Why write speeches for a living? Cuz it’s better than engineering

We write speeches cuz it beats the alternative. TV writer Bud Yorkin died last week, and his New York Times obit told of how he found the profession that led him to All in the Family and other shows. He left the Carnegie Institute of Technology to enlist in the Navy, where he wrote sketches for a comedy show at a base in Gulfport, Miss.

“It was a great thrill for me to hear a couple of thousand men laugh at a joke that I wrote,” he said. “I thought, maybe this was a better way to make a living than engineering.”

Well, yeah.