Aug 25, 2015

So. me. What would you like to know?

I decided to devote my life to writing humour when I was eight years old; it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, and I’ve pursued it ever since. I remember the first things I wrote: parodies of the Sherlock Holmes stories that I was reading at the time. I wrote them out in longhand on the backs of my father’s legal-sized accounting sheets (the fronts had too many crisscrossing lines); three stories, one per page. And, I remember thinking, “How do writers come up with enough material to write whole long stories?”

At this point, I’ve written 30 books of prose, all told, so I guess I must have figured it out.

It’s strange, when you think of it, for an eight year-old to devote his life to comedy. Stranger still that he manages to actually do it (after all, how many people are actually lucky enough to make the careers they dream about when they’re children?). And, yet…

There’s a wonderful TV series called The Green Room. It’s just a half dozen stand-up comics sitting around in a room talking craft, but for humour junkies like myself it’s pure gold. On one episode, Eddie Izzard was one of the guests. He spoke of an encounter he had with his idol, Richard Pryor. After a little small talk, he found that the two men had something in common: they both wanted to be stand-up comedians when they were four years old.

When I heard that, my response was: “I thought I was precocious when I decided to devote my life to comedy when I was eight, but I was actually already half a lifetime behind the curve!”

PS: Great thanks to Shawn Hancock for preordering a book yesterday, and especially for his sage advice. You’re a smart cookie, Shawn.