June, 1986

Tom and I were often asked about how we made the decision to become comedy writers. Our answer was always, "In the least interesting way possible." Not all pivotal life-changing moments are thunderbolts. Sometimes, they happen quietly, off-handedly. This one happened, quite literally, between yawns.

I had vowed to stay in touch with Tom, and I did, but it wasn't easy. Our colleges were hundreds of miles apart and back then there was no Skype, no FaceTime, no texting, no email. We used the telephone. But you couldn't use it to call a person; you used it to call a place — a home, an office — and you hoped the person was there (or, if not, a person who knew where they were). Yes, there were answering machines, but they were still considered a luxury. For most us, if we wanted to talk to someone, we called and if they weren't there, tough shit, we called back later.

The hardships we endured, kids. You have no idea.

Tom had visited me at Ellison College in October of my Freshman year. When I announced to my gaggle of friends that Tom was coming up, I let them know they were in for a real treat. "You think I'm funny?" — they did — "Wait until you see the two of us together!"

In almost all situations, I preferred to undersell, but if there was one thing that I was confident about, it was that Tom and I were hilarious together. If you look through my yearbook from Senior Year high school — and I'd caution you not to, unless you have a high tolerance for suburban white kids with bad perms — that is certainly the consensus.

"Tom and you make me crack up so hard!" wrote some wordsmith named Mike, apparently believing himself to be so unforgettable that he didn't need to bother with a surname. But not only did I forget Mike, I also forgot the other Mike who signed my yearbook because he didn't include his last name, either.

Foresight, people. Come on.

So I had every expectation that the weekend would be a blast. And it was. We riffed, we laughed, we completed each others' sentences. Plus, I had brought Tom up to speed on my group's inside jokes — Amy's unshaven feminism, Bruce's indecipherable inner-city idioms, the time a drunken Martin passed out while going down on Tanya (from then on, we all referred to extreme drunkenness as being "cooch-faced") — giving him an insiders' perspective that made him feel relaxed and included. The weekend, I thought, had been a tremendous success.

My friends disagreed.

"He's abrasive and déclassé," said Colette, a Bohemian art history major who unselfconsciously used words like déclassé. She had anointed herself the group spokesperson for this particular conversation. And if anyone disagreed with her, they were keeping their opinion to themselves.

"But you've got to admit," I replied, "He's funny."

"He's puerile." She lit a clove cigarette and took a drag. "Face it, your friend is a dud." I thought the word "dud" was an odd choice for someone who had just used the word déclassé.

"That's your opinion," I said dismissively, waving away the sickly-sweet smoke.

"That's everybody's opinion," she insisted, trying to tip the argument's scales in her favor with the combined weight of my peers. "Are you saying we're all wrong?"

"Yeah," I said matter-of-factly. "You're all wrong."

My friends were exasperated, but they shouldn't have been surprised. I was frequently — perhaps reflexively — at odds with the group. When I was about ten years old, my father sat me down for a talk. Not the sex talk (that particular trauma was a few years off) but one that proved far more consequential in shaping my world view.

"Always remember, Aaron," he said. "Most people are idiots."

Wise words and, unlike his advice about responsibility, initiative and the importance of reading instruction manuals, I actually heeded them. In truth, even at that age, this was less a revelation than a confirmation of what I already suspected. And it gave me license to maintain absolute certainty in the rightness of my position in the face of group consensus.

Carrie, my big-breasted, trust-funded OCD girlfriend waited until we were in private to inform me that she didn't like Tom, either. But what she disliked more than Tom — and this I would hear a lot in the coming years — was me, when Tom was around.

"You turn into a different person," she complained.

I didn't disagree. But that person I turned into when I was with Tom? I liked him a lot.

On breaks, Tom and I picked up where we left off, hanging out at my parents' house, just like before. On this particular evening, in the summer between Sophomore and Junior year, we were lounging on a gray sectional sofa, eating air-popped popcorn out of a large wooden bowl and watching NBC's massive Thursday night comedy block.

Back then, sitcoms were a quintessential part of the American experience. To give you some perspective as to how popular they were, consider that today the most successful sitcom in America is Big Bang Theory and it gets a rating of 7. In 1986, the most popular sitcom — in fact, the most popular show on TV — was The Cosby Show (again, we didn't know!) and it had a rating of 35.

Which, I think we can all agree, is more.

Tom and I loved sitcoms when they were done right and we grew up with some great ones. All In The Family, Mary Tyler Moore, Cheers, Taxi, The Bob Newhart Show, Soap, Night Court, M*A*S*H, The Jeffersons. We didn't think of them as mere entertainment, but as music. It wasn't just about the words, but the rhythms, the rests, the pianissimo of embarrassment, the fortissimo of panic, the rounded rise and fall of the audience's laugh.

And yes, I know this all sounds like pretentious bullshit — especially since I'm not entirely sure that I'm using those musical terms correctly — but it wasn't. Not to us.

Anyway, we were watching a rerun of a Family Ties episode in which Mallory scored higher on an I.Q. test than Alex and hijinks — as is hijinks' wont — ensued. We thought it was brilliant.

A commercial break came on and we used that time, as we usually did, to repeat our favorite lines from the preceding act. In this particular instance, the big winner had been expertly delivered by young actress Justine Bateman: "Your quasi-clever remarks are simply wasted on someone of my smartitude."

Ha-ha!

I stretched, I yawned and then, for no particular reason, I said to Tom, "You know, I bet we could write for TV."

"I guess," Tom responded.

"After graduation," I said while fishing a pieces of popcorn out of my shirt, "do you want to move to Los Angeles and write sitcoms?"

There was a brief silence as he thought about it, inclining his head from side to side, while I dug an unpopped kernel out of my navel. And then he said the words that would change our lives forever.

"Eh. Why the fuck not?"

And then he yawned, too.

My parents took the news astonishingly well. They didn't just accept my new life plan, they aggressively embraced it. "If that's what will make you happy," my mother said without a moment's hesitation, "we're one hundred percent behind you." She hugged me.

"If there is anything," my father said while waiting for his shot at a hug, "I mean anything we can do to help, just let us know." He hugged me, kissed me on the cheek. "I'm not exaggerating. Anything you need." My father had a tendency to keep hammering the same point over and over, long after it had already sunk in, a byproduct of his years in advertising. "Really. OK? Anything."

I was overwhelmed by their unconditional support. Not to mention their selflessness. I was their only child and I had just announced that I would be traveling to the other side of the continent and they didn't for a single second consider standing in the way of my dreams. And I must say, having become a parent myself, that I understand something about them now that I didn't then, namely: They were out of their fucking minds!

I mean, Jesus, what were they thinking? Tom and I made this decision on a fucking whim! We didn't think it through at all! Neither one of us had ever seen a sitcom script, much less written one! And even if we wrote one, who would we show it to? We didn't know anyone in Hollywood! Hell, we didn't even know anyone who knew anyone in Hollywood! And all of this would require us to move thousands of miles to Hollywood, leaving everyone and everything we knew behind!

Insanity!

And, by the way, completely out of character. True story: in high school, I mailed out letters to various colleges requesting information about their schools. It turned out that I had folded the letters improperly, in fourths instead of thirds. No big deal, right?

Well, when my parents found out about this, they flipped out.

"Holy shit! Ho. Ly. Shit!"

"They're going to think you're stupid!"

"That'll be their first impression of you! That you don't know how to fold a damn letter!"

"It'll be in your file, Aaron! Your file!"

"How is any college going to take you seriously now?"

So, mis-folding some letters made my parents despair for my future, but leaping blindly into the void... that they were OK with.

Incidentally, this wasn't just out of character for my parents, it was for me as well. I wasn't nearly as risk-averse as they were, but I was no adventurer, either. Up until that point, I had a solid plan. I would get my degree in psychology and then my doctorate in graduate school, then open up my own practice and tell people how to live their lives (it was something I was doing anyway, why not get paid for it?). It wasn't exciting, but it was practical and it most assuredly would have worked.

For Tom, it was a little different. I knew he didn't have any particular future plans. When asked, he talked noncommittally about journalism or computers or radio. What I didn't know until years later was that he was already failing out of college. He was also — and I didn't learn this until years later, either — smoking a ton of marijuana. Those two facts, I'm pretty sure, were related.

So while a leap into the void is frightening for anybody, Tom was trading uncertainty for uncertainty. I was abandoning a safe path to at least moderate success. Why would I do such a thing?

Well, first of all, virtually everything in my life had come easily to me so far and I saw no reason that the trend wouldn't continue in California. But more important, I think, was my unwavering belief in our friendship. Once broached, the idea of the two of us forging a path together, achieving fame and fortune, seemed not just irresistible, but inevitable.

Destiny.