.

Brent: The technology, look. Okay, so now I'm speaking generationally to you. Yeah, I had to figure out how to edit on my desktop. Really not that hard. You can always pay young people to teach you how to do this stuff and not knowing how to do TikTok is unfortunately not an excuse. Figure out how to do TikTok.

Lorien: So my daughter who's 13 and wants to be a director, she makes videos all the time. She has a YouTube channel about fairies, she just rips out content all the time. She knows how to edit, she knows Premiere Pro, she just. So I'll just write something, do something and I'll be like, you edit this Quincy and I'll put your name on it. How about that? That's what I'll do.

Brent: Excellent. That you get an A plus for that.

Lorien: Thank you, I'll let my therapist know. I'll take a scene from something I've written that I love. And I will make it and I'll just be like, here, I did a thing. No, that's good. Yeah.

Brent: Send it to me when you do. You've got my email. I wanna see that. So you now have,

Lorien: Aw, okay.

Brent: One eager viewer. That's a brilliant idea. Take a scene.

Lorien: It's your idea.

Brent: No wonder I love it so much.

Lorien: So right now, also I think something that I'm working on, a lot of writers are working on right, is separating your identity as a writer from your self. From your identity as a person.

 Because the culture that we are in, the culture I grew up in, in the seventies and eighties, it was very much like you, or how I grew up, was like you earn value and love through your accomplishments. And productivity and getting the A and winning and doing those things.

And as someone with overachieving sickness, overproduction, it's so important as a grownup and as a parent to realize I'm not just and only a writer. But so much of my narrative, my whole life has been about being a writer and a storyteller. And I've trained all the people in my life to give me validation in that one space.

So it's been very hard detangling that so that I can be valued and loved for who I am, but also still be a writer and try to get the A. Is that something you ever think about, like your writer self and your human self being the same or different?

Brent: I do. I feel for myself that my own happiness and peace of mind comes from spreading my life's energy into three categories.

First and most important is my relationships. So that's to my friends and my family and my daughter and just people in general. And that's a third of life at least. Another third, oddly is physical health for me. And it's just odd. It's just, if I, if I prioritize that enough, it's good for me. It gives me energy and makes me show up in the world better.

And then third, co-equal these are all co-equal, is the career, whatever it is. And for anybody who is trying to replicate that and is artist enough to still be listening, I think that your career can be a combination of how you support yourself and how you express yourself. How you support yourself, and how you make your art.

That's always been the case for artists. So sometimes we get real lucky and we can support ourselves entirely with our art. And that's always the goal. And then other times we've gotta have some kind of balance. But it's still within that third.

Now, for you, what I wanna reflect back to you is awesome. Yeah. Your relationships and all that you're doing, that's beautiful and wonderful and clearly very, very satisfying for you. I support that. But I also want to remind you that you are a writer and you are a writer forever. No matter where you are on the up.

Lorien: It's a promise and a threat.

Brent: It's because you're gifted. It's because you're gifted. Anybody who tries to write and put their time into writing does so because they have seen talent within themselves. Very few people do this and a fraction of a fraction of all the people that have ever lived do it as much as you have done it already and as you who are listening have done it. Okay, you're rare.

Why are you doing it? Because you've glimpsed talent within yourself and that talent is real. And you are on a lifelong quest to prove how real it is. I'm here to say I saw it in myself and have had the luck of validating it. And you have two, Lorien, selling your pilots alone. But, but all the other val validations, you know along the way.

And so we're gonna keep doing that all of our lives. That's interesting for me to be saying this year. I didn't realize it. I always thought in my career, be kicked out. I thought by 40 or something, I never saw any writers over like 45 in TV comedy, certainly. And I think largely that was self-selecting, they just didn't want to do it anymore.

And now I feel like no, no, no, the goal is to do this until you die. And how do we do that? The good news is that we can make stuff, like you're gonna do with your daughter and send me a scene. You can do that.

Lorien: Actually, the scene I'm thinking of I don't think it's appropriate for her. So maybe ask some like professional friends to help me with that, maybe.

Brent: Oh, very funny. How old is she?

Lorien: She's 13.

Brent: 13. Oh yeah. Trust me. Yeah. No, she's way ahead of you. But that's great. That's great. I love it. Yeah.

Lorien: You know what I love about what you said about recognizing talent in yourself, it's such a shocking thing to consider for me. Because I think as a woman and a lot of women, we are not encouraged to be ambitious or brag or reflect back to others the things we're good at. Right. So it's like for me to say I see the talent in myself and that's why I'm doing that feels very like, it's like beyond hubris.

Right? It's like, no, no, no I need to be the one, a lot of women and a lot of young writers too, are waiting to be anointed. You are a writer. And like what ego it is to say I'm talented, without that like stamp of approval from Hollywood or the external validation machine.

So finding a way to, no I recognize this in myself and that is why it is, that's why I'm doing it. 'Cause I want to. And that it's not to serve anyone else or any other big mechanism, but it is worth, for women and other people marginalized people or people who are waiting to be accepted into a world not always built for them, that it's encouraged. You must see the talent in yourself. It's just a really important way to think about that. A really simplified way of like, no, it's you. You get to decide and then you have to own it too, which is scary. 'Cause what if no one else agrees with you, but you still have to keep doing it anyway.

Brent: Lorien, I agree with so much of what you say. I hear you on the special challenge for women. Yeah. Man. You don't have to know too much about the history of the planet to see. That underdog story. And yes, women can be eter internally I think, self-limiting in that way. I can well imagine that.

And not just women, you know? . So I do believe in a initial act of faith where you say, look, you have glimpse talenting yourself. It's real. And I'm here to tell you that it's real 'cause I know I, I had that feeling before it was validated and then I validated it. And I know you can do the same.

And I watch a million people do it as well. It's real. The fact that you're doing it proves that. But there is more than just an isolated self-belief. Now go out in the world and prove it some more. First I really like it when people find their tribe. I think it's cool when you find a few people like you, and I really encourage people to do this.

For me, it's been curative. There's something about isolation that's not healthy for me, and there's something about interaction with other people that is super healthy for me. And if there's some mutual respect, the respect that I feel for you as a writer across this screen is sufficient for me to go, oh, this would be great.

I would much rather bring my writing to you than bring it to, the vacuum. Just that alone is, is great. And then you're trying to bring your quality to people to amuse them. That's validation. We're always seeking validation. And we can continue to seek and find that validation for the rest of our lives.

I guess the next piece of the pie is can you harness this, essentially narcissistic drive for social good? And then the answer is that kind of takes care of itself because people need entertainment for their reasons. And if you're entertaining them, then you can rest assured you're doing something good.

Lorien: Right. Okay. Let's talk about what you've learned in your career. So like The Ben Stiller Show, what was your takeaway?

Brent: Ooh, gosh. I was learning sketch writing. I learned sketch structure, which for all you structure nerds out there: premise, escalation, escalation, twist was the structure of a sketch that I taught myself by just analyzing sketches that worked.

The takeaway from that group was highly motivated young artists who really are trying to change the world and have something to say and are trying to be original. There's always a market for that. That always is amazing. We were canceled after 12 episodes on Fox because the young artists were so intolerable to the executives at the Fox Corporation.

Oh my God. Judd Apatow, Judd Apatow, 24 years old, berating Sandy, Grushow. "Sandy, if you don't know why, this is funny, I can't explain it to you." And hanging up on 'em. They canceled the show after 12 episodes. And then we won the Emmy for best writing in a comedy or variety show, proving something about this group. Like, hey, we do better than you. So that was a great lesson.

Lorien: That's awesome. All right. So the lesson in that is, you know. Right? You know what's funny?

Brent: Yes. Yes.

Lorien: And then, and if somebody else doesn't know, you can't explain it to them.

Brent: That's right. And originality matters. And generally what you see out in the entertainment landscape is not as original as you want it to be, or the audience wants it to be.

The economics are the reason for that. If you and I go out to risk a million dollars and I say, hey I've got a really risky thing and a not so risky thing, you're gonna go not risky. Don't blame the executives, they don't wanna risk their money. So they're always gonna make stuff that is similar to what is already successful.

The audience doesn't want that. Of course, we're not risking our money. You can exploit this gap by making stuff that's risky and original when you're shooting it on your camera, or when your daughter is filming the scenes from your un public screenplay. If it feels different, that's great. And that's a huge resource for all of us.

Lorien: Okay, so Judd Apatow then went out and he did Freaks and Geeks, right?

Brent: Yes, he did.

Lorien: Again canceled after the first season, right?

Brent: Yes, that's right.

Lorien: Considered a brilliant show, right?

Brent: One of the top shows ever. Really? Yeah, it was Judd starting to really show what he could do. His extraordinary ability with casting the cast.

Judd's another self-taught artist. He didn't, he didn't go to college. He got one year of college and his parents announced that they had not saved any money to continue, to his surprise. So he had to just go in the world and make it as a comedian. And a writer. Totally self-taught. Judd's lesson: follow the emotion. His ability to courageously go after what's painful for him.

He was a. Just a socially isolated high school kid who reflected on that in his work. And that's Freaks and Geeks.

Lorien: And then he did Undeclared?

Brent: Undeclared, yeah. That was another one. Yeah, that was, I was on that one as well. He brought me in to write an episode. Yeah, that was his one year at college. He reflected on that in Undeclared.

Lorien: And what was that, what was your takeaway from working on that show in that space?

Brent: I mean once again, look at who he casts. Everybody he cast was an unknown and they all went on to huge careers. Incredible the way he did that. Seth Rogan, Jason Segel, gosh.

Lorien: Well Linda Cardellini is in Freaks and Geeks, right?

Brent: Yes, yes.

Lorien: She's brilliant.

Brent: James Franco had never been in anything before Freaks and Geeks. The list of people he has discovered before they were famous. Nobody can compare.

Lorien: Yeah. All right let's talk about animation. So you've done-- well you wanna talk about The Office or do you wanna talk about animation?

Brent: Your call.

Lorien: Okay. I wanna talk about animation. Right. So, I've been in animation. You've been in animation. I'm sure you get this a lot. How do I write for animation?

Brent: Yes, yes. You're asking me now sort of chronologically and biographically for me I went from the sketch show, The Ben Stiller Show To The Simpsons. Alright. Bob Odenkirk had been the head writer at The Ben Stiller Show, and he liked my sketches enough to show them to a writer named Conan O'Brien, who had just left The Simpsons to go start a talk show.

He liked my sketches, offered to hire me, but then The Simpsons found out that Conan liked me and so they hired me at The Simpsons. So I was basically massively over promoted to a show which had the best writers in Hollywood. All these Harvard geniuses, I mean, it was the greatest writing staff ever assembled by some measures.

And then half of them left and they brought in some young writers like me. I don't know, a dozen of us. Not many of them survived. I survived largely because I watched every episode of The Simpsons. There had been 88 of them shot. And over a period of four weekends, I watched them all and wrote down every joke that made me laugh and did my thing of analyzing the jokes.

Why are these funny? Why are these funny? So I resorted to analysis again to try to become a Simpsons joke writer. And largely what you would do on that show was sit in silence and write new jokes. So it was like a joke writing contest. Yeah. I was in that contest for two years, 12 hours a day.

Lorien: Wow.

Brent: That was my education.

Lorien: So how does The Simpsons tell the future?

Brent: Pure accident. If you think about it, it's just a kind of a magic trick. There have been more episodes of The Simpsons than of any other television show ever created.

Lorien: Some of them were bound to tell.

Brent: 90% of the predictions that The Simpsons makes don't come true. But you don't see YouTube videos about all the predictions that didn't come true.

Lorien: Nostradamus and The Simpsons, right? Same batting average.

Brent: I don't, I think Nostradamus was better. It's all

Lorien: Really?

Brent: Oh yeah. I mean, The Simpsons just churns through material. There've been so many flash forwards, that just, coincidentally gonna be, some things seem to come true.

Lorien: I don't know some of it's so specific. It's a little spooky.

Brent: Alright. And maybe I should go with what the audience wants. We predicted the future. Everyone was so brilliant.

Lorien: Okay, so tell me, in the joke room. You're in a joke room, you're not breaking story like-- I mean, are you breaking story? In the same way that you are in another, in a more traditional room?

Brent: It was a little different. The Simpsons would have a story conference at the beginning of the year and we would have a few days off to come up with stories. And then we would go to the hotel Shutters in Santa Monica and they would rent out a giant suite and it would be filled.

Lorien: That's such a beautiful hotel.

Brent: Oh yeah. And nobody enjoyed a second of it because they, they couldn't eat any of the food, they're so nervous. And for like one full day we would just pitch stories back to back. And then out of that we would then go back to the bungalow on the fox lot and and start breaking stories.

So there would be a story breaking period. And then there was always just this overlap. You're breaking stories, you're sending people to write an episode. Episodes are coming back, you're rewriting, and then finally this new phase of you are sending it to the animators and the animatic are coming back, the black and white version.

So you're giving notes on those. It's a factory of things going out and things coming back in all year round.

Lorien: So you're joke writer. What is your right? The goal is every joke of mine is a hit. It's hilarious. Everybody's like, yes, you're the funniest one in the room. What do you think the real, what's the reality of that? Of being a joke writer in the room? How many of your jokes are landing?

Brent: I'm so glad you've asked that. I think the truth is joke writing is trial and error, and the best way to run a room I've discovered is to really encourage a lot of trial. So I do something that The Simpsons Room did not. The Simpsons room was a very tough room.

The head writer, David Mirkin, would literally say, go to page three we need a new joke for Homer in the middle of the page. And the room would go silent for like five minutes as people tried to think of a brilliant joke that was unlike any other joke ever told. And that's a very intimidating room and I don't think it's the most productive.

It was, it was nerve wracking. There was a guy who sat next to me, hired at the same time. He never pitched a joke in three months. He had a contract and then they just fired him. He knew his job was to write jokes, but he was like, I don't wanna embarrass myself in this room. That's a terrible environment.

Honestly. When I run a room, I try to create the exact opposite feeling. You can say no wrong in my room. We stay focused. I tell you where we're trying to think, but I encourage a lot of trial because joke writing is trial and error. Now, within that there are definitely things I can point out to you that will make you a better generator of jokes.

 Here's my little tutorial for you, because I did this to myself. Analyzing comedy, analyzing punchlines, analyzing jokes. There are structural things that you can notice for sure. And if you start to notice structural elements of jokes, they occur to you faster in that trial and error period.

Okay, for example, just recognize when you are analyzing comedy that frequently there's a mechanism of a contrast between the high and the low. The sacred and the profane is a real good place to find comedy. Just make a list of things that are sacred and a list of things that are profane. Sacred: religion, old people, babies. Profane: violence, sex, the bathroom.

Just connect 'em up and you'll have an adult swim show in about four seconds. Baby with a machine gun and the nun who can't stop saying vagina will be back after this, right? It's nothing. It's just combining sacred and profane. Very often what we react to as comedy is just that mechanism.

Alright, add to that comic irony. Charlie Chaplin said a man steps into a manhole. That's slapstick. A man steps over a manhole and gets hit by a bus. That's irony. It's funnier. Why? Because in the attempt to get to safety, he gets himself killed. Anytime something backfires, it's intrinsically comic.

In the attempt to make a thousand dollars, we lose a million. That's intrinsically a comic mechanism. In the attempt to show off how smart I am, I make myself look stupid. Intrinsically funny. Just being stupid, not as funny. Comic irony. There's a lot of mechanisms like this that you can pull out of comedy once you start looking.

There are visual elements. Notice how often when you go, that's a funny image, it's because it's a reversal of scale. Big giant Hawaiian guy with a tiny ukulele. Little tiny mariachi with a giant guitar. Why are those funny? Simply reversal of scale. Funny words, is there such a thing as funny words?

Yeah. If you watch Neil Simon's play The Sunshine Boys about two old timey comics and they're saying the K sound is funny, the K sound is funny. Okay. Yeah, the K sounds funny. So is X, P, T and D all plosives are funny. Funnier. They have a staccato sound to them. Kennebunkport is intrinsically funnier to me.

 Alright. So if you take one of my famous comedy courses I sometimes do a weekend seminar where I try to tell all of my comedy mechanisms and I have something that I, in tongue in cheek, call the 27 joke formulas that I will share with you.

And yeah, you can improve your ability to crank comedy by being analytic. But at the end of the day you generate comedy by sitting back, trying to get playful and funny and just generating trial and error. If you come up with 10 funny ideas, tomorrow one or two or three of those are gonna be legit. It's a volume business.

Lorien: I think that's what's so intimidating for me about this feature is that it's long and I have to sustain real character and the funny has to come from the character. In the world, along the theme. Right. It's like interacting with each other so it's like so much more to keep track of. Rather than in a sitcom, to your point, it's they try to make it better, they make it worse.

I mean, that is what's happening in a lot of sitcom Multicam especially. Trying to solve the problem, I create a bigger problem.

Brent: Yes, yes, absolutely. It's a plot device for sure that you wanna lean on. But you know, when you're talking l about your sustaining over a long period scenes in the screenplay there's one more principle that I wanna share with you, which may be just the fundamental one.

If we're trying to be funny the best place to find funny is in character, as you mentioned. So, we wanna talk about what is behavioral comedy. Behavior over banter is a principle that I learned late in my career when I was writing on the show Love. It was Judd Apatow, by the way who hit me over the head with this.

He said, Larry Sanders is funnier than Parks and Rec. And he said, it's because Parks and Rec is leaning on clever lines and Larry Sanders is leaning on behavior. What is behavioral comedy? It's comedy that doesn't depend on cleverness and language, it depends on what people are doing.

Frequently lying is funny. Hiding things about ourselves is funny. Pretending to be people that we're not, pretending to be better than we are. Those are behavioral comedy elements. And if you are looking for a formula related to character comedy, I will share with you what I think of as my great contribution to the science of comedy.

Okay. Remember little, little Bfo'. Bfo' is myself imposed nickname this year. It's, it's B for Brent and then FO apostrophe for Forrester. So when I think back about myself as a young writer, I think of Bfo', the 25-year-old trying to learn comedy, sitting in The Simpsons room analyzing jokes.

My contribution as a grownup to the science of comedy is what I call the core comic contradiction. And this is a contradiction between the way a character is trying to come across and the way they're actually coming across. I first noticed this when I was out there trying to get punch up work in the Austin Powers era of comedy.

And I would take meetings on, I would say, well, why Austin Powers is funny is because he's trying to come across sexy baby with the smooth talking attitude, but he's got the big glasses and the teeth and the bad hair. Trying to come across sexy, actually coming across repulsive. It's a core comic contradiction in the modern era.

Michael Scott is trying to come across as popular and we know him to be unpopular. Trying to come across as funny with the, that's what she said, jokes actually unfunny. So that formula if you identify it in your character can be very useful. Combine that with an instinct for behavioral comedy and situations that provoke comic behavior from your character and my dear friend, you can't go wrong.

Lorien: I also love that it's core comic. What'd you say? The, it's all the K sounds.

Brent: Contradiction. Yeah, I'm going with the, yeah, with the plosives there. Yeah, the Triple K.

Lorien: Okay. This has been great. I don't wanna take up too much more of your time, but do you have any one last piece of advice for our listeners who are professional writers and emerging writers, and a lot of people who are in the industry and not in the industry. What is one thing you would like them to know?

Brent: I think a lot of people who are listening are probably wondering if I have any advice about their spec scripts. I have a lot of thoughts on that. At any given time there are countless numbers of ambitious writers writing half hour comedy episodes. That's my area of expertise. And I passionately encourage you to do this. This is an art form, kinda like playing the guitar, which you can do for fun or to try to change your life. And I encourage you to do it for both reasons.

When you are writing your script. Okay? There's two different kinds of spec scripts you can write. You can either write a writing sample that is a spec of an existing show, or you can write your original pilot.

When I was trying to break in, it was all specs of existing shows and those are much easier to write, young writer. The characters are already created for you, the world's already there, you can already hear all the voices. It's probably 10 times easier to write a successful spec of an existing show than it is to try to come up with one great comic voice. A second, great comic voice that works with it, and then four that kind of surround it.

But I'm not gonna stop you because that's probably what you wanna do. You have a pilot in your head, you wanna go for it, okay. Go for it. I encourage you to do this. The number one error to-- let me put it this way, I don't like to say the word error to artists.

Lorien: Development opportunity.

Brent: When I read other people's specs, the number one thing that I wanna share with the aspiring writers is this: like me, you are trying to show off, but you're trying to show off too much in the first scene. You wanna show me all your characters and you wanna start your story and you're afraid that you'll lose my attention and you're rushing to get it all down my throat in the first three pages.

Relax. Just show me your main character in a scene that provokes your main character's interesting core behaviors. We'll call that a cold open. It doesn't have to do with the plot at all. I don't care about your plot now. I just wanna meet your character and see your character in her funny behavior provoking situation.

Then do the title page and then do your plot. And here's the great news. You will impress me in your first scene because you are working with a character that is interesting and you're smart enough to come up with a situation that provokes that behavior. I will go, wow, good writer. I like this writer and I like this character.

And I will never change that opinion. No matter what you do for the next 28 pages. Even if you eat it in the next 28 pages, I'll go, I like that character. And with a rewrite, this could work.

Lorien: No, that's great. Do you think people are still reading specs, like specs of existing shows?

Brent: Sure. Writers who are trying to staff up shows we're just looking for you to impress us with your writing talent. And frankly, we're asking you to write for an existing show, hours. So that's great. If you can show me that you can write for any existing show, that's all I care about. And then we just care how well can you do it.

So are you writing good scenes? That's principally what we want. And then it really doesn't matter. It can be in your existing pilot or it can be a spec of an existing show. It truly does not matter. I will say it's important to recognize it is harder to write your own pilot. However, whatever makes you finish a draft is the most important thing.

And most writers, it turns out they just wanna write that original pilot because they're trying to express something they've seen and experienced and they wanna do something original. So I'm never gonna stand in the way of a writer's dream.

Lorien: Yes. To double down on the don't put it all on the first scene, the first pilot I sold was my first time in TV. It was for NBC and I dunno what the hell. I was with Meg and we didn't know what, you know, it was TV. And so we put the whole season in the pilot. But we didn't realize we'd done it until like, 'cause we, when you're a feature writer and then you come into TV, you're not understanding what actually needs to be in a pilot of a TV show.

Because when we think about TV shows, we're imagining the whole season. Right. And like everything that show did in the first season. So you're trying to put all that into your pilot? Well, we did. I did. And then I realized, oh wait, we just needed one A story. B story and a C. It was too much and it was really intimidating.

And I still love it, but you know, it was too much. It was too heavy. And complex and too much going on. And so figure out what really needs to happen. What is your show actually like, what is the tone or the comp? And what's happening in the pilot of a show for that network or like, 'cause not a lot happens in a pilot.

Brent: Very true. Very true. And less happens in a pilot than in almost any of the other episodes plot wise because we are typically introducing all the characters and that takes real estate. Yeah. Yes. I also. Very much. Yes. And your suggestion that for anybody who's running a pilot, ask yourself what other show is it most like? Watch the pilot of that episode and then count the number of scenes.

I've done it for you. Sometimes it's 11 scenes. More often it's 15 to 17 scenes. It's rarely more than 25. Sometimes it's 30, but it, but you know, aim for like 17 scenes. It's not a lot of scenes. A, B and C story. No, not a C story. A and B. Sure. But A story alone is okay. Pilots uniquely will very often be just an A story.

And so simplify. Yes, for sure.

Lorien: Yeah. Which is hard 'cause we have a lot to say. Yes. And we want you to know that we like, okay, but I thought about this in episode seven. This is gonna happen and it's so hard and you must resist.

Brent: Yeah. I think that's very wise.

Lorien: Okay. So, loved all your advice. Loved all the comedy, the science of comedy. Again, it's like this is just something you know or you don't, and I think there is a way to break it down. I do think you have to have some spark of knowing what's funny in order to learn how to be funnier. Right?

Brent: Well, I'm living proof of the opposite. I was never considered funny and taught myself to do it. So.

Jeff: That might be a core comic contradiction, right? In you, Brent. Totally unfunny but you learned in sort of an inverted way.

Brent: Thank you. That's very clever.

Jeff: Yeah.

Lorien: That's awesome. Okay so we ask every guest the same three questions at the end of every episode.

And so the first one is, what brings you the most joy when it comes to your writing?

Brent: Well, right now I'm doing the thing that all writers do, which is try to dream up a show on spec and go from hoping it will work to people liking it. And I'm having the full gamut of experiences from thinking something is great and my friends going no, to thinking something's great and finding out somebody else is already doing it, to sticking with a project for 60 practice pitches until an actor likes it.

I would say that's really giving me joy. I like, having some of those old principles of grit validated still. Pure grit, man. I just kept trying on that one until it worked and now you know what the proof is. If you keep going back to the page, it does pay off.

Lorien: Okay, good. What pisses you off about writing?

Brent: I wish all the talented people could be employed at the highest level. I mean, it's sad that there are just more brilliant people than there are jobs at any given time. And again, it's just a reality that we have to embrace as artists and take some pride and honor in that. You're gonna know great artists who didn't get as much validation as they deserved.

And we just have to recognize that's part of it. Van Gogh, man, he died in poverty. They found some of his greatest works like in patching a chicken coop in France. Right, right. So we all have a bit of that to contend with.

Lorien: Okay. If you could have coffee with your younger self, what would your advice be?

Jeff: How young?

Lorien: Jeff? How young? What do you think?

Jeff: Typically we say like, you know what. When you were in that second career slum, before you had to break back in. And during that low after Nurses, but before Ben Stiller.

Brent: Yeah. I, I guess I might say what I'm saying to young people now who are looking at the career of television writer, entertainment writer, performer, et cetera. I'm looking at it now in three year chunks. So I wanna say to everybody who is graduating from college and imagining that they might explore a career as a television writer or in any of the facets of the entertainment industry. Bite off a three year chunk and live the life of an aspiring artist, which is, figure out a place where the rent is cheap.

Probably get a roommate. Get a job that pays for your Top Ramen and gives you enough time to pursue your art. Writing, putting stuff up on stage. For sure. Filming stuff on your phone, finding your tribe, and living this life of the Bohemian aspiring artist. Do it for three years. Have the time of your life doing it, because it is a noble and exciting pursuit.

The possibility that it might end in poverty is part of the nobility, and hopefully the excitement. At the end of three years, you can go off and become a doctor. You can go become a fricking cop and you can continue to write and put yourself on stage as a police officer, helping save the world and make cop culture more progressive. There are a lot of different ways to go. You can never write again in your life if you want and always look back with pride and look at your fellow doctors with disdain 'cause they never did this.

Some version of that is the lecture I would give myself is embrace the life of the young artist. And every three years reevaluate whether you wanna up it for another term, redo it in another form, forget it forever, or forget it for some time and come back.

Lorien: Good advice. I wish I'd done that. Took myself and my life and my ever, I was so panicked when I was younger. Yeah. I didn't realize that at 27 I wasn't like-- like what if I'd done that, right?. And like just. 'Cause you think like, oh, I gotta do something by some point, I gotta prove something I did. But at 27, you're still so young.

You have still so much invention of yourself to go through. I think you're unaware of the fact that your many lives in the course of a life, many versions of you.

Brent: Yes. Oh, 27, please. I know a guy who passionately pursued a life in the arts. A good writer, funny performer. And at 40 he said, I think that's enough of that I'm gonna go become a doctor. And that's what he is now. 40.

Lorien: I have a friend who did that too. He was my boss when I was a technical writer, and he's like, I'm gonna go back to school and become a neurosurgeon. And then he changed mid way, he's a psychiatrist now.

Brent: Yeah. Really important to have that framework. Yeah. In addition, you can do the opposite, which is have a full career and then at 65 become a hot shot comedy writer.

I highly encourage it.

Lorien: Yep. Oh, that's great. I think there are a lot, our audience is a lot of people who are in second career or coming back to writing after, having families and careers and everything. I think that there is a big fear about age. And understanding that they can translate all the things they've already done and all the people, they've been into this. They're not actually at the beginning, they bring so much with them, with all that life. Yeah, I have to remember that all the time. I've done more things than just this today.

Brent: Well, for writers of a certain age, that's your age, my age, and thereabouts. I will say writers always get better with age, for sure. And your craftsman. Think about what, when you picture the word craftsperson, craftswoman. How old is she? I would hope she's 65. Come on. You just become masterful in later age. But that's not to say, I also encourage the young people with their experience of the contemporary world to use that advantage against the old farts too.

Lorien: Like the ticking and the tokking of the TikTok.

Brent: Yeah, and it's just being young and sensitive to the world and experiencing it now. There, there's always a place for the voice of the young people, but every age its has its moment for sure.

Lorien: Cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. It's been delightful chatting with you.

Brent: Yeah, for me too. Thanks so much for giving me this opportunity to talk about this shared passion, my friend.

Lorien: Thanks so much to Brent for coming on the show today. Brent teaches pilot writing and joke writing classes on his website, brent forrester.com, which is also linked in today's event description.

And if you're looking for a little more connection and community, you can check out our TSL workshops membership site. It's been this really great place where Meg and I do these twice a month lives. One is a question/ answer, one is a story workshop where we help writers develop their stories, and we have these awesome videos up.

And, remember, you are not alone and keep writing.