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Hashtag #CNF Episode 4—Harrison Scott Key
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In Episode 4, I welcome Harrison Scott Key, winner of Creative Nonfictin's "Southern Sin" essay contest. The essay, titled "The Wishbone", is a hilarious account of Key's father suiting up his too-old son to win a pee-wee football game. In this conversation, we talk about "The Wishbone", where Key found his comedic sensibility, his forays into improv and stand up, and the mechanics of humor writing.
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Transcript
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to hashtag CNF, a conversation about reading and writing with authors in the genre of creative nonfiction. I'm Brendan O'Mara.
Winning the Southern Sin Essay Prize
00:00:31
Speaker
Harrison Scott Key is the winner of Creative Nonfiction's Southern Sin Essay Prize for his story The Wishbone, which is about his father suiting up a too old Harrison to play peewee football to win a coveted game against rival Pearl. If it sounds funny, that's because it is. Key's wit and humor permeate the essay to keep the reader turning to see just what he and his father will do next in the high stakes world of football in the south.
00:00:56
Speaker
Key's work has appeared in the Oxford American, The Pinch, Swink, Defenestration, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and teaches at the Savannah College of Art and Design. It is my great pleasure to welcome the author of The Wishbone, Harrison Scott Key, to hashtag CNF. Well, thanks for inviting me, man. I'm excited to be
Storytelling Traditions and Youth
00:01:14
Speaker
here. Right, and at what point did you know you had the elements of a great essay here? Well, you know, this is a story that I have been telling for a long time.
00:01:26
Speaker
Most of my essays, at least the memoir pieces from, you know, 20, 30 years ago, are stories that I had been telling to a lot of people, you know, sitting around a campfire or sitting on someone's front porch or at a party or something. And, you know, the story would just come up because of whatever subject. And I found, this was even before I was a writer, you know, before I was really trying to write some of these stories down, I just found that I was telling them over and over again. So I think when I started to write,
00:01:56
Speaker
And once I realized that memoir and autobiography is really probably what I should be writing, I had this huge bucket of stories that I've been telling for so long and it was really just a matter of knowing the stories were good, just trying to find out how to get the goodness out and not make them too long and to pick and choose the right details.
00:02:19
Speaker
Right. And is that kind of how you flush out your story ideas? Is just by maybe just essentially sitting around a campfire and talking to friends and family and then just realizing, hey, this actually has the elements of something pretty darn good.
00:02:36
Speaker
yeah you know i mean you've got these you know i think everybody has these kind of seminal moment these kind of crazy memories from your childhood uh... everybody's got a video from people just forget them they just kind of get glossed over you know like this like the football story that the wishbone it is a story that probably did not want to think about too much right after it happened because it was kind of embarrassing and weird and you know
00:03:02
Speaker
Unlike writers, you know, most people have to take the strange thing that happens to them and I won't say, you know, suppress it, but you have to kind of explain it away because you're trying to, you know, feel normal, right? So the weird thing that happens, you don't want to talk about its weirdness, you kind of want to make it seem normal like the rest of you. And so I think like, you know, right after a lot of these stories happen,
00:03:27
Speaker
I didn't think about them, and I didn't think they were funny. They were, you know, horrifying and terrible and weird and embarrassing. But then, you know, five, ten years go by, you know, I find myself in college or graduate school, and I kind of get horrified when I remember like, oh, I remember that thing that my dad made me do that time, oh my gosh, that was so weird, and I had totally forgotten about that.
00:03:50
Speaker
I mean, I have conversations with people all the time from my childhood and that I went to school with and about crazy things that happened to us that I didn't even remember. And then as soon as I brought them up, it kind of all comes back
Drafting Stories from Memories
00:04:03
Speaker
to me. But once I have an idea, I just take out a piece of paper and I just start writing down everything I can remember about that idea. I don't really outline so much as just start writing down every detail I remember.
00:04:17
Speaker
I don't know who it was. Maybe Eudora Welty said, you know, when we write, we remember. And then, you know, the more we remember, the more you write. And, you know, you can find, they're kind of like little breadcrumbs that lead you from one memory to the next. Like, you know, trying to remember what day something happened on.
00:04:34
Speaker
You can't remember at all, then all of a sudden you remember what show you were watching when the thing happened. And then you go on Google and you find out that in that year, that show aired on Tuesdays, and then all of a sudden you're starting to kind of piece together a story. So I just write everything down that I can remember, and then I start trying to tell the story to the paper just the way I would tell it to somebody at a bar or at a party. And it takes shape, of course you're gonna write
00:05:01
Speaker
30 drafts of it, so it's like you're retelling the story 30 times, that's how it works. Yeah, there was a great exercise that a professor of mine had in college, it was a memoir class, and she had us just lay out a timeline, and just from certain years, and you were to write down, just this certain thing happened in 1989, and you're thinking, oh yeah, I was playing with Ninja Turtles, and all this, that, and the other, and then all of a sudden, yeah, I was playing Ninja Turtles, and then,
00:05:30
Speaker
you realize who you were friends with at the time, and all of a sudden the mosaic starts to fill in on itself. So I totally understand where you're coming from in that instance. People ask me how I remember so much. I guess it's just like working out or something. The more you do it, the more you remember.
Challenges of Memory and Family Feedback
00:05:50
Speaker
And of course, how much can you trust memory? That's a tough thing.
00:05:54
Speaker
That's a tough call. I felt a lot more uncomfortable with how much I remembered and how accurate it was earlier in my career. What I started realizing is that if there were people who were there, if I let them read the story or an early draft of the story,
00:06:17
Speaker
You know, there might be some huge detail that they don't remember that I do. So if I'm very confident in my memory, I'm going to leave it in there. But, you know, also, I also want there to be room for argument. And so, you know, like, my mom
00:06:33
Speaker
She will, you know, read all my stuff and she will frequently say, oh, I don't remember that. What I remember was this. And then when she says that, I'm like, oh, I totally forgot about that. And then that works its way into the story too. So, you know, you can do your own fact checking. But my whole theory on, you know, the accuracy of childhood memories is that as long as
00:06:55
Speaker
uh... the person is what it is somebody who is at you know at that theater in that moment or in your life at the time if they read it they can disagree with it if they look all like i can't the way i explain it i'll try to call try to be focused here i think it's like it might like if i'm sitting around the dinner table with my family that you know we tell a lot of stories
00:07:17
Speaker
We frequently argue about what actually happened. I mean, this was before my becoming a writer. Like, we would be telling some, you know, deer hunting story and I would say, well, I remember this happened and this happened and I came up to the deer stand and my dad was doing this and my brother was like, no, no, no, no, he wasn't doing that. That was me. He was at the other place. And so we kind of have this. Yeah.
00:07:35
Speaker
And of course, it's friendly. We're not yelling at each other. But I think there's room for that kind of weird disagreement in memoir. Like, I'm telling my version of the story. And as long as you don't say it in such a way as to, you know, make somebody storm off away from the table because they hate you, because they think you're lying. Like, there's got to be room for disagreement. But I think readers can tell, or I think, you know, family members can tell when it's just misremembering and when it's like an outright case of distorting the truth intentionally.
00:08:03
Speaker
And when your father approached you to be the ringer on this Pee Wee team, do you think it was so he could see his son dominate, if only once, and even if it was against kids who hadn't quite hit puberty yet? I think, well, you know, I mean, deep down, you know, what dad doesn't want to see his son kick some butt in football no matter what the rules are, how old they are.
00:08:28
Speaker
But for him, it was just a pragmatic thing. He didn't have enough players to make a team, and he was going to have to forfeit his game. And so the most natural thing in the world was for him to say, well, I've got this son, and he doesn't look too much older than these other kids. So he can put a helmet on him, and he just looks like he's got a growth problem or something, and he can play. So for him, it was totally pragmatic.
00:08:51
Speaker
We need to play this game. He probably thought it was the moral thing to do because otherwise we'd have to send all his other teammates or all the other players home. Has your father gotten a chance to read the essay? Yeah. He doesn't read a lot. My mom sometimes makes him read my stories. Actually, I think she read it to him because she said it was too long for him to read by himself.
00:09:18
Speaker
He, yeah, he read it and he said, you know, hey, I read your story. I thought it was pretty funny. And that was about it, which is his way of saying, um, uh, you know, my mom, my mom, your mother said, I had to tell you that I read your story. She reads it and she's like the family. My mom is like the family fact checker for me. Um, so yeah, you know, like he, I mean, I don't think he gets what I do, but I also think like, you know, that doesn't really matter. It's not a big deal to me.
Comedic Roots and Humor in Writing
00:09:47
Speaker
Where did you find and hone your comedic sensibility? You mean like how did I like what do I do to get better or funnier that kind of thing?
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah, and also, where was the origins of that? Some people come to comedy as a way of defraying insult, as a self-defense mechanism in some cases, or other people are just drawn to comedy and then they just kind of start developing their own voice. Well, you know, I think, I mean, I've always been cut up
00:10:26
Speaker
I used to always get in trouble in school for talking too much in class. That was always my worst grade. I got an unsatisfactory for talking in class all the time. I think I was always a talker and a joke teller and trying to be cute, as my mother would say, and command an audience in some form.
00:10:51
Speaker
but you know i think i mean i was picked on a lot in uh or i say a lot i mean i don't think i was
00:10:57
Speaker
bullied or picked on any more than anyone else. But I do remember getting picked on in elementary school and junior high. I had really big ears. I had a giant head and my ears were just huge. In fact, my ears have not grown at all since I was about five years old. And if you look at them now, they kind of fit my head size, but they were huge. I mean, I had all kind of big names, you know, radar and Dumbo and satellite. And I think
00:11:25
Speaker
I just, I mean, this is also in Mississippi, where everybody has a nickname anyway, so they might be making fun of you, but they're also making fun of everyone else at the same time. But I think I realized that people, I mean, I had an older brother who was at my school too, and we played sports, and we had a deer camp.
00:11:43
Speaker
You know, when you're around guys in the locker room or at the hunting club or something, I mean, everybody's making fun of everybody. You kind of have to grow a pretty thick skin. And since I wasn't really, I mean, I wasn't, you know, me and I wasn't going to fight anybody. I wasn't a violent kid. I think I just realized that if you could make fun of them too, that you could kind of, you know, they would respect you a little bit more. Um, and so I just, I think I cultivated my sense of humor that way. I mean, there's a lot of sarcasm on a baseball team and a football team and you have to get used to it.
00:12:13
Speaker
I think I did.
00:12:15
Speaker
I think I was naturally funny or at least naturally wanting to be funny and then that was just cultivated like that was my defense mechanism like you know other people in Mississippi have guns or knives or something but for me it was just being funny and if like somebody made fun of me if I could then make fun of him and get all of his friends to laugh at him they would all like me more and then he wouldn't he wouldn't hurt me because his friends all of a sudden liked me because I was being funny so yeah I definitely
00:12:44
Speaker
cultivated as I grew up. I did a lot of plays and stuff in college, which naturally I just wanted somewhere to be a stage to perform Shakespeare and that kind of thing. I did stand up for a little while in graduate school and I did comedy improv. I was okay at that stuff. It really was hard. Comedy improv was awesome, but so much work and stand up was the same way. But I really enjoyed writing material for the stand up.
00:13:13
Speaker
and writing plays or monologues to perform. And that's really how I got into writing prose and essays, is just realizing that all the funny things you're saying in class or all the funny things you're saying to your friends, there's a way to turn that into a story. There's a way to go to school for that, to teach that, to make a living doing that. And it took a long time to realize that I can make a living doing something that was pretty fun for me to do just naturally.
00:13:39
Speaker
And what are some of the pitfalls of the writer who tries to be funny and misses? Because that's about as skin-cringing a moment as there is in writing and performance, I imagine. I mean, being funny is really hard. I would consider myself a pretty funny person.
00:13:59
Speaker
and have always been pretty, I mean I'm sure there are a lot of people who think I'm an idiot and a jackass and don't think I'm funny at all, but I've always made some people laugh and even that, like even for me, finding a way to be funny on the page took a long time. I mean it has probably taken
00:14:20
Speaker
it probably took me ten years of you know writing for three hours a day to find to figure out a way to to be to be as funny in prose as i was doing comedy and prob or doing uh... monologue or something like that and you know i mean the pitfalls are it's not funny right like i mean you have to keep it right funny jokes and funny descriptions that you know i teach a humor class uh... here at scad
00:14:50
Speaker
These students that I've had this term, they are super talented, they're great writers, and you can tell when you interact with them that they're pretty funny people, or they're sarcastic, they're ironic.
00:15:04
Speaker
uh... and then but on the page it was just painful you know it was really hard for them to figure out a way that just because they said funny things to their friends while they're sitting around at a coffee shop doesn't mean that they can write in in that same way it was in of course they got much better at the term for grass and their last pieces were also and publishable but you have to write funny stuff and you have to write things that you read out loud and i mean he nobody laughs and that that's what's so great about writing humor
00:15:33
Speaker
That you have an immediate barometer for whether or not it's successful i mean if you read a lyric essay something thoughtful something reflective you know it might be sad or might be dramatic or might just be suspenseful but when you read it nobody reacts and you know there's no audible this or reaction you can't tell in an audience.
00:15:53
Speaker
you know whether or not the people successful uh... it's really hard to pay or you know you can tell by the how loud they applaud i guess at the end but in the humor piece fantastic about it if it's not working you'll just hear crickets that is it something about that really raises the stakes for me i really love the fact that
00:16:12
Speaker
No, I mean, I really write all my stuff to be read out loud or at least envisioned at some level, you know, whether I'm reading it out loud in a reading or whether somebody just really likes it in the magazine and wants to read it to their friends, right? And I always try to imagine what does it sound like and are there enough laughs? Like, is there a laugh, you know, if it's a humor piece?
00:16:33
Speaker
And there better be something funny every 30 or 60 seconds, right? Every page better have a couple of good laughs on it. And I love the intensity of knowing that when I read it, if you read a funny piece for an audience and they don't laugh, I mean, it's painful. And, you know, I think, you know, to answer your earlier question about like, what are the pitfalls? Like, how do you learn how to do that? How horrible is that? You know, I did speech writing for a long time, I guess for about five or six years.
00:17:00
Speaker
And the person that I wrote speeches for, you know, she said, well, you know, there needs to be a few laughs in this next speech. I had written just a few for her. I just started the job. And she said, you know, we need to have a few laughs here, you know, have a couple of moments of levity so the audience can relax, that kind of thing.
00:17:19
Speaker
I had already written a couple of mildly funny essays by that time in my career, but I really hadn't written like a speech for somebody else, you know, a real person is supposed to be funny. And oh my gosh, it was so hard. It was nerve wracking because this other human being, you know, was going to take my words and go up in front of 500 people and deliver a line. And this person was not a comedian. They were, you know, a leader.
00:17:44
Speaker
and you know they were somebody who will often get speeches but they're not uh... comedian and the intensity of knowing cosh if the person failed it's not just me it's there you know they're the one who failed and so i would you know what i would do that i would write three or four different that's a different joke that could then be inserted into the speech not show them to where i say you know do you find any of these funny are they kind of funny you know it should act out three of them and then circle one
00:18:11
Speaker
And then she'd say, this is OK. So we keep working on it. And you really have to tweak everything. You have to tweak the syntax. And you have to make sure the tone is right. I tend to be, I think, a little too mean or cold hearted or cruel in my humor, at least in the early draft. I tend to be too mean to myself and to other people that I'm describing. And so I find that as I revise the meanness, I try to kind of wash the meanness out.
00:18:41
Speaker
and just make it as true as possible. And of course, sometimes the truth does hurt, but sometimes I find that I would be being a little acid or a little cruel just for no reason. It wasn't even funny. And so when I was writing these jokes and these speeches, I found that sometimes my sense of humor was just a little too harsh and I'd have to pull back and make it a little more sophisticated.
00:19:03
Speaker
You know, I think the first funny speech I wrote for this person, you know, I got a few laughs and you're sitting in the wings and you're holding a copy of the speech and you're, you know, I mean, you're sweating bullets. It's awful. And you know, the person comes off, the applause happens and, you know, she says, you know, I think that was pretty good. And you go, okay, you know, and you recover your pulse and you know, you don't die. And the next time you get a little bit better, a little bit better.
00:19:26
Speaker
You know, after a few years, I was able to write, you know, five and six jokes per page, things that felt natural within the speech itself, that felt honest, and that experience was so key to me being able to write my own funny memoir humor, just knowing that, like, you have to know what's gonna be funny to somebody else. It's not, it's not, you can't be writing, they always say you gotta write for yourself, and I guess there's truth to that, but, I mean, I don't know, you really have to write and think, like,
00:19:56
Speaker
Do you have to think about your ideal reader and are they going to think this is funny? If you look at your stuff and you go, is this really funny? If the answer is probably not, then it probably isn't and you have to take it out and you just have to keep trying and it takes a long time.
00:20:11
Speaker
Yeah, and do you ever get a sense that some of your students that just, in being breezy and as people, they said that they're funny and entertaining to be around, but when they try to put it on the page that it comes across as just trying too hard?
Literary Techniques in Humor
00:20:28
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's what failed humor tends to be, right? I mean, it's always trying too hard, because if you're not trying at all, then it's not even humor.
00:20:37
Speaker
That's just words. That's just the paragraph. Yeah, I think, you know, what happens when it's forced, when it's, you know, the worst humor is the forced kind, whether it's a pun or something corny, you know, a play on words.
00:20:52
Speaker
Um, the kind of humor where everybody groans like, okay, like we get it, you know, like that's, that's forced stuff. And, and you can tell, I can look back at early stuff that I wrote and it was just so forced. I was just, because you're really, you're really just grappling at anything you can find to get a laugh.
00:21:10
Speaker
And it just takes a really long time to find your voice. I mean, there's so many things that are happening in a work of literature anyway. Not just, I mean, even stuff that's not funny, right? There's so much that's happening. You're trying to describe physical objects in a way that seems real and believable. You're trying to communicate an idea of who a person is or what's happening in this particular moment or what you're thinking or what someone is thinking. And to be doing all of that,
00:21:40
Speaker
And in a way that makes people laugh, it's a little bit like juggling while you're riding a bike. It's just something that even
00:21:51
Speaker
You know, I'd say even five years ago, you know, I might be able to write a funny tweet or a funny Facebook update. And sometimes with my students, not in every class, but I've had them do that because the stakes are so low. You're just writing 140 characters. Of course, it's still hard to get a laugh. I mean, it's, you know, it's really hard to get a laugh at 140 characters.
00:22:11
Speaker
The idea that it's so short, I think, is lessens the pressure on them a little bit to do all the other things that a story or an essay has to do, just to say, look, you've got one little paragraph for a Facebook update or one little sentence for a tweet.
00:22:27
Speaker
And you just have to say something funny. Of course, in the class we do. I did learn, I think, as I was learning how to write, you know, I learned some of these techniques that other funny people, you know, use. And some of the people that I really love to read are
00:22:43
Speaker
like Anthony Lane, the film critic for The New Yorker. I mean, he is so funny. And he's not funny in every piece. I mean, if he really likes a movie, he's usually not going to make fun of it. But he really hates a movie. Like his reviews of Pearl Harbor from like 10 or 12 years ago, his reviews of some of the Star Wars movies.
00:23:07
Speaker
his review of Speed 2, which was like in 1995 or something. These are classic works of contemporary, where they're so funny. And so, as I was learning to write, the way he describes
00:23:20
Speaker
characters and scenes and movies is hilarious and they're easily applicable to describing characters and scenes in fiction or characters and scenes in your own life. And I started learning some of these things just from reading his work and the work of others but now in my classes of course I kind of reverse engineered and I try to show the students like before they're funny I try to show them like here's how the other people are doing it so like
00:23:46
Speaker
you take somebody like Jack Handy, who writes for the New Yorker, and I don't know if he still writes for Saturday Night Live or not, he used to. He had deep thoughts by Jack Handy, which was big in the late 80s and early 90s. His technique is understatement, or litotes, which is just, and also dramatic irony, right? And a lot of Jack Handy's humor
00:24:13
Speaker
his speakers are clueless, they have no idea what they're saying, they're usually very confident and they're very dumb. And to be able to show that to a student and then say, okay, so write me a character who's very confident in what he's saying, but completely stupid. And what's so great about dramatic irony is that the reader knows that this person's an idiot, that's how it works, and that's why they call it irony. The reader is aware that the speaker doesn't know what he's talking about, and we get some sort of weird pleasure from
00:24:42
Speaker
feeling like we know more than what a character knows. And so being able to show students that and then say, okay, let's see if we can find this in literature, because dramatic irony exists, and not just in humor writing, it exists in all kinds of literature, and then to try and do that themselves. And so in some ways, you know, it's really hard to say like, okay, write something funny. Well, what is that? What does that even mean? Like, you know, natural humorists, I mean, people who are just naturally funny, a stand-up comedian,
00:25:08
Speaker
uh... somewhat after you know comedy you like somebody who is naturally funny they don't have to have names for what they do they just do it they just have an instinct for it you know but in a classroom setting for somebody who really wants to get better at it you know it's really good to take come up with some names for these techniques and okay this is dramatic irony this is verbal irony this is misdirection this is hyperbole
00:25:31
Speaker
and then to see how people like George Saunders or Anthony Lane or David Sedaris or Bill Bryson or Simon Rich or Charles Portis to see how they do these things and then to try and imitate and you're going to imitate and you know it's going to suck real bad but you know hopefully over the years it sucks less and less and I don't know five ten years later you've got something that's actually funny that people want to publish.
00:25:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny you brought up Bill Bryson. I just finished reading his memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. And it's hysterical, especially in the early goings when he'll be describing the neighborhood kids. We went out there and we were playing a football game and there were easily three million kids on the field.
00:26:18
Speaker
And it's just that one little hyperbolic statement that it's coming through the seven year old's lens and it's just a very simple thing but it's hysterical on its face even though it's just completely ludicrous.
00:26:36
Speaker
So there's two things happening in that line. So first of all, you know, Bryson is saying what his seven-year-old self thought, right? That the seven-year-old self was so overwhelmed by how many kids were on the field. We as readers know that the seven-year-old is exact, the seven-year-old is wrong, right? There aren't that many kids.
00:26:57
Speaker
Yeah. But we also have pleasure in knowing that we know a little bit more than this little seven-year-old idiot does, right? So there's some pleasure. That's dramatic irony. We're getting pleasure from knowing more than this stupid person. Of course, the kid's seven, so it's okay that he's stupid, but we enjoy that. And then there's hyperbole, like you say, with the seven million or whatever the number was. And so, you know, I mean, just to be able to do that
00:27:20
Speaker
I think funny people can do that more naturally when they talk, but to do that when you write, it feels so much more complicated. You really have to be really loose when you're writing, because I think we're so used to
00:27:35
Speaker
Being truthful, when I say truthful, I mean like logically, literally truthful when we write, whether it's because of, you know, our good hearted English teachers, God bless them from, you know, junior high and high school and college, you know, they were trying to be as literal as possible. We're trying to be as clear as possible when we write a sentence or write a paper about Dostoevsky or write a paper about politics.
00:27:59
Speaker
And when you're writing humor or really any kind of literature, you know, you're not being literal. You have to be loose. You have to describe things in ways that aren't lowercase t true, right? But like to say there were easily 7 million people on the field.
00:28:16
Speaker
you know if you write that in an english class you know english composition your teachers are going to say or were there seven million people or was it more like thirty or the more like twenty you know the human right or the right of literature have to be a loose enough to say first of all the reader is going to know there were seven million people right you naturally know that because you're reading a book you're not an idiot but that could be loose enough and comfortable enough for the writer
00:28:40
Speaker
to make up something that's clearly not true, but in the service of some larger idea, for example, that obviously the seven-year-old is so overwhelmed by how many people are on the field that he conceives of it as being the population of New York City. I mean, it takes a lot of confidence for a writer to get to a point where they can exaggerate like that confidently without looking like they're just making something up.
Tragedy, Comedy, and Influences
00:29:03
Speaker
Hemingway has said something to the effect that a writer has to take a beating to write a really funny book. I was wondering what your feelings were about that statement. Well, you know, there's the old saying that comedy equals tragedy plus time. I mean, I guess that's true.
00:29:22
Speaker
But, you know, everybody, I mean, first of all, you know, there's no good story where somebody's not taking a beating, right? I mean, bad things happen in every story, you know, in every book of the Bible, in every, you know, play by Shakespeare, in every good poem, something bad is happening or has happened or will happen and is being thought about or experienced, right?
00:29:46
Speaker
I'm trying to think of what E.B. White said. He's got this essay called Some Remarks on Humor, and he says something to the effect of that a humorist will make pain pay, that a humorist will take the
00:30:05
Speaker
the terrible thing that happens, and you know, you turn it into, you redeem it a little bit, you turn it into something that we can all enjoy. I mean, you know, you look at comedy, like most comedy, you know, tragedy is about looking at death and acknowledging that you can't really escape it, right? Death is coming for us all, even our greatest heroes, you know, Hamlet, you know, that everybody is going to die, that death comes for us all, and comedy,
00:30:33
Speaker
kind of is what happens next. So if death is coming for us all, if none of us can be noble and great and somehow cheat death, then what do you do? And what you do is comedy, right? So tragedy, the realization that we're all gonna die and comedy is, okay, so given that fact, how should we behave? And I really think that's, you know, all humor is about terrible things. I tell my students,
00:31:03
Speaker
that, you know, humor really starts in either anger or anxiety. It's one of those two things. It's either you're really mad about something out there in the world, right, which is how we get satire, how we get the Daily Show. You know, you're really mad about this ridiculous thing. And maybe mad is not always the best word. Maybe incense, or maybe you're raging about it. Maybe you just sense there's some injustice, but it's external.
00:31:29
Speaker
And then the other kind of humor is internal. It's you're mad about something that's happening inside of you. You're anxious. You have fears. And so most humor feels like it comes from one of those two places. You're either really pissed off about something in the world or really pissed off about something inside of you. And it's usually a little bit of both. And you already touched upon this a little bit. Who are some of your writing influences from a pure comedic standpoint? Well, I mean, I definitely have to say,
00:31:57
Speaker
I mean, I guess I'd have to start with stand-up comics because when I was little, I mean, those were the first funny people, you know, I ever listened to. And I can remember, oh my gosh, I guess it was, what is it, comic relief from the 80s, maybe like 1985 or 86? I remember renting that on VHS and, you know, Robin Williams was on that and George Carlin. And I think Robin Williams was really my first favorite comedian.
00:32:25
Speaker
And just the kind of insanity of his stuff, it got so absurd and it was so frenetic. Maybe because he was doing so much coke, I'm not sure, but he never stopped. And there was never a breather. And it was just so energizing to watch, kind of mesmerizing. So I loved Robin Williams. I loved George Carlin. I really liked Richard Pryor.
00:32:50
Speaker
Oh well, that guy with the long hair, oh, Gallagher, who did the watermelon. Oh man, I used to love watching Gallagher. I probably, I mean, it's pretty corny stuff, but I remember when I was a kid just being so mesmerized by that, even more than funny movies, I really loved watching comedy, and we didn't have cable or anything growing up, so every now and then you'd have a comedian on Star Search, if you remember Star Search, it was like the American Idol of the 1980s,
00:33:18
Speaker
And Sinbad was on there. There were some other comedians that we would record Star Search and watch it. And occasionally it would be like stand up on like these weird shows on Saturday afternoon and I would watch those religiously and of course listen to
00:33:32
Speaker
Prairie Home Companion on the radio. And then, you know, when I was in college, I think the first real funny book that I read was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. My roommate Brian gave that book to me, and I kind of thought it was like some kind of sci-fi nerd book, which I guess...
00:33:52
Speaker
Technically, that's what it is. But man, it was so funny, and it was so smart, and it was just doing these kind of magic tricks with your brain. Even in the first, even in the prologue, there's this great line about digital watches in the prologue to this, and when I read it, I remember exactly where I was sitting. I was sitting on my college campus, and it was a quiet day, and I just opened this book up. I guess I was bored,
00:34:21
Speaker
It was just so funny and so unexpected that this kind of humor that I had heard comedians do, but here it was in book form, and I loved books. I mean, I've been reading my whole life, you know, reading a book a week. And then to see that, oh wow, like that kind of funny can also happen here, it really kind of blew my mind. And so, you know, I think there's five books in that series, and I read all of those in about two weeks.
00:34:44
Speaker
And of course, I also was disillusioned with that book or with that series because I remember by about book three, it stopped being as funny. And I thought, well, maybe it's just me. So I found another funny novel and I found another Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, those guys.
00:35:01
Speaker
I don't know if that was back then or maybe a few years later, but I remember thinking, I just got really hungry to find funny stuff and I would ask everybody, this is in college and in graduate school, who are some funny writers? Who's writing funny novels? Who's writing funny essays, funny plays? And of course everybody thinks they know, right?
00:35:19
Speaker
other writers or writing students or writing teachers would tell me. And I'd be like, oh, this book is so funny. You look on the back of the book and it says, oh, you know, laugh out loud funny, or you'll be rolling on the floor. And, you know, I never would be. I'd read this stuff and like a couple of pages might be funny, but I'm not going to wait. I don't want to waste, you know, 12 hours of my life reading a book when I laugh two or three times.
00:35:40
Speaker
And it was really disheartening to me, but that's in one way, one reason I started trying to write stuff is because I thought, I want to write something that makes me laugh the whole way through or as much of the way through as you can and still be a good story. And the first book I read that was really like that for me was A Confederacy of Dunces, which I read, I guess.
00:36:04
Speaker
I don't know I was in my early 20s maybe 23 or 24 when I read that book but that was another one that really kind of blew my mind because it was just as funny as Hitchhiker's but it was also smart you know it had
00:36:18
Speaker
There were big ideas in it about religion and philosophy and how humans should act, but it never took itself seriously. The writer didn't necessarily have these ideas so much as the characters did. The idea of combining really big, huge, abstract, philosophical thinking about how humans should be with
00:36:41
Speaker
with humor was just awesome and you know again it was just kept wetting my appetite trying to find something funny and you know I read all the Woody Allen books and you know Steve Martin had a book called Pure Dribble and I read that and then I started to see that there were different kinds of humor that you know you've got like your basic comic novel like a Confederacy of Dutchess or Hitchhiker's Guide and your Straight Man by Richard Russo is
00:37:06
Speaker
terrifically funny novel, at least the first half of it is as good as anything I've ever read. So there's that. But then I realized there's also, of course, you've got nonfiction humor, you've got essays and memoir, but then you also have this kind of weird humor like you see at McSweeney's Internet Tendency and on Shouts and Murmurs that's not really so much a story, at least usually not a story.
00:37:28
Speaker
But, you know, whether it's a list or a how-to or an open letter or you have an inanimate object as talking to the reader. And so just to discover these different modes of humor and where to find them and to realize which ones I was good at, which ones I was not quite as good at, which ones I wanted to write. But, man, it's really everywhere. I mean, George Saunders, you know, his stuff is...
00:37:53
Speaker
both really funny and often really sad or really dark or really weird. His book, The Brain Dead Megaphone, has some hilarious essays in it. Nostalgia is a great essay. A Brief Study of the British is a great essay. But his book, Pastoralia, has some great stories. Let's do his other books. But Pastoralia has some really funny stuff that we read with my humor students. And these are stories that are really touching. They're not just like
00:38:22
Speaker
it's not just fart jokes and potty humor and gross things happening and making fun of people that are really human stories where crazy weird strange sad things happen uh... and then you know sometimes it ends well sometimes it ends on a positive note and sometimes it ends on a more of a question mark but man like that guy had got something crazy weird happening in his brain
00:38:46
Speaker
And so I try to discover new stuff every week and I try to share that with my students and everything you reach should make you get better.
00:38:55
Speaker
well you've definitely got a skill for it and
Podcast Conclusion
00:38:57
Speaker
uh... it was a good tremendously entertaining to uh... to read the wishbone again the wishbone of one the creative non-fiction southern sin essay contest uh... he says that creative non-fiction to get your hands on Harrison's essays and many many others there's been a great pleasure to have you on the show thank you so much for taking some time at your afternoon where there are really appreciate hope i didn't talk your off and i really appreciate what you do with the podcast i think it's pretty great