In anticipation and celebration of tomorrow’s Thanksgiving holiday, I invited a very special guest to the latest episode of Rushfield Lunch: comedy writer and director Jay Kogen, an alumnus of The Simpsons and Frasier. In recent days, Kogen has led a very important project on his podcast, Don’t Be Alone with Jay Kogen, exploring issues of mental health and coping mechanisms in the creative community, where maintaining balance is tenuous at the best of times.
“I don’t know if the industry is sliding out of control so much as reforming,” Jay told me during our wide-ranging conversation. “We’re in the middle of a blender and at the end of the day, the blender will stop, and a new concoction will have formed, and we’ll figure it out.”
This kind of level-headedness is something Jay said he sees in the people who have best adapted to the current landscape, where the list of problems is too long and varied to rattle off (but includes everything from careless tech overlords to a creative retreat from once-lucrative genres like comedy and drama).
“They’re still working. They haven’t stopped. They haven’t given up,” Jay said of these resilient folks. “They’re not just sitting, frightened, doing nothing, waiting for someone to save them. Because nobody’s coming to save you. You have to do it yourself. We have to work to make things better ourselves. Being frightened has a certain value in getting you started doing something. But if you stay in that position, you’re going to waste your life. So good, smart people are doing things.”
Before diving into your Thanksgiving dinner, please watch the full chat above — we cover everything from the state of comedy to Jay’s thoughts on the controversy about The Simpsons character Apu to why sometimes executive notes can be a good thing.
