Vacation

Once, early in my career, I was sitting the writers’ room during a particularly grueling rewrite, and we were all stuck on one joke. It was the last line of a scene – what some people call a scene blow or a button or a scene out, depending, I guess, on when you joined the business and who you learned from – and we were stuck, all of us – and there were about nine of us in the room, maybe a dozen Emmys among us (not mine, of course) and several seriously rich guys (not me, of course) who had expensive cars and giant houses and second houses near some water somewhere precisely because they were able to come up with things like the last joke in a scene...