For over twenty years, Boston native Joe Toplyn has written and produced television comedy. His credits include Late Night with David Letterman, for which he won four Emmy Awards; The Tonight Show with Jay Leno; The Late Show with David Letterman; and In Living Color. He presently teaches a course on comedy writing at the People’s Improv Theater in addition to writing for Monk, a USA Network weekly comedy-mystery series. Toplyn and his wife, Sherry, are the parents of two teenage sons.

As an undergrad, I worked on the Harvard Lampoon. Surrounded by funny people, all bouncing ideas off each other and cracking wise, I learned something about writing comedy. I left college having done something I really enjoyed, but since I didn’t think anyone would ever pay me to write, I took a job in Israel working for a high-fashion leather garment manufacturer. That was my first exposure to business, and I started to learn what it takes to manage an unwieldy production process and to please the fickle consumer.

Business school made sense to me because I liked to hatch ideas and make them happen. After HBS I went to work in consumer packaged goods marketing at General Foods, thinking I’d found a position that would blend my creative and management interests. Although I love dogs, it turned out that marketing dog food didn’t provide me with enough creative exercise. So I sidestepped into working for the vice chairman of the motion-picture division of Columbia Pictures. I had decided I wanted to be in show business, so at Columbia at least I was in the right theater, if not the right row.

Then came my big break: a benevolent Lampoon friend of mine who worked for David Letterman called to say that his show needed writers and encouraged me to submit a writing sample. With the support of my understanding wife, I sent over some material, pretty certain that it would get me nowhere. But Dave liked it and called me in for a meeting. I arrived at the Late Night offices a few minutes early so I could change out of my pinstriped suit and into blue jeans. I didn’t want Dave to think I was just a numbers cruncher. That was the first time I had ever considered my Harvard MBA to be a career liability.

Producing a television show well requires a surprising amount of general management expertise. So much of the job is analyzing the competition, appealing to your target audience, running meetings efficiently, getting a quality product out the door, and managing your staff so that they’re happy, productive, and motivated. It’s often hard to find writers who also have the management skills needed to run a show successfully. So MBA tools can come in handy even in a nontraditional MBA arena like television comedy. Show business is, of course, a business, and any business can use MBAs.

Writing a comedy-mystery show like Monk involves adding jokes to the mix of character and story. I’ve always been a fan of mysteries. In fact, at the end of my second year at HBS, I wrote a comedy-mystery sketch that poked fun at Professor Gordon Rausser, who taught Managerial Economics. With his permission, several of us Section I-mates performed the sketch for the class. It was well-received but somewhat barbed, and I was relieved when Professor Rausser asked me for a copy of the script as a souvenir, and not as a potential exhibit in a libel suit.

My advice to others is to try to make your living doing something you really enjoy. It’s not the most original advice in the world, and it may not be easy to follow. But if you can take pleasure in the tasks you perform every day you’ll find it so much easier to get up in the morning, work hard, and feel fulfilled.

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