Job Title: TV writer Employers: Television networks and studios Openings: Get an agent or try launching a show on the Web Salary Cap: Low eight figures Number of Jobs: About 6,000

"It's stressful being funny for a living," says Robert Carlock, a writer on the critically-acclaimed NBC comedy 30 Rock. "The bar for toasts at weddings seems to be high."

But Carlock has one surefire way of telling whether his jokes are working or not—at least the ones he writes for pay. "A long silence from Tina is the best indicator that something is not worth pursuing," he says, referring to the show's creator and star, Tina Fey.

Though Carlock says the show's team of writers are not quite as slovenly as the ones depicted on the program's fictional sketch-comedy show, he says the collegial atmosphere and constant spitballing of ideas are indeed true to life.

"We have fun, we do bits—we laugh a lot," the 35-year-old Carlock says.
    
He and the group's staff of about a dozen writers spend hours together during the show's writing season from June to April pitching jokes and ideas to one another. But material that kills in the writer's room doesn't always make it on to the show.

"Comedy is musical—the timing of it, the pitch," says Carlock. "When you've got people like Alec Baldwin doing the acting, you can only blame yourself when it doesn't work."

Even after years of writing for such shows as Saturday Night Live, Friends, the short-lived Friends spinoff Joey, and now 30 Rock, Carlock says he still finds it nerve-wracking to try out his material for the first time on the cast and crew.

However, he says, in sitcom work, "the most important thing is to take that risk."

Carlock made his way into television as have many successful comedy writers: He edited the venerable Harvard Lampoon while in college (other ex-Lampooners populate the staffs of shows like The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, and Late Night With David Letterman). After graduating in the late '90s, he hit the job market during what he calls a "gold rush" of comedy, when sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends were hitting their strides.

"It was a little daunting saying, 'I'm going to make my living as a writer,'" says Carlock. But watching fellow Lampooners move to New York and get jobs in television motivated him to do the same.

After landing an agent at the hot new firm Endeavor (model for the show Entourage), Carlock became a writer on The Dana Carvey Show in 1996. Though the show only lasted for one season and Carlock barely got his material in front of the cameras, that hardly mattered since he was sitting side by side with the show's other all-star writers, including Dave Chappelle, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.

Carlock's current schedule on 30 Rock requires him and the other writers to sit in the writers' room all day and churn out 22 30-minute episodes in a single season—the equivalent of about seven feature films a year—as well as being present on set to help rewrite material that isn't working.

"I've fallen asleep on set more times than I care to admit," Carlock says. "But the fun thing about serial television is you do get to make some mistakes—it's inevitable. That's also the fun of it."

---