Hi, everyone. My name is Pamela Cortez. I am from Microsoft. I'm on the Azure IoT team. I'm a senior PM and developer advocate. My role is to train developers, and my background is embedded development. I'm excited to be at this event, to be able to walk through how to connect your device to Azure IoT. Let's go ahead and jump into it. For this session, we're going to create a managed IoT device leveraging Microsoft Azure IoT services and the STM32L4 plus Discovery Kit IoT node. Even though I'm going to be using this particular Discovery Kit, you can actually use the F746 Discovery Kit as well. We have a couple of examples to get you started quickly. Now, I'm going to make sure that this presentation is going to be less slideware and then jump into the demo. But before we can do that, I'm going to go over what are some of the products that are going to be mentioned in this demo. That way, we can all level set and understand why we're using particular products when connecting this board to the Cloud. To start off with, we have a great partnership with ST, with Microsoft because we really wanted to make sure that we are having a positive experience for all developers who are trying to connect their devices to the Cloud. In order to do that, we're working very closely with the microcontroller lines. We're making sure that the development kits, our inner device catalog, works nicely with our services and products, and that the tooling is integrated as well. We're working really, really closely with ST Micro to make that happen. We also are providing projects with the new Azure Embedded SDK using Azure IoT Plug and Play Convention. We'll continue leveraging this existing development kits and reference design to add support for Azure IoT. Keep looking at our samples, we're continuing to grow support there. High-level Microsoft IoT actually has a lot of products and services when you're building IoT solutions. We have anywhere to help you connect your different types of devices. These could be research resource constrained devices, these could be gateway devices, any type of devices, we can get connected to Azure IoT. We also have managed services as well. If you're trying to create an application and you want Microsoft to manage services for you, we do have something called Azure IoT Central, which we won't really cover in this session, but just throwing that out there that we do have the ability for you to quickly connect your device and then visualize the data coming in and take actions out of it. We all have a list of different IoT core services. Really, I like to think of each one of these services like IoT Hub, Azure Defender for IoT, all of these different products and services as Lego blocks when you're building an IoT solution, because you don't have to use Azure IoT Central, that's one way to build an IoT solution, but you can use and make your own custom solution by using our core platform services. If you're curious about how to use these products, I didn't want to throw on the screen all of the products that support building IoT solutions, because IoT solutions are very, very ranges many different industries, many different scenarios, so you really need to be able to have these different Lego blocks to customize your own solution. But we do have this Azure IoT reference architecture that will help you on which products and services to use. Then what are the common scenarios and common architecture that you can leverage to get started quickly? Because at the end of the day, really most IoT solutions have things, insights, and actions, and most of them are pretty similar when it comes to having those core subsystems of building an architecture. Definitely check that out if you're interested in learning more after this event. One of the products we're going to be using is Azure RTOS. Now, Bill from the Microsoft team is doing a session here at this event about Azure RTOS. I won't deep dive too much about it, but I just wanted to cover that really Azure RTOS is a full suite of components that really helps you in developing for embedded IoT applications. We have the Azure RTOS ThreadX, which is really our small, fast, reliable real-time operating system, and that's already powering more than 6.2 billion devices worldwide. Each of our Azure RTOS components are fully supported and easy to use to help developers get to market quickly. This is the different components part of that suite. As I mentioned just now, we have ThreadX which is a real-time operating system, but we have all of these other components to make it really easy to get started when you're thinking about embedded development, especially if you need something that requires a real-time operating system and you want to be able to connect resource constrained devices to Azure IoT. We have support there. In order to connect to Azure IoT, especially Azure IoT Hub, which I'll get to in a moment, which what that is, we have what we call the Embedded SDK for seat. What this is is really a set of libraries designed to simplify the process of sending your messages and receiving messages from Azure IoT services, like device provisioning service, IoT Hub, and works with plug-and-play as well. If you're maybe have already been following Azure IoT and wondering, hey, didn't you have device SDKs in the past? We did and we still do, but for these smaller devices, we have that special embedded SDK meant for those type of devices. Great for MCUs. Now, what we have when it comes to a Cloud Gateway is Azure IoT Hub. Now, this is meant for when you connect a device, you need some sort of managed service to be able to send those messages to the Cloud, and also be able to send messages back to the device. Really, that is Azure IoT Hub. You can send up to millions of devices, we have full support for open source SDKs, and then you're able to do your device management with IoT Hub as well. Then we have end-to-end security, which is really important. I think all of us understand the importance of security. We have X509 certificate support, and many other different types of support when it comes on the security end. Then we have this helper service for IoT Hub called Device Provisioning Service. Really think of this as zero-touch provisioning. You need to be able to register your device, configure your device, and get it connected to Azure IoT Hub. Look at device provisioning service, especially if you're connecting thousands and millions of devices, and you want to do that quickly in that zero-touch provisioning type of way. We recommend checking that out, but that's all about IoT scale automated provisioning. We just GA'd for our Platform Services IoT Plug and Play. What IoT Plug and Play is, it really takes away that idea of that tight coupling between devices and solutions. Because that is a huge, huge problem right now for connecting devices and the solution builders, is that these devices are coupled really tightly to particular solutions. But what if you want devices that can happen and go into any type of solution, and instead of just taking the device, doing custom code every single time on a device for every different type of solution, that could be time-consuming. We came up with this open modeling language, which is called IoT Plug and Play, that has support there to simplify that device interaction and IoT solutions. Think of this as Windows Plug and Play, because Windows had this issue a long time before as well when it comes to connecting peripherals or mics or headphones or anything like that. We solved this issue with that tight coupling with Windows Plug and Play, and we're doing the same when it comes to IoT. We also have an extra layer of security called Azure Defender for IoT. Azure RTOS can easily pull in that extra security from Azure Defender with seamless connectivity. At the end, what that really means is that you can manage those same security across all of your on-premise and Cloud workloads. You could prevent, detect, mitigate attacks on all IoT deployment components. You could continuously monitor your security of IoT devices, machines, networks, Azure services, and then you can automatically discover and onboard new devices and apply security policies to ensure compliance with security standards. I'll go into this a little bit at the end, but this is just a really nice extra layer of security because you really understand your solution the best and how your device will be in your solution, and that knowledge is going to help you when it comes to working with Azure Defender. I'll explain that a little bit more towards the end of the demo. Here's high level what we're going to be doing and stepping through is we're going to go ahead and take that discovery kit. We're going to go and have Azure RTOS deployed on it within Bennett CSDK leveraging that to connect to IoT Hub that we've created, and then I'll also talk about plug-and-play and the device provisioning service with that as well, and then I've created a time series insights environment so we can visualize the data. But all of this is really quickly to get started, so let's jump right into it. Now, one of the first things you're going to want to do when you're getting started is go ahead and get your development board. This particular one we are using the STL32L4 plus discovery kit IoT node. I'm really a big fan of this board because it already has the sensors on there. I can tell you as someone who teaches a lot, it's just nice to have a development board has all the sensors on there. Even gesture detection sensor too, which is really nice, and then it has that Arduino Uno footprint. If you already have shields, you can already plug it in, reuse those sensors for this particular board. I'm also a huge fan of the other discovery kit, the F746 because it has that LCD screen already on there, so I've been using that a lot as well, but moving to this particular demo, we're going to go ahead and use this kit. Once you get this board, you're going to want to go ahead and select your IDE and your preferred tooling really. Today, we're going to use STM32 Cube, but if you're using IAR and you're used to it, you can definitely use IAR and have that support when it comes to Azure RTOS and our Azure IoT products and services. Even Kaio and other popular IDEs too. I've already downloaded, I've already had this on my machine, the STM32 Cube. The next piece of tooling you're going to want to install, and this is actually optional, and I'm going to show you why I like to use this, but this is the Azure IoT Explorer. It's a cross-platform UI for interacting with devices attached to the IoT Hub. You'll see in a moment why I'm a big fan of this, but it's all of the codes here. You can download it for free, and you can actually see all of the code on. We try to have this nice and open for you to view. The next thing you're going to want to do is go ahead and head to the Azure RTOS GitHub page. We're going to have all of our repos here. One thing that's really nice about Azure RTOS is that we have everything on GitHub. This is nice for you. If you want to go ahead and would say, test and explore the source code, you could do that at zero cost. The full source code is here on GitHub. You can explore, develop, test, even adopt Azure RTOS to suit your needs for a managed IoT application. You can see I have ThreadX, which is my real-time operating system, GUIX and other components, but we do have getting started guides and samples. For this particular demo, I am actually going to use samples. One thing we just want to always want to make sure is after we do these talks that you could get your hands on it quickly. If you have the discovery kit, you could go ahead and leverage these samples or in zip files, but it has nice documentation that comes with it for you to get started. You're going to go ahead, download that zip file and then take the project files and put it into your IDE. I already have already selected the sample project files. The one I'm going to be using today is sample Azure IoT Embedded SDK plug-and-play. A lot of our services all in this one project file to get started. Before, we can actually put our information of what we need here because there's really two files you're going to change and add some information, but before we do that, we're going to need to create an Azure IoT Hub. There's quite a few ways to do this. We try to make it really easy for you, but one way to do this is, you're going to want to sign up for an Azure account. Actually, you need to sign up for an Azure account to work with our products and services. But I just want to mention that we do have Azure Free Account that you can get started. They have 12 months of extra free services. Even though it's 12 months of extra free services, keep in mind that IoT Hub has a free tier. It has all of the features that you're going to need. It just has limited amount of messaging. If you wanted to get started for free, even after the 12 months or after you've run out of credits, we have that free tier for the lifetime. When you're building your proof of concept all the way into production. I'm going to go ahead jump into the portal. I am on my demo account here, and let me zoom in so it's a little bit easier for everyone to see. Now that I have my account set up, I'm going to go ahead and create a new IoT Hub. Because I use IoT Hub a lot, I see it in my Azure services when I join into the portal. Just keep in mind, you might not see that when you first join in and create an Azure account. But a way for you to go ahead and create a resource is, you can go to the Marketplace, go to Internet of Things, and then go ahead and find IoT Hub. You can actually type in IoT Hub here. You can do it this way. You can even do it through, let's say if you're using VS Code, we have extension for VS Code to create IoT Hub. We even have, if you prefer to do everything in PowerShell, or in Bash, or even Cloud Shell, which is a really fun feature in the Azure portal, you could do that as well. All right. I'm going to go ahead, create my IoT Hub. Now, I was going to ask for your subscription. You should have a subscription that's tied to your Azure account.  Resource group is just a group to host all of your products and services, your resources. For this particular one, I'm going to go ahead and create a new one. I'm just going to say my resource group demo. You're going to select the region. You're going to always want to select the region that's closest to you. Keep in mind when you do this and deploy to create an IoT Hub, doesn't mean that that IoT Hub is forever in that region. There is options where you can change regions based on, I would say you have a device with a device provisioning service and you have a device that is made in the US and then has shipped over to Europe. There are nice features within device provisioning service where it can go to the particular region which is great because you want to be able to lower that latency. You're going to go ahead and name your IoT Hub, so I'm just going to have this TDevCon01 and that's not taken, which is great and then at default, it's going to say standard tier. Standard tier does have a cost to it, but if you're wanting to get started, go ahead and hit that free tier. You get all the features that you want to leverage off of the free tier to get started. I'm going to select that and then I'm going to review and create. After I review, everything looks good and then hit create. This is going to create a new IoT Hub, which is our Cloud Gateway and while that deployment is in process, I have already created an IoT Hub for this event. Normally, this creating an IoT Hub can be a couple of minutes, it could be a couple of seconds, but since we're limited on time and I want to make sure everyone sees how to get started, we're going to just jump into this one I've already created. I've created two devices and for you getting started to create a device, you're going to go ahead and hit new and you're going to add your device ID. Your device ID is a way for you to identify that particular device. This one, I can go ahead and say my DevKit, old three and I'm actually going to show on the Azure IoT Explorer. When we look at devices, we don't have that right now and I'm going to hit Save. It's already created an IoT device for us. If you go into that device, you can see your information about your primary key, secondary key, your connection string, all of the information you're going to need to get connected to Azure IoT. That's all you needed to do to create an IoT Hub. I'm going to go ahead and go to the Azure IoT Explorer. You're going to see that there's not going to be anything here, and there's going to be a button called Add Connection. I've already added that particular connection to this IoT Hub, but in order for you to be able to visualize your device and be able to see that telemetry come in, you're going to want to hit the connection string of that IoT Hub. In order to find that, you can go to Share Access Policy, IoT Hub owner and go ahead and click on your connection string and add it here. You can see that says, hey, it's already listed because I have already done that here. When I click on this, you can see that it's added that their device. The device that we're going to use today is the My Dev Kit device. Now I'm going to go back to my project. As I mentioned before, there's going to be two files that you're going to want to update. One is a board setup. The board setup, this is where you're going to make changes or add your Wi-Fi information. I'm not actually going to click on that right now because I am recording live, so I'm not going to click on that just because I'm too busy to change my Wi-Fi password. The next file you're going to want to change is your sample config file. This is that particular file. Click on it and you're going to have three places that you're going to want to add information to. One is your host name. The second is that device ID, and then the third is your device key. In order to find your host name, you can find that in the portal. Let me go back to the portal and that is easy to find an overview. Again, you don't have to do this in the portal. You could do this all through a command line, but the host name is right here. We're going to go ahead and copy that to the clipboard. I place that here. I've already done that. My device ID, remember, this is how we identify our device. Now that we have our endpoint with our host name, so we know where to go to for IoT Hub and we know which device in that particular IoT Hub, now we need our credentials, our device security credentials, which is symmetric key. I've already used this one. If you're going to try to connect quickly, I've already deleted. I'll already delete this device, but security practice, don't ever share this out with people. The good thing is to, we're really using a symmetric key, but you should be able to use certificates and other security practices as well. All right. Now that I have all three of that information in there, I have saved, I'm going to go ahead and build all. And what this is going to do is build all of the projects that we need for this particular example. And I've hit that before, but this sample code goes over and has the embedded SDK plug and play, all of that for you, nicely ready for you. So if you're curious on what that looks like, I know our session is really short today, but I recommend taking a look at that code. And it even talks about how to enable your device provisioning as well. So after you build, you're going to go ahead and debug. You could do that a couple of different ways. You could hit F11, you could debug this way, but what's going to happen is it's going to download, run on the device. And I have had this device running for a little bit now. You can see I'm using termite, but really I didn't need to do this. It was just another way for me to kind of showcase what's going on. I see that telemetry come in. But when you're in the Azure IoT Explorer, you can hit your particular device. So this is one that I've created, the My Dev Kit. You can go ahead and start seeing that telemetry come in. So I'm going to go ahead and hit start. And you can see the telemetry is being sent, the timestamp and that it is working and is being sent up to the hub. And if you're even curious on how that looks in the portal, we do have a view of seeing, oh, you've been sending messages up here and you can start to see device to cloud messages that are coming in and how many connected devices you have for that particular hub. Now I'm going to go ahead and stop. We have the state call direct methods. This is a great way to go ahead and invoke a method with on your board. So for this particular example, you could see here, I got telemetry going. Let's scroll all the way down. I'm going to hit reboot and I'm going to say for the payload, I'm going to time out. So for example, I'm going to do a reboot right now and I'm going to hit invoke method, but let's say you had an LED on this dashboard, which you do, you could go ahead within your code do sets or set LED state and then change it to true or false to turn the LED on and off, which is a nice feature, but really direct methods is to be able to kind of send that command down. So I'm going to invoke this message and it was successful. So let's see if it happened. Yes, okay. We reboot with a payload of timeout 500. Perfect. You can even do cloud to device messages if you need to have that for your solution. And here is the IoT plug and play component. For this particular one, you could see that the models are nicely set already for us for this particular example. We have our type, which is telemetry. We have name, which is temperature. We have the description, which is temperature and degrees Celsius. The schema, which is double unit degrees Celsius. We could set our properties, which is target property. So this is a great way for you to get quickly started with plug and play with this particular sample. One last thing or second to last thing I wanted to show you is time series insights. So you could use time series insights to store and visualize your data. And this is really great, especially if you have a lot of devices or even one device. For example, if you have, would say, a sensor on a machine on the factory floor. I used to work in a factory floor running pick and place machines, if you have a sensor on there and the machine stops working or anything like that, you can nicely visualize that. So for this one, I can see what my temperature data is for this particular device. I can see how many events that I sent up to the cloud. I'm sending up an event every five seconds, but you could see that. But what's nice about time series insights and our other products and services is that you could start visualizing quickly but also gather those insights. As I mentioned before, if it's like a pick and place machine goes down on the factory floor and you will be able to visualize the change. And then you would be able to create an alert to then message or email your service worker on the factory floor, which is really nice to be able to take those insights and actually do something with them quickly because of lots of times, if you have a machine on the floor that's not working, I think we all can understand that that is time where people are standing around and when we should be building our next product. So it helps with that downtime and less latency for us to be able to send alerts quickly. I made a mention of Azure Defender. If you're interested in learning more about that, if you go into the security blade under settings, you could set up custom alerts. You have different views in the Azure Defender and you could set it up, but what's really nice about Azure Defender is not just for IoT Hub, it's for all different products and services at Azure. So you can actually see security across your whole workload. This is really great if you would say you have a VM running and it's gonna give you security recommendations on that VM and tell you the health of that VM or if you have your devices or your storage, you get to see that full workload and you're able to create custom alerts too. For example, for this particular one, I can create alert that says, hey, for this particular device, outbound connection to IP address is not allowed, you can set those. Another great example is these other custom alerts for one that I really like to mention, number of file uploads that allowed range or unauthorized operations or login of a user that wasn't supposed to be in there or messing with the device or message size too, with that threshold is, which is really important. So you can see there's a lot of different options to create the custom alert rule. It's just an extra layer of protection for your IoT solution and for your devices. All right, so that was an end-to-end demo of our products and services when it comes to connecting to Azure IoT and getting started quickly. So I'm gonna list off a couple of different resources for you. One is our Azure RTOS landing page. If you're wanting to get started with Azure RTOS and get to the documentation where you have the samples to go ahead and connect with the discovery kits, go ahead and go to that link. And then the link to the GitHub is right there as well. Next is a full documentation for all of the components. There's, you can find that on our doc site. And then if you have technical questions. So if you have a technical question about Azure RTOS or about our SDKs or IoT central or anything like that, we do have Microsoft Q&A. Think of this as Stack Overflow, even though myself and fellow engineers were on Stack Overflow and other places, monitoring and making sure that, hey, do folks need help in the community? Microsoft Q&A, we have a full dedicated team or we're watching for those technical questions there. So you can submit any question that you have to that form. And then for latest announcements and online training, we have the Microsoft IoT Dev Channel. This is a YouTube channel where you could go ahead and hear, as I mentioned the latest announcements, but we have these deep dives where I run every Wednesday and we train on a new product and service, we bring in different partners. So it's just a great way for you to stay up to date and go ahead and do some more online training. And then we have a full IoT tech community at Microsoft. We have one for Azure RTOS, but we have one for all things IoT. So if you have a project that you love to share with us, maybe with a discovery kit, we would love to see it. We're on there monitoring and wanting to hear your feedback. If there's a feature that you wanna see or samples built, let us know and that's a great way to provide that feedback. So I wanna thank all of you for staying and listening to the presentation and hopefully this gives you a little bit more insights on how to get started. You could see that in less than 10 minutes, I was able to go ahead, get the code and start connecting and sending data up to the cloud and then visualizing. Great, I had the tooling setup, which is, if you already have STM32Q, it goes a lot quicker, but keep in mind, I would say if you're just downloading everything from scratch, learning and following this video, you could probably get started in under 20 minutes. So thank you so much again and I hope all of you are staying safe and having a great day. Okay, bye.


One turn too many, bounces back to Lerner, 25 yards out, plays a lovely ball in behind for Stacey. Can he drive it across? Zalanki! Oh, great finish at the near post from Dom Zalanki. And Bournemouth take the lead with a beautifully crafted goal. Credit to Jefferson Lerner, who opened up the card of defence. Stacey pulled it back and Dominic Zalanki at the near post beyond Smithies. His second lead goal of the season and the cherry's in front. Well, it's amazing. They just took the tempo, didn't they? It was like they just found a way to pass and quicker. Cardiff have lost it again and Rico forward to Dan Duma. There's oceans of space for Jack Stacey here. If Dan Duma times his right, he rolls it into Stacey now, who squares it back for Zalanki.  Onto the bar, magnificent touch from the goalkeeper. The cherries can't believe they haven't scored. And Zalanki from six yards out, found himself denied by a miraculous bit of goalkeeping. Fairly cherries' man. Forward it comes down this left side from Bagan. Oh, it's nice play nearly from Hoyler. And then cherries have got themselves in a mess and Mepham couldn't clear. And it comes back to Harry Wilson who shoots low. And Harry Wilson, of course, finds the equaliser for Cardiff. Low shot as it ran to the edge of the penalty area. The cherries really have got themselves to blame there because it was poor defending. They never cleared. And a drizzly night. It's Junius Danez who goes for pace. Oh, he's rattled the woodwork again. Terrific free kick, which did everything but go in. Danez last on the edge of the penalty area. He now to the left an opportunity for Adam Smith onto his stronger right foot. Smith's cost. Zalanki's header. Oh, past the post from Zalanki. Back past the goalkeeper and back past the post as well. Dear me, that has got to go down as a really good chance. Stacey on this right-hand side when Mepham makes the run outside him to draw Defender away. Gosling and Stacey with a little 1-2. Stacey's ball in. Sarge with a chance. Great block comes in. Raquel makes in there. Smith's in there and it's a free kick. I thought it was going to be a shot for a penalty but actually there's a collision in the box.


Okay. Hi. This is exciting because we're going to talk about comedy songs and as a writer, I'm sure you all are too. I'm fascinated to know how everybody gets into this thing. I think one of the harder things to do, drama is easy and comedy is hard, I think. First of all, I love the fact that you've written a show called Bromance the Dudesicle, everyone. The Dudesicle. It's actually our most serious piece. Yeah. How are you getting expose on masculinity in America? Great. And that's going to be your first song tonight, a song called Heartburn. Yes. Can you set that up for us? Sure. Bromance the Dudesicle, as I just said, is about a group of friends, dudes, who have gone a lot of crazy ventures and teach a new guy the ways of being a bro. And this song happens late in the show after a lot of things have gone wrong. And the character Harry is singing it. He has always been sort of the loving sidekick, never quite gets his moment in the sun. And it's always sort of me as fun as you. That's it. So we have Will Fuller, who's going to play piano for us. Great. And Damien Graveer, who's going to sing for us. Excellent. There's a bird that I bite. And I can't tell. I'm just choked on the silence. And the fish and chips that I can't shake. In particular, can we back up on what you do in the collaboration? What are your jobs? Yeah. It's as simple as ten of it, but 99% of the time I write the book, I write music, and we share a bit of it. Okay, yeah. Can we find that that actually helps with any of your thoughts as we're talking about keywords or sentiments or whatever it is. There are so many moving parts that it helps to be able to share that. Absolutely. Yeah. In collaborating on the lyrics. Yeah. That's right. Do you recall how you started writing this particular song? Was there anything that sparked this song? I mean, many songs in romance.   Like, are you going to do this whole thing? And so I literally just texted Kyle about that. And I was like, I think I sound like a musical, and he thought I was insane. Wow. And then, so we started writing a song or two, or it just sort of sets out in a conference. People loved it. It's actually like our most favorite song. And so a lot of the ideas in usually for romance came out of like just funny, funny sort of concepts and situations. Right? So we knew in the bro realm. We knew that Harry was obsessed with food and would make fun of for this route. So we sort of knew at the crisis point, like, we kind of got a thing about called heartbreak. I mean, maybe isn't, isn't like the greatest way to explain it, but it's sort of like, there was like an inevitability about a number of things in romance in our minds. Just being one of them. But I can also say that in order, this is made sweeter by the setup, which is his fun song from the first half of the show is called Chili Cheese Fries. And celebrating, we're going to get Chili Cheese Fries at 11.45 on a Tuesday night. So he's at a rally pie that's so great that when the friendship falls apart, of course he'd be lamenting over something that is the effect of too much indulgence in fried food. Yes. And friendship. And friendship. Yeah, that's right. French fries and friendship. Yeah. Oh my God. We didn't even know we did that. Finding something to do every day.  And these connections occur, right? Well, okay, great. I mean, I think one thing that's really successful about it is how seriously the character takes the situation at the start of the song. It's like, I think there are people, sorry, you could approach a comedy song in the Waka Waka fashion, I'm going to call it, meaning you feel like you have to write joke, joke, joke. And then there's this approach, which I think is the way I come at it too, is you find a character who's in a situation that is inherently funny. But the character doesn't know it's funny. The character just is being himself and living out the details and the throws of what he's in, like Pepsi, they see. And all those things that accumulate in your song make us laugh. Absolutely. And I think that, yeah, we don't think of ourselves as joke writers at all. We think of ourselves as creating situations and characters out of which comedy can soothe. And I think that, especially with romance, and maybe, I don't know if you're in town, the expectations and the title of romance to do school is like, it might be ridiculous. It might not have any substance. And so how do you keep the comedy and fulfill that for people who are expecting a comedy, but also be it heart and soul? And a song, The Carpenter, is a fun example of that. I mean, you actually feel bad for him. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you see the show. But he is in a ridiculous situation, but he cares so much about it. And that's sort of the humor, but also the sources that, hey, those are definitely important. Yes, I agree. I totally agree. Let's go on to... Can we talk about how you guys... Say you're writing that song. Do you guys have a routine? Do you get in the same room? How does that work? Well, I think we're talking about... So Mike and I have really enjoyed the process of writing full shows. And we think about songs in context. That's bad because you go, this is a good enough standalone. But usually, if we take it all the way back, we're thinking about the story that we're trying to tell, the moments where a song makes sense, the context and then the content for each of those songs, and gradually chip away at it until we get to where we are. So I think once we get to this stage, usually my goal has come up with some cool concept. And I see something shining around with it. Primarily, you go, oh, yeah, I was thinking of that. That being a lyric phrase or a bit of dialogue or something? I mean, it changes a little bit. I think the most common version, I guess, would be that I'll write a draft, which is really prosy, which is not me trying to write the lyrics yet. He'll take it and sort of find some inspiration and then the third one is when we're together, sort of going, how do we really make this lyrics? Struggling, growing punches, whatever it may be. And that's the most common, but we've written some side-by-side, and we've written some not in the same way. Well, some I believe more wholly to what you said. I think it's maybe sometimes harder with comedy songs because rhyme and comedy seem to go hand-in-hand with it. So if we're doing something really lush, then I can be a bit more free-form with placing a lyric in a melody line. But there are other times when it'll just be, hey, how's this? And I'll go, exactly how it is. Let's do it more or at all. Rip it to shreds and the skeleton is what remains. Yeah, that sounds familiar to me, too. I'm looking for, if it's dialogue, I'm looking for that phrase that could become the title of the song. And maybe as you read the title, if you're the composer, a melody occurs to you, maybe on a good day, right? Like the words sing themselves. Do you guys, when you're working on a comedy song like this, do you find that you have disagreements about what is funny and what is not funny? There have been certain instances. I think the best one is from the song that Michael was talking about that kind of started, Bromance. There was a phrase that was, he doesn't even like me, or we met on St. Patrick's Day, but I said, I'm not even Irish. It doesn't even matter. And he's like, no, no, no, you have to flip it. You have to land on, I'm not even Irish. And in my mind, I was like, it's cute, but it's much better. It doesn't even matter. I'm not even Irish. It just lends itself to be the second beat. I do think that the timing is something that you get, that you have to finesse to get this right. Yeah, sure. I mean, we disagree about many things, but generally, what is funny is not what we're disagreeing about. You know, we have a similar sense of humor. I think we will definitely... No, I think it's true. I mean, there's times when we'll both say, oh, we didn't make it funny enough, we need to figure out how to be funnier, but not usually times where one person is like, that's hysterical, and the other person is like, you know what? I would say sometimes we have the argument over what's too intellectual and what's too plebeian. So it's too simple to say, like, Michael's the intellectual and I'm the common man. But we may go... Nobody cares about Greek tragedy here. They want to hear, haha! We have to kind of figure out the right way to make it the right kind of smart and the right kind of approachable. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, I feel like I've got that in my collaboration, too. We're trying to figure out how to be... Yeah, just like you said, smart enough but emotional enough or appealing enough, right? Once you've gotten, let's say, the comedy song to the point where you both think it's hilarious, do you have experiences where you get it into a room with an audience and then it falls flat, or has that happened? I don't think the opposite is happening, but we don't think something is funny and the audience is like, haha! We're just weird because you're like, why are you laughing at that? I mean, maybe it's about levels, right? I feel like something that we are forced to battle with just because we're in a fairly small, fairly competitive industry when there's fairly little money to fly around for $50 million productions, making trade-offs and saying every minute is precious. Is this getting us as much as we need it to, both from story and from knocking out of the park or the right type of rest from those bigger moments? Yeah. I'm sure there have been... I feel like in pumps, this is a show that we are commissioned to write. I'm throwing out many, many, many songs. I'm sure there are some that we can sort of win and be like, oh, this is going to be really funny in this moment. And even if it was maybe somewhat funny, it wasn't appropriate or something. You know what I mean? It didn't quite fill the need of the moment. Yeah, sure. Those are the toughest to lose because you're like, oh, it's so good for these four minutes, it just doesn't make sense in the show. Yeah. I mean, I can't really deal with how we were like, we are the funniest bases in the world and everybody else is not funny as it looks. That's what I think. I'm sure it has happened. No one told us. Perhaps. And I love what you said before, that you come up with something that you think is not funny, but in the room with the audience, it is funny. I think those are great discoveries. It's the only... We lead solitary lives as writers, singly or in collaborations, and once you get in front of the living thing that's called the audience, then things change. I think it's a great thing about theater. You learn what is funny that you didn't think so. Right? Well, I'd love to hear another one. Shall we set up the song called Welcome to My Sleep Over Party? So after all of our talk about how we... Not from romance. It's character first. This is a standalone song on the show. This was a song we wrote for a concert we did a couple of weeks ago at The Four Below, which was a late night concert, and they asked us if we'd do a show and said have it 11.30 at night. And we were like... I said, well, I'm usually asleep at that time. So if we're going to do it, we'd sort of have to wear our pajamas. And then out of that, we decided we would make the whole night at Sleep Over Party. And we thought, well, let's go to a classy joint and make it in that classy. So we were like, we have to write a song about Sleep Over Parties and sort of came up with... But even still it came up with a situation for a boy who is planning to sleep over party as you'll see is a little nervous about how it's going to go. Then hit the jackpot and we're lucky enough to find our next singer, Luca Padavan, who makes anything funny and charming. So we had him do the concert and now we're like... maybe we need to write Sleep Over Beautiful. You can all help us decide that. But yeah, so Luca can come up and sing. And now they're also going to sing with the guy. Great. We're going to be just fine here. Your first song is called Don't Cross Kitty from Symphony Jones. Well, and I love the title Symphony Jones. That's like a spy, a thriller musical. Can you tell us about that? Sure, yeah, let's do that. The song that we're going to do today has to do with the case that our heroine has to fall in order to save the world from a disaster that ends up being upon us all the time. So we're going to meet our bonus in the summer. Her name is Tim Hock. She is an Upper East Side Socialist and recently divorced. And we learned in this number that she's actually the leader of the Secret Coalition for Revenge, and it's fascinating to encounter intelligence and height. I'm also going to scratch. And I think I'm skipping on the censors. So her ex-husband, Henry Ossell, is really a designer of Oslet's luxury watches. Recently invented a watch that grants the person who bears the eternal life, the eternal youth. So she's eventually going to be used to mastermind upon herself time. I'm telling you this because you might not catch all of it. She's going to use her husband's watch. Yeah, her ex-husband's watch. Okay, the technology of that for this... Make an evil weapon. So in the scene just prior Ossell, her ex-husband was kidnapped from his lab and speared it away. And then in the scene opens and you see all of her evil minions wading into a dark alley led by her top henchman, Tiktok. Okay, and so they're all waiting for her to appear and then see it first. Because I'm slow about these things. So this is the villain whom Symphony Jones is going to stop. Okay, okay, great. And here is where we meet her. Oh, wonderful. Okay, great. And so we have a great cast. If you guys want to start coming up. Jason, look right on piano. This is playing Tiktok. Jordan Stanley is playing Henry Ossell. And then we have Darryl Holland, Katie Ray, Tamara Noly, Jim Ray, Tiktok, and Ethan Shulfin. And I should say just one quick comment. Jordan is most of the time an evil spy. At a certain moment he steps forward and becomes Henry Ossell. The threatening ex-husband.  Great. There's been excuses for world-renowned, highly trained and very devious people's spies. I haven't come out. You just didn't start it yet. So trust me, anyone who interrupts me dies. As they come.  Well, then here's the bass. Right. So, and I'm going to say, you know, start with the bottom. No, the number. She's really explaining things. We're trying to find a character that was early. And then she was like doing a manic show too. And then the number that we've had for a very long time, which people love there, it's called Serbs and Orphans. It's a person who's wondering if they're at their home to raise money. It's supposed to be like orphans, but it's really for her to be the cause. Yes. Right. Right. So we figured that out. And there were a couple of plot points. Like maybe we saw also these kidnaps, that we saw the watch. There's two kidnaps watching these numbers. So we read the numbers and kind of talked them out around and forth. Yes. Are you able to name the titles of all the discarded songs? You said one of them was Serbs and Orphans. Do you remember the other ones? Or where you went on this journey? Yeah. I mean, I remember some that first took one lesson and I was like, no, right again. But I think the very first one was now the day when it was like, the woman with glasses, she can find a human man now. Yeah. Then there was a manic show. She was like, I'm off the figure and better thing. She being a... Forget you, forget the husband. So we were missing a couple of plot things. So this version felt more broken into the arc of the story that we needed to tell. Yes. Right, right. There's so much to accomplish, right? Your songs have to do two or three jobs, usually, to stay on the show. So this is great. I mean, it's a funny song and yet you're serving your story in the ways that you needed to.  The last very long. Yes. Right, right. Right, right. The mimes sound funny. I mean, you're going for whatever seems funny, right? And yet you have to stay on task, you just have to keep things moving forward. It can't just be a lark. It can't just be silly for silly's sake, right? Which is fun. It gets me to a certain point that then when people see your whole show and they're like, how did you get the watch? Yes. Yeah, right. That's right. Well, it sounds from the way you described, I'm sorry, say your name again. Brooke. Brooke. Brooke, from the way Matthew just said that you said, no thanks to a song like Right Away. But when you're in a situation where you're able to like just be upfront about something that's not working. Yeah, we're nice about it. Yeah. Yes. I tend to be the one who's like, this is great. We're going to have an underwater ballet and a tune. And she's like, let's think about it. Yeah. But I think, on the plus side, I'm very ruthless. If it doesn't work, I'm happy to just How can I phrase this? Is sympathy Jones, does she get comedy songs in this show? That's a good question. I looked at the villains of the Scoopiest characters. They get more of the broad comedy. She has some fun numbers. Her main theme song is kind of like the TV theme song. She sort of has this, oh, here's my life in an office, but I really want to be fine. She gets this driving baseline and imagines what her life is like. So she has some fun numbers, but I think that the villains get the best comedy, and they have the funness dialogue. Yeah, yeah. How did you... So when you landed at this song, did you come up with the title first, what occurred to you first about this one? Do you remember? I was having a really hard time with this one because we were trying to get this down. We had a publication going on in the publishing show, and we did it out there. And when we looked at the clock, I was like, I remember I brought it into a drama still fellowship session. I got the line for this, but I knew I had to do it. And so I listened to a lot of Jones songs. I went and listened to all of them. We listened to Jones songs. We had a version that wasn't Tango, but it had to be Tango, you know?  I don't know, I don't know how it came up the title. I don't remember how I liked it that, but I remember feeling that I got the feel of it, and the sense of her sort of like perched on a trash can and all of you like, expecting her reunion. Yeah. Yeah. And when you start staging the show in your mind like that, and you imagine the backup singers and the dancing, how does that, how does that help you? That really helps me. So at the end of this number, they sort of hoist also up and they're parading him around, and it sort of, it has sort of a three-dimensionality, which is hard to get in the reading format, but then you sort of, it's like they have energy, you know, there's a reason for them to be sort of singing in this rowdy way, and so hard you're doing the Jonesy Jonesy thing, which tastes similar for you or great, I think the director had some great suggestions about Jonesy Jones and the Rumpa Blues. Yeah. Yes, and it's great how a musical director, because I've worked with musical directors like you too. Like, yes, a good one can make things lots funnier with choral interjections, vocal arrangement, I mean vocal arrangements can be funny, or there can be funny effects. So, I'm so glad you're bringing that into it too, because, yeah, yeah, you can be funnier with your collaborators pitching in ideas like that. It wasn't actually until I wrote it, I actually literally wrote the trumpet line first, you know. You can probably sing this. What's American? I think it's a Rumpa Blues. That's great. Yeah, yeah, well, that's the beauty of working with other people. I mean, that's, love stories like that. Can we go on to another song here? This being called Subway Romance. Yes. And is this a standalone song? Okay. Can you talk about this one? Yeah, this is a song from many years ago, so it's almost like a period now, but when I first moved to New York, over a decade ago, I lived in a lot of different sublates. I lived in Fortune Sublates in four years, and a lot of them were in Portland and Williamsburg. And that was before Williamsburg was sort of like out for Wall Street types. It was a really different landscape that's been, and I wrote The Elk Train a lot. And so, this is a song about writing old things and being a little delusional at the same time. Okay, great. I'll just play this one. I'll sympathize with you. No, you performed it very well. It just seems like it's the humanity... Sorry, I don't mean to take all the fun out of this, by analyzing it this way, but it seems like it's the humanity of someone who doesn't really... who doesn't fully understand, but she knows she feels something for the guy, and it's the light we feel in the audience like figuring out her situation before she has that makes it funny. Sorry, I just feel like I'm telling you stuff that you wrote it. Now, here's something. What leads you to write a standalone song like this? It's like going to a show, right? Well, I mean, I think this particular one, I mean, like I said, it was years ago, and it's kind of great to dust it up and bring it back in, because, you know, I think I played it for a couple gigs in the East Village, you know, singing bars, doing that, and they got a kick out of it, because you know that from Bedford, if you take the other thing, know that from Bedford to first out is one song. So they got, it's sort of like an in... if you're in the in crowd, you get that extra joke. So in the East Village, they got it. So I played it a couple times, and then, you know, I think, I wasn't writing big shows at that time, so it was, you know, I did a lot of children's theater, I'd written a lot of short songs, and I was trying to grow up a little long, so I think it was just testing the wires, and it felt more in the musical theater realm, and I think I'm there to sort of write more longer shows. Yeah, oh, great. Does anyone have a question for Masi? I've realized I haven't been taking questions. Maybe one will occur to you. Oh, yeah. Well, do you do music and lyrics? Yeah, I do music and lyrics. You're collaborative. My collaborative book writes the book, so she's a very talented playwright, and we come up with a concept for those shows together, and so that's how we worked on sympathy challenge. She wrote the hilarious script. When you're working with Brooke, or when you worked with Brooke on this project, did Brooke, did you have an outline first? Sorry, my real question is, because I'm often in this position, too, what did you work from, a full book or an outline or something in between? Yeah, well, first of all, I should say that I invited Brooke to come up to the point, but she did take three things, so she should feel free to chime in. So we always have a very detailed outline that gets realized over time, and that's why I work with her. And then Brooke often writes scenes, and then I'll steal all the best stuff from her scene and put it on, and we'll do that. So I think sometimes if we have a scene and we want to put a song in there, we discuss there should be a song here, and maybe I'm not sure where to go. I may ask her for a monologue or a little more content so that I can get inside the head of the character a little more, and then that helps when I sit down to songify that particular scene. Yeah. When you're working on a song that you think is going to be a comedy song, what are you... Is there anything in particular that you're aiming for, or is there a joke that you're aiming for, or is there anything concrete, concretely funny, let's say, that you see as a guiding star out in the distance that leaves you the right... the full draft? That's a great question. You know, I have to say, I was one of the advocates for this comedy theme because I had originally asked for a different theme and I didn't finish the songs for that theme, so then I was like, well, it's not even that funny, but here we are in comedy. So how do I think about comedy songs? I think... I liked those comments that were made previously about how it really comes from character. I think that's how I approach it. I think it's just kind of scary as a writer, for me, to think about, oh, I've got to hit this joke. I mean, it's hard to do that well, so people have a gift for it. But I feel like if the characters themselves are poopy enough, the audience will come along for the ride. And the performers will find ways to make it even funnier than I imagined because they'll have... we'll be in the character and the character will take them there. So we've definitely found that there's a really fun duet in Act Two for Kitty Hawk and TikTok where they are singing about how much they love each other, but really about how much they love, how evil each other is. And so there's all these metaphors for evilness, and that sort of is a fun guy. But again, it comes out of the character. Yeah. Oh, that's a... Yeah, that's another fun song. Well, great.  I mean, because I'm... I'm just the same way. It's like having to write a joke. Like, who can do that? Well, Mel Brooks can do it well. Right? Yeah. He's wonderful at that. And then there are, you know, us mere mortals who just have to... have to make it funny with sort of the stuff we've got with a character in a situation. Yeah. Yeah. Any other questions from us? Yes. Well, on that, I was thinking about, you know, where does a funny song come from? And I remember reading about the fact that if you didn't know your rising sign, it was usually connected to some illness. That was how you'd be able to tell what your rising sign was. A rising sign in zodiac? Yeah. Oh, okay.  So I wrote a whole song about it. So that's where the ideas come from. Sure. Sure. That sounds pretty funny. Well, we have another song from you called, and that's art. Yes. The show is called, I Want a Free Ride to College. And can you set this up? Yes, absolutely. And I'd love to invite my collaborator, Joyce. Nobody wants to come up. I brought this great house of women writers in. Just put it back here. So for this project, I actually just write lyrics, and I'm working with a great composer, Joyce Dunne, who's also here in the front row because he's doing the book. This is a reality show musical about a group of high school students on a fictitious but nevertheless hit reality TV show competing for scholarship cash. And this was an interesting process. So our Symphony Jones piece was published a couple years ago and has had a number of productions, and it's actually really popular with high schools. So we're seeing all these high school productions of the secret agent show. And they throw all these kids in the cast. You have 20, 30 kids in the cast, and we found this is the opposite of a professional theater where they make your cast as small as possible. So we thought, well, let's run a show for a cast of 20 and pitch it to high schools and let's see if they run with it. So that's what we're working on. It's a lot of fun. And this number, I think maybe more in the zone of it comes from a musical comedy. That's how you're related to the female comedy. It's sort of towards the number, towards the end of act one, there are 10 finalists who are competing on this reality TV show. There are some judges, some crew members, so we have a cast of 20. And so toward the end of act one, there have been a number of challenges and a number of contestants have been eliminated. And we're following our lead character, Teresa, who's going to be played by Tara Novy. She's kind of a shy, bookish girl, and she moves through the competition and sort of comes more into her own and has some tough choices to make about how cutthroat she wants to be late in the show. So this is the next challenge along the way. We've had a couple and here we are on like three or four. And there's one character named Marcus, who's played by Jordan Stanley, our previous awesome slash slide, who is the favorite to win at this particular challenge. But Teresa gets some advice from him and that kind of turns the odds in her favor. It's quite a long sequence. There's a music in the actual show. There's a musical number and there's a scene where you get to see all of their projects with terrible spoken word and interpreted. And then there's a reprise for Teresa. But we're just going to do the first big introduction musical number piece of it. Great. Teacher Pat Vicasso. Yes, it's absolutely my real name. Welcome to my studio in artist. Today's challenge is to create a work of art. Okay, let's get started. On the count of three you might begin one, two, three. Yes, so yes you are. Sort of becoming so expansive and he's a little out of control and so very nice work. Very nice to meet you and anyone have a parting question for Massey before? Yes, he has it in the back. How does it not go for the dude model in the art class? Oh, I sense a rewrite. I sense a rewrite. Good, good question. I will say I wanted to thank the singers though because this is the first time we ever heard from that show and just like an hour basically a rehearsal this has come together and I'm just really thankful. So I just want to thank them. Okay, well thank you. Massey Asari everyone. And finally we have the team of Michael Kuman and Chris Diamond. Please welcome them. It's a pleasure. This is a special pleasure because I got to sit down for coffee. When I happened to be in Pittsburgh about seven years ago I got to have coffee with Chris and Michael and at the time they were considering moving to New York I think, right? So we had a little chat about what it was like to be in New York and here you are years later and you've got a list of awards like as long as my arm so congratulations and it's such a pleasure to get to talk to you again here and to hear some of your work. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Oh good. Good, well I mean let me just let me just start off by saying this I got to you sent me your show Danny Girl back around that time and am I remembering correctly Danny Girl is a show about a girl who has cancer, right? So imagine that these guys were writing a show like that as one of your first efforts and as I remember it well it had a tremendous heart but it also had a fair amount of comedy right? Am I I mean I don't think you have one of those songs from Danny Girl tonight but I just wanted to start off by talking a bit about that show and how did you find comedy in cancer? Can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean that was sort of the big challenge with the show we knew right from the beginning that if you're going to write a musical about a nine-year-old girl with leukemia that it can't be what people expected to be so we really worked hard to try and find the joy in it and it was inspired by actual events inspired by the life of my cousin and if you know anyone who deals with cancer or any serious illness you know the truth is that there are moments of levity there is great joy and I mean I think for both of us you know comedy and a lot of times comes from pain and comedy is one way of dealing with that so that was what we really set out to find that when you look at kids who are sick there's a ton of life in them and so that's what we really wanted to capture with that piece Yeah, I mean I just I remember really being captivated by it and then really delighted at how there was something to laugh about along the way so and let's and let's move on to a song that we will hear tonight called Welcome to Today from the Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes can you set this one up? Sure so after our first musical about cancer what else do you do? we thought for a long time what could we do to do something that was just really fun something sort of completely opposite of a nine year old girl with cancer so we came up with the idea of a guy who wakes up to discover his life has become a musical and he's on a quest to get out of the musical because he hates musicals and so this song we're going to hear is the actual first number of the show and you don't really need to know too much setup other than that Chris is going to be playing Howard Barnes the title character and I will be playing his neighbor this song in the actual show ends up being like a huge group number it starts with two people and then it follows Howard on his trip to work and becomes just like an over-the-top group number with like lots of choreography and lots of light changes and you'll just have to see and hear those in your head also I'm not a super loud singer so if I'm too soft you can just you know do what old people in church do and be louder tomorrow it's tomorrow's to day today's to day tomorrow it's yesterday yeah absolutely there's a lot of back and forth a lot of collaboration you know we have kind of bounce ideas off each other and give each other a lot of feedback so yeah there's a lot of back and forth and that's healthy I mean I remember when I first started like writing shows with other people I thought oh I've got to do my job they do their job and as you go on I think you find that you're sort of in it together and like it's the cross-pollination that really leads to stuff that you never come up with on your own sometimes definitely especially with comedy I mean I think with comedy whatever is funny works so like we always work with the best idea in the room you know and sometimes sometimes just rearranging a couple words makes something significantly more funny it's really it's an interesting thing sometimes it's trial and error sometimes it just comes to you the first time yeah yeah rearranging a couple words that leads me to ask how did you how did you get the fat guy face that was very funny I wasn't expecting it I think because we weren't expecting it yeah anyway you remember that was pretty early on that was that sort of first that first chunk there kind of came out pretty quickly as we were sort of searching for what the song was and it there was something about somebody eating bacon that I thought was particularly amusing to lyricize and just looking for the exact way to express that so that it landed properly right there at the end and fat guy face happened to be the the lyricist right we haven't really talked much about it yet but the idea of the joke landing at the end of the musical line makes us laugh yeah that's actually the big one can you talk more about that how you can point that point the joke we're calling it a joke now I know I was not supposed to I think you can think of it as a joke because a joke has a punchline right and where the punchline occurs at the end of a joke so if you kind of are translating that to musical terms if you have a rhyming couplet with the second part of the rhyming couplet it's going to be the punchline to the joke so usually that's where jokes happen in in a musical song yes I would right you save the joke for the second line of the rhyming couplet absolutely yeah and even if it's not that funny a joke it's being in that position so it kind of suggests that it ought to be funny on our bad days that's I guess what happens but on the good days it actually is funny and it's in the right position could you talk a little bit about the bodily fluids you know what I'm talking about blood or feet that's the title of our memoir that was another one that took a while to get that line phrased exactly correctly and I think it's another one of those things that wouldn't be funny if it weren't so true that joke plays a lot better in New York than it does anywhere else anytime you sit down in the subway you sort of resign yourself to the fact that you're probably sitting in somebody's bodily fluids you know so it took us a while to get the exact kind of what does the line say the line is now you're cruising beneath Manhattan oh what wonders may come to be there's a chance that the seat you sat in wasn't covered in semen blood or feet yeah it took us a while to get the sort of backhanded compliment of that right which kind of comes up a couple of times in the song to figure out you know for someone like the main character in this show whose world view is kind of cynical helps you adapt that to musical theater and so that original joke I think the punchline was always semen blood or feet but it wasn't always set up properly it was originally something like that the seat you sat in might be covered in semen blood something that wasn't as funny because it wasn't the opposite the humor really comes from playing the contrast an idea that on some logical level is hopeful earlier the idea that none of the homeless people have exposed themselves to you today is a great thing it's kind of the joke that we discovered with this song that thematically it kind of ends up playing out over the course of the story and that's an interesting thing that I think about in comedy like what is the game of this song I have a hard time just thinking about how to describe it but the game of this song was how can we rephrase horrible things to sound positive also with a little semi comic theme of making fun of musical theater opening of a musical that you might think there's like little things like that but I would say the big thing was although I think biggest punchlines come from that kind of game but it's interesting that you bring up semen blood or pee as well because that is the that's for us that's sort of an important part of the song because if you're writing a comedic song generally you want the jokes to get funnier as the song goes on and that's sort of the last expected joke place because we've set it up it's the very end of the third verse so to speak so we wanted that to be the strongest one do you agree about that? of course you've got to build it you've got to make things funnier not less funny absolutely that's very smart and I didn't realize until you just said it but you were saving these things for the ends of verses and then going into your cherry chirpy chorus it's just sort of funny because it's grinding into the nerves that this character doesn't want to be in a musical and just let me compliment the music too we've been talking about the lyrics but the music is like it's so bouncy that you expect it to be funny in some fashion I just want to go out on the loom and say that because music is subjective differently but I feel like the music is setting us up to laugh thank you but let's move we have another song from the same musical so I really want to make sure we have time for that this is called Gotta Get Out also from the noteworthy life of Howard Barnes can you set this song up? yeah so this occurs a little bit later in the story it features the character of Howard who's been for 15 minutes or so trying to wrestle with this idea of what's happened to his life now that it's been hijacked by this musical and this is the point where he definitively declares that he is going to get out of the musical to this point in the show it's important to know that he has not sung yet he's just been hearing people sing to him this will be the first time that we hear him sing and to play Howard we have the fabulous Sergey Robles applause and as the song begins he's alone on stage and he gets hit with a bright spotlight god damn it that's bright terrific what? oh I see what's going on here really you think I'm going to stand here and suddenly start to sing what's going to happen screw that whole show to think you almost got me there didn't you well I hate to burst your bubble but my life's too normal for a musical play steady install it and I like it that way the rainbows and bunnies save it for some sentimental sap I hate musical musical my condition's getting worse I gotta find a way out of this musical before the second verse I gotta get out I know what you're trying to do you owe me and my dreams I'm sorry I have to win I strive for order nothing simple and my life is on track my bread is white and my coffee black oh my god this musical is terrible once again I swear to god this musical is unbearable it's driving me insane some little trick some secret switch to be flipped someone that I can escape they're so god stupid musical but I swear that I'll pull it once and for all I will stop this musical to pigeonhole this song but is this a song of complaint give it as the I want song the I want is I don't want yes which made it really tricky we talked about this one for a long time before we dug into it because the essential challenge of a musical about someone who doesn't want to be in a musical is how can he sing do we want him to sing can he sing at all can you get away with not having a protagonist ever sing in a musical and so this was the way that we kind of got around that challenge to have the musical really kind of pulling the singing out of them yeah that's a great solution does he, well we'll have to see the musical I won't ask if he sings more because that is a huge right, that's a huge issue the reason I asked about song of complaint is that it seems like a lot of comedy comes from seeing characters in a situation that they don't want to be in and it's the complaint it's their complaining that actually leads to some very funny funny relatable comedy but maybe I'm wrong to think that about I mean that's his whole character actually his whole character is he doesn't want to be in this musical so maybe I'm being too Dr. Renare about that I have a feeling no I mean I don't think that's inaccurate to say I think it's part of the fun of comedy is watching characters actively struggle against circumstances they don't want to be in and trying to raise them so yeah that brings up an idea that I remember from BMI the BMI workshop of that you really it's hard to get behind characters that complain except in comedy you really don't want to write characters that have a lot of self pity except in comedy it's something to laugh at but it's hard to really get on the character's side of their complaining yes that is an excellent point I mean the classic one is Adelaide's Lament from Guys and Dolls and you're right the BMI workshop the famous Lehmann Engel musical theater workshop hosted by a broadcast musical incorporated yes that is a wonderful lesson I went through that workshop as well or I dropped out of it sorry but before I dropped out that message of yes you can't sympathize with a complaining character but you've stated wonderfully the exception to that rule which applies to our theme tonight do we have any questions for this team there are two wild parties there you go that's right yes well we just had a workshop at the national lines for musical theater last week so we're starting some really exciting talks I don't know I can't say for certain but hopefully soon very good anyone else can I ask a question about the song before that phrase about the that phrase you know did you I think you either extended the music there or forced the lyric on purpose is that correct actually it is the exact same rhythm that is actually a lesson that we've learned quite well is that you don't want to mess too much with the punchline as in let the punchline breathe as you would as a sort of as a stand-up comedian would but particularly in the world of musical if you set up a rhythm or a scansion for a lyric don't break it or try to mess with the punchline let it fall naturally and that what you're referring to actually there isn't I don't think there's a change there actually I wasn't sure it matches another verse for the same yes okay maybe it's just the way it was delivered possibly I'm not a trained singer quite possible no I'm I was just curious whether musically that was a musical joke no I you know I let the lyrics be jokes I know I try not to mess with the with the lyrics too much because I think in a comedy song if you're writing a comedy song it is all about the joke right everything needs to support the joke and I last thing I want to do it if you write a really funny line last thing I want to do it is get in the way with it in fact I just want to let it breathe let it live as much as possible and something that would be interesting to hear your thoughts on is I you know I think particularly in a comedy song the composer has a lot to do with the punchline because you are literally comedies about timing and you are literally setting the time of the joke so I think music in a comedy song even though it can't really get in the way of the joke has to sort of set the timing of the joke do you agree more yes I mean the music needs to have led us to that place magnificently efficiently I mean that's that is the total joy of it to me like you've been able to make the music in such a way that the joke lands on those two or three or four notes whatever yeah and it just feels like it was meant to be like that I want to say about your reaction to fat face I I think it my sense of it is it's because you in the lyric the phrase was already used like just like two or three seconds before and we're not expecting fat face to come back that was the lyric surprise of it to me that maybe made it seem musically different too but I totally believe you that it's the same music sorry that's my sense of why that played the way it did we we are running out of time but let's hear this last song which is called if you only knew from a show called Judge Jack Justice Judge Jack Justice Judge Jackie Justice oh is this a misprint here maybe but it's going to be it would be more appropriate because I shall be playing the Judge Jackie oh ok this is a show that was commissioned by the Pittsburgh CLO it's sort of a satire on reality television courtroom dramas a lot of people's court and Judge Judy it's about an aging female judge named Judge Jackie and this song is going to be sung by her trusty bailiff Henry who will again be played by Sergio Robles you'll have to imagine me to be not only a woman and a judge but also a good actor it's important to know that that she is speaking to the plaintiff and defendant throughout this song and not to Henry so it goes into fantasy a little bit you know something people wouldn't realize what a moron you were if you learned to keep your moron mouth shut you ever heard that before? neither did I I just made it up I'm going to put it on t-shirts and make a million dollars Henry you want to buy a t-shirt? no your honor I'm going to bring a sile like Romeo and Juliet over here love love will make fools of them all Henry everyone but you and me let me tell you something you cast off from the cast of deliverance on your best date you are half as smart as I'll be three days after I'm dead you've got this wit that I'm utterly disarmed but you're sarcastic laugh it sets my heart on fire and I must admit that I find myself quite charmed by your cynical work you want to know something about love and I'm not s-love makes about as much sense as male nipples we put up the character wonderfully and we understand the situation anyway it was compliments to you both for making that happen like how often does usually you have to get into a song a little bit so that thank you um I feel we're out of time okay well it's been a total joy first let's applaud this guy and also let's re-applaud Kyle Ewalt Michael Walker listening to their song I hope you enjoyed yourself as much as I did and thank you to the drama skill for sponsoring this evening where we could talk about comedy songs thank you


This is the first page of the Form 1040 Income section, we're on Line 10, Adjustments to Income from Schedule 1, Line 26. This is the Schedule 1, Part 2, Adjustments to Income, our focus this time on Line 21, Student Loan Interest Deduction. All right, so Line 21, Student Loan Interest Deduction. You can take this deduction only if all the following apply. You paid interest in 2023 on a qualified student loan. So note, when we think about student loan interest, how does this take place? Clearly, what is the government trying to do? Incentivize education. What actually happens? They end up subsidizing education, which increases the price of education. First, a word from our sponsor. Yeah, actually we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers, they don't wanna be seen with us.  Like our, trust me, I'm an accountant product line. Yeah, it's paramount that you let people know that you're an accountant, because apparently we're among the only ones equipped with the number crunching skills to answer society's current deep, complex, and nuanced questions. If you would like a commercial free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com. And that's why we have these very high tuition fees and whatnot. But the general idea, try to incentivize education. How? Well, when people take out loans in order to pay for education, we can give them a tax benefit on the loans once they start repaying it, giving the interest portion, which is kind of like the rent on the loan, a tax advantage standpoint where you might be able to deduct the interest. Now, quick recap of the income tax system and the types of deductions that are natural to an income tax system. In other words, if we tax income as we do in the United States for federal income tax purposes, it would make sense not to tax gross income, but rather net income, which we can see when we look at business income, such as a sole proprietorship typically reported on a schedule C, where we have income minus expenses, basically business deductions to get to net income.