By snoadmin
Like any other Cal State Long Beach student, alumnus Travon Free used to have his writing overseen by professors in the classroom.
Now, six years later, it’s overseen by Jon Stewart in New York City.
Free, who graduated from CSULB in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, started as a writer for “The Daily Show” late last year after applying for the position in the summer.
Free said that after college, he wanted to eventually take on a writing career in comedy TV, though at one point in his life he “didn’t pay attention” to his interest in comedy or writing.
Instead, Free devoted the majority of his time to something else: basketball.
Free “got to [Cal State Long Beach] through basketball,” receiving a full-ride basketball scholarship to CSULB. But his college basketball career was cut short in his sophomore year due to knee surgery, disabling him from continuing with the team.
“It’s one of those things where… when that’s taken away from you, it’s like losing a part of yourself,” Free said. “Because you’ve never given time or energy in that capacity to anything else, you think, ‘What else am I good at?'”
With the help of his counselor and CSULB film and electronic arts professor Brian Lane, though, Free said he found a talent for stand-up comedy and comedy writing.
“I never for one minute felt that [Free] was new to it,” Lane said. “He hadn’t done it, but I felt that in a past life he had done it for sure. He had the God-given natural talent to be a comedy writer.”
Free’s involvement in comedy writing didn’t stop with his graduation from CSULB. Last April he performed a stand-up and improv comedy show with Rob Kutner, who wrote for “The Daily Show” at the time but has since moved to “Conan.”
In late June, Free sent a message to Kutner on Twitter, asking about the “The Daily Show” even though he had no intention of applying to become a writer.
“It was really just me wanting to see what it was like because it was my favorite show,” Free said. “Since I was 18, I was a huge fan of the show.”
Free said he was more than surprised when Kutner replied to his message, saying that he would have the head writer email him.
“I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s pretty huge. I don’t know if that’s a good idea,'” Free said. “And a week later the head writer emailed me saying they’re looking for a new writer, and it was the longest, scariest email I’ve ever read.”
For the next two weeks, Free locked himself in his apartment and dove into writing multiple scripts to later submit to “The Daily Show.” Throughout the submissions process, he was required write four scripts in all, one of which he had to write in 24 hours.
“When you submit to the show, you’re doing all of that on your own,” Free said. “There’s no Jon Stewart telling you what to write about.”
After making it through the submission rounds, Free initially lost the writing position to someone else, but he said the producers liked his submission enough to keep in contact with him. They asked him to fly to New York during the first week of October to meet with Jon Stewart.
Then, after a taping of “The Daily Show” on Oct. 4, Stewart offered a writing job to Free.
“It was unreal,” Free said. “I couldn’t even feel my body… I wasn’t prepared for that to happen … I called my mom and told her what happened. Then I realized I was, like, standing in the middle of the street on the phone with my mom, crying.”
Free moved from Los Angeles to New York City three weeks later, the day before Hurricane Sandy hit the city. Now he spends each day writing “headlines,” or actual scripts, for the show with nine other writers.
“We get assigned those in the morning meeting,” Free said. “[We] meet with Jon [Stewart] in the middle of the day, go over what he wants to change, go back, write it again. He rehearses it, and around four [we] do a final rewrite.”
In addition to his work in stand-up comedy and writing, Free has maintained his own blog and written a book called “Stop Hetero-Supremacy.”
As advice, Free said that anyone hoping to become a comedy writer should align themselves with talented people and use their Twitter accounts to talk to TV writers and producers instead of “people like Kim Kardashian.” He also said hopeful writers have to trust that they’re doing the right thing by pursuing comedy writing.
“You have those days for months where you feel like, ‘Man, I should get a real job,’ because being broke sucks,” Free said. “But I think if you can get through that, and mentally tough it out, being around the right people, it will work out for you.”
