The secret world of joke writers

I can make you funny – but at whose cost?

It’s a profession as old as time. Mel Brooks described being one as “wonderful and terrible”. The Anglo-Saxons apparently called them “hleahtorsmið”, or “laughter-smiths”. Watch the credits on any TV show and there they are: hidden among the hosts and guests and producers and executives, names credited under “programme associate” or “additional material” – the joke writers. Not the type responsible for whole shows or series, but a different kind, sometimes a secret. Someone who can make you funny. Gags for hire.

Everyone in the entertainment industry uses joke writers. The controversial comedian who wants you to think of them as dangerous, ground-breaking, iconoclastic, original? They use writers. The family man stand-up does, too. Not all the time, and not for every joke, but they do it. It’s not just comedians – Ant and Dec, Claudia, Tess, Dermot and Paddy all have their favourites. Political pundits do it, paying a writer for the sense of humour they lack as they try to make the jump from think tank to Good Morning Britain. I hope Labour’s usurper-in-waiting Wes Streeting didn’t pay for the singular joke about being “a faithful” that he trotted out three times in 24 hours while denying that he was trying to oust Keir Starmer, but he very well may have.

It’s not that all of these people are secretly unfunny. You don’t make it to a point where you’re paid to be on television or trusted to be worth the risk of unsold seats for a live show without being very funny. But being funny on cue, episode after episode, is almost impossible. Before the death of the Great British Panel Show, Jimmy Carr hosted 217 episodes of 8 Out of 10 Cats. Prolific though he may be, the only way to generate enough jokes for that is to bring in other people. At its peak, Alan Carr’s prime-time TV show Chatty Man was on for 16, sometimes 18 weeks in a row – of course you would spread the work, bring in some other voices, stop you from losing your mind. It’s a question of volume, and the writer can help you through.

In theory, being a gag writer sounds like a dream: paid well to sit in a room with like-minded people being as funny as you can; flown to Paris to punch up a celebrity’s speech at fashion week. In reality it’s often more like being an emotional support animal for Tony Soprano, your ideas less important than your ability to keep a frequently unstable boss happy. It’s a petty world, where egos compete. I’ve seen writers put down someone else’s idea when they’re not in the room, hosts reject a writer’s idea wholesale before re-pitching it as their own later on, and talent pushing through ideas they don’t like, just to prove to a writer that it won’t work.

When times were good, (they are now bad), writers could spread a day’s work across an entire week of shows – a joke rejected by one room pitched again and again elsewhere. By Friday, a joke written on Monday could have been through two writers’ rooms for TV and one for radio, passing through endless hands until a producer turns snow blind and shoves it into a script. Unless a royal dies or a prime minister resigns, the news tends to remain the same and so the jokes can too.

But times have changed. You can tell when a writer began working in television by where and how they live. The Eighties, Notting Hill; the Nineties, Kentish Town; the Noughties, perhaps a fixer-upper in Hackney. Now? A room in a shared house if renting, or else the commuter belts of Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, or Kent. Traditional TV audiences are collapsing, which means budgets are smaller, fewer shows are commissioned, and work that was once spread across ten weeks can be compressed into half the time.

During the Writers Guild of America strikes in 2023, the genuinely successful British comedy writer Joel Morris pointed out that the worst-case scenario the Americans were fighting against – no minimum contract length and no guaranteed fees – is what British comedy writers have already learned to endure. In the UK, writers are paid by the day, while talent fees have rocketed – as channels rely more and more on names rather than ideas to attract audiences. The more the stars earn, the less there is to go around. But beyond giving Romesh Ranganathan another show or putting YouTubers on Strictly Come Dancing, channels don’t actually appear to have any new ideas.

A lot of people think they are funny, many that they could be a writer. They probably couldn’t. Joke writing is a skill, part humour and part attrition. What you think is funny mostly doesn’t matter – it’s about putting aside what you like, and writing for someone else’s voice or particular audience. Understanding that is a talent of its own.

There’s no single route to becoming a comedy writer, either. Some writers start off working in TV, as producers and researchers with comedy aspirations who write themselves into a career.Others might “choose” to leave behind a middling stand-up career after finding that they can be just as funny on the page as they were on stage. A few do just genuinely want to be writers and nothing else. The best can do it for anyone they’re asked to – writing award show monologues, sketches, and topical jokes.

It’s often not about who is funniest or what joke is best; it can be about who’s fastest, who’s loudest, or who’s the most resilient. Being a man seems to help. The only thing there is less of in comedy than new commissions is regularly employed female writers. You often hear that certain hosts – men and women – “don’t work well with women”, a problem that is tolerated rather than resolved.

The lack of recognition can be difficult. I heard about one comedian inviting his regular writers to a dinner and presenting them all with a cheque for a few grand, a thank you after a particularly fruitful year. Generous, but also about one fifth of what he would have earned performing for a night at a regional theatre on a particularly miserable evening in November. Another writer complained that while watching a new stand-up special starring a former employer, they realised that jokes written for a TV show made with said comic earlier in the year had gone into the special, uncredited and unpaid.

That’s not to say it’s all bad. Joke writers do have fun; sometimes good ideas even get on TV. Stories of the worst insults thrown at them by comedians or hosts are passed back and forth, the misery turned into entertainment – who’s the vainest, the richest, the cruellest. I’ve heard whispers of one long-serving writer on Have I Got News for You (a machine that runs on writers) who sends in jokes and invoices from some far-flung town, only materialising for the annual Christmas party. One producer told me that when he was a runner, the writers pooled their lunch allowances and called around local establishments to see what they could afford that would be funniest. In the end they ordered a whole cooked Turkish lamb for him to go and collect.

Through this, the question of success remains. What does success look like? How do you get there? Where does it lead? Regular employment is one part of it, but in entertainment there’s always more. Charlie Brooker was a regular feature in writers’ rooms for years, which might explain why he made the jump to talking about just how bad television actually is, before ultimately turning Black Mirror into the kind of never-ending celebrity-appearance factory he would have previously slated. Before creating the favourite shows of your boyfriends at school (Peep Show) and university (Succession), Jesse Armstrong was writing jokes and “links”, the snappy sentences that tie two seemingly unconnected items in a show together, perfected by The One Show, for television. Maybe a few move up into being on camera themselves. But they are the outliers.

The American model – where the writer can become a star in their own right and be signed up to lucrative exclusive deals with studios or networks – is not what we have in Britain. In the good times, success just about ranks with what a fairly successful management consultant might earn on the way to their first divorce, without the stability or benefits. In the bad times, it equates to a lot less. Plenty end up leaving comedy behind entirely, drifting into something more stable like selling courses about writing jokes to aspiring writers, or making podcasts. Or marketing.

But what about the future? What about YouTube and TikTok, where a star’s personality and honesty is all an audience cares about? Do they use writers? Of course they do. One online star – whose fast but not always funny videos you will have seen uploaded in what feels like the minutes after a story breaks – has been using writers for years, but routinely only credits himself.

People want to be funny. It provides a cultural capital that all the money in the world can’t give you – it’s why musicians release tongue-in-cheek comedy music specials, why celebrities host Saturday Night Live, and why it seems to obsess the incredibly unfunny Elon Musk. Not everyone can do it, and as long as this problem exists, the joke writer will be there to solve it. The only person I’ve been told absolutely doesn’t use writers is Alan Sugar.

But maybe it will all change. Musk, who once tried (and failed) to go into the comedy business with two former editors from the Onion, may have a solution for the terminally unfunny. In a podcast with amateur kickboxer-turned-modern-mystic Joe Rogan, he explained that one can simply ask Grok, his AI chatbot, to be funny. “If you want to have a good time or really make people laugh at a party, you can use Grok and you can say, ‘Do a vulgar roast of someone,’ and it’s gonna be an epic vulgar roast of someone.”

There we have it: an epic vulgar roast. Comedy on demand from an app. Maybe that’s the future of this all. No more writers. You might not be funny but your iPhone can be. Your iPhone, and Alan Sugar.

[Further reading: Never recommend Philip Roth to your mother]