Comedy writers suffer from snack attack

If you've ever wondered how the networks manage to trap a team of otherwise intelligent writers in a room for sixteen hours stretches to punch up jokes on some lame sitcom that you can't even bare to watch, the New York Times has your answer. It's the food.

This Sunday's Times magazine had a ton of great comedy revelations in it. There was the How to be Funny compendium put together by sometime Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman with two cents from TV scribe and director Paul Feig and, of course, the comedy writer's snack attack article.

Writers from Knights of Prosperity, Everybody Loves Raymond and How I Met Your Mother all confessed to the terrible eating habits of the writer's room and the accompanying weight gain. How I Met Your Mother's Chris Harris even relayed a story of how the staff of Joey "apparently weighed themselves at the beginning of what turned out to be a grueling season and then again at the end. The net gain was around 125 pounds - more than what their lead actress weighed."

As a struggling TV writer whose cabinets look like I never graduated from college (ramen, ramen and ramen), I personally understand why writers would go bonkers on the delicious, free foodstuffs.

Phil Rosenthal, the much-loved showrunner of Everybody Loves Raymond, gained 30 pounds over the course of the show. He told the Times, "Before you're working as a writer, you're scrounging for food. And then suddenly you're in a room all day. Sometimes the only sunshine coming into the room is the menu. And the writer's main preoccupation is lunch: 'Where are we ordering from?' and 'Where's that guy with my lunch?' " His company's name is, not coincidentally, Where's Lunch Productions.

Well, folks, nobody every said that bringing the funny was pretty.