25 Comedy Writers Pick Their Most Influential TV Episodes (Part 2)

I’m not sure there was one “eureka” moment for me. The earliest I can remember feeling inspired by an episode was season 1, episode 10 of Cheers, “The Endless Slumper.”

At the very beginning, Sam demonstrates an impossible power he has — he slides a full beer down the length of the bar and it slides right around the bend, curling to its waiting patron. Later, Sam loans his lucky bottlecap to a slumping ballplayer, and as soon as he does, things start going wrong for him. He tries his “slide the beer down the bar” trick again and instead of curling around the bend it just goes sliding right off and shatters.

Sam reveals that the bottlecap is from the last beer he ever drank, before giving up booze forever. He calls to get it back, but the player — whose slump was broken by the lucky bottlecap — says he lost it in Kansas City. Sam tells Diane to go home. Sensing he is in trouble, she stays to keep him from drinking. He pours himself a beer. Stares at it. The crowd is completely silent. After what seems like an eternity, Sam walks up… and slides it down the bar, where it bends around perfectly. He claps his hands in glee, and the crowd goes crazy.

Just an absolutely perfect character-defining story, early in the run of a show.

Michael Schur is the Emmy-winning creator of Parks and Recreation and The Good Place, performed as Mose Schrute on The Office, and co-hosts The Poscast, talking “sports, drafts, and nonsense.”

Stream Cheers' "The Endless Slumper" on Netflix

Every once in a while during Saturday Night Live’s first nine seasons, a family party would go late and I’d get to watch a few sketches with some of my cousins, but I was not a regular viewer of that program until its tenth season, which still holds a very special place in my heart. That was the year that Martin Short, Billy Crystal, Harry Shearer, and Christopher Guest joined Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Rich Hall, and Mary Gross (among others) and basically blew my thirteen-year-old mind every week.

No episode that season was as important to me as the one that Eddie Murphy hosted with musical guest Robert Plant and The Honeydrippers [season 10, episode 9]. Luckily I recorded it on a VHS tape and God knows how many times I watched it. A hundred? It was so so great. Gumby hanging out with with Mort Cohn and friends, “Lifestyles of The Relatives of The Rich and Famous” featuring Martin Short’s incredible Jerry Lewis impression. There was a wonderfully stupid sketch where Martin Short’s Leonard character, who grew up in a ranch-style house, has to learn how to climb up stairs during a gun battle and another one where Eddie Murphy, as Bishop Desmond Tutu, accidentally breaks Doug Flutie’s Heisman Trophy on a talk show and frantically tries to fix it with chewing gum.

This episode also featured the hilarious pre-taped sketch “Black Like Eddie,” which is really amazing. I practiced impressions of every funny character that was on that night and cracked up my friends for months with that stuff.  That episode was so fun and so full of ideas and loose and beautifully and confidently executed. I loved it. And even though I had no idea whether I could ever do any of that for a living, I knew I desperately wanted to.

Andy Daly is a UCB vet and MadTV alum who created and starred in the Comedy Central series Review.

Where to stream Saturday Night Live

Weirdly enough, I can pinpoint the exact episode of television that made me want to be a sitcom writer: Friends’ “The One With The Morning After” [season 3, episode 16].

Maybe you haven’t seen it — which is kinda crazy, because at this very moment, there are about 800 different channels playing Friends reruns. Pretty soon Friends reruns will automatically play on the insides of our eyelids, Black Mirror-style. But anyway, it’s the episode where Ross and Rachel break up after Ross sleeps with someone else. It’s the first time anyone says the phrase, “we were on a break” (iconic, I know).

The entire second half of the episode, starting around minute 11, is essentially a bottle episode: Ross and Rachel fight in one room of Rachel and Monica’s apartment while the rest of the group is holed up in Monica’s room, listening to the breakup. The scenes with Monica, Phoebe, Chandler, and Joey are funny and silly and filled with great jokes. The scenes with Rachel and Ross are funny, too, but they’re also emotional, incredibly well-acted, and just plain heartbreaking. Monica and Rachel’s apartment becomes a literal physical representation of the ideal sitcom episode: on one side, it just makes you laugh. On the other, it’s real, poignant, and affecting.

The first time I watched “The One With The Morning After,” I laughed and I cried and I just couldn’t believe a sitcom could so perfectly walk the line between comedy and drama, and do it all in just 22 minutes. When I rewatch it today, I kind of still can’t.

Jen Statsky is a writer for The Good Place, Broad City, and Lady Dynamite. Previously, she wrote for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Stream Friends' "The One the Morning After" on Netflix.

The definitive moment I decided to become an actor was after watching an episode of Arthur [season 2, episode 4]. I’ll never forget it. It was October 23, 1997. I was relaxing at home and watching some good ole’ PBS. The Arthur theme song finally comes on. A classic theme song. Top 5 of my generation. So, after I finish singing along to the theme song, the episode opens with Arthur talking in a movie theater during a trailer. The trailer is for a new James Hound movie (think James Bond meets a dog). Arthur rambles about the types of movies he loves to watch, “ones with great chase scenes. Lots of action and suspense. Lots of really cool gadgets. And evil geniuses planning to take over the world.” I was already hooked. “Those are the movies I like to watch!” I said to myself.

After the trailer finishes, a caption on-screen reads: “rated PG-13” and Arthur’s dad leans over to tell him, “Sorry Arthur. 5 more years.” Then the kids’ movie they’re actually there to see with D.W. begins. It’s called “Kitty Go Home.”  Arthur leaves the theater upset that he had to sit through that kiddie movie. He meets up with his friends and they all realize if they’re too young to see a James Hound movie, that they’ll make their own! At home, I was like, “YES! MAKE IT! MAKE IT!” So excited.

Arthur and his friends begin production on their James Hound movie on a severe budget. After they finished making it, Arthur screens it for a friend and SHE LOVES IT. I was so inspired after watching this episode that it’s the reason I wanted to create and star in my own vehicles.

Jermaine Fowler is the star of the CBS sitcom Superior Donuts. He served as the announcer at the 2017 Primetime Emmy Awards.

Stream Arthur's "Arthur Makes a Movie" on Amazon Prime with a PBS Kids subscription.

Growing up I loved watching You Can’t Do That on Television — this sketch-comedy show that aired on Nickelodeon starring a cast of kids.

It was gross and snotty (in both senses of the word) and really really funny. My favorite episode was one that let viewers “vote” at home by putting two squares on screen and giving you the option of pressing one or the other to decide what happened next in a sketch. It was an obvious gimmick but it was so inventive and strange and cool… and also predicted interactive touch-screen technology by about 20 years.

I’d like to think Steve Jobs was at home watching too and somehow a kids’ comedy show from Canada changed the course of human history.

Paul Rust is the co-creator and star of the Netflix comedy series Love. 

Where to stream You Can't Do That on Television

Most, if not all, of the comedy writers I’ve worked with over the years have had incredible TV memories. They’re able to recall specific story lines from decades-old sitcom episodes. For some reason, I can’t do that. This is strange to me because when I was a kid, I would watch literally anything on TV categorized as a comedy.  I distinctly remember watching Cheers, Wings, Night Court, Alf, Martin, Designing Women, Evening Shade, The Cosby Show, Golden Girls, Empty  Nest, Mad About You, Frasier, Murphy Brown, Northern Exposure, Family Matters, Full House, to name too many. Yet I retained none of it; the content simply washed over me. When I think about it now, I’m actually kind of annoyed at myself that I wasted so much time wasting so much time.

That all changed when I was about twelve years old. I was up late one night and stumbled upon an HBO sketch comedy show called Mr. Show. I was blown away. It was the first thing I’d ever seen that made me actually think about the writing process. How did people come up with this stuff? Who were they? How did they weave everything together like that? I became obsessed. To me, Mr. Show wasn’t funny. It was beyond funny. It was important. I would stay up late to manually record episodes on my dad’s VCR and then religiously watch episodes over and over, like a lunatic. Mr. Show became my comedy bible (torah).

One Mr. Show sketch made a huge impact on me and probably inspired me to pursue a career in comedy writing. It’s a sketch called “The Story of Everest” (season 4, episode 4). In it, a man returns home to tell his family about a harrowing mountain climbing adventure. But before he can finish the dramatic story, he knocks over his mother’s set of decorative thimbles. As the sketch goes on, the thimble collection is carefully put back into place, and the man keeps knocking it down over and over again. It’s an amazing display of physical comedy by the actor Jay Johnston.

But what always struck me was the structure of the sketch itself. “The Story of Everest” is like a magic trick. Johnston crashes into the thimbles seven or eight times. You see it coming. You know what’s going to happen. And yet, somehow, it gets a laugh each time. If I ever write anything anywhere close to that sketch, I will be happy.

Joe Mande is a writer for The Good Place, and has written in the past for Parks and Recreation and Kroll Show.

Stream Mr. Show's "The Story of Everest" on Prime Video.

I feel like when I was younger and asked this question, I said answers I thought I was supposed to say. And I don’t know that there’s one episode or show, or even one factor, that made me want to be a writer… but I will say The Wonder Years was the first show that instilled in me a passion for television. I was raised in a very traditional Korean household, so what we watched together as a whole family was pretty limited — I’m talking Hour of Power, the weekly church service program with Robert Schuller, and Chicago Bulls games.

But the one and only scripted show we would never miss was The Wonder Years. In particular, I remember the episode, “My Father’s Office,” when Kevin spends a day at his dad’s work, really resonated with me and I think honestly helped my family dynamic for like two days.

Since so much of what we experience in our childhood as our minds develop affects our adult behavior in ways we don’t even realize, I’m sure the honest tone of The Wonder Years shaped my taste and sensibility in a deep-rooted way.

Sonny Lee has been a writer/producer on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Silicon Valley, and Girlboss His TV pilot, Singularity, was directed by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen.

There are lots of shows I can thank/blame for turning me into a comedy writer: In Living Color, Saturday Night Live, and even Sister, Sister (don’t sleep on Tia & Tamera). But it wasn’t until I saw the backwards episode of Seinfeld, that I realized that someone wrote the funny things my favorite performers said every night on TV.

I watched the episode, “The Betrayal” (season 9, episode 8), live on November 20th, 1997. As I watched it start at the end of the story and work backwards towards the beginning with clarity, continuity, and even callbacks, I was both amazed and clued in. I thought, “Wow, someone wrote this.” I couldn’t imagine being smart and talented enough to conceive of and pull off something so creative and deeply funny, and I still can’t tbh, but knowing that someone did, planted the comedy writer seed for the very first time.

Now, as a comedy writer, “The Betrayal” reminds me to always try harder. The writers could have walked away with a good 22 minutes of TV, based solely on the fact that the episode was in reverse. Instead, they took a device that was already (in my opinion) a genius idea, and elevated it with incredible jokes (“unvitation,” Schnapps, and pretty much anything JLD said or did) and subplots that would have made for an excellent regular episode of the show.

I try to set the same standard for my own work. Because of “The Betrayal,” my goal is to always take my good ideas and make them great, then excellent, then whatever comes after excellent, and then whatever comes after that. Also, I still really want to go to India.

Lauren Smith is a writer for The Rundown with Robin Thede, Thursdays at 11pm on BET.

Stream Seinfeld's "The Betrayal" on Hulu.

I first saw the British version of The Office in high school. Now, I was raised watching brightly-lit American sitcoms where everyone had expensive hair, so it was nothing short of shocking to see a show that looked this grey and drab, where the costumes were ill-fitting and no one had “the Rachel.” These aesthetic choices, combined with the mockumentary format, made the show feel startlingly real. Sitcom characters had always seemed unbreakable to me; sure, their boyfriend-of-the-week might dump them, but I always knew they’d be okay. The Office, however, made the characters feel so lifelike that I worried they’d actually be crushed by the small tragedies that occurred in their daily lives.

The series 1 episode “Training” was the most influential to me because it combined comedy and pathos so seamlessly. It takes place over the course of a dull daylong training session that David Brent is constantly derailing. From shouting “I think there’s been a rape up there!” to “win” a customer service role-play to busting out his guitar to sing “Free Love Freeway,” David is a cringe-worthy nightmare boss in this episode. A true narcissist, he even uses Dawn’s break-up as an opportunity to re-purpose a song he wrote about Princess Diana. While David is often pathetic and vile, I loved that the show treated him with sympathy rather than revulsion. We never fully hate him because we see that he is just a man who’s desperate to feel valued and in control.

The Office’s ability to shift gears between comedy and pathos is best exemplified in the final scene, in which Tim becomes so bored that he quits his job and walks out. In true Office fashion, what could have been a small moment of triumph turns into a bracing moment of pain. With his newfound courage, Tim returns to ask Dawn on a date, only to discover, in front of everyone, that she hasn’t actually split up with her fiancé. Tim exits, brutally humbled, and we sit in ten seconds of agonizing silence before David Brent says, “Go get the guitar.”

The speed at which The Office could go from hilarious to painful and back again was thrilling. I think it was so influential to my desire to be a TV writer because it made me realize television comedy could tell stories that were outrageously funny and deeply human at the same time.

Chris Schleicher was a staff writer on The Mindy Project, where he also played the role of Nurse Chris.

Stream The Office's "Training" on Netflix.

I have always loved really smart jokes about really dumb things. Many shows helped shape my sensibilities – SNL, Late Night, South Park – but if there is a single television episode that had the greatest impact, it would have to be Mitch Hedberg’s Comedy Central Presents. What I loved about Mitch was that his jokes were well-written but had a simple set-up/punch-line structure. He was cerebral but dealt with mundane topics (like escalators and donut receipts). It was observational humor in the tradition of Seinfeld but instead of rambling about the observation in lengthy detail, Mitch boiled it down to a hard-hitting one-liner.

As a writer, I love jokes that have clear punch lines –something to “get” – as opposed to rants, stories, and act-outs. These jokes seem purer to me because they rely on the strength of the writing and can’t be forced through overconfidence in selling the joke. Mitch’s bizarre and bashful delivery underscored this. Other comics have imitated Mitch’s style but the result is sometimes so cerebral that it sounds more like a brainteaser than a joke. It became “I see what you did there” comedy. The jokes in Mitch’s special were not just brainy, they were hilarious.

Whether I am writing for myself or for someone else, I always try to write about the dumbest topics in the smartest ways. And I always want a punch line at the end of the sentence.

Adam Yenser is a stand-up comedian and writer/performer for The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

I’m very lucky in that I have a very funny dad, so I was exposed to brilliant comedy from a super young age. When I read this question, I immediately knew the answer, full-stop. Although weirdly, considering I had an unequivocal answer at the forefront of my brain, I’d never thought about it this way before.

In the late ’80s, Fox secured the rights to air reruns of Showtime’s It’s Garry Shandling’s Show on Sunday nights. My dad didn’t have Showtime (please— he was a high school English teacher; with that salary, we’re lucky we even had a VCR), so he was really excited when It’s Garry Shandling’s Show made it over to Fox. He and I (about age 11) would plan our Sunday night meal around sitting in front of the television and watching it together. That meal would usually consist of either Burger King or microwave Stouffer’s mac and cheese. It was classy times for the Varney family.

It’s Garry Shandling’s Show was incredibly meta. When people talk about it now, I feel like they mostly refer to it as the show that predated the much more popular Larry Sanders Show, which is certainly true (and Larry Sanders was also brilliant – no argument there), but I kind of wish it had the chance to stand on its own a bit more in comedy conversations. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, Garry would open the show with a monologue to the camera, not unlike a late night talk show host, but he’d have the set of his Sherman Oaks house behind him. And throughout the sitcom, he’d continually refer to both the live studio audience and the viewer at home by speaking directly into camera. The entire series was totally absurd; silly and sharp and charming. But my favorite episode is definitely episode 19 of season 3, “Worry Wart.”

It’s an incredibly ambitious and convoluted episode that is kind of hard to explain, but I’ll briefly try. Garry’s opening monologue involves him reading a letter from a viewer who is concerned about a suspicious growth he noticed in last week’s show. Garry goes into his living room and plays a tape of “last week’s show,” which was a non-existent episode, made up purely for the conceit of THIS episode. Gary fast-forwards through the episode (because he’s wearing scarves and turtlenecks and all kinds of things preventing present-day Garry from identifying this suspicious growth). Finally he sees it, and the rest of the episode is about Garry getting the mole removed. When Garry wakes up from his surgery, he’s incredibly stoned/loopy and does and says some insane things, including betraying a secret about his best friend Nancy to Nancy’s fiance, Ian.

But listen — it’s so much more than that. It’s just… brilliant. For me, it infused my love of comedy with a love of the meta and absurd. I feel like that show was WAY ahead of its time, and I know I’ve been inspired as a writer to try and create layers of absurdity (which sometimes make zero sense and utterly fail) and to think outside of the box, to use an annoyingly apt and defeatingly boring cliché. It’s Garry Shandling’s Show completely changed the way I thought about comedy, particularly from a writing perspective. And I’m so glad.

Janet Varney is an actress on Stan Versus Evil and You’re the Worst. You can also recognize her as the voice of the title character on The Legend of Korra. 

Where to stream It's Garry Shandling's Show

One of my favorite episodes of television is Seinfeld‘s “The Hamptons” (season 5, episode 21) written by Peter Mehlman and Carol Leifer. It has so many memorable plots — including the “breathtaking” ugly baby and George’s “shrinkage.” Seinfeld is one of the greatest shows of all time because it explored relatable topics and put such brilliant spins on them. I still find myself referencing it even though the series finale was over 19 years ago.

The way that Larry David was able to consistently tie the plots together always blew my mind and really inspired me as a writer. It’s a show that I can always sit down and watch no matter how many times I have seen an episode because as a viewer, it makes me laugh, and as a writer, I learn from it. It is a masterclass in television writing.

Kate Lambert is an actress, writer, and improviser. She appears on and is the co-creator of the TV Land series Teachers.

Stream Seinfeld's "The Hamptons" on Hulu.

In March of 1994, Olympic silver medalist Nancy Kerrigan hosted Saturday Night Live, which meant two things for me, personally. Number one: Comedy, which I loved, was performed by real living people. Sure, this particular real life human being was someone I had only ever seen on television competing in the Olympics and in person at parades in her honor. But also, more encouragingly, she was a person from Stoneham, Massachusetts, where I grew up. Number two: Given the limited slots for SNL hosts every year and the level of fame required just to be in consideration, I knew from the age of nine that I would only ever be (at best) the second most successful comedian from my hometown. If I’m being honest, I’m probably fourth on the list, behind Nancy Kerrigan, Mario Cantone, and whoever spray-painted that penis on the rock wall by the high school.

My parents recorded Nancy Kerrigan’s Saturday Night Live episode on VHS, and I watched it early the next morning. I don’t remember many specifics (I just looked it up, and the musical guest was Aretha Franklin! How did I forget that???), but the sketch that still stands out involved Kerrigan and Chris Farley as an ice skating team. Farley had (according to the sketch’s setup) gained a substantial amount of weight in the off-season, and as a result he was graceless on the ice, and every time he tossed his partner into the air, he launched her out of the rink entirely. I’d be a little scared to look back and see how it holds up. Although that’s probably true of many things I laughed at in the ’90s.

Still, the combination of broad, physical comedy, the deadpan lines delivered by the “announcers,” and an honest to goodness hometown hero have stuck in my head for 2+ decades. My parents, sister, and I still quote lines from the sketch to each other (“Kenny G…a bold choice”). My family’s enjoyment of the sketch, plus the local connection to the upper echelons of comedy made it feel more real than anything I’d seen on tv before. It made the idea of comedy more immediate and present, even in a Boston suburb with no connection to show business. It was, much like that one movie about the perfect storm, a perfect storm. And it showed me, to quote the great Kevin Garnett years later: “Anything is possibllleeee!”

Josh Gondelman is a stand-up comedian and Emmy-winning writer for Last Week Tonight on HBO.

RELATED: 25 Comedy Writers Pick Their Most Influential TV Episodes (Part 1)

Where to stream Saturday Night Live