TIL Zach Galifianakis had a two-week trial run as a writer on “SNL” before being let go. He wrote a sketch with Will Ferrell being the bodyguard of Britney Spears’s belly button that bombed so bad in the writer’s room that Tina Fey put her hand on his shoulder to comfort him.

norm macdonald does a similar thing, whether people realize it or not. even bill burr and dave chappelle do it to an extent - they're all bored to some extent with just telling jokes, and the game they're really playing is seeing how much they can fuck with the audience, what kind of games they can play.

i used to do this growing up with my family who were ultra-serious. you just start to find the humor in seeing the situation from the third person perspective - it's not for them, it's not even necessarily for you, it's for the humor of the entire situation that would really only be fully appreciated by a third party. like being in a sitcom scene.

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