Today's Reading
INTRODUCTION
So I'm in a rock band with Stephen King.
(I'm not name-dropping here; I have a point.)
It's an all-author band called the Rock Bottom Remainders. If I had to identify our biggest weakness, as a band, I would say it's performing music. We suck at that. What we're good at is endurance. We have endured, as a band, for more than thirty years, something you cannot say about, for example, the Beatles.
I met Steve (I call him Steve) at our first rehearsal, in 1992. When I arrived, the other authors were already "jamming," which is what musicians call it when everybody is playing something on an instrument, but nobody knows for sure what anyone else is playing. At least that's how the Remainders jam.
So I shouldered my guitar and joined in. After we spent maybe a half hour trying, with only sporadic success, to play the same chord at the same time, we took a break. As I was unshouldering my guitar, Steve, whom I'd never met, came over to me, leaned his face down to mine (he's a big guy) and said, in a booming voice, "So, Dave Barry, WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?"
Then he laughed a maniacal horror-master laugh. We all laughed, because "Where do you get your ideas?" is the cliché question authors get asked all the time, to the point where many of us have a joke response, such as "Costco."
The truth is, there's no simple answer to the question of where ideas come from. Sure, sometimes it's obvious. If you're a humor columnist, and your dog manages to snag your uncooked Thanksgiving turkey off the kitchen counter and eat a bunch of it raw, then vomit it back up, then, shortly thereafter, notice the mess on the floor and decide for some dog reason to eat it again, your initial reaction is going to be "Dammit! The dog has ruined Thanksgiving!" But your immediate next reaction is going to be, "Hey! That's an idea for a humor column!"
But most of the time you have no idea where you got an idea: It just appears in your brain. Of course it had to have inspired by something—your childhood, your education, your social environment, your fourth vodka gimlet, or some combination of these and other factors, swirling around in your subconscious mind until an idea burbles up to where you can grab hold of it and turn it into words, and thus survive for another day as a writer, instead of having to get a real job.
So it's complicated, the ideas question. You could write a whole book about it. And that, basically, is what this memoir is: my attempt to give a non-Costco explanation of how, over the decades, I was able to pull enough jokes out of my butt, or wherever they came from, to achieve fame and fortune in the field of humor writing.
Although I hesitate to use the word "fame." I have achieved a certain level of celebrity, but it's a pretty low level. I mean, people do sometimes recognize me in public, but it turns out, upon further review, that a substantial number of these people think I'm Carl Hiaasen. Carl is my good friend—I love Carl—but he's a completely separate human being.
So I worry that I'm not famous enough to write a memoir. I'm nervous about venturing into a genre dominated by mega-celebrities such as Barbra Streisand, who wrote a 970-page memoir teeming with anecdotes about all the famous people she has known. For example, in her book she describes the time she got a phone call from Warren Beatty, then writes: "I hung up and asked myself, Did I sleep with Warren? I kind of remember. I guess I did. Probably once."
Think about that: Barbra Streisand has had so many celebrity encounters that she doesn't even know for sure whether she slept with Warren Beatty. I can't compete with that. Warren Beatty has never even texted me, let alone called. Sure, I've had some noteworthy experiences. I once used a Barbie doll to set fire to a pair of men's underpants on national television (more on this later). Also I'm in a rock band—did I mention this already?—with Stephen King. But I'm nowhere near Barbra's league.
So when I started this memoir project, I was genuinely unsure about whether it was a good idea. Throughout the writing process, I was nagged by nagging questions, such as: "Why would anybody want to read this?" And: "Who's going to care?"
And those questions were coming from my wife.
No, that's a joke. My wife has been very supportive. But I'm hoping to reach a wider audience. So to you, the person reading these words who, ideally, is not one of my close relatives who got the book for free, I say: Thanks. I hope you enjoy this memoir. It's not all jokes—there are some serious parts, especially in the early chapters—but I hope you'll be entertained.
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