fall tv

12.03.08

The Geekification of TV

Comedy writer and Futurama co-creator David X. Cohen on the growing influence of science on TV and the value of writing physics jokes no one gets
By Stuart Fox Posted 10.03.2008 at 12:19 pm 1 Comment

To look at his academic résumé, you wouldn’t think David X. Cohen was funny. The son of two biologists, Cohen left his hometown of Englewood, New Jersey, in 1984 to major in physics at Harvard University. He followed up with a master’s degree in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley and was on track to earning his doctorate. Then came Beavis and Butt-Head. Cohen had been an amateur comedy writer since Harvard, and in 1992, one of his scripts landed him a job writing for the now-classic MTV animated series. That was the end of grad school.

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