A World Sans Roundtables? Not Funny

Eliminate the table?! No more sitting around with the funniest people you know, tasting each other’s food and trying to make each other laugh?! Sounds like a sad day in the comedy world to me (“TV: Squaring Off Against ‘Roundtable Writing,’ ” Calendar, March 14).

Recently, at the Museum of Broadcasting tribute to Sid Caesar held at the L.A. County Museum, a packed audience sat for hours, enraptured, as the greatest writing staff ever assembled swapped stories about the days of “Your Show of Shows,” when a dozen or so voices tried to outshout each other, outjoke each other, outlaugh each other.

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One after another, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Sid Caesar and Neil Simon, for whom this was his first real job, described the time spent in the rewrite room as the best of their creative lives. Audiences attending Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” currently running in New York, are convulsed into hysterics on a nightly basis by the competition, camaraderie and hilarity that takes place in the single setting, the rewrite room.

I’ve worked on sitcoms for the past six years, and my most treasured times, as the “Your Show of Shows” writers before me, are of being in the room, around the table. I moved to Los Angeles, in 1988, on a Sunday, and began my first job, as the lowest writer on the ladder on “Dear John,” on Monday. I was fortunate enough to spend the next year studying with a wonderful mentor, the prolific Ed Weinberger. I soaked up the brilliant joke rhythms of legends like Bob Ellison and David Lloyd. I absorbed the ambitious new ideas of new wave writers who believed that sitcom didn’t have to be shticky and jokey, but more reflective of real life, writers like Peter Noah and Bob Stevens.

Perhaps “Dear John” will never be honored with a retrospective at a museum, but at least I know now that I have one thing in common with Neil Simon: Whatever I know about comedy writing, I learned in the room, around the table.

This year on “Coach,” I work with a wonderful group of people. I come to work, I laugh. We have long story sessions, I laugh. I go to run-through each afternoon, and I laugh. We order food, and go into the rewrite room and sit around a table, and whether the rewrite lasts an hour or all day, one thing is guaranteed: I laugh.

Where is the romance in sitting alone in an office, banging out a draft? Where is the enjoyment in eating only what you’ve ordered? And, as network executives are so fond of asking, where are the laughs?