Comediapedia

Merrill Markoe: I love taking material and figuring out where the funny part of it is.

Marc Maron: Yeah, I don’t always know…

Merrill: It’s a puzzle…

MM: Do you?

Merrill: Well no, but I get assignments sometimes… like lately I’ve written a couple of pieces for The Wall Street Journal, of all things. And they give you a topic. And I love when people give you a topic and I go, “okay”, roll up my sleeves, “there’s got to be jokes here, where are they?”

MM: And how, what’s that process, how do you start to do that?

Merrill: Well first I walk around saying I can’t do it and I get really depressed and I sit under a table for a while (laughing).

MM: That’s part of my process too… like, “Why’d they ask me to do this. Its not the right format for me...”

Merrill: "God, I can’t do it, there’s nothing funny here, I never thought there was anything funny here…" and then you start to assemble a jigsaw puzzle…

MM: Right, do you do it from, um, do you start to… My only recourse when I’m dealing with that is: I can only speak for me. So I start writing from there. Its very hard for me to just look at externals and say, “those two things together are funny and…”. I have to be like, “How, what is my reaction to this?”

WTF with Marc Maron / Episode 228 - Merrill Markoe / aprox 1:09