TVSquad

(S01E13) Marry. Boff. Kill. Tina Fey. Jane Krakowski. Rachel Dratch. Scratch that. Marry. Boff. Kill. Alec Baldwin. Tracy Morgan. Judah Friedlander. Man, I could play this game all night. Markie Post. Shelly Long. Tina Yothers. I only wish I had the cojones to make that my entire review. Five hundred words - all of them "marry, boff, kill." I'm always looking for an easy, gimmicky way to approach this review because, like I said last week, it's hard to not just recount the funny lines, comment on Alec Baldwin's genius and compare Tina Fey to Mary Tyler Moore. It's never easy to write about something that's just plain solid week-after-week, and well, my job didn't get any easier this week.

Watch your backs, Harvard alum. Yale's looking to take on the Crimson mafia's domination of televised comedy. For the uninformed, this is the fast track to a job as a television comedy writer:

1. Be a man - preferably a Catholic or a Jew. (More guilt = More funny)
2. Go to Harvard. (Legacy, class privilege, whatever it takes to get you there.)
3. Write for the Lampoon.

That's it. Within a year or two of graduation, you should be writing for Conan, The Daily Show, SNL, The Office or The Simpsons. Guaranteed. Or, is it? Certain Yalies are looking to challenge Harvard's stranglehold on the writer's room. The Yale Daily News paints a picture of Yale's growing influence on comedy or, at least, Comedy Central. The article name-checks Yalies Lewis Black, Demetri Martin, John Hodgman, Daily Show writer Steve Bodow and Colbert Report head writer Allison Silervman. Hodgman offered, "By accident, maybe there is the beginning of a similar - extremely feeble - Yale network of professionals that may give the aspiring comedy writer on Cross Campus a glimmer of hope." And, so the elitist pissing contest commences.

For those of you who want to pursue a career in comedy and can't afford the Ivy route, you will be happy to know that Jon Stewart attended the College of William and Mary, Tina Fey is a woman and Bob Odenkirk is an atheist.

[Via CCInsider]

If you've ever wondered how the networks manage to trap a team of otherwise intelligent writers in a room for sixteen hours stretches to punch up jokes on some lame sitcom that you can't even bare to watch, the New York Times has your answer. It's the food.

This Sunday's Times magazine had a ton of great comedy revelations in it. There was the How to be Funny compendium put together by sometime Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman with two cents from TV scribe and director Paul Feig and, of course, the comedy writer's snack attack article.

Writers from Knights of Prosperity, Everybody Loves Raymond and How I Met Your Mother all confessed to the terrible eating habits of the writer's room and the accompanying weight gain. How I Met Your Mother's Chris Harris even relayed a story of how the staff of Joey "apparently weighed themselves at the beginning of what turned out to be a grueling season and then again at the end. The net gain was around 125 pounds - more than what their lead actress weighed."