With writing gigs to pay the bills, Fitzsimmons is free to go wild onstage

Greg Fitzsimmons has written for "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and more.

Switching jobs is a traumatic experience for some people. For comedian Greg Fitzsimmons, who opens for Artie Lange at tonight's sold-out show at Symphony Hall, it's all part of the adventure.

That's not to say the changes can't be jarring. Fitzsimmons once left a job writing for Joe Rogan and Doug Stanhope on "The Man Show" on a Thursday and started writing for "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" the following Monday. "That's the hardest turn anyone's ever made in TV history, I think," he says.

He aced that gig, winning four Daytime Emmys as a writer and producer (one for each in both 2005 and 2006), and followed up by working on the pilot of Louis C.K.'s "Lucky Louie." After a two-month stint writing on a show for VH1 hosted by Nick DiPaolo, he went back to "Lucky Louie" after it got picked up for the season.

The next stop for the 40-year-old BU grad might be writing for the second season of "The Sarah Silverman Show" on Comedy Central, which would mean adjusting to yet another style and sensibility. That's an unnatural instinct for comedians, who spend most of their time trying to define their own voices, but it's a perk to Fitzsimmons. "To me, that's part of the creativity," he says. "Learning how to write in a different voice is a great challenge."

When HBO canceled "Lucky Louie" last year, it left Fitzsimmons with a rare break in his writing schedule. But no one works as hard as a comedian between gigs. In addition to his weekly appearances on VH1's "Best Week Ever," he's working on a parody of a popular website due to launch April 1 (revealing any more would ruin the joke) and he'll executive produce "The Real Love Boat," a reality show that starts shooting for TV Land in June. He's been pitching a game show idea to networks and hopes to launch a monthly satellite radio show in the coming months.

"Right now it's kind of an interesting time for me because I have not ever grown up to the point where I chose what I wanted to do for a living," he says. "I always try to do everything because I figure most of it's going to fail."

Ironically, it was the stability of TV writing that first drew Fitzsimmons to the job. "My son was born about six years ago and I spent the first year still on the road, and it was really depressing," he says. "Being away from him, seeing what a hard time my wife was having without me around, I just basically started calling my friends and seeing where I could get a writing job."

The day job also allows Fitzsimmons to be his edgy, impish self onstage. If an audience doesn't enjoy his material about herpes or managing a sex life as a father, they're not who he's trying to reach. "There's enough people out there that want to go to comedy clubs that I don't care if lose a few every night," he says. "If I'm doing what I want to do, the people who like what I do are going to be that much more committed to it, because it's refreshing and it's real and it's honest."

Greg Giraldo plays the Comedy Connection tonight and tomorrow. . . . Ardal O'Hanlon plays the Burren pub tonight through Sunday. . . . Erin Judge plays the Comedy Studio tonight through Sunday. . . . Fresh off his win for best stand-up live performance at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., Shane Mauss hosts Sunday night at the Comedy Connection.