A Divine Comedy

Welcome to Madison’s Footnotes, the substack page for the Madison’s Notes podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program.

Here in Episode 9 of Season 5, I interview Mr. Rob Long. A longtime Hollywood professional, he was a writer and producer for Cheers as well as for over a dozen other shows. A National Review contributor and columnist for Commentary and Washington Examiner magazine, he has authored two books, Conversations With My Agent (1998) and Set-Up, Joke, Set-Up, Joke (2005), and edited one, Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse (2017). As the co-founder of Ricochet, a media network, he hosts “Martini Shot,” a long-running, bite-size showbiz podcast, as well as cohosts “GLoP Culture.”

Drawing on his two comic memoirs—alongside his religious studies as a Master of Divinity student at Princeton Theological Seminary—we discuss his life in Hollywood, religious journey, and current training to become an Episcopal priest. Along the way we dig into the nature of humor, the rise and fall of the TV sitcom, the lost formation of the writer’s room, what it is like to be a Hollywood conservative, how technology like streaming and AI has changed show business, the strategy for the perfect sermon, and the spiritual calling of the creative arts.

Among the shows discussed are the Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Andy Griffith Show, plus films like Twentieth Century, A Night at the Opera, The In-Laws, and Midnight Run; along with guest appearances by Michelangelo’s Pieta, Aristotle’s Poetics, Moliere, P.G. Wodehouse, P.J. O’Rourke, plus the wit of Jesus of Nazareth.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Please enjoy.

Mr. Long, welcome to Madison’s Notes.

Well, thanks for having me. It’s a lot of fun.

Boy, I forgot when you do the podcast, you don’t have to answer questions. That was a strategic error coming here, I think. Well go ahead. You can ask away, and if I don’t like it, I’ll just answer something else. That’s my normal pattern.

I am grateful for whatever answers you provide. Tell me a bit about yourself first. How did you get into Hollywood screenwriting?

You’re originally from Boston. How did you come to LA?

I’m not originally from Boston, actually. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, and so we lived in Northern California for a while. My dad was in the electronics business, so he was in Silicon Valley, and then he was in Route 128. And so we moved back; and he moved back for a job. My mother worked in schools for a long time, and I went to school in Massachusetts, and then I went to college. So I love New England, but I can’t really claim to be a New Englander. I’m much more of a Californian, actually, which is weird when you think about it.

The way I got to Hollywood was just that I didn’t have any other skills. I graduated from college in 1987, and the law in 1987 was that you had to be an investment banker; and I didn’t even have any skills for that; and that, at that point, was a pretty low standard. I think it probably is low standard, but you really only had to be able to do some math, and I couldn’t even do that.

So I was in a writing class taught by a guy who was getting his MFA at the Yale School of Drama. His wife had just moved to be a professor at the UCLA Film and Theater school. He said, “Oh, you should go there.” And this was the moment in your senior year in college when you think, “ I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Then somebody says, “Do that,” and you’re like, “Okay.” Thank God he didn’t say you should move to Budapest.

So that’s really where I went, I thought, under the cover of being a student. It’s amazing what you can get away with, especially with your parents paying. So I headed out to LA to be a student to get an MFA at UCLA in screenwriting, but really it was just to figure out how it worked. That’s really how I ended up there.

I’d written a couple plays with a friend of mine college. We really loved it, and we loved writing comedy. He had graduated earlier, and was already working in advertising. And so I thought, “Okay, I’ll just go out there like a weird little first recon trip.”

And I still had LSAT books in my little bedroom apartment in LA just so that I could look at every morning. This is what awaits if you can’t make this work.

A good motivational tool.

Oh my God, I would’ve been the worst lawyer. I think I would’ve been a worse lawyer than an investment banker—which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have made a good living at it, but I would’ve been miserable. Then you figure it out.

The great thing about show business then was everybody was working too hard to explain how you break in, but nobody wanted to keep you out, especially in the television business. They couldn’t wait for you to knock on the door. TV’s the one sector where all the material disappears every night. You need new material every day, and so there’s this constant need for young writers to come in.

I was just at the right place, right time. It was great.

I also have to follow it up by saying: this world that I’m describing does not exist anymore. Do not take anything I say as encouragement to follow in those steps, because those steps don’t exist anymore. I’m describing a map of a landscape that’s subsumed by coastal erosion, right? It’s like Atlantis. Maybe it was there, but it’s not there now. Don’t go looking for it. It’s a totally different business.

Well, in the former days of the industry, what was it like when you first got into the writers’ room? How did you go from UCLA MFA to being on the show for Cheers?

You never really know what it’s going to be because your whole life has been spent on the other side of the screen. So I asked somebody, “How do you get an agent?”

It was a very simple thing. It wasn’t easy, but the process was really simple. You find the names of agents who represent writers on TV shows that you like who are at the younger, lower level. So you find the agents who represent young writers, and then you write them a letter, and you ask them if they will read your spec. scripts. And that’s how you do it.

I don’t think you do it that way anymore, but back then that’s how you did it. I walked in and met this agent that everybody loved and told me she was great for young writers. she happened to be one of the agents that packaged the show Cheers. She was kind of tough, but great and very honest, and she said, “Alright.”

It was December. She said, “I need another spec. script from you guys. Don’t call me ever again. Don’t ever call and ask me what I’m doing or if there’s anything for you. I will call you and tell you if there’s something.”

She really knew how to handle young writers. Then we went away for Christmas, and then came back in January. She called us up and said, “Put on some clean pants. You got a meeting at Cheers.” And we just showed up. I mean, it, it sounds insane.

Is this during the height of the show?

Yeah, it was the seventh season, I think. It wasn’t quite the perennial number one show, but it was in that era of 1990.

So this is before Frasier.

Before Frasier, right.

Seinfeld had already started, but it wasn’t up and running yet?

Well, Seinfeld hadn’t started yet. That came the next year for us and, or maybe a year after that. Seinfeld had a weird stutter start. So it’s hard to know, but it was definitely important.

I mean, Frasier was a character on our show. We wrote for the character Frasier.

Very different background.

Yeah, right. It’s funny because when you’re writing the show, you write whatever you want. It never occurred to us that there would ever be a show called Frasier that would have its own setup.

When we wrote him, he was an orphan. He grew up in Boston, and his mom was played by Nancy Marchand on the show, and his father we described as a remote figure who was some famous Harvard researcher who died when he was young.

And it’s not like there’s a back catalog that you can access, and there are people online putting together all the backstories.

Not then, right. I remember reading the pilot of Frasier, the TV show, three to four years and thinking, “Oh, they can’t do this. They can’t have his father. He’s an only child and an orphan.” And I wasn’t quite still as young as I was when I started. Even then I knew, oh, come on, nobody cares. If it’s funny, people will like it. And the smartest thing they did, I think, is to say, “ Okay, same character, we get to make up everything we want to make up. The result of that was that great show, Frasier.

On one episode in Season 1, they bring back his ex-wife from Cheers.

Yeah, they brought her back. Actually, I think all the characters they brought back. I think they got Norman Lloyd—they definitely got Ted Danson—because of course the continuity of it was fine.

Someone told me once there was one episode where they referred obliquely to the fact that he had lied to the team, told them that he was an orphan, and lied about his father. I guess they felt it was funny and needed to do, and maybe 10 people in the world got it.

The writers’ room is a kind of lost world from the way it was when you first joined. Describe for people what was it like.

Well, if you’ve seen The Dick Van Dyke Show, it’s kind of like that. It really was. I never imagined that there would be that many funny people in one room being funny just because they were funny.

When you first start out—when you’re new and you’re young—you don’t know that the protocol is you’re not supposed to laugh all the time. Now, you’re not supposed to withhold laughter. The first couple days, everything is hilarious. You can’t believe it how funny everybody is.

At a certain point, though, you have to stop because then it feels a little like you walk into a room and sit on the sofa, and then other people make you laugh, and then you get paid, and you go home. And you forget, “No, my job is actually to make them laugh.” And then that’s another struggle because then you try too hard and you’re pitching too many dumb things.

IF they’re nice, they’ll guide you to what they really need. But it’s very hard to find your place in those rooms. Those rooms are really tough. Some people just absolutely hate them, and they’re crushing; and some people just flourish and love it.

How does a joke in a sitcom work? Can you describe the structure of it?

That’s how you kill it. E.B. White said “comedy, like a frog, can be dissected, but the frog tends to die in the process.”

But really, in the best possible room, it’s a spontaneous little play that you’re putting on for your writer colleagues. In fact—at least as how I learned it—it’s bad form to pitch the idea of a joke, or “Here’s what we need. We need this kind of joke.” You’re not getting paid to tell me the shape of the thing I need. You’re getting paid to pitch something that somebody says as an actual line of dialogue I can put in the show.

So it’s the spontaneous improvisation of everything and the way you work with a bunch of people who are your colleagues and your friends, and with whom you’re also competitive because you’re writers. You want to make them laugh. You want to be the guy to save the show. You don’t want to ever reverse engineer it. You want to just get to the point.

I remember people whose skill was setting something up. They kind of knew, “There’s a joke over here,” and they would pitch the setup, and then somebody else would pitch the punchline (and that’s also important).

One of the first three bosses had a great phrase. He was a very improvisational, very spontaneous writer, and he said, “Look, even if you pitch the stupidest, worst thing ever, well, now we know we want the opposite of that. So we know a little bit more than we knew before you pitched it.” Which was not a license to go and just pitch random, garbage, but it did make you feel better when you pitched something and people were like, “Oh, God, no. Oh, no.”

When you’re younger and you’re just starting out, that’s crushing. That’s like, “Oh, my God. No one’s going to fire me. They just think I’m bad.” And that’s a death killer. That’s a hard thing, but everybody goes through that.

In your books, you mention that anyone can be taught how to write a story, but you can’t be taught how to be funny.

I wouldn’t rank them. I think the craft of it is really important. You have to compress a satisfying story with characters that people have ownership of. They don’t tune in to Cheers or to a show they love to watch your unique take on it. They want to watch the characters whom they know and own do a story that you’ve written, but they still feel like they own them. So you have to be really respectful of the audience that you’ve built up with loyalty over time.

The craft part you learn by just doing it, and you learn it by doing it with people who are really smart. The people who ended up being my mentors started writing for the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, and so their whole standard of how things worked, how you actually made a show, and how you thought about it was in the crucible of the James Brooks world, which itself came from The Dick Van Dyke Show, which itself came from sort of Carl Reiner’s work on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows.

There are trees of it, and as you can see the different personnel go to different shows, that’s how you learn. You learn by being with those people and seeing what they notice is a problem, seeing what they notice is not a problem, seeing how they solve something, and seeing how they head off a problem. You just learn a lot of the craft by being an apprentice, which is what a young writer used to be.

Unfortunately, now that’s gone. They don’t have that anymore mostly because, I think, everything’s much cheaper, the staffs are smaller, and they don’t make as many. We made 26, sometimes 28 episodes a year. If you said that to a young writer now, maybe they make six for Hulu.

What changed the industry? Did it change before streaming?

I think streaming did it, or at least it amplified it. I think streaming—or just unlimited store width—changed everything. It changed everything in all areas of the entertainment business. Like the music business, which changed completely. Its upheaval was due to unlimited bandwidth

In the old days, you had to choose which song you were going to listen, which record you were going to hear, which CD you were going to put in the CD changer even. New music had a priority because you bought it, put it in the thing, and listen to your music; and then you put it on a CD shelf that you bought at IKEA, and unless you were a total weirdo, you would never listen to it again, or maybe only once or twice.

You’d mainly listen to new music, so new music used to compete only with new music for your attention. But now it competes with everything ever recorded in the history of the recording industry. It is as easy for you to listen to the most recent Taylor Swift album as it is for you to listen to Evgeny Kissin’s Chopin concerto. It’s the same process. It doesn’t require you to go to your stupid rack and find the thing. It doesn’t require anything of you other than just actually speaking now into Siri, “Play that thing.”

That’s great, but it also means that everything is chaotic, and I think we’re seeing that in TV now, in which there’s a thousand shows on Netflix servers no one’s ever going to watch.

It seems a paradox where there are more episodes before streaming and then fewer episodes even though the amount of storage that you can have is far more unlimited. Likewise, the limited storage created a discipline, and the actual medium created constraints on the actual production of content.

Yes. Also, the money’s not there. I just told somebody this, that I think I made $1,000 on a bet with a friend of mine who said that at no point will Netflix have ads. “Just absolutely not. It’s anathema,” he said. “The minute they have ads, I’m quitting.” And I said, “They’re going to have ads, and you’re not going to quit.” So he said, “I’ll bet you $1,000.”

Of course, they have ads now, and he didn’t quit, because there is no way to run a business like that. You cannot pay as you go. The subscription business does not work. I don’t know why they all thought it did, but it absolutely doesn’t. No entertainment business has ever had only one gate, only one way in, only one profit center, and survived.

They all have to have two or three or four profit centers. And TV’s got to have two, three, or four ancillary stuff so they can sell the show to someplace else. Syndication or foreign, advertising, and then the network license fee—all the costs are based on that.

This is in the weeds stuff, but the people in show business, and certainly the Silicon Valley people who have joined the business, all believe that if they just tune the algorithm right or they just tune their audience research right, they’ll de-risk the whole thing.

They’ll figure out what exactly what you want to watch and give you that, which is bizarre because of course they don’t act that way. Because if you really believe that, then you wouldn’t five episodes of a series. You’d say, “No, I want 50 because I know that I’m going to want it.” But they continually fail at it because they don’t order enough.

They don’t really know. And you never can know. There is no way to know. It’s a risk business, and if you don’t like it, you should be in something else.

Like the William Goldman line, “Nobody knows anything”?

Yeah, he’s right. He said it as a hilarious, sardonic way of looking at all these people making these terrible mistakes. I happen to think that’s fantastic. That is incredibly fun chaos, and if you keep trying new stuff, you’re going to eventually get a hit. What could be better than that?

But if you step on the hose thinking that you can figure things out, or your automatic brain is going to reverse engineer a hit, then you’re going to continually lose money and get more and more cautious until suddenly you’re not even ordering two episodes. You’re going to order one.

I think that’s where we are now. We’re in a terrified, terrified business that needs to shrink, and half of the people who are working at these studios need to do something else. All the supervision needs to go away.

Was it just quantitative easing which made a lot of loose money floating around? Everything was in exorbitant spending, and eventually there’s going to be a contraction.

It’s happening now.

Did the LA fire at all add to that?

I don’t know actually. I think the LA fire was the physical embodiment of what needed to happen, but I don’t think it’s happened, which is we need less. We don’t know how to get less. We need fewer people in LA trying to be in the entertainment business. The personnel and the footprint need to shrink by 25-30%.

Would that make it leaner and produce more hits maybe?

Well, it’ll make it leaner and produce more projects that people haven’t supervised to death because they’re terrified that it might fail.

Fewer people means less risk-averse?

Fewer people means there’s only so much they can do. At some point they have to let something go. I don’t know. Maybe it’ll work. Who knows?

I used to say this when I started a project or I do a pitch with somebody and they want it, I would go, “Yeah. What if it works? It won’t be great, but what if it works? I have no idea.” That’s one part. The second part is that because you have so many younger people and untested people running TV shows (which also can be great), they don’t have the skills and the craft yet to make 25 episodes.

So I was ranting to a friend of mine who runs one of these streamers who foolishly bought me dinner to hear my rant, and then I gave it to him, which is never the most generous way to handle a free dinner, but whatever.

I complained about all these short orders, saying how “You have no way of knowing that this thing could’ve been a big hit.” I was complaining about one show I liked that they canceled. And he said, “What you don’t know is that had we ordered 20 more of them, those people doing that show couldn’t have done it. They barely made the five because they didn’t have any experience.”

Remember, these are $100 million business units, and the showrunner’s in charge of everything. So when you’re new and you do something that big, you don’t know if the showrunner can do these days until after it’s all fallen.

And he said “They’re all really great, but they were exhausted. Had we come to them and said, ‘We want 20 more,’ they would’ve jumped off a bridge.” So there’s also that.

My friend, Joe Joyce, once pointed out that the way it works at Netflix, they broke down the writer’s room, so everyone is constantly moved around. There’s rarely time to develop as a group and sharpen your tools.

A stand-up comedian, for example, sharpens his tools by going from comedy club to comedy club, interacting with people, dealing with hecklers, and sharpening his material over a course of a year for just one routine. In the writers’ room, by contrast, you guys don’t have direct access to the audience. You just have to each other’s taste.

Yeah, but also in a comedy you have a rehearsal and the cast, especially if the cast is great.

I’ve been incredibly lucky in my career. I’ve only worked with amazingly great people. We’d go to the stage on Thursday morning to watch a run-through at Cheers, and then these incredibly funny people would be doing just the little play we wrote.

Who are your favorite people you’ve worked with?

Definitely the entire cast of Cheers was fantastic, but then I’ve done many other shows. I worked with Bob Newhart. Judd Hirsch was great.

Judd Hirsch was also this incredibly intuitive actor who knew when something wasn’t working, which sometimes happens. That’s why you have rehearsals. A little like Ted Danson, he would try to help you by explaining what wasn’t working for him. And it was always nonsense. It’s always just gibberish. But it didn’t matter because that’s not his job is to tell me how to fix it or what’s wrong. His job is to be super authentic and just to say, “I can’t. I don’t know how to do this.”

Ted Danson was also that guy. Ted is an incredibly intuitive actor. One of the great things is the sheer diversity of the parts that he’s playing as other people are always realizing just how great he is. He is a great actor I loved. Swoosie Kurtz was fantastic. I worked with a woman named Jodi Long, also Brian Doyle Murray, and these are just great performers. And Christine Ebersole.

Sometimes a real pro will come up to you at the run-through. Maybe they’ve been working all morning, and they’re tired and blow something in a run-through. They’ll stop, turn to the writers, and say, “Don’t cut this. This is great. I just messed it up. Please don’t. Let me have one more day at this.”

Every now and then, you give it another day, and if it’s somebody who’s really good, they take it personally when you cut it. And so you just have to say to them, “Look, you could not sell this material. The material didn’t work. We need to write you better material.”

It’s a great feeling when you have this kind of relationship with your cast and your team. They didn’t make a mistake. You made a mistake. You think they think they made a mistake, and you are trying to explain to them, “No, no. Thank you for respecting us, but boy, we just gave you a stinker of a scene, and we got to fix it.” That was the joy of it. I’m not sure that there’s that time anymore.

Most people don’t like the multi-camera processes to rehearse. It’s like a play and then you put it on the shoot night in front of an audience that’s real. That’s not a tape. It’s real. It’s not a laugh track. It’s an audience track. We record the audience, and the cameras are zooming around and trying to capture that performance. It’s the sum total of your week’s work. The script starts in one place and ends in another place because you are making it better each time.

If you actually read these scripts, they change. For us anyway, Cheers definitely was the case: if you read the script we brought to the table the first day—the table read script, in which, all the dialogue’s worked out—it reads like a script. But then you read the shooting script—so the script we actually shot and the dialogue that actually lasted—sometimes it reads like an insane person wrote it.

It’s just brittle. There is stuff missing. But that’s the show, right? You don’t need as many words when you have a cast like we had, or a cast like I’ve had since then. You overwrite because you’re writing, but you take to the script less. When the table reading’s over, it becomes a show.

I used to say this to even executives: when they’d come to a run-through, and they’d be sitting there reading the script along with a pencil, reading the script, and their head would naturally (which writers also do) go down to the script, they’re reading the lines like they’re hearing the actors in front of them reading the lines.

I would actually stop things. I would say, “All right, stop. Stop. Let’s, just do it again.” And then turn to the people in the chairs and say: “You need to watch. We don’t send the script to the audience. They don’t get that. And they’re not allowed to read the script. They just watch the show. So this is either going to work or not work based on what we all are watching.”

And they go, “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.” But it’s just human nature, like you’re just naturally going to look down at the book you have in your front of you, which is usually when things go bad.

What about the element of serendipity? You’ve written a script; you have the cast together; it’s a pilot; then already a number of episodes have been ordered for season one. What happens then? Do things alter? Do things change?

If you’re smart, they change. If you’re paying attention, they change, because you don’t know.

The problem of living life is that you must have some certainty. You must believe in certain things just to get out of bed in the morning, but you also have to know also that none of these things that you plan for are true or real or going to happen, and that everything’s going to be an improvisation. You are constantly batting up against your idea of what should be or what you had planned for, and then what really is.

So you write a script, you have a very clear vision, you start casting it, and then everybody kind of pitches in on casting. Say somebody comes in who’s fantastic, but completely wrong for the part. Then you have to decide, “Okay, is the part right? This person’s great. Maybe we just have to adjust the part.” Or maybe you have the first table reading and you discover that, “Oh my gosh: this other person that we cast comes in, who’s just the mailman or postman—that person’s great and getting huge laughs. More of that person.”

You have to have the flexibility to do that, and the awareness to not throw everything away because you’re chasing something. It’s kind of like life, right? You make plans and God laughs, as they say, but you have to have some kind of structure, and you have to be willing to throw it out.

But you’re always wondering whether you’re throwing it out too soon, or you should dig in. That’s show business in a nutshell. Because we have to work with other people, I have to get the actors to say the lines and make them real. So their input is really crucial. And if you don’t like them, or they’re not good, or you don’t trust them, or they don’t trust you, you’re in trouble. You’re going to have some trouble.

So you’ve had the career working as a TV writer and producer in Hollywood, but you’ve also had a career taking the business-production side of Hollywood—both your own personal experiences, and also famous Hollywood anecdotes—and putting them together in syndication, you might say, in books and columns.

Yeah, always monetize. Always monetize content. That’s our rule.

Also in “The Martini Shot,” your podcast.

Your first book, Conversations with My Agent, is a coming-of-age story of a TV writer who’s had great success but his show ends. So it’s about he has to come up with a new show and relearn the business while out in the wilderness, with the agent as his mentor. Now a lot of this seems drawn from some personal experience, but the humor is made very anonymous. It’s just “my agent,” never named. This goes even when you’re telling a story about a TV network executive or some film or some show. Was that a self-protective strategy?

Listen, I was 30. I got to work in this town. But also it allows you then to blend people together. It allows you to say it wasn’t this one executive, it was actually these three, and now they’re one person in this. The irony is that the truest portrait was of my agent. A lot of that was real dialogue, which people are like, “No.” And I’m like, “Actually, yeah.”

She was someone who knew the business very well inside and out, never really creatively made it, but was able to help other people make it.

I don’t know how it is now, but I think back then, for an agent like that, that was their goal.

She asked us one question in our first meeting. She said: “What do you guys want? What do you want in this business? What do you want to do?” I don’t think we’d even talked about it. We just said, “Oh, we want to have our own show.” And she said, “That’s the right answer.”

So now she knows, “Okay, they want to have their own show. My job is to get them to that point, and to tell them not to do stupid stuff, and tell them not to chase more money.” Because after the first year of Cheers we could’ve gone somewhere else and probably could get paid a lot more, but you want to stay and learn, right?

If I was an agent and two young writers came, and I said, “What do you want?” And they said, “Well...” I don’t think they would say, “We want to have our own show,” because I don’t know if that’s the pinnacle.

I think they just want a job. And at the time, of course, my real answer was, “I just want a job.” But we knew enough to know that, no, I think what she wants and what we want is eventually to have our own show. Hard to believe, but in show business, they really believe their mission is to get you there. In many ways, it’s a very supportive place.

In preparation for this interview, this was the second time going through your book. What struck me...

That’s more than me.

Well, the audiobook helped.

I read it. Do you know that? I narrated it. Yeah. It’s an interesting thing about audiobooks, when you read them, you can change things. I changed some stuff.

I thought your voice sounded a little familiar…I was wondering why the humor was working even though it lacked specifics and was stripped down.

While it was a protective tactic while you’re working in this business, and also allowed you to blend things for more creative room, nevertheless, to violate E.B. White’s dictum, why do you think a joke works like that where you have the archetype rather than this particular person with this specific name in this area and working at this company and so on?

First of all, when you’re telling a joke, you don’t want them to be thinking about anything that is unimportant to the joke. So you don’t want anyone’s mind distracted when moving from the setup to the punchline. Attention management is the most important thing in humor. Actually, it’s the most important thing in everything.

Also, once you give somebody a name, now they have a character, and now it’s not an anecdote. Now it’s not a story I’m telling. It’s a story that’s unfolding, and I’m just narrating a story. Whereas I wanted it to feel like I am telling you a story, and that I’m going to tell you what’s important: I’ve sat you down, handed you a drink, and now I’m going at it.

And part of that’s just laziness. I don’t really want to create a character. Now I got to give the character dimension? No. It’s just a guy. It’s an executive.

And part of it was cowardice. I don’t want to name the person, because if I name the person, then that person’s going to read it, and they’ll be really mad, or they’ll be really flattered, or the person I don’t mention will be really mad or really flattered.

And you can always end up working with someone at any given point in Hollywood.

Oh, yeah. I had a deal at a studio once—this is after the books—and there was a delay in it. I was hopping on a project that was already going on, and they needed me. I started working while we hadn’t settled on the deal, but I know we were going to fight.

There was this strange delay, and people were like, “Why has your deal not closed? It’s getting awkward. You’ve been here too long.” And so I called my attorney, “What’s going on?” She said, “Everything’s fine except they are digging in on this one thing. They want you to sign a piece of paper that says that you will not use anything that happens, like any conversation you have with anybody, in any of your writing.”

And I said, “Okay, I’m fine. I’ll sign it.” But my attorney was like: “Then I’m not your lawyer, because that is a violation of your First Amendment rights, and I’m not going to do that. ‘No,’ I told them, ‘That under no circumstances would you ever even dream of signing that.’”

I’m like, “Yeah, but I’m here two weeks. It’s fine. Everything’s going to be fine.” She’s like, “No, my job is to remind you that everything is not going to be fine, so there’s absolutely no way you’re giving them that guarantee. You’ll have to find somebody else to make this deal.” I was like, “Okay. All right. But in the meantime, I’m working, so let’s wrap it up.”

So eventually she made it clear to them that I was never going to sign it. And I think I said to her, “Oh, I’ll sign it. It’s fine, and then later if I want to write about it, I’ll write about it. They don’t care.” She’s like, “No. No. That is not how the world works. You sign contract, and make a promise, and then while you’re signing it, you’re planning that eventually break it. You’re just lying.” And I thought, “Well, I don’t think of it as lying.” But that’s exactly what it was.

She’s a great lawyer, so she got them to back down, and I think it was like a month later. A very thing typical in Hollywood is that you won’t make a deal or close a deal and then start working. You just agree that we’re going to make a deal here, and then you start working just in a position like that.

Are there a group of your friends who find a second layer to the humor in your columns or your podcasts or your books where they know who you’re talking about?

Oh, yes. And then occasionally they’ll correct me. They’re like: “Actually, that’s not how it unfolded.”

Occasionally I’ve had usually good friends of mine say something, because only your good friends can be honest and cruel to you. If somebody says something stupid or wrong, and I attribute it to one of them, not often, but every now and then I’ll get a text from someone: “I was listening to your Martini Shot and you talk about a guy. No, you’re that guy. Just so you know, in the story as it really happened, you were the jerk.” And I think, “Oh, wow. I remember it differently.”

But that’s also what people do. And I think they’re right and I’m wrong, but I’m the one with the microphone.

You host podcasts with a microphone. But you’ve also been a purveyor of helping other people create podcasts through Ricochet. There was an Atlantic piece back in 2010 that said this was the attempt to “make conservatism fun again” through the Ricochet network.

Oh, wow. Really? That’s interesting.

How did you become part of that rare Hollywood breed, a Republican, and how did you get into the conservative movement as a Hollywood writer, and how did you start Ricochet the podcast network?

I wish I could say the podcast network was this goal all along for us, but it really wasn’t. I was starting this thing with Peter Robinson, who’s this wonderful writer, thinker, and interviewer—I think one of the best serious interviewers alive.

The host of “Uncommon Knowledge” with the Hoover Institution.

If it’s anybody interesting in your world that you think is interesting, the first thing you should do is google “Uncommon Knowledge Peter Robinson” and that person’s name, because if that comes up, which it does often, that’s gold.

That conversation’s going to be riveting. He’s really great. It’s incredible that if the culture wasn’t so dumb, it would be a hit on French television—which is what I always tell him, and which he thinks is an insult.

It would’ve been bigger than Charlie Rose.

Oh, yeah. Much better than Charlie Rose, unbelievably so.

Anyway, so we didn’t have that plan, but then we started it because of our friend, Scott Immergut, who now produces Uncommon Knowledge, who also does “GLoP” with us, and who was a liberal Democrat whom I knew from show business. He was a friend of mine from Hollywood.

He kept saying over and over again, “You guys, what are you doing? It’s so dumb. Make a podcast. Do a podcast.” So we did a podcast as a companion to the site and then we discovered that actually, as long as they’re conversational, people like podcasts.

These are hard. Just because you can do it, it’s easy, and you can buy two really great mics at Best Buy doesn’t mean that you’re a podcaster. It does, but it doesn’t mean you are one. Because mostly people turn out homework, right? And nobody wants homework. The audience does not pay for homework. They want it to be interesting. so that was part of it.

And then the Hollywood the conservative Hollywood thing was: generationally, the schools I went to were all very progressive and liberal. And Reagan was president, he was terrible, and he was ruining everything. Then suddenly the Berlin Wall comes down. Okay, now you got to figure that out. I had this theory, and then this other thing happened which wasn’t supposed to happen. Then everybody who was behind the Iron Curtain was thrilled, and they all wanted to put up statues to Ronald Reagan.

So maybe I’m wrong. Then if you’re wrong about that, what else are you wrong about? And then you suddenly notice that there are people who in very good faith are looking for other progressive shibboleths and making thoughtful critiques of them.

And I was like, “Okay these guys are right, so I’m going to give these guys my vote.” That’s how it happened. I can’t speak to what it is now, and I think certain people had bad experiences. I never did. Everybody in Cheers knew. The minute they know that you’re a Republican, they’re like, “Hey, what does the Republican think? Hey, get over here. What do you... “

I remember being called to the set urgently because Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson were having an argument about the first Iraq War, and they wanted to know my perspective. “As somebody who’s pro the Iraq War, what do you think?” And I’m like, “Well, I’m not really pro it, but okay…”

But entertainment business in my experience was incredibly open and absolutely willing to have the argument. Had I been an associate professor of English literature at Yale University, I would’ve been fired, without a doubt. Hollywood is much more open-minded and diverse and thoughtful than any American university, absolutely.

Except Princeton University.

Oh, sure. Speaking as an individual, I can say that Princeton University has inculcated this weird, rare orchid, and that’s great. But if I was teaching Chaucer and I said something like, “As a wise Milton Friedman would say,” or you know, “I was just reading the Thomas Sowell column,” I’d have a show trial. I’d be arrested and carried out and shot at dawn.

So it was never an encumbrance while in Hollywood?

Not that I know. I heard one dark moment when someone told me, “Well, you say that, but I heard somebody say this about you: ‘But, you know, we don’t want that guy.’” But I’ve never experienced it. I never knew about it.

I mean, if anything, they’re curious. You’re like a zoo animal: “Hey, what does that guy think? Let’s throw this at him, see what he does with it.”

Everything’s now been irretrievably toxified, but back then, it wasn’t quite the way it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s, or maybe even the ‘80s. It was essentially a non-confrontational politics. They were all reflexively liberal, but they weren’t Maoists.

I think there was a period where they were, but I missed that period, or at that point I already had a career and so people were like, “Yeah, you know the guy’s kind of a right-wing kook, but he knows how to run a show.”

Now during your time co-founding Ricochet with Peter Robinson, you also walked into a church in New York called St. James Episcopal Church.

I had been there many times before, but it’s the church you go to when your friends get married there. I was “a cradle Episcopalian” as we say, which is meaningless, but Episcopalians think it’s meaningful. Maybe it’s 2012, I just walked up the steps on New Year’s Day, which was the Feast of the Holy Name, which was on a Sunday. I’m just like, “Oh this is interesting. This is kind of wild—this thing I’ve really given no thought to my whole life.”

Now I think it happens when you get to be a certain age. We’ve been running an experiment in the country—I’m 60, so I was born in ‘65—just to see what happens if you raise people in an entirely secular world. What is that like? What is it like if all popular culture is secular, which it is? There’s only one family in America that goes to church. That’s The Simpsons.

Presbylutherians.

Presbylutherians, right. It’s great, right?

Reverend Lovejoy.

Reverend Lovejoy. But they go every Sunday. It’s fantastic, right?

They don’t believe in infant baptism. Homer was the only one baptized…by accident.

Yeah, but you know what? I shouldn’t say this. I’m an Episcopalian on the ordination track, but I kind of get it. I get the argument. But even to be able to have those conversations, it’s rare, right?

It didn’t used to be. People used to like, “Oh, you go to church.” It wasn’t whether you had faith or not. The world was not secular. I went to fancy schools. Nobody made me go to chapel or read the Bible, and I think I was the first generation not to have to do so.

We live in a 100% secular society, and all of that would be fine except that the human life is not secular. It is the least secular thing you can imagine. Every big event in your life, your whole life—the span of it, the highs, the lows, the joys, the sorrows, the pain, the heartbreak, victory, the illness, the health, the marriage, the love, the death, all that—those are the least secular things that you could ever imagine.

This is my Pollyanna view, but there’s a whole generation of Americans who are not babies and are not cradle Episcopalians, who are not cradle anything, who are 30, 40, 50, or 60 years old.

The “nones.”

The “nones” they call them, but I think people don’t have an opinion on religion, but they still are living a life that is not secular, because your life isn’t secular, and they’re still having experiences where whatever tools we have in the world right now are not enough. There are not enough yoga classes or Burning Man events.

Or Psychedelics.

Psychedelics. Yeah, there’s plenty of those. There’s not enough of that to get you. There’s just something else, right? There’s a reason why people have had faith since the very beginning, and those are people who are going to walk into a church at some point.

So you walk into a church, and you find your own life isn’t very secular, or that you can’t explain moments in it through a godless lens. What specifically happened when you were in that church?

Well, I was reacquainted (depending on how woo-woo you are) with the baptism of my infancy, where you’re sealed as Christ’s own forever. Then you walk into a church, and somebody says, “Oh.” Basically what I felt was: “Huh, it’s been waiting for you. The table’s all set, ready to go.”

They say something at St. James that is liturgical, but it’s not in the Book of Common Prayer. It’s the invitation to the table, and the Episcopalians are really good at keeping difficult concepts a little vague, so you can kind of fill it in.

I worked for a year here at this great church, Trinity Episcopal. It’s a fantastic place. The rector who’s retiring now is wonderful, and the associate rector was a professor of mine. She’s great and it’s a really great place. They have their own invitation, and I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s beautiful.

So the invitation to the table is kind of not written in the Book of Common Prayer, but everybody does one. At St. James they say the call to the table after the Eucharistic prayer. They say: “The table is ready, so come. Those of you who come often, those of you who’ve not been for a long time, those of you who have faith, those of you who would like to have more, those of you who have followed Jesus, and those of you who have failed, come because it is Christ who invites you to meet him here.”

It’s a very succinct theological statement, and if you’re in the frame of mind and you’re willing to hear it, it’s kind of mind-blowing. So then I thought, “I should keep coming back.” It wasn’t like I had a big moment. I was like, “Oh, I like hearing that, so I should just keep coming back.” And I did. And then you keep coming back, and then get a little more deep into it, and you’re like, “Oh, what is this? What else do we believe that I forgot that we believed?”

And then I went to Jerusalem with the people in my church on a pilgrimage, and then you think, “Oh, this is wild. Why do I care about any of this?” I always say the story about when you go to Jerusalem: I spent like the first three or four days just being a normal tourist. You’re like, “Okay.”

And when they take you around, they go, “This is where this happened. Well, not here. Here or near. We don’t really know where, but it’s probably here. And if it happened here, it didn’t happen right here, it happened like 20 feet below.” And so you’re always kind of like looking around for clues. It’s like CSI Jesus, like you’re going to find the thing: “Oh, wait, I found the thing that proves that this thing happened.”

I was lucky enough that I knew some people who said, “Oh, you got to go to the Dome of the Rock,” which is a very complicated political thing, and you got to get cleared off. You go up there, and you can’t pray, because it’s what they’re always fighting about. But, if you say the right things, and you’re polite, you can’t go in the mosque, but you can go in the dome, and you go in the dome.

It’s the dome over the rock, and depending on what you believe, the rock is where Abraham took Isaac for the Binding of Isaac—which is the euphemism you use for “he was going to murder him,” right? And then if you’re Muslim, it’s where on Muhammad’s night ride, he flew and hit the rock, and then went up into and got more of the Quran.

And where Solomon built the temple.

Yeah, then there’s a temple there. That’s the other thing, right? So there’s no more temple there since AD 70.

You go into the Dome of the Rock. It’s a nice room, but it’s an empty room. You come up. You have to do a lot: go through the metal detectors, get people signing you things, and stuff. So you finally go in, and they open the room, and it’s just an empty room. Then you come down the hill, and then you’re right there by the Western Wall. And there’s these people praying against the wall.

The Wailing Wall?

Yeah, the Wailing Wall. But it’s the PC way, the woke way. We say it’s the Western Wall. And so they’re praying, but they’re praying against a wall that is a retaining wall holding up nothing, because there hasn’t been a temple there the year 70. So somehow, they’re praying against nothing, and the Muslims are going and protecting a room that’s empty.

And then if you walk a little bit farther and you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Church of the Resurrection, where one part of it is where Jesus was crucified and the other part is where his tomb is. You go into the tomb; that’s also an empty room. So it’s three empty places.

Now, obviously, the empty tomb is the foundational thing for us Christians. Of course it’s empty, because that’s the whole point. But you come a long to be in empty rooms. What I realized for me was: “Oh, the rooms aren’t really empty, because I’m in them.” And that’s maybe why I came here, to be in that room. To be not empty in an empty room, but to fill the room.

Also, God would be present, right?

Yeah. He’s also there. He’s also outside. But if you have that faith, you believe that God wanted you to come not to see Him, but to see yourself. And you know, the Collect for Purity in the Episcopal faith is: “God to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, from whom no secrets are hid.” So, He already knows you fully. The only person who doesn’t know you fully is you.

But you didn’t just come back to Episcopalianism. You also have a calling to the priesthood. Tell me how that got started. How did you find that you were being called?

They ask you that when you’re going through your discernment committee process, like “when did you hear the call?” Well, I don’t know if I heard it. I think I just agreed to hear it, or agreed to hear what I was already playing.

Partly I wanted to do something different with my life and different with my writing. Not because I didn’t like Hollywood or show business, but also, I had been doing it for 30 years, so I wanted to do something different. I started when I was very young. So it helps that when you start at 24, then when you’re 50-something, you’re like, “Well, I’ve done this.” If I was a cop, I’d be on a boat. I’d be retired with my boat.

So I don’t know if I heard a specific call. I just found myself drawn more and more to thinking and writing about this stuff, and more and more seeing it being applied in my life and seeing it either present or not present in my life, and more and more to serving needs in other people.

When people ask, I’ll answer that at a certain point I thought, “Well, maybe I should just study this a little bit,” which would be an unusual thing for me to do the research first, right? Mostly, I’ll wing it. Then I decided to go, “Okay, I’m going to get an MDiv, because then I’ll learn everything and I’ll know all this stuff.” Last year I did it. And I thought, “Okay, well now I know.”

Because I still want to do this despite the fact that there’s all this boring reading. Much of it is really, incredibly impenetrable prose written by theologians. The worst thing about theology is that theologians do it.

Once you’re done with that, it’s like: what do I think about mostly? What am I drawn to mostly? And it’s this. So partly you just have to get out of your own way. Instead of coming up with reasons why I can’t do this, I’m coming up with reasons the way I can do it.

The reaction from my friends has been really interesting because, some people have said, “What?” But then other people said, “Uh-huh, I see it. Oh, totally.” So, it’s funny to me. I thought all my friends would say, “What?” But a lot of them were like, “Oh, I can see that.”

What about it has surprised you now that you’ve done formal studies? And also, why Princeton Theological Seminary specifically?

I love Princeton because it was Princeton.

It’s close to New York. I was an undergraduate at Yale. It also seemed very academic. Princeton tends to be a little bit more nerdy and academic than anywhere else, mostly because it’s Presbyterian. The Presbyterians started it, so it has a very flinty Scottish Presbyterian, like, “Well, you’re going to read hard books.”

We had Reverend Kevin DeYoung talking about John Witherspoon at the start of season five.

Yeah, they love that stuff. And we Episcopalians are like, “Oh, please, relax. Have a drink, you know? Life’s not that hard.”

And this is a stranger looking at it from the other side of the telescope from your traditional audience, but what has surprised me the most about it is the willingness of people who are coming from a very strong and very doctrinaire faith tradition, whether it was non-denominational or denominational. But the young people, their willingness to come to this place knowing that it’s going to get a little weird for them, that they’re going to be reading theology that they would have never imagined.

I really admire the bravery of that. When you’re my age, everything seems confusing, but when you’re young and you actively place yourself in a position to be studying something that you care about and you’ve always cared about your whole life, knowing full well some of the cherished givens of your faith and your background and maybe your family’s faith are going to be irrevocably changed, I think it’s pretty amazing.

I don’t even know if they notice it, because most of my classmates are in their late 20s. But I notice it. I’m always blown.

Have you noticed any deep concord between writing comedy and studying God?

Yeah, I have. But I’m not sure everybody sees it my way.

What is your way?

My way is that it’s funny. It’s a comedy. But life is a comedy, right? A comedy is a thing that happens and has a happy ending at the end where you go home. Not that you suffer heartbreak in it, but it’s also more surprising.

In a tragedy, everybody’s dead on stage. We know how a tragedy ends: they all die. For some, half of them die and they shouldn’t have. They just die because they’re dumb, or they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they’re holding on too tight. Comedy is more like your life. If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re not lying dead on stage, I got bad news for you. You’re in a comedy.

I also think that Jesus is funny. What they call the red print—which is all his lines—if you say it in a certain way, it just sounds like he’s just wandering around stentorian, so he sounds like Charlton Heston. Some of it’s funny. A lot of it’s funny. He’ll say two things back-to-back that are contradictory.

And it isn’t because he’s trying to be obscure. I think it’s trying to impress upon you just how hard it is, how all the rules you believe in, you got bigger rules to follow. Every one of your more conservative fundamentalist listeners is now ready to throw this podcast out the window, but I think that’s what he says.

There’s a great scene in John when he meets a Samaritan woman at the well.

Samaritans are great because they’re in there all the time. The New Testament writers love the Samaritans. They represented everything because they were the original Jews. They were a little bit even more orthodox than the orthodox, right? They believe in just the Pentateuch. Apparently, there are 1,200 left somewhere, and they have an incredibly wild Passover Seder. On my life’s bucket list, there are two things I want to see. One is the Samaritan Passover Seder.

The other is the Orthodox Easter celebration in Jerusalem, which is bananas. Oh, the fire: the whole place is on fire. I’m surprised that people don’t burn to death in this thing. My idea of hell is to write their umbrella policy.

Then there are the Samaritans, right? And, even in English when we say, “Oh, it’s the Good Samaritan.” But actually, the way we should be pronouncing it for the story is “The Good Samaritan because most Samaritans are terrible.” Everybody hated the Samaritans. But he’s always with Samaritans for some reason. And he meets this woman at the well.

There are huge forests that have been cut down to print the pages that have been written about this. So it utterly disrespectful for me to tell them that they’re all wrong and I’m right, because I’ve been writing comedy my whole life, and I’m telling you, that is a funny scene. It’s comedy, and that’s the only way to read the dialogue, that he and this woman are having a very witty conversation that gets serious but doesn’t start serious.

If you read it with spooky music behind it, then I guess you miss it. But if you just read it this one scene, he’s talking to this woman, and then he says, “Where’s your husband?” And she says, “I don’t have a husband.” And his next line is, “I know you don’t have a husband. You’ve had five husbands, and the guy you’re living with right now is not your husband.”

Alright, they’re joking with each other. And then her next line is, “Oh, you’re a prophet.”

Like everyone knows.

Right. And if you read it like a human being talks, which is that he was very good at talking like a human being. I don’t see how it’s not an interesting interlude with him. And it’s very written because there’s nobody there. It’s just him and it’s her. To me, I actually think that’s fine.

One of the essences of Christianity is in its embodied human, real presence of God, and He’s going to say some funny stuff.

Did Jesus just tell funny things, or do you think he also partook?

Did he laugh?

That’s the controversy among the Fathers, whether he did or didn’t.

Ah, of course he did. He was a human. He’s one of the God-in-three persons, right? It makes no sense that he suffers but doesn’t have joy.

Meister Eckhart says something to the effect that ‘the Son is the laughter of the Father.’

Have you ever found when you’re trying to teach theology or apply the word to the people of God that you’ve drawn from some of your comedy writing?

When you write sermons and stuff, absolutely. You got to have a very firm timing, especially in an Episcopal church: ten minutes, twelve minutes.

Basically, my Martini Shots are ten or less. And if you’re doing a homily, a weekday Eucharist for a Tuesday, you have five minutes. People want to hear it, but they don’t want to hear a speech. They want to hear a five-minute homily on the weekday, and then on Sundays, you got about ten minutes, maybe fifteen. But if you do fifteen full minutes, there better be some laughs in there. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. So I do them just the way I do a Martini Shot, which I start with a story, and this is what happened to me. And people were like: “Oh, yeah, it happened. Yeah, that’s right. I get it. “

One I preached on the first Sunday after Easter—so Easter one. (I guess they call it Easter two; I can’t remember what they call it.) And it was about the word “hallelujah,” because we can bring it back now. We don’t say hallelujah during Lent. And then I said, “Listen, the way I hear people almost say it…” It comes right out. I think the line I said was, “I do it, too, every now and then. During Lent, I’ll just come right out.” And you’re supposed to. No ‘hallelujahs’ during Lent is the rule. And I said, “I always feel bad about it. I feel like I’ve violated something. I’ve committed a crime, you know: the Episcopalian crime of expressing unauthorized joy.”

People in the audience laugh. People in the pews laugh. I say audience like that’s right—that’s what it feels like. And they laugh because I do that. “During Lent, remember, don’t say hallelujah.” And then you have them because they’re like, “Oh, okay,” but I think preaching should be that. And I think to the extent that I would adjust the preaching ethos in general, especially in the Episcopal Church, is that I would remind the people that it is an invitation and a sharing. It is not a lecture.

If you look at something like Michelangelo’s Pietà, the Crucifixion is fundamentally tragic. You can’t look at that and not feel its pathos. But the Crucifixion is an act of humiliation. The first depiction of the Crucifixion is in the Roman catacombs, where it was a donkey that’s put on a cross.

Yeah, it was like: “Here is so-and-so worshiping his God.”

And Christians didn’t start depicting it until centuries later. They would only talk about the cross. Is the Crucifixion in itself comical, or tragic? Or does the Resurrection take something that’s comical and make it tragic because we know who He is, and then it becomes a comedy again once He’s risen?

I don’t know. Those categories are complicated. The crucifixion is human. The idea is that if you believe that the world is about achievement, being in charge, and being the richest person and the most powerful, you have a hard time understanding why God let this happen. It’s the ultimate theodicy question, right?

Not just how does God allow bad things to happen, how does God allow bad things to happen to Him? And when he’s partly in two minds of it, depending on which gospel you’re reading. He’s either like, “Oh my God, get me out of here”… And I think all of those things are at play. So I don’t actually think you have to choose.

Look, we are all going to die. Every single one of us is going to die. Our lives are not our most precious possession. They’re just not. It’s what we do with them. It’s the hours that we’re not dead that are the most precious possession. And we have an incredible neurotic-like buildup of attempts to circumvent that.

There are a million things you can take from the crucifixion and then the resurrection, but I really think that one of the lessons is this is not the worst thing. Don’t be afraid of this. And I think that’s hard. That’s really hard to accept because we want to hold on to everything really tightly. And this is not getting super woo-woo, but we have switched from believing that life is precious (which I think it is), and now what we believe is that death is the end, and it’s to be avoided at all costs.

There’s a great Rumi poem where he says “all sorrows come,” and the idea is that you have to welcome all of these things, these terrible things, all of your shame and your fears. Welcome them at the door, and see them laughing and smiling.

I want to talk to future Father Long, as well as Hollywood writer, Mr. Long, for someone who is a writer or any person in the creative arts looking how their craft has been automated with AI. It’s not just that show business has changed, and not just that streaming’s been here.

Yeah, right.

It’s that the technology itself is making human input dispensable, obsolete.

From someone who’s worked that craft for a long time, and someone who has a theological perspective on what it’s like for us to be “sub-creators,” to use Tolkien phrase, to make things, to produce things, as we’re meant to do like in the Garden: what is your advice to people when they’re facing this sort of technological oblivion?

I think two things. One is that there is probably a way that AI or any kind of large language model in the future, and maybe even in the present, can write a pretty good Law & Order episode or CSI probably right now.

They call it a procedural for that reason, right? There’s a process and you’re following it. And it doesn’t deviate. If you’re on the treadmill at the gym watching Law & Order, that’s where most people see it. Because it’s on, you know what time it is by what’s happening on screen. You don’t even need the dialogue. You’re like, “Oh, they’re at the court? I better wrap this up because that means we’re at the top of the hour. It’s almost the end of the show.”

So I think that could happen. And I’m not sure. Maybe that’s fine. Look, people don’t like Thomas Kinkade: Painter of Light. If there was ever an AI painter, that’s “Thomas Kinkade: Painter of Light.”

It wasn’t just one person, but it was a bunch of people basically working like cogs in a machine churning these out.

Alright. Well, now we don’t need those people because we have AI doing it, and probably do a pretty good job.

When I was a kid, I read all The Hardy Boys, written by Franklin W. Dixon, who was nine writers, and sometimes they were Carolyn Keene writing Nancy Drew books. Sometimes they were writing Tom Swift. There’s that. There’s always going to be that, and maybe a computer can do that at some point.

As you’re saying, like a generic template generator.

You know what I want? I just want to sit and watch a Law & Order. I don’t want to think too hard.

But I think for people who are creating and want to create, or they want to create just for themselves, the idea is to be spontaneous and surprising, which I think is very hard to build into any system. But also the one thing that the code can never get is how you really feel. Your truth—that’s something that a computer can’t know in the same way that I can’t know how you really feel. You have to tell me how you really feel and what you’re really thinking and what your real insight is. Maybe we’ll just listen to each other more.

I have this theory, which is my ow, Pollyanna theory, that if you imagine a graph. There was a time in my life—and your life too, this is very recent stuff—when I didn’t know anything about my neighbor, but I liked him. Then social media came, and now I know a lot about my neighbor and what his idiotic beliefs are, what his stupid political choices have been, and what his ridiculous opinions are; and now I don’t like him because I know him.

To know my neighbors and not like him.

So now we’re at this like trough, if you plot it out on an X-axis of knowledge like bad-low. And instead of going back to why I don’t know my neighbor, because I don’t think we can, I think we need to go forward and now I know I need to know more about him, because the more you know about somebody, the harder it is.

There’s a point at which I think the curve goes back up and you start to like that guy. I know he’s a jerk and I know he believes this and that, but he’s a nice guy, he was nice to the dog, and he said a nice thing to me. All this other stuff isn’t as important as the fact that I know he had a tough life or his parents were this or that.

All those things seem extremely Pollyannaish, and I know there are people rolling their eyes. I actually feel the only way through this uncanny valley—”unlikey valley,” I would call it—where we know just enough to get mad is to know more.

So you’re saying we need to have more use of the technology to know what it’s actually going to be doing?

I think so. And I think we probably need to be a little bit more careful about who we let into our mood regulator. So we have to accept the fact that there are people who are going to enrage us and there are politics that will enrage us. Get over it.

Religion teaches to think about our souls, and modern society often forgets the fact that we have them. Does art require some metaphysical vision to justify its own existence and its continuation? That we have to put deliberate effort into this thing, not just as an economic function that’s gone now, but because we, as the kind of creatures we are, need it. I want something from someone who has a soul, who’s a divine icon, right?

Even if it’s bad. There was that guy who asked you in your book: “I know you hire great old writers. But do you ever hire hack writers?”

“Oh, those guys are great,” he said.

I don’t know. I think that the goal of the artist is to do something that you can’t really do any other way. That if you explained it, it wouldn’t make any sense.

You mentioned the Pieta. Alright, that’s an incredibly powerful work of art. It’s Mary, weirdly sculpted as a young girl.

As the age she would’ve been when she gave birth to Christ.

Right.

…holding the body of the 33-year-old Christ.

So it’s a weird kind of time thing.

A physical impossibility.

A physical impossibility. But also, it’s not in the Bible. That’s not a scene in the Bible.

There’s a great book out called How Catholics Encounter the Bible by Michael Peppard. I heard him speak, and the book is fantastic, by the way. He makes a point that this image is seen by 10 million people a year because it’s right there. You walk in the Vatican, right in St. Peter’s Basilica, it’s right there. That’s how many people see it every year. They all see this famous Michelangelo artwork. More people than read the Gospels, right? Probably. So what do you make of that? That’s somebody’s imagination—someone’s theological imagination.

Thank God it was Michelangelo, right? Because he’s a genius, but he imagined that moment, and he imagined it in a certain way, and he imagined it as a teaching moment. So where are you? Are you on Good Friday, or are you at Candlemas when Simeon says, “Your heart will be broken”—by the way, to Mary—”and you too will suffer, and you’re going to have a heartbreak”? A sword will pierce your heart, yeah.

So that’s where you are, you’re at the beginning, and you’re at the end, and you’re all around, and that’s an imaginative theological moment that isn’t in the text, but is in the reception of the text if you read it.

You can’t unknow it. No one reads Luke and says, “I wonder what he’s talking about. I wonder what he thinks. I wonder what Simeon is saying. I got to keep reading and find out.” You know what happens at the end. That’s the whole point.

So the more honest we are with ourselves and with each other, I think the easier it will be to distinguish between pretty good Law & Order scripts, and maybe even pretty good comedy scripts—maybe, although I think jokes are much harder—and something that’s really truthful. I think. I hope.

Like The Pieta.

Like The Pieta, yeah. Or a great novel, like something that takes more time and that’s hard to evaluate.

There’s also something to be said about mistakes in things that it gives them a certain quality. Bonus round.

Okay.

Which sitcoms were the biggest influence on your comedy writing?

Mary Tyler Moore, definitely. Taxi, without a doubt. A brilliant show, though I was devoted as a kid to reruns of The Honeymooners and Dick Van Dyke Show. But I think one of the unsung brilliant shows that people just keep forgetting is The Andy Griffith Show, which is this incredibly slow, quiet, single-camera rural show that is lovely and funny and also kind of sad. So I think that’s a great one.

Greatest writers of farce of all time, or at least your favorites.

Oh, farce? Molière, because it lasts forever. That’s as pretentious as I’m going to get.

Please.

So Molière, I think, pretty much started it for me anyway.

Kaufman and Hart. The great American playwrights Kaufman and Hart. I read Act One, which is Moss Hart’s autobiography before I even knew I wanted to be a writer, and that’s how I think, “Oh, I want to do this. I want to do this.” They’re super-technical, and it’s great.

Any Wodehouse?

Woodhouse, of course. I was thinking more about on the stage.

But yeah, Woodhouse manages to create just a weird thing. He absolutely disappears as a narrator. You just have no idea whose point of view these hilarious stories are written in. They’re not written in the Jeeves point of view, and they’re not written certainly the Bertie point of view. It’s some other weird point of view that kind of just disappears until you’re there.

He’s one of these guys who’s so brilliant you don’t even notice it. Not only do you not see the strings, you don’t even believe there are any strings. It’s just effortless.

The kind of language he creates.

Oh, yeah. And you just hear it. It’s like he’s down and telling you a story. It’s amazing.

Favorite comedy films?

The In-Laws, brilliant. I love Night at the Opera, which is hard for younger people to get into. Twentieth Century, with John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. It’s a fantastic, really funny movie. So I’m moving up in Midnight Run with Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, an unbelievably great movie.

Not a single joke is ever made. There’s not a gag, but it’s the funniest thing.

Oh my God, it’s a great movie. It’s a great movie.

When he’s afraid of flying, and then he flies the helicopter….

Exactly right. So many choices. And it’s got a sweet feeling to it too. It’s a buddy picture.

One of the great American movies, which is not a comedy but has great moments in it, is Paper Moon by Peter Bogdanovich. Tatum O’Neal was like 12 and she got an Oscar for it. And Madeline Kahn has the kind of monologue she in the theater where you would stand up and applaud. And then, when she stood up to do it in the theater, everyone would be quiet, and then would wait because she knew she was going to applause. And Ryan O’Neal’s great in it too. It’s a really great, great movie.

Favorite theologian?

Oh God, well I’m at Princeton, so you got to say Karl Barth. I don’t know. I have a hard time with theology. Some of it’s really hard.

Augustine?

Oh, okay. You want to do that. I didn’t know you wanted to go fancy.

I was thinking like Rowan Williams. But, yeah, Augustine’s a great example of that because Augustine’s text is himself.

For the Confessions.

That’s the fundamental. I mean, the rest of it is great, but that honesty point earns him a lot.

Origen! I think Origen, second or third century. Origen’s pretty amazing. You know, he paid a price for it, but he was the first of a groovy, hippie theology that the Gospels are reading you. He didn’t say it, but that’s what he meant.

Favorite religion joke or funniest thing in the Bible?

Oh, that’s a hard one. There’s a great joke in a synagogue where the rabbi prays and says, “I am worthless. I am a worthless person. God, please forgive me, I’m worthless. I’m nothing.” And then the cantor hears that and is so moved. The cantor comes up, stands up next to him, and says, “God, I am worthless. I am nothing. I’m a worm. I’m nothing. I’m worthless. Please forgive me, I’m worthless. I’m nothing.” And then the janitor who’s there in the hallway hears this, and he’s also moved, and he comes up and says, “I am worthless. I am nothing. I’m a worm. I’m nothing. God, forgive me. I’m nothing.” And the cantor turns to the rabbi and says, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.” Just all in one place.

There’s the bit that Aristotle wrote on comedy. We don’t actually have the Comedics because his book on tragedy, the Poetics, is incomplete.

I’m glad we don’t have it, though. I bet you it’s wrong.

Umberto Eco had a little reconstruction of it in The Name of the Rose. It’s just a little line, that just as tragedy is the catharsis derived from the purging and purifying of our emotions of pity and fear, that comedy is catharsis derived from the purging and the purifying of our feelings of the ridiculous and ridiculousness. That’s his idea of what Aristotle’s theory about comedy would be. What do you think of that?

Well, probably, because Aristotle’s about categories, and you have to think of these two things as two separate categories that are equal like it’s a hot and cold tap on the faucet. I just don’t think that’s true. I think comedy’s everything, and in a subset of comedy is tragedy.

But look, the thing about laughter is that it is utterly involuntary. You are laughing before you know you’re laughing. I’m making you laugh in a way that you’re completely taken surprise by, and you can’t not laugh. That’s one reason why laughter is a thing that culture police really hate. What if I’m laughing at something and I’m not supposed to be laughing at it, which is a thing that a lot of people feel, right? I don’t want any comedy in my life because I may end up laughing at something that’s not okay.

But you’re laughing, so it’s involuntary. I make you do it, and it’s a form of weird choking, because I’m making you breathe funny and you’re breathing in a weird way. Sometimes your face turns red, and you can choke back tears. You can’t take back laughter. And also, we look incredibly ugly when we’re laughing. If you actually see yourself laughing, you’re like, “Oh my God, I look...” Our face is all contorted and all squinched up. Nobody ever looks good when they’re laughing.

And so this involuntary weird breathing practice that we do, where we look at our absolute ugliest, is something that we should do every day.

Itself being an object that you could laugh at. It’s laughing at yourself laugh.

And we should do it every single day, because it’s a very good practice.

And thus we will always have a need to hire comedy writers to make us laugh.

Let’s hope. Yes, right. Exactly. Claude can’t make you laugh.

One great comedy writer was the late P.J. O’Rourke. You were friends with him. Can you tell me a bit about him and your relationship with him?

I just knew him a little bit, and then we met. So we contributed to a couple of books, and then I met him and we went to the book party. We hung out, and he had this idea that one of his books called Holidays in Hell would be a great TV show. So we ended up talking. That was the foundation of our conversations for many, many years—like, “How do we do that?”

He was a great writer, a very funny guy and very witty writer, but I think where his writing were not only funny little essays, but something really seriously important, was in that he managed to be funny, but also tell the truth. He was an incredibly good reporter. He really wrote stuff down. I don’t do that. And I think that’s what I what makes his writing so amazing, is that it’s incredibly well observed.

He writes in Parliament of Whores—which is a masterpiece of American political writing—in one chapter about how he goes into the attic of his mom’s house, where he finds a bunch of receipts, and tries to recreate from her tax records their financial picture when he was a kid. And he realizes how poor they were. He said, “I had no idea how poor we were. We were broke all the time, and somehow my mother did all this, and somehow it all worked.”

He said, I think, “it’s not because of what we had. It’s because of what we didn’t have. What we didn’t have was help.” There was no sort of argument against welfare. None of that was there. And it’s a funny essay; it’s witty and sharp; but it’s also still incredibly funny. And I think that was him at his best.

In Anno Domini 2026, what makes you hopeful?

You mean 2026 CE?

Well, this is a podcast.

Before the common era. I don’t know.

Before the common event—whatever that was.

Whatever that was, right. Well, I’m hopeful about a lot of things. I actually feel like despair is a sin in general. It’s a very Catholic thing to think—I’m not Catholic—but I think it mostly because we tend to focus on years and dates.

If you’re, reading the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, you’re convinced they’re all talking about one thing that happened in 586 BC, the end when Jerusalem’s destroyed, and Babylonians come and cart them all away. They weren’t really talking about that date. These things are happening hundreds of years before, are slow things that happen, and somebody is writing to put them all in perspective, so you see them as more urgent.

And so I think what I’m hopeful about in 2026 is that people are either exhausted by the distractions they’ve come up with for and just willing to be. I’m interested in this idea—I don’t know if I really believe it—but I’m interested in the idea that people are finding places to think about faith, and some of those people are young. I think that’s really interesting.

I heard a great story the other night about these young people in Tbilisi in Georgia who a bunch of years ago wrote a letter to an Episcopal bishop in Europe, and said, “Hey, we’re using your Book of Common Prayer in our worship. Can we be Episcopalians?” In their response, the church was like, “We have no way of doing that. No one’s ever written to us that way. We don’t know how to help.” So then they wrote another letter saying, “Well, we have some questions about your catechism.”

Half the Episcopalians listening now are like, “Wait, we have a catechism?” Yeah, we do, the Book of Common Prayer (1979). It wasn’t there before. It was put in. It was scattered around, but now it’s there. Then the third question was super weirdly specific, and then finally the church said, “Okay you know what? We’re going to send you a couple priests, and we’ll just show you how to do it.” And so now there’s four- or five-month a year rotating rector or priest in charge who goes in a basement in Tbilisi, where they’re actually considered enemies of the state.

Georgia’s changed a lot since then. I was there in the year 2000. It’s very different now. I don’t know, that’s kind of nice, right? It’s amazing with young people.

Look, how many ways can you distract yourself until you think, “Okay, all the things I’m doing aren’t doing it for me. So maybe I’ll give this ancient 2,000-year-old fractious, controversial, schismatic faith a try.”

Excellent. And on that note, we shall end. Mr. Robert Long—Father Rob Long…

No, not yet. Don’t rush me.

…with one year left! Thank you for joining us on Madison’s Notes.

Thank you for having me.