It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. W...
In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else...
I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on...
How’s the uh..uh..(look at palm) SCREENPLAY going… uh..uh..(racking brain) LESLIE NIELSEN. Yipes. Or:
For a while, Mirabelle believes there will be a moment when he will cave in and let himself love her, but eventually she lets the idea go. She hits bottom. She dwells in the muck for several months, n...
A young man, Jamaican, perhaps, his head circled in a scarf with sunbleached dreadlocks on piled on top, looking like a plate of soft-shell crabs.
I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.
Career in the irrational world of creativity not only made sense but had moral purpose.
When you work in the glove department at Neiman's, you are selling things that nobody buys anymore.
What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would t...
These word games bothered and intrigued me. Appearing to be silly nonsense, on examination they were absolutely logical—yet they were still funny. The comedy doors opened wide, and Lewis Carroll’s cle...
There is nothing too mysterious about Ray Porter, at least not in the usual sense of the word. He is single, he is kind, he tries to do the right thing, and he does not understand himself, or women, o...
The woman speaks, stops, then after what must have been a long speech by the person on the other end of the line, says, ... just remember, darling, it is pain that changes our lives. Mirabelle cannot...
The overhead lights reflect in the glass countertop and mingle in the gray and black of the gloves, resulting in a mother-of-pearl swirl that sometimes sends Mirabelle into a shallow hypnotic dream.
Sure, I've gotten some disbelieving stares when I've tried to explain this little habit of mine to, say, a bus seatmate. I've watched a guy adjust his posture, or get up and move back several rows, ev...
So she viewed time spent in the land of the normal as an investigation into the world of marriage-worthy men, even if she was unsure about her own interest in marriage. There must be one solid citizen...
One day I was particularly gloomy, and Jim asked me what the matter was. I told him my high school girlfriend (for all of two weeks) had broken up with me. He said, Oh, that’ll happen a lot. The knowl...
Mirabelle, who never takes credit for her attractiveness, believes it is not she he is responding to, but rather something independent of her.
Mirabelle's ambition is about one-tenth of 1 percent of what would be called normal. ... She is not aware that some people fight like alley cats for desirable situations. She presents a résumé, fills...