Closer to home, my own shock left me unable to come up with a joke for nearly two weeks, something that has never happened in my 10 years of writing for late-night television. Two months later I still struggle to be appropriately funny, a concept as foreign to today’s phalanx of comedy writers as “recession” was to Generation Y.

Why were TV’s funnymen and those of us who write for them so paralyzed? We were knocked out of commission, I’m afraid, not so much because we couldn’t figure out when to be funny again, but because we couldn’t figure out how to be funny again. The lines I would once have wrung from Strom Thurmond’s age or Tom Cruise’s divorce didn’t fly. Pre-September 11 comedy simply wasn’t up to the task of comforting a country in crisis.

The truth is that people crave humor in difficult times. Bob Hope made a career out of telling jokes on makeshift USO stages barely miles away from the front lines of battlefields. During the Vietnam War, Johnny Carson sent millions of Americans off to dreamland with smiles on their faces.

But then came the ’80s. Cable TV begat a bumper crop of stand-up comedians like rain begets mushrooms. The ’90s brought the Internet, and suddenly it was open-mike night for anyone with a keyboard. In the deluge, audiences lost their regard for the craftsmanship of jesters like Jack Paar and Steve Allen, and settled instead for paint-by-number comedy bits tacked together with predictable and formulaic punch lines. Fat joke? Select a punch line from the following list: Monica Lewinsky, Marlon Brando, Al Roker. Skinny joke? Two words: “Calista” and “Flockhart.”

The ’90s also delivered Jerry Seinfeld, who made his fortune off the humor of nothingness. In contrast, the “Seinfeld” episode in which a character dies from licking an envelope was yanked from syndication last week because a TV executive worried that someone would find the joke more disturbing than funny. Was it really less disturbing before anthrax became a household word? Or was it in poor taste then and we just didn’t care? After seeing the “something” of September 11, suddenly “nothing” has lost its cachet. The joke now, perhaps, is that it was ever funny in the first place.

Somewhere between the setups and the punch lines of the past 40 years, American humor got meaner. Would the audience that chuckled at Bob Hope’s respectful jabs about Dwight Eisenhower’s affinity for golf laugh at the joke about the Bush girls’ being glad they’re twins because no one likes to drink alone? True, in the ’60s Don Rickles hammered a career out of insult comedy, but if you’ve seen him perform, you know there isn’t a mean bone in his body or his act. His zingers capture his subject’s uniqueness and reveal it through exaggeration.

The challenge for those of us trying to make people laugh between channel flips to 24-hour news networks is how to return to the craft of creating humor that’s truthful and funny–not in the hurtful and superficial way we’ve become accustomed to, but in a more heartfelt way. Aging-politician and divorced-movie-star jokes still find their way into my material, but far less often, and never without a moment’s reflection on my intention–something I almost never did in the past.

Red Skelton, perhaps one of our greatest comedians, signed off his weekly TV show by saying, “If someday when you’re not feeling well you remember some silly little thing that I’ve said or done and it brings back a smile to your face or a chuckle to your heart, then my purpose has been served for my fellow man.” It would sadden him, I think, to know that in the days and months following the attacks, when the entire country wasn’t “feeling well,” the only silly little things anyone could remember were a truckload of Gary Condit jokes.

So let’s pause the age-old “chicken or the egg” conundrum of who dictates what’s funny, the comic or the audience, and agree to a fresh start. I’ll promise to work harder at writing comedy that’s honest, kind-spirited and, of course, funny, if you’ll promise to hold me to that standard.