Jack Handey

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Jack Handey (born 25 February 1949) is an American humorist. He is best known for his Deep Thoughts, a large body of surrealistic one-liner jokes, as well as his "Fuzzy Memories" and "My Big Thick Novel" shorts. Many people have the impression that Jack Handey is not an actual person, but a character created by Saturday Night Live or a pen name used by National Lampoon.

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[edit] Early years

Handey was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1949. His family later moved to El Paso, Texas, where Handey attended Eastwood High School and the University of Texas at El Paso.

Handey's earliest writing job was for a newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News. He lost the job, in his words, after writing "an article that offended local car dealerships".[1] His first comic writing was with comedian and fellow Texan Steve Martin. According to Martin, Handey got a job writing for Saturday Night Live in 1975 after Martin introduced Handey to the show's creator, Lorne Michaels.[2] For several years Handey worked on other television projects: the Canadian sketch series Bizarre in 1980; the 1980 TV special Steve Martin: Comedy is Not Pretty; and Lorne Michaels' short-lived sketch show on ABC called The New Show in 1984. Handey returned to Saturday Night Live in 1985 as a writer and co-producer.[3]

[edit] Deep Thoughts

In April 1984, National Lampoon published the first of Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts. Additional Deep Thoughts appeared in the October and November 1984 editions as well as in the short-lived comedy magazine Army Man, while more appeared in 1988 in The New Mexican. The one-liners were to become Handey's signature work, notable for their concise humor, their outlandish hypothetical situations, and their unexpected garden path twists:

“
  • If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.[4][5]
  • The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.[6][7]
 ”


Handey's work next showed up in the Mike Nesmith film, Doctor Duck's Super Secret All-Purpose Sauce, in the format which would later become famous on Saturday Night Live (though narrated by Nesmith).

Between 1991 and 1998, Saturday Night Live included Deep Thoughts on the show as filler between sketches. Read live by Handey (who never appeared onscreen), the one-liners proved to be extremely popular. They became an enduring feature of SNL (particularly in the mid-1990s when critics panned SNL for its decline in quality) and made Handey a well-known name. Other Handey pieces that appeared on SNL include "Fuzzy Memories" which shows a re-enactment of a twisted childhood memory (which aired in the late 1990s) and the short-lived "My Big Thick Novel" (which aired during the 2001-2002 season of SNL and in a few episodes in the 2002-2003 season), which showed chapters from a very long book.

Today the Deep Thoughts can be found copied on numerous websites (although his name is often misspelled as "Handy" or "Handley"). A Deep Thought is also featured in the Nirvana song "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die."

[edit] Recent whereabouts

As of 2002, Jack Handey lives with his wife, Marta Chavez Handey,[8] in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.[9]

Recently, several short humor pieces of his have appeared in The New Yorker's "Shouts & Murmurs" section: "What I'd Say To The Martians," in the issue of August 8 & 15, 2005; "This Is No Game," in the issue of January 9, 2006; "Ideas For Paintings," in the issue of March 20, 2006 [10]; and "My First Day In Hell", in the issue of October 30, 2006 [11].

[edit] Books

[edit] References

  1. ^ Handey, Jack: "Deep Thoughts about Me: Questions I am Often Asked (and My Answers)", Texas Monthly, January 2002.
  2. ^ "Martin Writes Off Fried Shrimp Days," New York Post, 1 October 1999.
  3. ^ "Jack Handey," Internet Movie Database, [1].
  4. ^ Handey, Jack: "Deep Thoughts," Saturday Night Live Episode 17.3, 12 October 1991. Cited online in The SNL Archives, [2].
  5. ^ Handey, Jack: Deep Thoughts (1992). Berkley Publishing Group, n.p.
  6. ^ Handey, Jack: "Deep Thoughts," Saturday Night Live Episode 18.7, 21 October 1992. Cited online in The SNL Archives, [3].
  7. ^ Handey, Jack: Deeper Thoughts: All New, All Crispy (1993). Hyperion, n.p.
  8. ^ Handey, Deep Thoughts, n.p.
  9. ^ Handey, Jack: "Deep Thoughts about Me: Questions I am Often Asked (and My Answers)", Texas Monthly, January 2002.
  10. ^ Handey, Jack: "Ideas for Paintings," New Yorker, 20 March 2006; and [4]
  11. ^ Handey, Jack: "My First Day In Hell," New Yorker, 30 October 2006, [5]

[edit] External links

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