Book Launch: Poking a Dead Frog by Mike Sacks, with Bill Hader

There’s never been a better time to be a comedy writer. With the advent of platforms like Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube and television’s new Golden Age, more fresh young writers have a shot at making us laugh than ever before. Despite these new opportunities, the road to comedic stardom is still notoriously long and arduous. But the reward for traveling it can be enormous: those  who succeed become part of our cultural lexicon, with generations of people able to recall a certain movie, show, book, or even line that made them laugh. In POKING A DEAD FROG: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers, Vanity Fair writer Mike Sacks sits down with some of the most widely recognized comedy writers of the last six decades to offer an inside look at their creative influences and processes, their hard times and breakthroughs, and how they managed to succeed in one of the most competitive and uncertain industries around.

These never-before-seen interviews cover every facet of the industry, from a typical day in the writers’ rooms of The Onion or The Colbert Report to why a sketch does or doesn’t make it onto Saturday Night Live. From comedy legends like Mel Brooks and Monty Python’s Terry Jones, to the hottest comedy writers working today, including Paul Feig, Adam McKay, and Mike Schur, POKING A DEAD FROG covers comedy writing in all mediums: television, movies, radio, cartoons, and even Twitter. Interspersed throughout the book are original essays from Amy Poehler, Diablo Cody, and Marc Maron, among others, and “Ultra-Specific Comedic Knowledge” including the character bible from “Freaks and Geeks” and Bill Hader’s list of two hundred movies every comedy writer should see.

POKING A DEAD FROG is a bible for budding comedy writers and comedy buffs, but it’s also an essential read for anyone who wants a behind-the-scenes look at some of pop culture’s biggest moments: how the BBC almost destroyed the tapes of the first season of Monty Python, just to save about $150 per reel; the origins of “double-dipping” and “shrinkage,” made infamous by Seinfeld; and what it was really like when Andy Kaufman’s lizard-lounge character Tony Clifton would make an appearance on the set of Taxi.