Rick Rosner On, 6: Email Bombing, Hair Tech, and Joke-Writing Odds
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/06/ 24
Rick Rosner discusses thinning hair, low-level light therapy, and a recent email bombing fraud attempt that buried legitimate alerts under thousands of junk messages. Scott Douglas Jacobsen compares the volume to ordinary inbox overload and asks about scam targeting. The conversation shifts to comedy writing, including Rosner’s joke about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, late-night monologue competition, low joke acceptance rates, and the dangers of speaking candidly to inexperienced reporters.
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Rick Rosner: My hair is becoming increasingly wispy. I have a helmet that uses low-level red or near-infrared light on the scalp, but I am too lazy to use it.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Will that make your hair thicker?
Rosner: I do not know. It may help if the device is properly designed and I use it consistently, but the $25 version I bought is unlikely to match FDA-cleared devices that cost hundreds or more than $1,000. However, I probably should use it while I watch TV, at least.
There was an attempted fraud. This is a type of fraud that I had not heard of until I was hit with it. It is called email bombing. They flood your email account with a bunch of bullshit, thousands and thousands of emails. Over the past few days, not today, but yesterday and the day before, I received about 7,500 emails.
Jacobsen: My most out-of-control email account, and I have about five active accounts, has 4,559 emails in it. However, that is over eight years of being unable to deal with it. So 7,500 emails in a day is not just more in total; on a daily rate basis, it is hundreds of times more than I would be used to, taking into account all of my active emails, private and public.
Rosner: I got a shit ton of emails. Luckily, most of them went to junk, but a significant number did not. It turns out the strategy is that, at the same time they hit you with a shit ton of emails, they are doing some fraud on you. They are hoping that the email saying, “This transaction is happening,” or “This account change is happening,” will get lost when you mass-delete thousands of emails, which I did not do. I did not mass-delete them. I had to delete them one by one once I read about this. I could not have done it anyway, because legitimate emails were mixed in among the thousands of junk emails.
So, just a few minutes ago, I found one fraudulent transaction or account-related notice and put the kibosh on it. Are there others? I do not know. However, there you go. It is good that I caught it. My wife is extremely anxious about being defrauded, and she is asleep right now. When I tell her about it, she will not be pleased.
Jacobsen: They target people over 50 or over 60, right?
Rosner: For many scams, yes, older adults are commonly targeted. However, with email bombing, they can target anyone with active online accounts, because the point is not necessarily that the victim is gullible. The point is to bury the fraud alert or transaction notice under a flood of junk email. I am definitely over 50 and over 60. Anyway, we should talk about the reflecting pool.
Jacobsen: If you were still in a comedy room, or if you were at home and got a contract for a comedy thing, for a late-night show like Seth Meyers or something, what would be the process of deconstructing that series of unfortunate events into a joke?
Rosner: The one joke I made, which I would submit, is that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is much more majestic than the White House deflecting tool, though they both leak stinky fluids.
Jacobsen: That is pretty good. What would be the chance of that getting to air, intuitively?
Rosner: Ten percent.
Jacobsen: Which American late-night talk show host has historically had the reputation for being the most stringent about standards, and therefore the least likely to let any particular writer’s joke get on air?
Rosner: It is not stringent. When you say “stringent,” what you mean is: who solicits the most material from their team? I was listening to an interview with my ex-boss, and she said, and she may or may not have gotten the number right, that there are currently 19 writers on staff, which is almost double the number from when I was there.
If every writer writes 50 jokes a day, or quips, or little snippets of something, 50 times 19 is 950. There is only so much room in a show. You have the monologue, and on the high end, I am not basing this on personal experience, but on watching shows, Seth Meyers might tell something like seven jokes in his opening monologue. I used to know the exact number. I do not know. We could ask AI, but I am not going to do it.
Someone like Leno, or somebody else, might have a fast-paced, long monologue that encompasses a lot of different subjects, and you might get some number approaching 30. Then, throughout the show, there might be other opportunities for writers to submit quips or ideas. However, let us use 30.
Let us cut it down from 950 and say that 800 little ideas, jokes, quips, or whatever are submitted in a day by a huge staff working hard all day. If 30 of those things get on, that gives you a success rate of less than 4 percent.
Also, some hosts write none of their material. Some hosts write a huge fraction of their material. However, 30 divided by 800 gives you a success rate of less than 4 percent.
That does not mean the work is wasted. It takes a lot of unused material to get to the very best material that is used. Moreover, the joke you think is best, or that you are proud of, or that you think works well, may not work well in the context of the monologue. So you cannot love your jokes. You have to get in there, fearlessly pitch your shit, and hope you do not suck.
Think of a giant awards show, like the Oscars or the Emmys. On those shows, you might have a dozen writers or more submitting jokes for weeks. For an awards show, it is not inconceivable that, over the weeks leading up to the show, the host might receive 1,200 jokes, maybe more. Again, there is no room for more than a few dozen. So the ratio is in the low single-digit percentages.
In fact, I talked about this in an interview I gave that helped get me fired. I talked about the low percentage of my stuff that gets on. What I meant was the low percentage of anybody’s stuff, unless somebody is a fucking genius who manages to get maybe 10 percent of their stuff on, if they are the Shohei Ohtani of pitching jokes. However, people do not get a lot of their stuff on. A lot of shit does not make it.
Also, the person who wrote the article hated me by the time it was ready to be published because I called her out on some shit she was doing. She was an inexperienced reporter. So she put things in the article to present me in an unfairly bad light. In the article, I said maybe 4 percent gets on. She fucked it up, either from inexperience or malice, and had me saying, inaccurately, because I never said it, that 2 percent of my stuff gets on. The fucking twat. I mean, she cost me my job, though I was dumb to give the interview in the first place, and dumb to give a rookie reporter from Fox News that much power over me.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.
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