I STARTED WRITING for The Late Late Show on the Columbia Broadcasting System. (CBS! SHOUTOUT TO THE BIG BANG THEORY. SHOUT OUT SHELDON. One of them is named Sheldon right? One of them has to be Sheldon. Like, if none of them are actually named Sheldon that's a fucking mistake on their part. Honestly, I bet they're all named Sheldon. I've never seen the program.)

Anyway, I started writing for The Late Late Show on CBS back in December. The rest of the staff included James Corden (the host), two other writers who were also stand-up comedians, some dude named Jeff, and an executive assistant. (I think you would basically call her a secretary, but it seems like we've diminished that job title to the point where it's almost an insult, which if you actually look at all the massively vital work secretaries do, it absolutely shouldn't be an insult—another slow, slight fuckover of the patriarchy, bruh.)

We all worked together in a small trailer... well, not all of us. Corden was back in England being a British celebrity. He's Banksy. The rest of us worked, though. The writers and myself sat around and came up with ideas for the show. Our ideas started out vast and weird and impossible to put on late-night television. So many ideas that started out like "Okay, do you think we could get Denzel Washington to dress up like Rivers Cuomo for a sketch called Denz-El Scorcho?" Or like "Do you think we could get Cher and a bunch of Cher impersonators to play musical chairs?" Most of our early ideas were just based on almost clever wordplay.

The show gradually grew, and we became a REEEEAAAAAAL PRODUCTION. James stopped being Banksy and joined the show, and he brought with him some other British-types with strong ideas about what, exactly, the show should be. Our ideas narrowed and gained focus, but everything was still so murky. The notion that you have a TV show and you can do almost anything on it is kind of intoxicating until you realize that the idea of "everything" is STRAIGHT-UP PARALYZING.

We prepared for four months before our first episode. Four months of blood, sweat, earth, wind, fire, tears, and Garfunkel work, and our first episode wasn't even that good. I mean, it was good for a first episode, but still. We've done almost 30 episodes since then, and they've been wonderful and awful and many clicks in between.

Working on a network late-night show has made me admire David Letterman so much more than I did before, and I admired him massively before. He's a prickly fuckfire of a man, but he might be the greatest late-night host we've seen. His show was so inventive and funny and risky, and it failed all the time, but the highs would have been impossible without the lows. He loved music and broke stand-up comedians. He was maybe the best, and as he gets ready to do his last show tonight, May 20, I have just one question... could you talk Denzel Washington into dressing up as Rivers Cuomo?