It's a few days before the Academy Awards, and I'm deep in the bowels of the Kodak Theater (which has miles of bowels) in a cramped space temporarily named the Writers Room. The show writers, of whom I am one this year, are sitting around a conference table strewn with papers, Starbucks cups and the wrappers of long-deceased snacks. Also at the table are the co-hosts we're writing for, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.

We're going over the monologue they'll deliver at the start of the show (which is actually a dialogue, but everybody calls it a ``monologue'').

The monologue has been under construction for a couple of months now, via a process that's both serious, because it's for the Oscars, and funny, because it's basically a bunch of comedy writers sitting around thinking up jokes. The early writers' conferences took place in Los Angeles. I participated by phone from Miami, which was not ideal because (a) I could hear only about every third word, and (b) I was in a room with my dog, Lucy, who often barks violently to alert me if she sees something alarming outside the window such as a leaf. So from my perspective, the writers' conferences went like this:

WRITERS IN CALIFORNIA: What if we did a joke about (garble garble) Woody Harrelson (garble garble) refrigerator (garble garble) kangaroo. (Laughter.)

STEVE MARTIN (into phone): Dave, what do you think?

ME: I didn't really . . .

LUCY: Bark! Bark! Bark!

STEVE MARTIN: What?

The writers' meetings produced several hundred ideas for jokes, bits, skits, etc., which got winnowed down to a few dozen and arranged into a rough draft of the monologue. Now Steve and Alec are going over the jokes in the Writers Room, trying them out, critiquing them, tweaking them. The hosts have very different styles. Steve is reserved, analytical, dry, almost professorial. He's also a perfectionist who will spend 20 minutes dissecting a single element of a joke, trying to determine the absolute best way to word something. He's a joke scientist.

Alec is more like a humor fullback. He's a big, physical guy, charming and charismatic; wherever he goes, the men want him to like them, the women want him to make love to them, and the cattle want to provide him with steaks. He's also very funny, and tends to dominate the Writers Room, launching into stories, delivering lines, doing accents (he's an excellent mimic). Usually he decides quickly whether he likes a joke or not, then wants to move on; whereas Steve will want to consider it 15 or 20 or possibly 53 more times before he's sure.

Despite their different styles, Steve and Alec like and respect each other, and as they go through the monologue they're able to agree on which jokes they'll keep, and which ones they'll kill. We writers take notes, looking outwardly calm and professional, although we're mentally cheering or despairing depending on what happens to the jokes we personally wrote. At least I do that. If they keep one of my jokes, inside I'm going ``Yayyy!'' If they kill one of mine, I'm ``Noooo! Not that one!'' But I force myself to maintain my calm facade, trying not to listen to the screams of my joke as it is marched away to the joke death camp.

Now it's the night before the Oscars, and we're gathered in the theater for a full dress rehearsal. This is a chance to hear how the monologue goes over with an actual audience, consisting of technical people (of whom there seem to be thousands) and the stand-ins who go through the motions of presenting and receiving awards, including giving tedious thank-you speeches. For rehearsal, the movie stars in the audience are represented by large cardboard photographs placed in the seats where the stars will be sitting. Thus when Steve and Alec do a joke about George Clooney, they talk to a photograph of him. (As it turned out, the photograph responded to the joke better than Clooney did.) The rehearsal goes until around 11 p.m., after which Steve and Alec huddle briefly with the writers to go over the monologue yet again, making some changes while we take notes (``Nooo!''). We all go home and enjoy a restful seven to eight minutes of actual sleep, then return to the Kodak Sunday morning for yet another run-through of the entire show, which includes more monologue revisions (``Nooo!'') Then we all change into our Oscars attire, which for men means tuxedos and for women means dresses that they cannot go to the bathroom in without the aid of two registered nurses.