| 37th | Top Saturday Night Live writers |
| Jack Handey | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 25, 1949 San Antonio, Texas |
| Website | http://www.deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com/ |
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. Although many people assume otherwise,[1][2] Handey is a real person, not a pen name or a character.
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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 in 1975 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]
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:
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 that program, 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.
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 Want to Die." Currently, the Deep Thoughts have their own official website overseen by Handey, Deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com.
Other Handey pieces that appeared on SNL included Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer,[10] "Fuzzy Memories" which depicted re-enactments 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 2001-2003 season of SNL.
Handey is also credited with creating Toonces, the cat who could drive a car.[11] The recurring skit originated in 1990 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. "It was just one of those free association ideas you write down and look at later and think, 'Maybe,'" he said.[11]
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]
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;[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. 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]
Jack Handey is an American comic writer. He is most famous for his Deep Thoughts, a large corpus of surrealistic one-liner jokes. Deep Thoughts gained popularity when they were read on Saturday Night Live beginning in 1991.
  | Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey - Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey |
| | "My First Day In Hell" - Shouts & Murmurs: My First Day in Hell: The New Yorker |
| | "What I'd Say To The Martians" - Shouts & Murmurs: What I’d Say to the Martians: The New Yorker |
| | "This is no Game" - Shouts & Murmurs: This is No Game: The New Yorker |
| | "My Nature Documentary" - Shouts & Murmurs: My Nature Documentary: Humor: The New Yorker |
| | "In Praise of the Human Body" - Jack Handy Praises the Human Body | Outside Online |
| | "How Things Even Out" - Shouts & Murmurs: How Things Even Out: Humor: The New Yorker |
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