Jeff Minton for The New York Times
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. . . . "
From Jack Handey
The writing team of "Saturday Night Live" for the 1985-86 season, when Jack Handey joined the show. Top row: Don Novello, John Swartzwelder, Mark McKinney, Handey, Tom Davis. Middle row: Bruce McCulloch, Robert Smigel, Carol Leifer, George Meyer. Bottom row: A. Whitney Brown, Lanier Laney, Terry Sweeney, Lorne Michaels, Al Franken, James Downey.
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."
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