After reading this article, though, I think what OP wrote is sort of not what I imagined. Sitting at home alone churning out ideas to some faceless em

After reading this article, though, I think what OP wrote is sort of not what I imagined. Sitting at home alone churning out ideas to some faceless email for a name on your resume is not my idea of creativity Yeah, jeez, it was actually kind of a bummer to read that in the article. That seems kind of soul-crushing! It's always sort of been that way in "the biz" though, from what I've been able to discern, though I never realized it was quite so impersonal at times. You have joke writers who churn out tons and tons of stuff for comedians, editors, etc. who sort of mine that output for ideas. I remember reading about how David Letterman's Top 10 lists were produced and I think the writers blasted out like 200+ ideas a night for those lists, just so they could narrow it down to 10. But I always thought there was some kind of ping-ponging of ideas, like you said. To me that's how comedy ideas have always developed, in my personal never-actually-done-this-for-a-living experience.