innovative and more of a pioneer. the fact that he own the it and made a weird windows joke was an extra-nice point. you don t use windows? i used to but i grew up. did you ever work on one of these speeches? yeah, i was our token funny person at the white house. the way i put it, as opposed to most speeches, joke-writing was a team effort, but if it had been badly, there were four years it would have been my fault. how did you go from working for president obama to working at funny or die? the opposite question, why do they want to hire you as the funny guy? fair question. nothing personal. yeah, sounds a little personal, but no, i got to know the funny or die folks between two firms which president obama recorded with zach galifianakis which was great. they had their people write it, they d been writing ferns episodes forever. a huge success.
that he noticed all the bs. right exactly. and sometimes you re watching it because he s no drama obama and this president is very cool sometimes you think does he know and he s like yes, i know. i have been listening to everything you have been saying and i am you know he does do it in such it s class syy the way he does it and it s funny. the key is that it is really funny and we all come on you have to love the guy. i m hoping given that we re in the last couple of years of the second term that maybe he ll be full like obama unplugged and it will go like really he has nothing to lose here. nothing left to lose here and i m sure he ll go off on the lame duck and cecily strong that, you know for her, she has to follow the president and it s all about the joke writing and being prepared and not looking at these people and saying oh my
forgetting up on the west coast. amen. so head writer sounds like a frooem dream job. tell us, how did you get it? it s kind of a convoluted story. it is a dream job. i always watched the dick vandyke show and saw rob petri as the writer of and i fantasized about that. i was in philadelphia working in advertising. but i always wanted to write jokes and be a comedy writer. i actually believe it or not took a correspondent course in joke writing. for a number of years i wrote for comics and i heard that jay was buying jokes for a stand-up act and he came to philadelphia and my wife i typed up a bunch of jokes and my wife drove it out to the box office and left it for him. after his appearance in philadelphia, 12:30 at night my phone rings and all of a sudden if the phone rings at 12:30 in the morning you re going, who is in the hospital, who is dead by the side of the road. it was jay.
your ticket home [ male announcer ] this is zales, the diamond store. the 2013 budget wars have begun. the president announced a budget that cuts $4 trillion over a decade, promises to invest in america s long-term future. at a time when our economy is growing and creating jobs at a faster clip, we ve got to do everybody in our power to keep this recovery on tram. what that allows us to do is invest in the things that will help grow our economy right now. naturally the republicans are having none of it. mvp mcconnell called it a failure before it was even announced. eric cantor used the opportunity to try his hand at joke writing, quote, president