Guest Author: Hamza Masoud ’26
Note: The MCS NYC Summer Internship Program is generously funded by the Harvard Club of New York Foundation.
My earliest memory of The Tonight Show is from February, 2014, when Jimmy Fallon was still in his first week of hosting the program, and I was still in my fifth year of elementary school. Though I was not allowed to stay up to watch the show when it aired at 11:35 PM, I would watch clips from it on YouTube the following morning. The first of these that I ever saw was from Fallon’s recurring “Thank You Notes” segment, in which he would thank various people and inanimate objects for making him smile in some curious way. The Sochi Olympics were happening at the time, and so when Fallon sat down at his desk, one of the notes he penned read, “Thank you, the Olympic curling icon, for looking like a guy doing yoga next to a boombox.” The line made me laugh so hard that I retold it to my friends when I went to school.
It is incredibly surreal that, eleven years later, I was able to spend my summer working at the very show that brought me so much joy back when I was ten. Thankfully, I have not changed much since then. I still love jokes, especially Fallon’s. The only real difference between the ten-year-old me and the twenty-one-year-old version is that where the former always thought of comedy as something done purely for fun, the latter is seriously considering making a career out of it. However, at the start of the summer, I did not have a clear idea of what that looked like. It is one thing to say that you want to be a television writer—it is another to know what the job actually requires of you. Working at The Tonight Show gave me that knowledge, and so much more. Through speaking with the writers, I learned about their processes, career trajectories, and goals, all of which was extremely valuable information for someone aspiring to be in their shoes one day. Yet that was only the beginning. My internship was a crash course in the development of a late-night television show, giving me the chance to learn from and work for people managing every part of the show: the talent bookers, the segment producers, the social media directors, even the showrunner. Most valuable, perhaps, was my experience in the script department, where I had the opportunity to see firsthand how the writers’ work was realized. As script updates came in from the writers throughout the day, I would distribute them to the stage managers during rehearsal, and watch as they turned the words written on the page into the bits that people across the nation would watch on their screens that night—everything from a fake advertisement for a wizard adult chat hotline, to a sketch based entirely on a guest’s answers to a Mad Libs puzzle, to a rendition of a Justin Bieber song by men dressed as the Mount Rushmore heads. Watching this process taught me how to identify writing that will be funny when it is performed, in addition to merely being funny on paper.
As I prepare to enter the creative job market following my final year of college, I now not only know the course I need to chart in order to realize my goal of becoming a comedy writer, but I also have a wealth of friends and mentors from The Tonight Show who are willing to help me along the way. All of this—my knowledge, my network, and the chance to realize a boyhood dream—I owe to the extremely generous grant from the Harvard Club of New York Foundation Summer Internship Fund, without which I would not have been able to have this experience. I am beyond grateful for this grant, and I will never forget the immensely positive impact it has already had on my young career—truly, it deepens my drive to succeed as a writer, as I strive to live up to the investment that the foundation has made in me.
