Jack Handey Is the Envy of Every Comedy
Writer in America
By DAN KOIS
When Jack Handey sold his first jokes to Steve Allen
in 1977, Allen sent him a letter offering him $100 and telling him his name
sounded like a product, not a person. “Say homemakers, take a look at the new
Jack Handey,” Allen wrote. “Just the thing for slicing, dicing, mopping,
slopping, stamping, primping. . . . ”
The longtime “Simpsons” writer Ian Maxtone-Graham, who
worked with Handey at “Saturday Night Live,” recalled that everyone he told
about Handey asked if that was a fake name. “I wonder why that is,”
Maxtone-Graham said. “I guess because it sounds like, if your car breaks down,
you should have a Jack Handey.”
“I hope your article can clear up all the confusion,”
Senator Al Franken told me when I contacted him. “Jack Handey is a real person,
and he wrote all the ‘Deep Thoughts.’ Not me.”
Jack Handey is a solidly built man of 64 with a swoop
of graying hair; when he smiles, his teeth are blindingly white. We were sitting
around the island in Handey’s Santa Fe kitchen as his wife, Marta, made huevos
rancheros for breakfast. Jack and Marta have been together for 36 years. I asked
if he helped out around the kitchen, and he said, “I can cook Cheerios.”
“You can cook a hard-boiled egg!” Marta said brightly.
“I’m getting pretty good at that,” he agreed.
Handey is best known as the writer and performer of
“Deep Thoughts,” a series of quasi-philosophical cracked aphorisms that ran on
“Saturday Night Live” from 1991 to 1998. The license plate on Handey’s car is
DPTHOTS; on the wall of the garage is mounted the plate he purchased initially
but never used: DEEPTHT. That’s because the day Handey was screwing it on,
Marta’s brother asked, “Why does your license plate say ‘Deep Throat’?”
The four “Deep Thoughts” books hogged bookstore
checkout counters for much of the 1990s and sold, in total, about a million
copies. Now he has written a novel, his first, titled “The Stench of Honolulu,”
available this month. The narrator is a narcissistic borderline sociopath, and
the novel’s fictional Honolulu is a smelly hellhole full of ooga-booga natives
right out of a 1930s cartoon. Handey is familiar with the real Hawaii; he
recounted a memorable trip the couple took to Kauai, in which a beautiful day of
snorkeling ended at nightfall with hundreds of cockroaches emerging from every
corner of their rental house and swarming over everything they owned. (Handey
joked about being nervous that, once the book comes out, he won’t ever be
allowed to go back.) The novel also functions as a kind of thought exercise. The
exercise is: What if the “Deep Thoughts” guy was a character in a book?
Maria Semple, a writer for “S.N.L.” and “Arrested
Development” and the author of the novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” spent a
long time on the phone with me trying to explain what it is about Handey’s
comedy that makes him different from almost anyone else writing comedy today.
“In the rewrite room,” she finally said, “we used to say, ‘It smells like a
joke.’ That’s the scourge of comedy these days. It smells like a joke, but
there’s no actual joke there. I’m not the comedy police, but you watch a movie,
and everyone’s laughing, and then you shake it out and you realize, ‘There’s no
joke there!’ ” But in Handey’s novel, she said, “I don’t think four lines go by
without a killer joke. These are real jokes, man. They don’t just smell like
jokes.”
This idea — the notion of real jokes and the existence
of pure comedy — came up again and again when I asked other writers about
Handey. It seemed as if to them Handey is not just writing jokes but trying to
achieve some kind of Platonic ideal of the joke form. “There is purity to his
comedy,” Semple said. “His references are all grandmas and Martians and cowboys.
It’s so completely free from topical references and pop culture that I feel like
everyone who’s gonna make a Honey Boo Boo joke should do some penance and read
Jack Handey.”
“For a lot of us, he was our favorite writer, and the
one we were most in awe of,” said James Downey, who wrote for “S.N.L.” “When I
was head writer there, my policy was just to let him do his thing and to make
sure that nothing got in the way of him creating.”
“He was the purest writer,” Franken said. “It was pure
humor, it wasn’t topical at all. It was Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.”
The humorist Ian Frazier, a friend of Handey’s, told
me, “I see Jack as in the tradition of Mark Twain or Will Rogers. He writes
jokes that just keep on going. They’re not gonna crash and burn because they’re
about Don Johnson, and people forget who Don Johnson was. Jokes are by their
nature perishable. If you can write a timeless joke, that’s an incredible
thing.”
Handey’s novel continues that quest for the timeless
joke. Its paragraph-by-paragraph structure will be familiar to anyone who
purchased one of those “Deep Thoughts” books. “The Stench of Honolulu” consists
of setup-punch-line bits, each just slightly more off-kilter than you might
expect. It’s both extremely funny and, at times, strikingly old-fashioned — to
the point that often when I read a joke, rather than laughing, I’d think, I can
imagine a time when I would have laughed at this joke. But then there were times
I laughed so hard that the person sitting next to me at the pool asked if I was
O.K. I told her I was reading a book by Jack Handey. She recognized the name,
but said she didn’t realize he was a real person.
One challenge in writing about Handey
is that his outward persona is very low-key — aggressively low-key, you might
say. “I met Jack when we shared an office at ‘The New Show,’ ” the “Simpsons”
writer George Meyer wrote to me. “From his flipped-out writing, I pictured a
wild-eyed comedy dervish, muttering and slobbering like the Tasmanian Devil.
Instead I found a kind, placid fly fisherman.”
When I visited him in New Mexico, Handey was never
less than friendly, but he made a point of telling me how uncomfortable he feels
performing in interview scenarios. “I’m not that funny on my feet,” he said.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t ever tell jokes. They’re just not the pithy
one-liners he’s famous for. The most I laughed in our interview was as he
explained how he and Frazier once bewildered a fishing guide with an hourlong
riff in which they pretended to be registered sex offenders. Handey slipped
easily into the riff: “Some of these other so-called sex offenders aren’t even
registered. They don’t even have papers! They don’t put the work into it.”
Handey was born in San Antonio; his father, an officer
in the Marines, moved the family around quite a bit before they settled in El
Paso, where Jack went to high school and college. He lucked out of the Vietnam
draft, and his father didn’t pressure him to serve — “You’re not going,” his
father sternly told him — and in 1972 he got a job as a newspaper reporter in
Santa Fe, where he lived next door to an up-and-coming comedian named Steve
Martin. “He’d come over and play his banjo,” Handey said, “and we got to know
each other.” Several years later, Handey sent Martin some material, and Martin
hired him to help write his “Wild and Crazy Guy” TV special in Los Angeles.
Marta, who met Handey in high school in El Paso, moved with him, because she had
faith in his comedic talents. “The only reason people bought our high-school
paper was to read his hilarious humor column,” she told me. The column was
called “Witty Words to Whittle By.”
In 1983, Martin recommended Handey to Lorne Michaels,
who hired him to write for “The New Show,” moving him from Los Angeles to New
York. “The New Show” didn’t last, but when Michaels took back “Saturday Night
Live,” following the Dick Ebersol interregnum of 1981-1985, he sought out Handey
again. Handey worked on the show for the next decade, writing the kinds of
sketches that nobody else on the staff could write.
The archetypal Jack Handey sketch is about
Frankenstein, or flying saucers, or a cat who, for some reason, can drive a car.
“Little-boy stuff,” Handey explained. He often worked alone on his sketches
rather than team up with other writers, and he liked to work from his and
Marta’s Chelsea apartment, so he would show up each week to Wednesday
read-throughs with these fully formed, immaculate sketches that would freak
everyone out. Franken recalled a sketch called “Giant Businessman,” about an
actual giant (played by Phil Hartman) who calls the cops on the loud party next
door, then is terrified when the neighbor threatens him. At the read-through,
Franken laughed so long and hard at the sketch’s final beat — in which the giant
asked the F.B.I., sincerely, if he might join the witness protection program —
that he had to excuse himself from the crowded room because his laughter was
interrupting the next sketch.
Handey’s sketches often appeared in the final minutes
of the show, in the position Maria Semple called “Cast for Good Nights” —
because it ran while the stage manager was announcing, “We need the cast for
good nights!” “I owned that 12:45 slot,” Handey told me proudly. According to
Maxtone-Graham, that spot was where the producers put “the really funny sketches
that were too cerebral to get belly laughs.” For Handey’s fellow writers, “those
late-in-the-show Jack Handeyesque sketches were sort of the treat you can’t wait
for.”
Everyone I talked to who worked at “S.N.L.” had a
favorite Jack Handey sketch, and many of those favorites are amazing-sounding
sketches that never even made it to air. Maxtone-Graham raved about an opening
Handey wrote in which the show’s host, Jerry Seinfeld, was to stand with the
cast pretending that they’re delivering the good nights, thanking all the
incredible guest stars who showed up that night. “ ‘Thank you so much to Madonna
for showing up, and the president!’ It’s as if you missed the world’s greatest
episode.” George Meyer recounted a sketch that Handey wrote with Christine
Zander about two dollmakers who imagine what it would be like if their creations
magically came to life. “That very night,” Meyer recalled, “two dolls begin to
stir, then they dance an enchanted pas de deux. The dollmakers awaken to this
wondrous scene, only to scream in terror and smash the dolls to bits with
mallets. I don’t think the piece made it to air, but I laughed until I couldn’t
breathe.”
“People cried laughing at that sketch at the table
read,” Zander remembered. “It must’ve been a total bomb at the dress rehearsal.
It happened to all of us, but it often happened to Jack. Sometimes his stuff was
just so smart and clever it could go right over a regular audience’s head.”
Handey enjoys “pontificating about comedy,” but he
doesn’t have a grand theory of why his jokes work. He rarely wrote sketches
about current events, he said, because “it feels so throwaway. I’m sure there
were great jokes that were very timely to 1878, but nobody wants to read ’em
now.”
I asked him about “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer,” one of my
all-time favorite “S.N.L.” sketches, in which Phil Hartman played Keerok, a
caveman who fell in an icy crevasse, then was thawed out by scientists and went
to law school. The central joke is simple and perfect: Keerok claims that the
modern world frightens him, then cynically uses the sympathy engendered to win
cases. “That was one that Lorne never really got,” Handey said. “He’d say at the
party, ‘You know, I heard people actually liked that!’
“A lot of comedy is going the extra step,” Handey
continued. “An unfrozen caveman was funny — but that’s not enough.” Later, he
e-mailed me a sheet of sketch ideas he typed up in 1991. The sketch seemed to be
a combination of two ideas: “Too Many Frozen Cavemen,” in which a surplus of
frozen Neanderthals drive scientists crazy, and “Swamp Bastard,” about a Swamp
Thing-like creature who keeps stealing everyone’s girlfriends. “I guess my brain
put these things in a blender,” he wrote, “and out came Unfrozen Caveman
Lawyer.”
He would work as many as 90 hours a week at “Saturday
Night Live,” inevitably becoming so burned out that he’d retreat to Santa Fe for
the summer, vowing never to return. But then they’d offer him a nice raise, and
he’d say, Well, O.K. I asked him if he ever clashed with other writers, and he
said, “One time I really got in Al Franken’s face. I shouldn’t say why. Can it
be off the record?” He went on to tell a story about a confrontation so
nonconfrontational that I eventually said, “Good news, Jack, that story was so
boring that I’m not going to ask you to put it on the record.” Marta and Jack
then began reminiscing about Franken. “I’m sure he’s a fine senator,” Handey
said finally. “But he’s such a great comedy writer, it’s almost like . . . Mark
Twain deciding to be a florist.”
Handey initially had a great deal of
difficulty persuading the show’s producers to run “Deep Thoughts,” which he
previously published in National Lampoon and in George Meyer’s legendary comedy
magazine Army Man. “They were reluctant to give a writer something with his name
on it, you know?” Handey said. “The ironic thing, of course, is that people
still think Jack Handey is a made-up name.” He submitted the jokes to a
read-through, where “Lorne gets his big basket of popcorn, and he reads the
stage directions, and then the actors would read the parts.” Joan Cusack read
the Deep Thoughts, and, Handey recalled, response was so-so. Still, he kept
lobbying for the spot to make the show. “I would go through Jim Downey, and he
would take it to Lorne. ” The answer was always the same: “No.” (“Lorne wasn’t
as big a fan of them as I was,” Downey remembered.)
“I guess eventually they sort of felt like, let’s
throw him this bone,” Handey said. “Deep Thoughts” made its debut on Jan. 19,
1991, in an episode hosted by Sting. It was this gem: “To me, clowns aren’t
funny. In fact, they’re kinda scary. I’ve wondered where this started, and I
think it goes back to the time when I went to the circus and a clown killed my
dad.”
“Deep Thoughts” wound up being the perfect
distillation of Handey’s comedic temperament. He was no longer constrained by
the format of the sketch — he was free to create koans, tiny polished gems of
comedy. Like: “If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell
him is ‘God is crying.’ And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to
tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.’ ”
“There’s a high attrition rate,” he said. “For each
one that works, I throw away 10. I find that easier than rewriting. I’d rather
just scrap it and start over. That’s why the novel was so hard — I really had to
rewrite things over and over.” He seems truly unconcerned with the novel’s
commercial fate; a friend offered to throw him a book party, but, Handey said,
“July is not the most pleasant time to be in New York.” He doesn’t like touring
or doing radio. “It all goes back to my innate laziness. Some people get out
there and sell and do readings. God bless ’em.” On some level, he sort-of-joked,
he feels as if the world should be grateful he even finished the damn thing:
“C’mon, I wrote it! I have to sell it too? What, do I have to pulp the
remainders next year?”
Handey doesn’t watch “Saturday Night Live” that much
anymore. (“It’s on so late.”) He asked what current comedy I liked; when I named
Patton Oswalt, Key & Peele and Amy Schumer, they were all news to him. The
comedy genius who was the idol of all his “S.N.L.” co-workers is now safely a
couple of thousand of miles away from New York, living with his wife, his
biggest fan, his first reader, to whom he dedicates even the silliest of books.
And he’s still quietly pursuing that one pure joke.
I asked if there’s any joke of his that stands out as
his favorite.
“Brevity is a big factor for me in a stand-alone joke.
To get a laugh with the fewest number of words possible. Which is why ‘Take my
wife, please’ is such a great joke. The closest I’ve ever come is probably ‘The
crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.’ ”
I also asked if there was one Deep Thought he’d never
been able to make work — the Great White Whale of Deep Thoughts. He told me one
that he said only ever made him and Marta laugh.
“See the fox running through the snow. Then he’s
attacked by his mortal enemy: the fox. Fox on fox. Man, what a sight.”
Then he and Marta both cracked up.
