Funny people are not funny all the time.
Would you expect a shoe salesman to measure your feet at a party?
Most of the time, funny people are just regular people with a particular set of skills. Or maybe one particular skill. If that skill is writing funny, it’s a useful one, because it might get you a job on a late-night show.
Jenny Hagel has one of those jobs. For ten years, she’s written funny things for Seth Meyers to say and do on NBC’s Late Night. She’s also become a regular performer on the show in the popular segment “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” alongside Amber Ruffin (watch for a new installment tonight).
Hagel loves the job. She loves being funny and writing funny. But she has another obsession:
“I am genuinely addicted to giving people advice.”
That includes advice of almost any kind, from jobs to relationships, to parenting, to how to pack a suitcase. The habit has already inspired a live stage show, Jenny Hagel Gives Advice; now it has produced Advice No One Asked For, a new book—out today—filled with advice both funny and serious.
For Hagel, sharing a piece of advice that actually makes someone’s life better, in ways large or small, can feel every bit as good as getting a big laugh from a joke.
“I’m going to say the dopamine hit from someone taking my advice is bigger,” Hagel told me when we chatted about her new book. “Because it happens less often. I don’t know whether it’s a weird brain glitch, but that’s how my brain works. If somebody takes my advice, it truly makes me feel good. Not in a self-aggrandizing way. It makes me delighted that I have a piece of knowledge that I transferred to the other person in some way.”
The knowledge she’s eager to share comes from a mid-lifetime of experience: taking an extra-large laundry basket of jobs, like working as a daycare teaching assistant and handing water bottles to a guy dressed as a goldfish; balancing work and life as a single mother; and diving into adventures—not always wisely in retrospect—like accepting an invitation to walk around a cage full of bad-tempered monkeys.
Hagel is not offering herself as an expert dispensing gems of personal wisdom, like “Be sure to choose the right karaoke song.” In fact, she acknowledges that she is a non-expert in many things.
“The area of my non-expertise is extensive,” she said. “I just think all of us have learned things as we’ve gone through life. Anybody who’s been on this earth, you just have things you’ve learned through trial and error or accidental experience.”
She acknowledges often diving in without invitation. Hence her book title. But she doesn’t mind being on the other end, either.
“I like to get advice from people,” Hagel said. “Please help me, I don’t know what I’m doing—if it’s given in the right spirit.”
What Hagel is certainly an expert on is comedy. From a young age, she was aware she had the ability to amuse people. She used it in the usual way funny kids do: to get by, to make friends.
She wasn’t even aware of things like jobs for writers of funny material. “The first thing you tend to think of creative people doing is acting,” Hagel said. “I went to Chicago to be a comedy performer.”
She joined Second City, did sketch work, and learned people actually wrote comedy—and that some of them got hired on late-night shows.
“I thought: Oh, that’s also a job?”
Hagel started doing both. That led to a lot of travel with other funny people and some of those useful life experiences, as well as a good grounding in what makes a joke work—how to use language and emphasis and pacing to get the best laugh possible.
She also learned early on that there has tended to be a scarcity of women in late-night writers’ rooms—not so much at Late Night with Seth Meyers, but certainly historically.
Hagel touches on one possible reason in the book, citing academic research going back to the 1970s showing that younger girls tell just as many jokes as boys until about the age of six, when girls start being told not to tell jokes.
There’s more evidence, but Hagel’s overarching point should be convincing to anyone still clinging to the absurd notion that women aren’t as funny as men—especially while people like Tina Fey, Nikki Glaser, Tig Notaro, Amy Poehler, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are walking this earth.
Another thing Hagel knows about comedy writers is that what’s funny to them is often far different from what is funny to those not in the profession. It’s usually something unconventional—because they see conventional jokes coming—and often much darker.
“I think comedy writers have a good barometer,” Hagel said. “That is a joke for regular humans. This is broken-comedy writer humor.”
The latter is one thing that will keep AI from depopulating late-night writers’ rooms, Hagel said.
“I don’t think AI can replace anything that requires human emotion and nuance,” she said. “Can AI assemble a series of words that technically equal a joke? Sure. Are those jokes I’m going to enjoy or connect with as a human being? Probably not. I’m going to say definitely not.”
What about Hagel’s other obsession? Can AI give advice?
“No. What you want from a piece of advice is human experience,” Hagel said. “I don’t want to see a painting made by a computer. I want to see one made by somebody with a broken heart.”
And a joke from somebody with a joyful one.
Hagel’s bag of advice includes some for anyone chasing a job writing for late night:
“Bring your whole self to the work, because there are a lot of comedy writers but there’s only one you. The thing that makes comedy sing is when it has a really specific point of view.”
Hagel’s book, Advice No One Asked For, hits bookstores today, Tuesday, June 2.
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my advice, watch Jenny and Amber with Seth tonight…funny with a great spirit between them all