When I got back from LA in late 2007, I was approached by a former screenwriting professor (who had taught “Writing for Television, where I wrote my South Park spec script), and she told me she was leading a group assigned to write a pilot. She said it needed punching up and just wasn’t funny, and that the South Park script made her think of me. I started punching it up with Corey, but a page or two in, we realized that it was foundationally unfunny – in other words, the characters were so cardboard, the only jokes you could make were quippy one-liners. The comedy couldn’t come from the characters or situations (which were prescribed to us very one-dimensionally). So we took the character/story bible they had developed and did a page one rewrite, building the characters from scratch (while still honoring the character/story bible). We submitted it, the professor said we got further in a 3 day weekend than her group did in 3 months, but ultimately, the executive producer took one joke from it and moved on. We got an “additional writing” credit in the film product, which we really didn’t deserve.