Jack Handey

Jack Handey (born 25 February 1949) is an American humorist. He is best known for his Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey, a large body of surrealistic one-liner jokes, as well as his "Fuzzy Memories" and "My Big Thick Novel" shorts. Although many people assume otherwise,^[1][2] Handey is a real person, not a pen name or character.

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 (where he was editor of Sabre, the school newspaper) 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".^[2] His first comic writing was with comedian Steve Martin. According to Martin, Handey got a job writing for Saturday Night Live after Martin introduced Handey to the show's creator, Lorne Michaels.^[3] 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 NBC called The New Show in 1984. Handey returned to Saturday Night Live in 1985 as a writer and co-producer.^[4]

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 and their outlandish hypothetical situations. For example:

• 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.^[5][6]

• The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.^[7][8][9]

Handey's work next showed up in the Mike Nesmith produced TV series Television Parts, in the format which would later become famous on Saturday Night Live (though in Television Parts, Nesmith provided the narration). Some of these bits appeared in the compilation video of that program, Doctor Duck's Super Secret All-Purpose Sauce.

Between 1991 and 1998, Saturday Night Live included Deep Thoughts on the show as an interstitial segment between sketches. Introduced by Phil Hartman and read live by Handey (neither actually appeared on screen), the one-liners proved to be extremely popular. Hartman would intone "And now, Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey...", and peaceful easy listening music would play while the screen showed soothing pastoral scenes, much like a New Age relaxation video. Handey would then read the Deep Thought as the text to it scrolled across the screen. They became an enduring feature of SNL, often having multiple Thoughts in each episode, and made Handey a well-known name.

Other SNL work

Other Handey pieces that appeared on SNL included Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer,^[10] "Fuzzy Memories" which depicted reenactments of a twisted childhood memory and aired in the late 1990s, and the short-lived "My Big Thick Novel", which were spoken excerpts from a very long book in the style of "Deep Thoughts" and which aired during the 2001–03 seasons of SNL.

Handey is also credited with creating Toonces, the cat who could drive a car, although badly ("See, I told you he could drive! Just not very well!").^[11] The recurring skit originated in 1989 with Steve Martin and Victoria Jackson as the crash-prone kitty's owners. In 1992 NBC aired a half-hour Toonces special, Handey, who owned a real cat by the same name, once said he couldn't remember exactly how he dreamed up the premise. He said, "It was just one of those free association ideas you write down and look at later and think, 'Maybe.'"^[11]

Recent life

Jack Handey currently lives with his wife, Marta Chavez Handey,^[6] in Santa Fe, New Mexico.^[1] Previously, the Handeys had lived in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.^[2]

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;^[12] "My First Day In Hell", in the issue of October 30, 2006;^[13] "My Nature Documentary", in the issue of July 2, 2007;^[14] "How Things Even Out", in the issue of March 3, 2008,^[15] "How I Want To Be Remembered," in the issue of March 31, 2008,^[16] "The Symbols on My Flag (And What They Mean)" in the issue of May 19, 2008 and "The Plan" in the issue of November 24, 2008.^[17] Handey has written and performed segments on the radio program Studio 360.

In early April, 2008, Handey published his first collection of magazine humor pieces, What I'd Say to the Martians and Other Veiled Threats. An example of a "deep thought" contained therein is: "I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus" (attributed elsewhere to British comedian Bob Monkhouse). The Associated Press critic Jake Coyle wrote, "With absurdist musings such as these, Handey has established himself as the strangest of birds: a famous comedian whose platform is not the stage or screen, but the page."^[18]

After four quiet years, Handey's piece "Alexander the Great" appeared in the March 12, 2012 issue of the New Yorker.^[19]

On July 16, 2013 Handey's first novel, The Stench of Honolulu, was released.

Works

Books

• Deep Thoughts (1992). Berkley Publishing Group, ISBN 0-425-13365-6
• Deeper Thoughts: All New, All Crispy (1993). Hyperion, ISBN 1-56282-840-1
• Deepest Thoughts: So Deep they Squeak (1994). Hyperion, ISBN 0-7868-8044-9
• Fuzzy Memories (1996). Andrews McMeel Publishing, ISBN 0-8362-1040-9 – a collection of "stories from Handey's childhood"

• Fuzzy Memories: CD-Rom (2003). Disc Us Books Inc, ISBN 1-58444-078-3 - An Emersa*Plus Reader/Viewer E-book that contains all of the text and pictures from the original book plus "new memories," 28 videos of "Jack's home movies", and 60 audio files of Jack reading selected stories.

• The Lost Deep Thoughts: Don't Fight the Deepness (1998), Hyperion, ISBN 0-7868-8305-7
• What I'd Say to the Martians and Other Veiled Threats (2008), Hyperion, ISBN 978-1-4013-2266-3
• The Stench of Honolulu: A Tropical Adventure (2013), Grand Central, ISBN 978-1-4555-2238-5

Articles

• Handey, Jack (24 November 2008). ""The Plan"". The New Yorker 84 (38): 62. Retrieved 16 April 2009. 

Television writing

• Steve Martin: Comedy Is Not Pretty! (1980)
• Prime Times (1983)
• The New Show (1984)
• Television Parts Home Companion (1985) - sequel to Elephant Parts by Michael Nesmith)
• Doctor Duck's Super Secret All-Purpose Sauce (1986) - another sequel to Elephant Parts by Michael Nesmith
• Saturday Night Live (1985–1998 and 2001–2002)

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jack Handey

• Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey official website
• Jack Handey at the Internet Movie Database
• Extensive audio interview on public radio program The Sound of Young America
• "In Praise of the Human Body", 2005 short piece for Outside
• "My Speech To The Martians", May 5, 2006 reading on the radio program Studio 360
• Jack Handey's articles at the The New Yorker
• Jack Handey Is the Envy of Every Comedy Writer in America from The New York Times