If you can’t come up with comedy premises based on subjects as interesting as those, then you’re in trouble. I also obviously draw from my own life and my own experience, but that has always been my secret weapon, reading a lot of nonfiction.

CD: Your father is Frank Rich and your brother is a novelist as well. How much does coming from a family of writers help you?

SR: A lot. I never had the experience of having to convince my family that writing was an acceptable job. So many of my friends who are writers have colossally let their families down. Especially at a place like the Harvard Lampoon, most of the people on staff have families that expect them to come to school to be doctors or engineers, something with merit, but I had already announced to my parents at a very young age that I was going to pick this frivolous profession and they always supported me. That’s the main leg up I had, I think: having parents who were completely accepting of my choice to be a writer, which is rare.

CD: At Saturday Night Live, you often wrote in a team with Marika Sawyer and John Mulaney. Marika is one of the longest tenured female writers on the show and John is a top-tier standup comic. How did you all first start working together?

SR: We were all hired at SNL at around the same time. It happened really naturally; we just found each other and realized we were writing really similar sorts of pieces. We teamed up on a couple of sketches and had a great time and decided to keep doing it. We wrote basically every week together for a couple of years. Writing with them was by far the best part of SNL for me.

CD: What makes a comedy writer successful?

SR: I’ve seen all different types of paths to success. At SNL, there were people who had come from the Lampoon but there were also people who had been stand-up comedians, who had been improvisers, who had been in sketch comedy troupes, people who considered themselves actors until the moment they became writers at SNL. All these people were enormously talented. I don’t think there is a set path.