Write for Comedians? How about Photoshopping for them?

As you've figured out by now, Photoshop is one of my hobbies...it's hard to resist creating realistic parodies and making goofy gags.

I toss 'em here, on Facebook, on Twitter, as email attachments...it's a compulsion. I get an idea and have to take a few moments to make the visualization come to life.

So, Fred Stoller does a joke about how he doesn't fully understand "Game of Thrones," but he does get the nudity.

And I instantly had a picture in my mind of Fred actually IN a "Game of Thrones" nude scene...

So I shot it off to Fred, who gave me a "Ha!" and aha...it turned up on Facebook.

Johnny Carson used to "stay in practice" writing jokes and faxing them to David Letterman. Steve Allen told me that a lot of jokes that he thought up, that were maybe too tasteless or strange for him to use, he'd hand off to other comics. (That probably included his line about meeting a guy suffering from acromegaly and asking "Why the long face?")

Neil Simon once told me, and come to think of it, Steve Allen did as well, that "funny" can be a curse. People say something to you, and you come up with a wisecrack...either spoken or unspoken. You're in the shower and some hilarious idea hits you and you have to keep repeating it or get out and go write it down, sopping wet. So lots of times I get comic mental images that, fortunately, I can make into reality via Photoshop. For a moment, these things seem real, and it would take hours to do a realistic drawing of it.

PS, for ME to do a realistic drawing, it would take weeks. Maybe months. I abandoned any notion of being a freelance cartoonist years ago...having published maybe three or four in as many years...