So here I am, 21 years old... on the verge of graduating from this lovely institute of higher learning... without a clue what I'm going to do with my life. Then I get a phone call - the call I've been waiting for all my life. It's a publicist interested i n setting up a phone interview with Chris X, one of the young writers who works on the new NBC sitcom "Newsradio."

How could I pass that up? A chance to talk to a successful comedy writer and an alumnus of both the magazine "National Lampoon" and "Beavis and Butthead." He's also the co-author of "What's Right With America." I didn't ask him where I should send my resume, but hey... at least I've got an "in" now. Ok, so maybe not.

Wildcat: I'm sorry... I don't even really know who you are.

Chris X: I'm an executive story editor - among the writers there's not really much of a hierarchy, even though we have various titles. My title is sort of below the level of co-producer because me and my writing partner Sam Johnson have the least s eniority.

WC: So what do you do all day?

CX: We spend a lot of our day trying to get out of doing our work, using various computer games and reading the paper. We generally work in the evenings. During the day, the actors come in and rehearse and work on the script. At the end of the day we go down to the stage and see what they've done, what works and what doesn't work. At night we fix it.

WC: According to the press release, you guys have an arcade at the office.

CX: I can confirm that. In our office, we have a foosball table, because that was our game in college.

WC: How does someone get into your line of work? What's your background?

CX: Almost everyone has a different way of getting into sitcom work. Sam and I met in college and we wrote underground humor stuff. After college what we really wanted to be was, like, New Yorker humorists like Ian Frasier and Robert Benchley... so we wrote a lot of magazine stuff and wound up at National Lampoon.

WC: Did you just do freelance work?

CX: Yup. We temped. I worked at an advertising agency and we were trying to sell our little semi-humorous stories. So we ended up at National Lampoon and got jobs as editors there, which was our first professional comedy job.

WC: Why does that seem to be such a training ground for comedy writers?

CX: You have to remember that National Lampoon is different than Harvard Lampoon. National Lampoon is virtually moribund now, and we'd like to think that we helped kill it.

Part of it is that when you write print humor, you have to do a lot of different things. Print humor is more difficult to write - on this show we have actors who can make even our lamest lines seem funny. But if it dies on the page, there's nobody to help you.

WC: Is there any tension between you guys and the overall hierarchy at NBC?

CX: One of the nice things about being at the bottom of the totem pole is that it's not something I have to deal with. That's one of the things about running a show that makes it kind of a daunting job... but that's Paul's [Simms - the creator of " Newsradio" and "Cheers"] job. He and Julie, our associate producer, deal with the network and the production company - that kind of thing. Making sure the actors are happy in their work, too. It all goes through his office.

WC: I've only seen the show once...I don't even know when its on.

CX: It's on at 9:00 PM on Wednesday, Eastern. I'm not sure how that works with

the whole time zone thing. We hate the time slot - any NBC sitcom that's not on Thursday night wishes it was on Thursday night. We feel we would fit in well there...we want to be on the hit night.

WC: Do you pull inspiration from the Seinfeld style of humor?

CX: You know, I really admire it a lot. I think the inspiration is in that it's very successful creatively and also in the ratings. The guy who directs most of our shows, Tom Cherones, used to direct a lot of the shows for Seinfeld in the early g oing. So there's that link, too.

WC: Is there a lot of rivalry with the other sitcom crews? Do they ever come over and challenge you at Defender?

CX: Well no, because basically everybody is working all the time. So during the season its hard to have much of a social life at all. We're famous for working far into the night because we get started later, but everyone works late. It's more like , I have some friends who work at the Simpsons, which is a show I really like a lot, and I think "Damn... that's really funny." We've got to prove ourselves. Because you can't measure it, it's more about peer respect.

WC: Do you ever worry that you'll wake up one day and you won't be funny anymore?

CX: Oh, I worry about that all the time... Somebody once asked me, "What do you do on days when you get in a bad mood and you just don't feel funny."

...But that's just learning the craft of it, I guess. You can always just do these hacky things and pull out the bag of comedy tricks on a bad day.

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