Phil Rosenthal

I don't know why that is.

I didn't know that anyone would even relate to it.

I thought that people would look at that and think that's funny because that happened to that guy.

I didn't realize you can't give your parents a gift without it blowing up in your face.

And I get letters from still from around the world.

That's my mother.

That's my father.

When we started casting the show and I'm hearing the dialogue come back from Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle and Patty Heaton and Brad Garrett and Ray Romano.

That's when I knew, oh, I don't know if we'll be successful, but they're great.

And they're elevating what I wrote.

Now comes the audience and they laugh.

good enough to get picked up to series the third episode was uh an episode written by steve one of our great writers and it's about an iq test that robert the policeman gives to uh ray and deborah okay and the results come in and ray has a higher iq than deborah well this is very unexpected

especially to deborah the audience coming in to watch that taping they haven't seen the show yet it hasn't been on television yet because it's week three of our production and you you have to edit the show and make it so that it won't be on for a few months before it's on tv before people see it so we're literally getting people who are uh from old age homes and and prisoners from jail literally that's our audience that's all we can get as the audience

Debra is not happy that Ray got a higher IQ than him.

They're sitting on the couch and Ray, she's eating a bowl of ice cream and Ray makes a snide comment about how he's smarter.

And she just nods and she takes her bowl of ice cream and just turns it over onto his lap.

OK, the laugh.

This is not a giant sight gag, but it showed laughter.

Underneath the husband and wife relationship, the laugh went on for over 30 seconds, which is a very long time on stage.

And right then and there, I turned to the other writers and I said, as a joke, we're all going to be millionaires.