Interviews with David Sedaris, Dave Barry, Jack Handey, Bob Odenkirk, and other humor-writing pros: Sure to captivate anyone who loves a good comedy. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

If you aspire to write sitcoms, standup, screenplays, or satirical essays--or are just a connoisseur of comedy--you should learn from the professionals. With interviews from twenty-one top humor writers whose credits include everything from Marx Brothers movies to Borat and The Office, readers will score not only professional advice but personal details about their processes, influences, and experiences in the industry--and, of course, more than a few amusing stories. Discover what Paul Feig thinks would have happened to Freaks and Geeks if the show had had another season; what the writers' room at SNL is really like; how the Onion editorial staff dealt with the aftermath of 9/11; and much, much more.

These humor writers are among the best in the business, ranging from veterans to newcomers, and have collectively been involved with many of the pop culture touchstones of the last half-century.

Interviewees include: Stephen Merchant (The Office) - Harold Ramis (Animal House, Groundhog Day) - Dan Mazer (Da Ali G Show, Borat) - Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks) - Bob Odenkirk (The Ben Stiller Show) - Todd Hanson (The Onion) - Mitch Hurwitz (Arrested Development) - David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day) - Al Jaffee (Mad) - Allison Silverman (The Colbert Report) - Robert Smigel (Late Night with Conan O'Brien) - Dave Barry (Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up) - Larry Wilmore (In Living Color, The Bernie Mac Show) - Jack Handey (Saturday Night Live) - Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H, Tootsie) - Buck Henry - Merrill Markoe - Irving Brecher - Marshall Brickman - George Meyer - Dick Cavett

Remarkably frank interviews . . . reads like a secret history of popular culture. --Time

Loaded with information for people interested in comedy, not just those who want to work in the business. --PopMatters

The 1994 movie This Is How We Love touched the hearts of so many critics and fans alike when it was released, and has since captivated an even wider audience after winning the Academy Award for Best Picture! Now you, too, can relive the on-screen movie magic right here on the page! With 221 film stills brought to incredible life by spirited, exhilarating captions, you will soon be enchanted all over again by this endlessly entertaining classic!

As former astronaut Bizz Adams proclaims in the film: Something tells me a big adventure is about to happen, despite my impotence!

This Is How We Love: The Foto-Novel (30th Anniversary Edition)

Starring: Patton Oswalt - Klat the Homeless Man Chris Meloni - Bobby the NASCAR driver, son of Bizz and Azure, brother to Melissa Jon Hamm - former astronaut Bizz Adams Paul Reubens - Tony, Harold and Victor (and Reuben the director) Michael Ian Black - Timmy the Grunger, Eldest Son of Bobby Jo Firestone - Melissa Adams, stutterer, depressive, lesbian Tim Barnes - George the Black Gang Banger Laraine Newman and Amy Sedaris - Azure Adams Scott Rogowsky - Mathew Schwartzmann, Gay Son of Neighbor Kerri Kenney-Silver - Vice Principal AD Miles - Marcus the Thief Laura Krafft - Marcus's Mother Ted Travelstead - Flatterhy the Deaf Boy, Youngest Son of Bobby Shonali Bowhick - Vicky, Melissa Adams' roommate Dave Hill - Topper, Vicky's bike messenger boyfriend Al Madrigal - Peckerwood (Pecker for short) Seth Herzog - Nazi guard Fritz Kimmy Gatewood - Rachey, wife of Bobby Jen Spyra - Angel, wife of Hispanic gardener, Ray Ray Jordan Carlos - Ray Ray, the gardener Owen Kline - Manuel, schizophrenic son of Ray Ray and Angel

Feel the This Is How We Love magic!

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR

Amy Poehler, Mel Brooks, Adam McKay, George Saunders, Bill Hader, Patton Oswalt, and many more take us deep inside the mysterious world of comedy in this fascinating, laugh-out-loud-funny book. Packed with behind-the-scenes stories--from a day in the writers' room at The Onion to why a sketch does or doesn't make it onto Saturday Night Live to how the BBC nearly erased the entire first season of Monty Python's Flying Circus--Poking a Dead Frog is a must-read for comedy buffs, writers and pop culture junkies alike.

This book is fucking awesome. It's my life's story. I'm thirty-four but look twenty-one. Maybe twenty-two at the most. I live in Maryland. Please read it. I'm a writer, a songwriter, an artist. I do it all. I'm an artist of life. I'm an adventurer, I'm the president of my development. Read the memoir. You won't be disappointed.

A self-published memoir of a Maryland thirty-something found by author Mike Sacks at a garage sale in 2019 and re-published here for the first time. The memoir is written by the struggling poet and novelist Noah B., who is embedded in the mind and lifestyle of a perversely unexceptional American asshole named Randy. Like Pale Fire if it were about a Danny McBride-style fuckup, the story is both unmoored from time and eerily prescient of our own--one so stupid and unbelievable that it requires a writer like Sacks to bring it to light.

If you don't know who Mike Sacks is, well, you should. His writing is funnier than just about anyone's and now he has a podcast that is excellent. I say Hooray for Mike Sacks and everything he stands for. -David Sedaris

He's the best kind of comedy writer; a bona fide weirdo with virtually no interest in satisfying anything other than his own personal obsessions. -Andy Richter

Randy is a hilariously, unexpectedly poignant and eminently worthy addition to Sacks' sociological/anthropological exploration of the American Jackass and his curious ways. Audacious and inspired. -Nathan Rabin

The year's best memoir is about a man who shot a porno in a Baskin-Robbins. -Vice

Randy does more to explain certain unexpected turns in this nation's political fate over the last couple of years than a bazillion think-pieces in the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, MSNBC. -John Colapinto (The New Yorker)

As the book's description alludes, Randy is an experiment in memoir, biography, and, well, sheer insanity. -Robobutt

Named One of Vulture's Top 5 Humor Books of the Year

The novelization to the 1992 Gen X movie Slouchers

It is the early 1990s in Seattle ... and the MTV video for Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit has just premiered the previous week. Lethargy is in the air. Grunge fashion is all the logy rage. Something is brewing beneath these moist, overcast Seattle skies.

Twenty-two-year-old Willow Montgomery has freshly arrived in town, having just graduated from an elite liberal arts college back east.

Willow soon befriends a motley crew of twenty-somethings who live in the parking lot next to the alternative record store where she works for $5 an hour, a store run by a cantankerous, irritable, grouchy older man (he's 29) named Skip.

Willow wants to desperately capture the brilliance of her generation on her Fuji DS-100 digicam with 3-power zoom (10-byte, digital flash-memory card, first of its kind), and to have her documentary ultimately broadcast on MTV. What a dream

In the meantime, she's dating Toody, part-time bike messenger, part-time lead singer of the grunge band That's Your Problem.

But there's a new man in town, Mr. Straight, an important businessman who works downtown and who also has eyes for Willow, after having met her while buying a Best Of Aerosmith CD at Skip's store.

Whom will Willow choose? The Grunger or the Straight? The man who digs this new music called grunge or the one who still listens to classic rock? Will she achieve any semblance of happiness? Will she continue to work a minimum McJob for the rest of her life, or can she somehow achieve her artistic goals, as lofty as they might be?

Will the Lost Boys and Girls, as they call themselves, ever leave the parking lot to achieve their own dreams?

Moreover, will the famous inventor of the hacky sack ever arrive at the parking lot in a stretch limousine like he's promised?

Lastly: Is it true that the world's most famous MTV VJ, Tabitha, is coming to Seattle to host the first Great MTV Grunge Off competition, to be filmed for live TV, for all the world to see?

It's 1992 in Seattle and the world is about to change forever. Or maybe not.

Regardless:

It's all about the look ... it's all about the collective alienation ... it's all about the deep-seated, delicious apathy ...

It's all about ... Slouchers.

She may be an insane chimp, but she's my insane chimp

Mike Sacks is writing the apotheosis of avant garde comedy--books written as found documents, trawling through the ephemera of suburban America, jokes low-brow, bizarre and visceral in a package more formally taut and wildly ambitious than nearly anything published as literary fiction today. Stinker Lets Loose is the deadly accurate novelization of a non-existent '70s drive-in film, complete with images from the set; it explores the implications behind Eastwood and Reynolds vehicles while one-upping them in puerility and wildness.

If you don't know who Mike Sacks is, well, you should. His writing is funnier than just about anyone's and now he has a podcast that is excellent. I say Hooray for Mike Sacks and everything he stands for. -David Sedaris

He's the best kind of comedy writer; a bona fide weirdo with virtually no interest in satisfying anything other than his own personal obsessions. -Andy Richter

One of the Best Comedy Releases of the year. -Splitsider

Top ten comedy release of the year -Vulture

Ever accidentally sent a mass e-mail to your office describing your Not Safe-For-Work fantasy kingdom? Or been confused about the ground rules at a cuddle party? Looking to rent an overpriced room in the Hamptons from a co-dependent sociopath with a checkered past (and a hot tub)? Good. Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason collects Mike Sacks's unique humor pieces--Craigslist ads, lesser-known tantric positions, letters to famous authors, Shaft living in the suburbs, a classic-rock DJ suffering a nervous breakdown, the occasional list--into one handsome, convenient volume. Originally published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and McSweeney's, among other venerable publications, Sacks's writing is original and sharp, yet broadly funny. Whether it's a groom tweeting his wedding and honeymoon in real time, or a publisher offering editorial suggestions for The Diary of Anne Frank, Sacks's work tangles contemporary social satire with his absurdist sensibilities.

At long last ... the candid, shocking and previously untold story of Skippy Batty Battison, the universe's most radical, free-thinking, and honest comedian, comedy writer, satellite radio and podcasting star!

This guy isn't afraid to tell it like it is!

Nothing is held back!

The infamous memoir that was dumped by Viking in June 2021 for being too controversial and against our moral standards

Now being published by Sunshine Beam Press!

Many consider Skippy to be the Worst Person in Comedy

While others feel that Skippy's story deserves to be heard, from his humble beginnings in Bethesda, Maryland, to his graduation from Georgetown Prep (a few years after Brett Kavanaugh), to his performing stand-up in Ocean City, Maryland (once), to his writing for the 1998 Academy Awards (the Titanic parody as sung by Billy Crystal), to his one unproduced Simpsons episode, to his fifteen unproduced movie scripts (too hot to handle!), to his being the only white writer on The Wayans Bros., to his invention of the phrase That's what she said!, to his stint in prison over a misunderstanding involving an underage girl, to his conversion to GOP moral values, to his involvement in the January 6th situation!

Love him or hate him, more than 5 Million of his daily listeners to his satellite radio show and podcast definitely have an opinion!

The FIRST memoir from America's Number One Conservative Comedic Persona Who's Always ... RIGHT!

Skippy is a [treat]! Everything he says makes me [laugh]. Buy this book! - Carole Tapp, OAN overnight weekend and holiday anchor

The [funniest] book ever written by a true American hero. I can't think of anything that even comes close! He's a conservative gift that keeps on giving! - Carter Heindle, CEO, American Lodest$r

Bestseller on the Advancing America Freedom Recommended Right Reading List and Runner-Up Winner for The Emphasis on the Family Book Award for All Ages & True Americans Suggested Reading Amer-I-Can Library!

in Pink is the latest book from best-selling author Mike Sacks (And Here's the Kicker, Poking a Dead Frog, Stinker Lets Loose).

Passable in Pink deftly sends up the 1980s and John Hughes movies while addressing the vital question: Will Addy Stevenson go to the senior prom?

Addy is suffering through her sophomore year at suburban Chicago's Northridge High. She lives on the wrong side of the lake with her father, a struggling advertising copywriter (Where the hell is the goddamn beef?) and her ever-boozy mom (Get me another drink, baby, and really make it sing.). Addy's younger brother, Spaz, her soon-to-marry older sister, Princess, and a visiting international transfer student add to the mix.

Her world is turned upside down when she meets Roland McDough, the most beautiful Richie boy at Northridge High. Is he actually interested in Addy, or is he just playing a game?

Are you ready to jump back into the cool, neon-glazed, high-topped reality of the 1980s? Do you miss those kick-ass tubular synth-rockin' sounds and delicious phantasma-gaseous smells? When was the last time you put on your Members Only jacket and danced the Safety Dance?

A loving send-up of a bygone era, this is one book in which Every Breath You Take will remind you of How You Used to Be.