"Its a strange business. It's really where the rubber meets the road - the rubber being art and the road being commerce. -Mike Schur, (b.1975), in conversation with Mike Sacks published in Poking a Dead Frog, (2014, New York, Penquin Books,p,48) Schur started writing comedy at the National Lampoon, moving to Saturday Night Live, The Office, and Parks and Recreation.
Sacks put together a book of interviews with "top comedy writers" discussing topics such as becoming a comedy writer and what constitutes funny including Henry Beard, who cowrote Bored with the Rings (1969) and co-created the National Lampoon (1970,) with Doug Kenny. Beard describes how he was taught to write at Taft boarding school in Connecticut. "...if you want to get perfect education as a writer, and if you want to have eight years of Latin before you go to college, well then, this is the place to go. Basically all we were all taught was how to read and write the English language. We had to write a thousand-word essay every week. At Taft in the English class, they had an exam called the 2-8-2. You had a little blue book, and the teacher would write a phrase from a Shakespeare play on the board. You had two minutes to think, eight minutes to compose, two minutes to correct, and then you put your pencils down. 2-8-2."
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