Poking A Dead Frog: Conversations With Today’s Top Comedy Writers
by Mike Sacks
Buy on AmazonA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR Amy Poehler, Mel Brooks, Adam McKay, George Saunders, Bill Hader, Patton Oswalt, and many more take us deep inside the mysterious world of comedy in this fascinating, laugh-out-loud-funny book. Packed with behind-the-scenes stories—from a day in the writers’ room at The Onion to why a sketch does or doesn’t make it onto Saturday Night Live to how the BBC nearly erased the entire first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus—Poking a Dead Frog is a must-read for comedy buffs, writers and pop culture junkies alike.
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"If you enjoy podcasts like Marc Maron’s WTF and J.R. Havlan’s Writer’s Bloc, or if you just enjoy being serious about comedy, then this book is for you. It’s filled with intelligent conversations about what comedy writers do but also about how hopeless it is to be one — so if you’re not doing it to fill some deep emotional void, run away. Each interview and essay in here says (shocker): Write what you find funny. Even if you’re not interested in a comedy writing career, at least you’ll get great suggestions for your Netflix queue."
NPR Books We Love — 2014 · apps.npr.org