Entertainment

Twitter Could Land You a Late Night Writing Job

by Alicia Lutes

Awww shucks, don't you just love a Twitter success story? Now that the social media platform has been largely overtaken by a slew of comedians, jokesters, joke-stealers, and writers of all sorts, it can sometimes feel as though 90 percent of the tweets out there are people hoping for a little e-validation. It can also feel like a bit of a pissing match between east coast/west coast insecure funny people hoping to make a mark. But fear not, ye with big Hollywood dreams, because Twitter can still land you a dream job, even if you're not one of those funny people in the comedy worlds on either coast. Just take Late Night with Seth Meyers writer/dream-liver Bryan Donaldson, whose own Twitter account managed to take him from an IT job in Peoria, Illinois to a staff writer gig on the former SNL funnyman's evening talker.

When it came to staffing the show head writer and producer Alex Baze decided to look beyond the polished packets of seasoned L.A. and NYC-area comedy writers and opted to also check out the raw talent floating around on Twitter. "If I go to somebody's Twitter, I can see what he's been doing the last two years — you get a much more complete sense of how he writes," Baze explained. "It's like you get to flip through somebody's comedy notebook."

Which is how Donaldson landed his own gig. "We found out in the interview that he was working IT in Peoria," said Baze. "It sort of slowly dawned on us, 'Oh, we just pulled somebody out of the middle of the country who has no ties to this business at all.'" Which ended up being an asset to Donaldson's hiring.

"We never stopped to wonder where he was from or what he was doing," said Meyers. "He just made us laugh." Ahh the power of the Internet: the great playing field-leveler!

And Donaldson himself still feels that there's a lot of luck for the rest of the country dreaming of big success thanks to the Tweeter. "I gotta believe that the people who are not located in New York or L.A. have an equal voice now on the internet, so they'll be easier to find." You know what that means? DON'T STOP BELIEVIN', INTERNET! Hold onto that feeling & keep fighting for your dreams! You never know where your next tweet will lead you!