#JACK HANDY CRACKED#
#JACK HANDY FULL#

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.” “His references are all grandmas and Martians and cowboys. “There is purity to his comedy,” Semple said. 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. 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. 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. It smells like a joke, but there’s no actual joke there. “In the rewrite room,” she finally said, “we used to say, ‘It smells like a joke.’ That’s the scourge of comedy these days. 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. The exercise is: What if the “Deep Thoughts” guy was a character in a book? (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. 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.

#JACK HANDY FULL#

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. Now he has written a novel, his first, titled “The Stench of Honolulu,” available this month. The four “Deep Thoughts” books hogged bookstore checkout counters for much of the 1990s and sold, in total, about a million copies. That’s because the day Handey was screwing it on, Marta’s brother asked, “Why does your license plate say ‘Deep Throat’?” 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.

#JACK HANDY CRACKED#

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. “I’m getting pretty good at that,” he agreed. “You can cook a hard-boiled egg!” Marta said brightly.

Jack handy