Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, these were from my friend, Manroop. Here we go. Question one: “How does it feel having done both parts of a strip club, stripper and bouncer?”

Rick Rosner: OK, so, I never bounced at a strip club. I bounced at a lot of other clubs. It’s never a strip club. Though, in retrospect, I kind of wish I had because I’ve been told that’s the way to get into porn. But you bounce at the club; you become friends with the strippers. A stripper gets invited to do porn, wants somebody she can trust to do porn with her, and sometimes she invites the bouncer. 

Jacobsen: Did you ever have any opportunity to do both, or did you never have the opportunity, period, so you missed it?

Rosner: The opportunity to bounce at a strip club has yet to come up. I’m not that big. At my biggest, I was 5’11”, 175lbs., maybe. A strip club bouncer tends to be 6’2”, 220lbs. There are some guys my size who bounce at strip clubs, but it never came up. Often, getting a bouncing job is about being there asking for a job when another bouncer doesn’t show up or when a bouncer tells the manager to fuck off and walks off the job. Since I already had a job at a strip club, which was dancing naked, I wasn’t in any position to be inquiring about club-bouncing jobs. Also, I liked checking IDs; strip clubs don’t have less traffic than nightclubs. It’s a nightclub that’ll get a few hundred people in there every night. A strip club, I don’t know, probably 50, 80 sad cases coming in on a busy night. Only a little in the way of fake IDs to catch in a strip club compared to a nightclub, which is what I used to do.

Jacobsen: Did you have any other things to say about your nude art model days?

Rosner: That I never hooked up off of it. But I was hoping to, being naked and having been lifting many weights and looking reasonably good naked. I’d always hoped to meet a girl among the students, but that never happened. I’m not sure I even got hit on by guys. It’s much easier to get hit on by guys as a guy than it is by girls. It’s not that I would have done anything with a guy, but at least I would have been flattered.

Jacobsen: Three more questions. The next question from Manroop is whether being a new art model is an excellent career to get into or whether writing for Jimmy Kimmel is better.

Rosner: Writing for a late-night show is a great job, particularly now because you get paid year-round and writing jobs have worsened. In the old days, in the seventies, a TV season might have 26 episodes, and you might be employed for nine months on those episodes. Now, a TV season might be six weeks, and you might be used for six weeks, and then you have to scramble to find another job. But a late-night job, if you can keep it, is 52 weeks a year with quite a few weeks of vacation. It’s unlike almost any other TV job out there now. There’s been a financial collapse for TV writers. The conditions have gotten much more exploitative. It’s ridiculous. Few TV writers can get by now without having another job. If you’re lucky, you can become a showrunner, get producer credit, get paid as a producer, and get a few extra weeks of work per season because you need to stay on longer as a producer. But people are writing for full-on TV shows on TV, not pilots, who are working crap other jobs like Uber or living in their car. It’s fucking ridiculous. So yes, working for a late-night show is a great job. I was steadily employed for 11 and a half years. With art modelling, you must keep hitting different art schools up for work. You have to live in a place that has a ton of schools. Then you have to visit all of them and ask for work. Then you have to get to all of them. In a week of art modelling, you might do, I don’t know, 11 shifts at three or four different schools, and 11 shifts isn’t enough to get by on. So yes, working for TV is much better.

Jacobsen: This is a comment. This is not one of the last two questions. She says, “I’m amazed by this guy. His life, like a movie.”

Rosner: Yes, before I got lazy, I tried to have adventures, and I tried to have fun jobs. My wife only had a career she enjoyed once she was in her 50s when she started working in the administrative offices of high schools where people, teachers, and school staff were friendly. She worked in a bunch of jobs where she didn’t enjoy it. She was in marketing and production for a line of cosmetics and perfume, and she didn’t enjoy it. When you’re in manufacturing, everybody lies to you. They lie about when they’re going to make the deadline. They send you crap products, and you have to have them redo it. It’s all a significant pain in the ass. But she enjoys working in schools where people may be less ambitious, which makes them more admirable. You’re working with high school kids, who are generally lovely. They haven’t turned into adults. People don’t turn into a-holes until they’re older and have to deal with the world on their own. But I always tried to pick fun jobs.

Jacobsen: My mother has a lot qualifications working with kids on the autism spectrum. So, my mother worked with kids who have special needs. A lot of them, in terms of qualifications, she had them for kids on the autism spectrum. I have no learning disabilities and am not on the spectrum, but I can ask her about any of that stuff. So, working with those kids, my mother found the same intrinsic joy as your mother. 

Rosner: So, Carole, we’ve talked about this. She had a chance to work at a school for all kids on the spectrum. She thought that would be too much for her as the admin assistant. If you work directly with the kids, that’s rewarding. But if you’re the admin assistant, you are the point of contact between the parents, the faculty, the staff, and the kids, and you might be the one who’s tracking down the kid who needs to take their meds or deal with the kid when the kid’s brought into the office for getting in trouble or for being absent. She found that kids on the spectrum were more of an administrative burden than others. And she decided that working in the office of a school where everybody’s on the spectrum would have been too much. Kids on the spectrum are fun and often gentle or exciting in small doses. But your mom can probably tell you if you have to try to ride herd on them.

Rosner: Next: “What was being an undercover high school student like 21 Jump Street?”

Jacobsen: Well, those on 21 Jump Street were trying to solve a crime every week. So, I wasn’t trying to solve crime. It was like being a ghost because I couldn’t fully interact with everybody. I had to stay out of direct sunlight because I looked older than everybody else in direct sunlight, and my hair looked thinner than everybody else’s. So, I stuck to the pretty ghostly shadows.

I was there to hang out and think about the universe. I didn’t have any social aspirations at that point, however. I was in a better situation to have social aspirations because I’d been lifting weights by the last time I was in high school. I’d been lifting weights for ten years. I was ripped, and most high school kids, they’re fucking kids, and I could bench 300 pounds. So, I had social advantages. At the very least, nobody was going to mess with me. If I were a sleazeball who wanted to hit on people, I would have been more successful than my first time in high school. Also, I have ten years of experience with everybody. So, I was much more relaxed than I was the first time, but I couldn’t do anything about it. It wouldn’t have been ethical. So yes, I felt ghostly. I’m in this world. But my identity is paper-thin, and I had to move gingerly through the world so I wouldn’t get caught or violate my principles.

Jacobsen: Last question, “Which of all your jobs made you question your life choices the most?”

Rosner: Anytime I had a shitty job, or anytime I got fired. I had a job at a cabinet manufacturing company that my dad got me, where I was the only one who didn’t speak Spanish. So, all I could do was sweep up. Once, they had me ride on top of the garbage as they drove to the dump so the wind wouldn’t catch the debris and blow it out of the truck, that job was when I was returning to high school for the first time. Anytime I do a stupid and non-rewarding job, I question myself. I had another job during that period, working at the United Pet Center in a shopping mall in Albuquerque. This was a puppy mill. They had about 110 puppies in there. They didn’t have room for all of them. There were cages everywhere. My job was pretty much to change the cages and clean up puppy shit my entire time there. There was no time to be nice to the puppies. Wad up the paper with the shit in it, throw it away. I was starving because I wasn’t making enough money, so I’d sneak handfuls of puppy kibble to eat. And that made me question my life. So, anytime I had a wretched job, most of my jobs were fun and distracting enough that I didn’t ask for my life.

Jacobsen: Any final comments from our group?

Rosner: I haven’t had a job in 10 years because nothing could match. It’s a failing of mine that I feel wrong about, but I’m pretty eccentric, and there wouldn’t necessarily be a writer’s room that I would fit well into. So I’d go on many interviews and do a lot of spec work, trying to get hired for my spec scripts and not get hired. In the last ten years, I’ve done three or four pilots about intelligent people and reality shows. All of them have yet to go anywhere. I’m getting old for being on TV. So I’ve regretted not doing a lot in the last ten years. You and I, the most significant thing I’ve done in the past decade is us working together. The end.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.

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