John Lutz
John Lutz is an actor, born 1973.
Lutz belongs to a specific New York comedy caste: the writer who is also, faintly reluctantly, on camera. He wrote for Saturday Night Live for seven seasons, and in 2014 joined the staff of Late Night with Seth Meyers, which is the job that funds the acting.
The acting produced one small immortal thing. As J.D. Lutz on 30 Rock, he played the least respected writer in the TGS room, a man defined mostly by everyone else's contempt for him. It is a joke about writers' rooms performed by an actual writer out of an actual writers' room, and the character carries his surname, which gives the humiliation a documentary edge. He came back to it for 30 Rock: A One-Time Special.
Everywhere else he works the same register in smaller doses: the colleague, the sad sack, the man at the back of a scene who has clearly had a worse day than anyone else in it. Sisters, Sleepwalk with Me, Mystery Team and Friends with Kids all use him for a couple of minutes each, while Girls5eva and Mapleworth Murders give him a little more room to move. It is a career built on being very funny for ninety seconds at a time, which is a real skill and an underpaid one.
Movies (5)
TV (8)
Where to start with John Lutz
30 Rock and nothing else, to begin with. Lutz is a background character by design, so the pleasure is cumulative: he is the writer nobody in the room will defend, and the show is merciless about it for its entire run.
Then 30 Rock: A One-Time Special for the reunion, which is mostly nostalgia but does put him back in the room. Girls5eva is the best of the later work, from the same comedy family and with a warmer part for him. On film, Sleepwalk with Me and Mystery Team are the two worth your time, both indie comedies made by people out of that scene, and Sisters is the studio version of the same joke. For the day job rather than the acting, Late Night with Seth Meyers is partly written by him.