Lynn: Thank you again for coming out. We're going to talk tonight about a serious topic -- comedy in these unfunny times. First I'll introduce the panel, then I'm going to throw some questions at these guys, and then you're going to throw some questions at these guys, and then you're going to have a few more drinks, and then we're all going to have a mixer with the Match.com people upstairs. Yes, Joel, there's really a Match.com thing upstairs. Joel is engaged, actually, so sit down please, Joel.

Speaking of being single, if you guys are single you have probably at some point said "I'm looking for someone with a sense of humor," and in that case, what I've assembled here is like the largest line-up ever of your dream dates. And yet Joel is engaged…so let me start with Joel Stein. Joel Stein is a humor columnist for Time magazine. He's been doing that for a couple years. You may also remember him from such magazines as Time Out New York, and Martha Stewart where he fact checked, right? This is Michael Colton, to my right. He is the cofounder of Modern Humorist, which produces comedy for the web and magazines and TV. Please note that Modern Humorist has just released a new book called Rough Draft: Pop Culture the Way It Almost Was.

Next, Eric Drysdale is a writer for Comedy Central's The Daily Show with John Stewart, which, by the way, won a Peabody Award for its coverage of the 2000 presidential election. Also with the Daily Show is Chris Regan. Chris has been there for three years, and during his tenure the staff was also nominated for a writing Emmy. Chris has been a stand-up comic for a long time, but he made his debut on television on Comedy Central on Premium Blend in September. On my right is Todd Barry, you already know and love Todd Barry, don't you? He is on every show ever -- the Late Show with David Letterman, Conan, he also starred in his own half hour special, Comedy Central presents Todd Barry, Dr. Katz, the Larry Sanders Show, and if you look at his web site, www.toddbarry.com in a couple of weeks you can purchase his new CD. Jason Gay is a Senior Editor at the New York Observer. Prior to that he wrote for the Boston Phoenix and the Vineyard Gazette in Martha's Vineyard, which is one of my favorite places. And, last but not least is Carol Kolb , she is a Senior Editor for the Onion.

We have a huge panel, I know. I was counting on a third of them to cancel and they let me down. We're here to talk about the role of comedy at times of tragedy. The simplest answer is that laughter is the best medicine. But we all know there's more to it, because that's the kind of thing that brings us comedy coaches with googily glasses and Patch Adams. Besides, Cipro is the best medicine right now…later we'll debate whether that crossed the line. So, humor can distract, but it can do more. We also have a huge history of humor as a response to tragedy, so we're not the first ones to talk about this. There's Dr. Strangelove, Slaughterhouse-Five, Charlie Chaplin and the Great Dictator, for example, Springtime for Hitler, Hogan's Heroes, Robert Crumb, certain unfortunate episodes of Bugs Bunny where bad things happen to Japanese people…It's not a proud history, necessarily.

Humor is more than just collective Valium. Some actually say it's life support. In fact, I have two quotes for you on that topic from the new Mariah Carey epic, Glitter…no, sorry, from some experts on the topic like Dr. M. Thomas Inge. He's a big shot Humanities professor at Randolph Macon College, and an authority on comics and their influence on culture and vice versa. He told me this yesterday on the phone: "One of the reasons this country survives is that we have the safety valve provided by humor. It's essential to survival. Humor enables us to adjust to things that are otherwise unbearable." James Thurber also said that humor is a serious thing. He did not tell me this on the phone, however. I like to think of it as one of our greatest and earliest natural resources which must be preserved at all costs. Now that we've all reassured ourselves that what we do is incredibly important, let's start with some questions. This is for anyone: Which are you more excited about, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings? We all watched the events unfold on September 11th with varying degrees of comprehension, so what I want to know from you guys (those of you who are not passing notes), is: When did you realize that what was happening in this world was going to affect your job and what did you think that you were going to have to do?

Panel:
Todd Barry: I noticed that on September 11th.

Lynn: Can you say what time?

Todd Barry: When I woke up at 11:30.

Joel Stein: What was the question?

Lynn: Was there a time that day when you actually thought, I'm going to have to write jokes about this, or, I can't write jokes about this, or, when did you connect this to what you do for a living?

Michael Colton: My first thought was how horrible this is. Then we needed to lose some of the anti-fireman material that was on our Web site...I mean I think the first thought was to make sure all our loved ones were fine. It was never like, "Holy shit, how are we ever going do our jobs? We have to go to law school." It was more like, "What are we going to do for the next few weeks?" and taking it day by day from there.

Todd Barry: I'm not saying this to get cheap applause, but the event did not affect my upcoming appearance at Dr. Grin's in Grand Rapids Oct 24-27th.

Lynn: He'll be passing out flyers after the show.

Todd Barry: Dr. Grin's. I wish I was lying about that. Look it up in the phone book.

Regan: I don't want to step on your plug, but, we actually had our morning meeting that we always have to see where we can fit our various dick jokes in the news that day. We kept watching the news and we valiantly tried to keep going and it wasn't until we read the Pentagon news that we realized, "Oh, we can't do the show today." Then we were given the option that if you wanted to work you could work, and no one took that option. No one took that option at all, everyone scampered home.

Lynn: You guys were off the air for how long?

Regan: A little over a week.

Lynn: At what point did you decide "We can't do the show for a week," or how did that go down?

Regan: It was really kind of a day to day thing, and basically it's been that way since the day we came back, the second Thursday after it happened. Usually we have a very strict format of how the show gets put together with a certain number of jokes at the beginning, then we have a field piece. But basically from the first day we were back, every day was taken as, "What can we do today? What's fair game for us today?" and every day has been figuring it out.

Lynn: At the Onion, give us a fly on the wall of your meeting, when you decided how you were going to put together the first issue after the attack.

Carol Kolb: First of all, the first week we said, no one wants to look at our fucking funny paper. No one wants to look at the joke about the guy with the train set or whatever, so we didn't do a paper the first week. And the second week we came together, and at first we didn't intend to do a paper about the issue. But then we thought, "What can we do that isn't about the issue?" because I mean, how can we move on and do the stupid bullshit stuff without first attacking the issue? And so we decided to do a few stories about that, and that grew into an entire issue because we were trying to decide what stories to do, and we decided we had to hit a couple different angles, and we ended up with this entire issue all about the WTC.

Regan: On that topic, in the first week after we came back on the Daily Show, we were sort of trying to have it both ways. We didn't want to attack the issue head on, so we would attack from an angle, and then do a story about water-skiing squirrels, and it sort of became obvious. What are you doing this silly story for when there's all this stuff going on? It sort of seemed dishonest and eventually we realized that there are ways of getting at the stuff that's around, it if not directly in, the tragedy.

Lynn: That leads to one of the big questions, and also Joel and Jason, this you can jump in on, and that is: what are the jokes that are on this side of the line and what's on the other side? Is there any way to make generalizations about that? Where's the line between what's ok and what's not?

Carol Kolb: At the Onion we sat down and we were deciding what we should do, and a lot of people made a lot of jokes, and we all brought in our big list of headlines and we were sort of wimpy because what we wanted to express was sort of the horror and the sadness and the confusion that everyone felt. We didn't feel the need to be the usual annoying, snarky, sarcastic Onion, so we did lay off the things we would normally target like Bush. We didn't want to say anyting positive about Bush but we didn't want to do our normal way of like, he's an obvious target, but we thought this isn't the point where we want to attack him because it's not the most important thing. Right now our shit is freaked out and we want to express that more than, like, we are against Bush's idiocy, so that's what we did.

Michael Colton: I feel like there's a big difference between what you can do in October versus September. It's sort of the difference between grief and war. You know, all September, you couldn't make fun of anything that had to do with human misery, but I think it feels very different now that the human misery is not going on in this country, now that it's going on somewhere else. I mean, as awful as that sounds, it's sort of freeing, in terms of jokes. But now I feel that, everyone did interviews, and anything I said on Sept 18th, I've changed my mind two weeks later, and whatever I say tonight will probably change in two weeks, because everything keeps changing so quickly. Like, now, with Anthrax, there's jokes that we wouldn't do on our site that we would have done a week ago. It just keeps changing. We had a lot of Anthrax. We had a whole Anthrax week…there was a joke today, about Dan Rather in a fit of jealousy, sending Anthrax to himself. And we were going to put that up, and I thought, "I wouldn't be surprised if I go home tonight and Dan Rather had been exposed to Anthrax and it makes that a lot less funny." You might disagree with that, but the crux of the joke was the absurdity of him sending Anthrax, and it doesn't seem that absurd anymore.

Joel Stein: Put the joke on, c'mon.

Michael Colton: All right, it'll go up tonight.

Lynn: Show of applause, who wants the joke? What about in organizations that are not just humor, but news gathering. With the Observer and Time, we know that there was sort of an unwritten policy at the beginning of not criticizing the president in jokes. Has there been anything about, is it ok to criticize the president if it's not funny?

Joel Stein: This is a scary group you all are in. People are taking notes. I don't know who you are, what I'm selling you. I don't know what the question is, I'm just a little freaked out. You know, I just have this weird job, where I work with a bunch of real journalists at Time magazine, and the day of the tragedy, around 4:00, I called up and was like, "What are you guys up to?" from my apartment. And they were like, "We're putting out an issue tonight." As soon as they saw it on TV they rushed out of their apartments down to the site and I stayed at home. It was dangerous out there. There was no way I was going out there, so then I came back in, like, the next day, late, and tried not to get noticed. They gave me an assignment where I had to like, write a seven page story about what they do with the body parts. No, seriously. They took out all my jokes right away, which was really, really frustrating for me. So, I wrote the seven-page story, and then I really have not been very busy since. I've done my expenses, I cleaned my office, and they sent me to interview Billy Bob Thornton last week, and that's never gonna run, so I was hanging out. Then they're sending me to the Mall of America tomorrow. They just have no clue. They have no idea what to do for a story that's not about Osama Bin Laden. It's not fun to work there. There's all this war stuff.

Colton: The Mall of America is fun, though.

Stein: Is it? There's a roller coaster there, isn't there?

Colton: There is a roller coaster.

Lynn: I know that some magazines are going back to some news, or even entertainment, as usual, even frivolous stuff. Not Time, because we all know Joel has nothing to do. And I remember Jason, maybe two weeks after the disaster, I pitched you a couple of stories that had nothing to do with it, and you rejected them, and I just wanted to say thanks a lot. But, they did have nothing to do with it and you said we're just not doing that stuff yet. So, do you guys have an actual timeline or is it just instinct as far as how you begin to incorporate non-World Trade Center stuff, and even funny stuff that's not World Trade Center…more frivolous stuff?

Jason Gay: I think it's exactly the same as what the comedy writers were saying. You just go how you feel, and with us, we published an issue the day after the attack, on September 12th. It was sort of a schizophrenic paper, it got Frankensteined together at the last minute. We had a lot of news writers writing for it. We had material that was running prior to the attacks, and we had to sort of make it up as we went along, and so it's really been a question of what fits at the moment. Story conferences are a heck of a lot different than they were before this, obviously, in terms of funny stuff that's not related to the World Trade Center, that's the hardest call of all because again, every joke you hear is somehow rooted in all this, and that's the hardest thing I think for people who are pitching stories, people who are writing stories, or even humorous people who are in the media and television and film that reporters are going out and interviewing. They feel that every joke they tell has to be somehow related to all this, so it's this vacuum of all this material.

Stein: To me, how you come out on this issue, like when you can make jokes about this or if you're going to be serious, is totally dependent on your world-view before hand. Everyone is inherently selfish and they just use whatever tragedy it is to, like, get their world view out there. So, I work with a bunch of people, who are uncomfortable with anything that isn't straight ahead hard news. So, to them, the world's changed. Or for Graydon Carter, like, this is the end of irony. This is a guy that you know, once he left the Observer, it's in his total interest. He writes these slavish love poems to celebrities. He's not an ironic guy. His is the most earnest magazine in the world. So, it is in his interest to come out and say, "This is the end of irony that I have been depending on for my whole career." I think you have a lot of people like that. I mean, it's just human nature to use this to base your world-view around.

You know there were some Hollywood actors who the day after that telethon thing were, like, bitching out their agents on the phone for not getting them the seat behind Kevin Spacey. So I work for a magazine and this is what they want to do. They don't want to run humor and they are uncomfortable with that, and I think this is going to be a permanent change for them for a couple of years even. They're not going to want to run, funny, gutsy stuff when they can run straight up the middle. And then you have other people, like the Onion, and this was in a way good for you, because you got to take something really serious and reaffirm your world-view. I don't know what that speech was about, but I felt very strongly about it when I started it. Now, I couldn't care less and I just want to get rid of this mic.

Lynn: What is Lara Flynn Boyle doing? That's what's important.

Colton: I've also been wondering about Lizzy Grubman and the sausage and egg hermit. Which, you journalist folks, have dropped the ball on.

(Audience): I just want to cover Gary Condit. That's what I've always covered.

Lynn: Gary Condit reference…Lizzy Grubman…I'm sorry, repeat…Giuliani's sex life is still of interest.

Stein: There are hecklers here? People, there's hecklers.

Lynn: I actually wanted to pick up on something serious, that Joel mentioned, which was the question of irony. And actually, Graydon Carter later told the Washington Post that he was referring to the death of ironing. But it totally proves your point.

Todd: I was going to say that, I'm not being ironic when I say that… is a hilarious comeback!

Lynn: Straight on. But, I think a lot of people including perhaps, Graydon Carter, when they talk about this, and they throw around the term "the death of irony," I think perhaps we haven't all agreed on what we're all referring to.

Michael: To define the terms I think we're talking about…black flies and Chardonnays, free rides when you've already paid, Death Row pardons two years too late.

Lynn: Which means, anything ironic is just sucky. Right?

Kolb: I'd just like to say that the death of irony is such a great topic and I really want to talk about it.

Stein: Ok. First of all, you'd expect a better sound system, from a conference room at an Asian restaurant. But, someone the other day told me that Gallagher, the comedian, is actually putting a picture of Bin Laden on a watermelon. And then he smashes it! It could be a Gallagher urban legend though. There's a lot of those.

Lynn: Do people really know what they're talking about when they talk about the death of irony, though? I think perhaps not. Well then, let's move on.

Question & Answer Section:
Q: Hi, my name is Drew Frady. I'm recently from Comedy Central. I actually just left Comedy Central unfortunately. Yeah, that's not very funny…. My question, I guess, White House spokesman Ari Fliescher recently, after the whole Bill Maher incident, said that people are going to have to watch what they say and what they do. I am just wondering how you feel about that and how that affects how you're writing and what you're writing.

Drysdale: My reaction to that was conflicted because, you know, as a comedian, someone who works in the media, I mean, I totally support Bill Maher's First Amendment rights. But I hate the fucking show so much that it was very difficult for me to get riled up. I mean, it's a great show if you want to know what Sean William Scott thinks of the Patients' Bill of Rights, but other than that, it serves no purpose for me.

Regan: Those of us who are taking our orders from Ari Fliescher…I've gotten in line since then…you know, I don't know if anyone is necessarily paying attention to it. It's all a matter of timing. I mean, whether you actually agree with Maher's statement or not, it might have made some people a little queasy.

Andrea: Hi, I'm Andrea Rengin, I'm a novelist. And this is actually for the Onion. How did it make you guys feel when the New York Times applauded you guys for saying that, "The Onion is the spirit, that's the way to go." Did it make you feel, in a weird way, that you were getting the wrong audience to applaud you guys? Or did it, you know, the Onion has always been kind of something on the outside, and I am wondering how it makes you guys feel when a mainstream paper and something that is right by the whole world is applauding you. Does that make you feel like you've made it, or you've actually mainstreamed?

Carol Kolb: Yeah, pretty much we hate anything that can make us earn a decent living wage. I don't know…I think with that particular issue of the Onion, we weren't really doing the "We Hate Everyone" Onion issue, and we were very careful actually not to offend anyone, or to do anything that was offensive to any of the people who died or the entire tragedy, which is really unusual for The Onion. But, it's just sort of what we were feeling. You know, we didn't feel like we wanted to be sarcastic or snarky or any of those media words that you all know, because you're media professionals. So, I guess I cannot stand against the New York Times lauding us. I guess, you know, we just wanted to show what we all were feeling. And that's what we all did. And we were all just freaked out, and sad and mad, and all of those things and that is what we did in the Onion. The End. Thank you!

Lynn: I'm going to jump in. This is a quote I read on girlcomic.net, which is an excellent web site by Lizz Winstead, who is one of the co-creators of the Daily Show. She wrote, "Let's stop turning out material we have to apologize for in times of grave reflection. I listen to my fellow comics, and late night hosts deliberate aloud whether the very nature of their comedic voices is trivial. I wonder with them, why it took a terrorist attack on our soil for us to scrutinize the kind of comedy we provide." Do you guys have comments on that, or did I just, basically, make you feel really bad?

Regan: No, you made me feel really good. I think that really is totally dead on. This not only has to do with the comedy business, but the entertainment business at large. And for instance, the way that the Emmy Awards, after the attack decided it would be business-casual -- like you're not supposed to wear a tux, you're supposed to wear business clothes and instead of calling the ball the Governor's Ball, they decided to call it the Unity Dinner. If you're so embarrassed about what you do, and patting yourself on the back, why would you do it in a time of peace? I feel like that's kind of the state the entire industry is in, and I don't think anybody should be back pedaling on what they do. They should stand behind what they do.

Stein: It's just like, yeah, we do stupid stuff for a living, but you know, so do most Americans. I mean, like the ice cream guys aren't feeling bad. We don't need ice cream, right? I don't know, if you were so ashamed of what you did before this that you're totally embarrassed now, that doesn't say much for what you felt about yourself.

Carol Kolb: I'd also like to point out here, that my fellow panelists, they're people that I in some way respect…you know, I don't think…yes, partially, at least sort of…

Colton: I mean, I agree that I don't think humor is going to change permanently. I think it will be the same thing where there are going to be people who are reacting to this in an interesting way, like the people on this panel, and doing creative stuff, but Leno is still going to suck. I mean, I actually watched Leno this week. I replayed it solely for this panel, and he did a fucking Monica joke in his monologue. Even like a month ago, before September 11th, it's pretty lame for him to do a Monica joke. But the joke was about how originally about how there was this intern who was behind it, a Middle Eastern intern, you probably heard about this briefly -- and then it turned out that it was just some rumor Hillary started to scare Bill. Like, the punch line is so bad, it took a while to even realize it was a Monica joke. But the point is, people who were shitty humorists are not going to all of a sudden realize, like, those jokes are lame and I'm going to start doing interesting things.

Drysdale: I want to defend Jay Leno for a minute. It's an unusual position for me to find myself in. But honestly, as I was talking earlier about finding ourselves the week after the attack doing water-skiing squirrel stories, I remember going home frustrated one night, feeling like I can't write any jokes about anything having to do with this. I got home and that night Jay Leno was kind of unloading his first wave of Bin Laden jokes. And I was like, "Wow, Jay Leno is braver than I am today." They weren't necessarily good jokes, but Jay Leno has a responsibility for making a lot of people in this country laugh. And I think he took a lead and brought a lot of Americans to a place where they felt like they were allowed to laugh at it. And that helps everybody up here.

Stein: Well, I'm going to go anti-Jay. It just seems like the laziest thing to do in these times is to make the angry humor jokes, the anti-Arab jokes or that Osama-fuck-your-mama jokes, and that is what I've seen on Leno. "I've got the Taliban Times here, and there is an apartment available -- a spacious cave." To me, that's just too easy. That's just the Andrew Dice Clay stuff. You're not getting laughs 'cause you're clever, you're getting laughs because people are angry. That is the only part of people that I have been ashamed of.

Barry: Consider it that the joke was faxed to him by a bartender from Columbus, Ohio. We have a question, right there in the back.

Q: How did people feel about the first Letterman? The first David Letterman, the Late Show, when he came back the Monday after.

Drysdale: How do I feel about it? It's kind of hard to judge, because what else can you do? I mean, we started our show with kind of a "Best Of," a brief speech on what's wrong, and then we showed some funny clips from stuff we've done before. But, I think he handled himself fairly eloquently, more than some of the other late night talk show hosts.

Colton: He didn't cry nearly enough as John. So, if you're basing it on just on crying…

Q: Fair enough. You know, some people may actually quote you here tonight. Be careful of that.

Q: My name is Charles Patronas. I'm a fact checker for Individual Investor magazine and we got de-listed in the process of recommending stocks to all you guys. The idea of the death of irony has got to be the most preposterous thing I have heard all night, or since the disaster in fact. I mean, our contradictions are bubbling up from the crevices of our society and kicking us in the face. Here is an administration that moved into Washington on an isolationist, "We can't solve the problems of the world" platform, and, now it's like, "Please, oh Pakistan, please oh, dictator, help us with our problems." I mean, the contradictions are bubbling out, and it's up to the humorists to be able to lead the media towards to coming to some kind of acceptance and realization of our responsibilities and what we're doing to fuck up this world.

Regan: You're absolutely right. We're incredibly important.

Barry: Maybe I shouldn't bring this up, but, my name was misspelled in Individual Investor magazine. One phone call, that's it. One phone call, Charles.

Ron: Hi, I'm Ron Hogan from Beatrice.com, and this is kind of a follow-up to the comments you were making before about the importance of not being ashamed of what you do, now more than ever. And, I think, at least for one or two of you, there is a distinction to be made here in terms of…at least let's say The Onion or The Modern Humorist…you're very much in charge of what you do. But for others of you, like say Joel or some of the other panelists, even if you're not ashamed of what you do, your bosses are. Or maybe they aren't, or maybe they just don't know what to do. How do you cope with that?

Barry: I'm ashamed for other reasons.

Stein: I guess we just look for jobs. Partly serious, I mean, if they're going to change the magazine permanently, and they're always ashamed of me, which is probably true and that kind of comes to the surface through this --I guess I'd look somewhere else. I don't know. I mean, if that's the way it's going to be then maybe we should have never been together.

Q: Hi, I'm Chelsea Freddie. I write for the Village Voice and American Theater magazine. So, this is another question about what did you think of this comic's show. Saturday Night Live, I mean, the New York Times wrote this thing like, "Our Lives on Saturday Night Live" and Lorne Michaels was like, "We've got some of the best writers on this.." And then I watched their first show and it was like a baby with uncontrollable gas, and I was like, oh wow. Anyway, I was just wondering what you all thought of it, if anyone even watches it anymore.

Barry: I don't know if you've ever heard of symbolism before?

Harris: Anyone else on that one? I didn't see it.

Q: They just totally wussed out. They did nothing about the event at all, which is their job.

Harris: Haven't they been criticizing the…I've seen a little bit…haven't they been criticizing the President more than, haven't they been at the forefront of criticizing Bush? You said a farting baby, OK. I haven't been keeping up. I've been keeping up on line, just not on television. I actually wanted to follow-up on the irony thing. I think that there's what we think is irony, which is sort of this snarky, if I might quote you, sarcasm, detachment, sniping and being kind of over everything and cooler-than-thou. And then there is true irony, which you were getting at, which is exactly what I think we need, which is the actual criticism of that which is in power, the establishment, those who say what goes. So, I think we have to be careful, as does Graydon Carter, and as does Alanis Morissette, when we talk about what this irony is, and in fact it may be what will save us. The good kind! So, I just wanted to clarify that.

Q: Before I get to my question, I just quickly want to defend Jay Leno. And I don't work for him. My name is Haley, I'm a performing artist and writer. But, he's been trashing the Taliban far before it was fashionable, as has his wife. My question is: when will it be OK to make fun of Bush again and how are you going to address the claims of being unpatriotic? Because I want to make Bush jokes, so I am asking you guys this, how are you going to defend against being called Osama Bin Laden? You know the immoral equivalent of Osama Bin Laden because you're making a joke about the fact that George W. Bush is inarticulate, or whatever.

Regan: Eventually, he will do something so big, that none of us can ignore it. I mean, it doesn't matter what your party or affiliation. You could be in the middle of a bombing raid, and he will do something that we can't turn a blind eye to. Whether it be a fun mispronunciation or a awkward moment, but eventually we'll get comfortable enough to call him silly.

Colton: We actually have an e-mail list solely devoted to George W. Bush, and we've been doing it for months, and we've done, like, one since then with only really a couple of jokes. But people are asking, "When are we going to do it?" And I agree with you. I think there is going to be a time when it comes back. But, I'm not sure the next phase is going to be Bush-dumb jokes. I think it is going to be something else. I am hoping he becomes very fat, so we can do Bush-fat jokes.

Dawn: Hi, I'm Dawn and I'm the editor of a soon-to-be-launched web site called Pinkslipper.org, which is a humor web site for unemployed people, which was really topical when we planned it, back in September. When can we talk about something else, is my question?

Lynn: Tuesday, suggests Michael. That's actually what I asked Jason. Hi Jason and Joel, what do you think?

Gay: We're looking for that kind of story right now.

Harris: So, if I pitched you something now, you'll accept it.

Gay: We got about an hour till close. Certainly by week three, we were looking for stories away from the WTC. I remember we had a business story that was about some sort of deal involving the Yankees and Cable Television. It was totally uninteresting, but people were like "Yes," because it was something to do with something else. And we're trying to encourage that kind of thing. But then again, everything in some respect related to this, and everyone is seeing their lives, their jobs, their family lives and their culture through the prism of what happened. And, so when you write a story that is completely separate from this -- and I have read a bunch of these -- they somehow feel weirdly disconnected and that is the challenge for writers right now. I think.

Harris: I think it's also partly, because we're all doing that "Going back to normal" dance, where normal really isn't normal. It's sort of like Classic Coke, where it looks the same, but you know it's not. I think it's important to say, though, it's not disrespectful to do stories or tell jokes that have nothing to do with "it," because moving on in some ways does not mean moving on in all ways, or that we've forgotten. And I think there is a certain amount of going back to quote-on-quote normal, the new normal that we can do that has nothing to do with how much we're affected by the events.

Q: The other issue is that there is always something around the corner. I mean, you know, people felt that they were getting, sort of, a month between September 11th and now, and then things happened last Friday with NBC. And now things are happening on Monday with ABC, and for people who are in the business trying to write humor based on topical events, there is, the possibility that Michael referred to, that you're going to go home and then something is going to be related to the joke you just made, and somehow the joke is going to be terribly inappropriate. And yes, you want to take that risk, but it can come back to bite you in a way that public events typically don't.

Harris: Actually I have one for Todd, if I can follow up. When you have been performing lately, have you felt people want to hear jokes about the event that are cathartic, or don't want to hear about it at all, or a little of both?

Todd Barry: Anyone who is going to go to a comedy club around this time doesn't. They're not going there to hear, "Oh God, I wonder what the comic's take is on this." They don't care. I mean, not until I really kick into the masturbation jokes do things start happening. So, if you have something funny to say, just like any other topic about it, you should do it. But, it's not like they're expecting it, or they are going to feel disappointed if you don't do it. And I did comedy, like, three days after, and I found that.

Harris: What was it like doing it three days after?

Todd Barry: Small crowd. But they were good!

Harris: Did you address it at all?

Todd Barry: I addressed it a little bit. Well, as I launch into my act, I talked about a few things. I didn't talk about it in any way that was too much, because there has never been anything that's chilled comedians more than this as far as I've seen. And comedians can pretty much make a joke about anything. Anytime! In front of the person who would get offended. What did I talk about? I just talked about how I made a therapy appointment. I tried to make a therapy appointment, and my therapist said she couldn't do it because she was going downtown to do crisis counseling. And I said, "Well, what do you think I'm calling you for? Remember that woman that broke up with me a year and a half ago? Well, she sent me an e-mail. If this ain't Code Red, I don't know what is." I have two hours of material.

Q: My name is Kathy. I work at Dow Jones. I just had a question. For those of us who haven't been exposed to much humor, can you guys give us a sample? Is there any humor like anthrax?

Colton: When you see humor, you want to step away from the desk, call the authorities. Don't use your own phone. Use someone else's phone.

Harris: Wear gloves.

Harris: Michael has some stuff…I do too, actually. I have printouts of the whole Onion.

Michael Colton: I brought some stuff to be prepared. We lately don't usually do fake news, because no one does it better than the Onion, so we sort of leave that to them. But we've been doing like a daily update. There's this one joke that I really like. E! Entertainment Television announces its plans to air the tribute to tribute to heroes next Sunday. A telethon to aid the celebrities whose courage was responsible for the most successful telethon in American history. "These stars selflessly dedicated 5 to 7 hours of their highly lucrative careers to this cause," said host Steve Kometco. "The least we could do now is see all their films, buy all their records, and restore the revenue they lost that September day through several million dollars in direct donations. On the telethon, Sean William Scott will pay tribute to Tom Cruise, Monica Potter to Julia Roberts, and the guy from Sixpence None the Richer will sing a song about the song that Bruce Springstein sang."

Lynn Harris: I can also tell you, if you haven't memorized it, some of the kind of stuff that the Onion did, which by the way, the Times cited as not only being hilarious, but as in a very edgy, funny way, capturing a lot of the ways we were all feeling. The headline for the whole special report at the Onion was, "Holy Fucking Shit: Attack on America!" And here's some headlines: "Arab-American Third Grader Returns from Recess Crying, Saying He Didn't Kill Anyone." " President Urges Calm Restraint Among Nation's Ballad Singers." "U.S. Vows to Defeat Who Ever it is We're At War With." Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell." "Not Knowing What Else to do, Woman Bakes American Flag Cake." Which is a story about me! This is my favorite, no, I'll get to that last. "Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again." "Jerry Fallwell: Is that Guy a Dick or What?" I think it's lovely how we all came together to agree on that issue. And finally, my favorite, "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule."