S2EP6 - Comedian and Late Night Writer Jon Rineman

The Department of Tangents Podcast

Jon Rineman started his career with as tumultuous and triumphant a 15-year run as a comic could envision for themselves. He started in 2003, then freelanced jokes for Jay Leno, wrote jokes for Seth Meyers including one infamous zinger at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that earned the ire of a future president, and wrote for Jimmy Fallon at Late Night and the Tonight Show until 2018. He survived the vicious battles around late night, got to write for the WWE, got married, had his first kid, and then saw things deteriorate quickly, both personally and professionally. A lot of this is detailed in his new podcast, Here’s What People Are Talking About. I would refer you to that for some of the more intricate workings of his writing role and departure from Fallon we reference here. We address that, but we also talk about his new comedy card game, Anti-Social Skills, his post-Tonight Show gig teaching at Emerson College in Boston, and what he learned about the future of late night from his students.

This one was a tough edit because we had so much to cover, so I’m hoping this gives you a taste of an extraordinary period in the life of a stand-up comedian and writer. You can find the podcast, Here’s What People Are Talking About, on Apple, Spotify, and all the usual podcast locations. Jon’s website is www.rinemania.com, and that’s where you can find at least a partial accounting of his late night monologue jokes. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @rinemania. Anti-Social Skills is at asskills.com, which should be easy to remember, and on Twitter at @antiskills and Instagram at @antisocialskillsgame.