This is the first Los Angeles reading of the anthology I’m in, No Kidding. I’m not in this show, I’m in the June 22nd one. But they both feature very funny people. 

mightyhunter:

“An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.”

Via Letters of Note

People have offered me so much money to buy this. I bought it at a yard sale for a dollar. 

If you have a Kindle or the free Kindle app for Mac or PC, you can get my book from Friday, March 1 to Sunday, March 3. 

You can get it here and read an excerpt about me and Sly Stallone here.

uncledynamite:

I read Suzy Soro’s “Celebrity sTalker” the other day and enjoyed Suzy’s hilarious and embarrassing celebrity anecdotes, which are quite good and - rare these days - improve over the course of the book rather than front-load it. Get it, enjoy it. Read it poolside or in the comfort of your cabana. Read it in your cubicle for all I care. But do read it. (http://www.amazon.com/Celebrity-sTalker-Stories-Thinks-Celebrities/dp/0615741320/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355971527&sr=1-1&keywords=suzy+soro) But what also struck me is that something about her inventive and digressionary style put me in mind of another writer, someone I hadn’t read in over thirty years. Let the wavy lines drop here as harp music falls like rain and come with me, friends, on yet another trip to YESTERYEAR.

The funny thing about being a kid is that you’re convinced every feeling you have is the most important feeling ever and that no one has ever had that feeling before. Your friends are spear carriers in this tragedy you call life and your parents - just look at them! - have obviously never felt anything in their lives. This is what I call the isolating pleasure of extreme narcissism.

Well, that was me. I did like to read, though, so I had that going for me, and if I was ignored long enough I’d get on my hands and knees, head sideways, reading the spines on people’s bookshelves.

Yes, I was awkward. Groan. Yes, I was gangly. Yawn. Nobody understood me. Eyes blink twice, slowly. I didn’t fit in. Except I did. But I didn’t feel like it. I wanted to fit in with those people over there, not with these ones here. These chuckleheads who don’t UNDERSTAND me.

Let’s just say I hadn’t found my niche and leave it at that.

In my grandparents’ house on a weekend stay, I found a few paperbacks by Jack Douglas. I believe they were “Shut Up and Eat Your Snowshoes” and “The Jewish-Japanese Sex & Cook Book and How To Raise Wolves.” Everything else on their shelves was about nice, but unimaginative men founding leper colonies and becoming saints, or about this other nice fellow who was pulled to pieces for his faith and now has box seats in heaven. On the landing of my grandparents’ stairs was a little alcove for religious statuary and…you get the picture.

My grandfather never, ever discussed religion. God bless him for that. I think he was along for the ride.

Anyway, these books were a revelation for a boy stuck in a house with his early-to-bed, early-to-rise pious grandparents where I can still hear the clock ticking and see the dust motes floating more slowly than can be believed in my mind’s eye. The books I’d read up to that point had been dull tracts about virtuousness by narrators who talked down to the young reader. Jack talked across to you as if you were sitting with him in his living room and you both had your feet up on the coffee table and whiskies in your hands.

They were very conversational books, very digressing, very funny. There is the aging comedy writer settling down in Canada with his Japanese wife Reiko, baby Timothy and pet wolves. All while he’s writing and sending jokes back to Laugh-In and other television shows.

There was inside dope on show business, insider stories about the comedians and actors of the time, memories of writing for this one or that one, and plenty of fish out of water stories in the present tense about a Hollywood man living in the woods and being greatly misunderstood by the hayseeds, and vice versa. The locals always seem to get the better of him. This becomes a theme across the books, particularly in ‘Benedict Arnold Slept Here” where he purchases and runs an inn in Connecticut.

I asked my grandmother if I could take them home and read them. She waved a nonchalant hand as if to say “Someone brought that trash to my house, you may take that trash away.” There was no leprosy in them, you see, and certainly no one being pulled into fifths by horses.

When I got home I went to the library and got out the rest of Douglas’ output, which was considerable, and I studied them minutely like a monk in a stone tower. What the librarian must have thought I cannot guess. I tried to think like the author, to try on his worldview. It felt much more gratifying than the swill I’d read up to that point, Tom Sawyer excluded. I began to work some of JD’s conversational gambits and observational kind of comedy into my banter, with positive crowd results. I felt a warm glow spreading over me. I know what I want, I said to myself. I want to make people laugh.

Why hadn’t I thought of this before? This was, perhaps, the germinating seed in my becoming a writer, a private comedian. My hat has always been off to you, Jack Douglas.

I haven’t gone back and re-read any of them because I fear there’d be a certain amount of sag when viewed through all that’s happened in comedy and comedic writing and the world since then. There would be a certain amount of corniness and of-its-time-ness and some of his premises would doubtless be seen as hackneyed by today’s readers, but for the time he wrote, he was pretty hot stuff. He could go on the Tonight Show and make Jack Paar wet his pants. He wrote jokes for Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Bing Crosby, George Gobel, Woody Allen, Jimmy Durante and was on the staff of a bunch of shows.

I often had to push a pillow into my mouth as I screamed with laughter at two in the morning so my parents wouldn’t know I was up late reading yet another Jack Douglas memoir with a flashlight. He could be that funny with a phrase or an observation. So maybe I will go back and read them.

So, Suzy, when I tell you that you remind me of Jack Douglas? I hope you take it as a compliment.

One of my twitter followers is buying 5 copies of my book, either paperback or Kindle version, to give away on my behalf. If you’re interested, email me at suzysoro(at)gmail (dot)com so I’ll have your email address, which I will then forward on to him. 

Two chances to win a copy of my book. Two websites are holding contests so leave a comment and be entered to win!

This contest ends tomorrow: http://ow.ly/gzYgf

Wendi Aarons is a very funny blogger and her post is about the celebrities who’ve annoyed her. KEVIN SPACEY I’m looking at you.

This contest ends Saturday January 12th: http://ow.ly/gzYbe

This humor blogger got her husband to read my book and he never reads anything for pleasure because he only reads important stuff. Whatever.

Or go to Amazon and buy it there: http://ow.ly/gzYuW

Finally, the back cover of my book, Celebrity sTalker,  is ready.

I’m very excited to announce that publication of the book No Kidding, an anthology due out next year, has been moved up. It’s a series of essays from women who decided not to have children. It was due out Mother’s Day but maybe that publishing date was too ironic when it came right down to it. 

I’m in it with some extremely talented and funny women like Merrill Markoe, (best selling NY Times author), Laura Kightlinger, (writer from Will & Grace) Henriette Mantel (web series The Middle with Kevin Meaney) and Nancy Shayne, (Louie) among others. As soon as I get the art work I’ll post it.

This is the cover for my book, minus a few things being tweaked by graphic artists. But mostly it’s this. Should be published before Christmas. 

I accidentally landed on a porn site. It was so disgusting. Who watches this crap? After an hour I’d seen enough.

Humor Outcasts publish a lot of my jokes so when they asked to interview me I couldn’t say no. They probably wish I had.

If you don’t want to hear an edgy joke, don’t listen

Gilbert Gottfried says if you don’t think Daniel Tosh’s jokes are funny, don’t listen and don’t go to his shows.

Editor’s note: Gilbert Gottfried is a comedian and actor. Follow him on Twitter @realgilbert.

(CNN) — Daniel Tosh, host of the Comedy Central show “Tosh.O,” recently came under attack on the Internet. People on the Internet with way too much time on their hands love attacking someone all at once.

The attack on Tosh came after an account of one of his stand-up shows at an L.A. club was posted to a website. According to the account, relayed by a female audience member to the person who kept the website, Tosh started making some rape jokes during his show.

The woman was shocked that the shocking Daniel Tosh would say such shocking things.

She called out from the audience in the middle of his set, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny.” To which Tosh allegedly replied, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys right now. Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?”

I’m not going to talk here about the joke. I’m not here to give an opinion about whether what he said was funny or not funny; that’s strictly a matter of taste, as is any joke. My subject here is whether it’s OK for him to say it.

If you have never in your life seen a comedian perform, here are the instructions:

Gilbert Gottfried

If a comedian tells a joke that you find funny, you laugh. If he tells a joke you do not find funny, don’t laugh. Or you could possibly go as far as groaning or rolling your eyes. Then you wait for his next joke; if that’s funny, then you laugh. If it’s not, you don’t laugh — or at very worst, you can leave quietly.

This is the way going to see a comedian has worked for centuries. Some comedians tell nice jokes that you can tell to your kids. Some use bad words — they work “blue.” If you don’t want to hear a joke that’s blue, you shouldn’t go to a comedy club where a comedian who makes blue jokes is performing.

Back to Tosh: There was talk that he might lose his TV show. I, for one, say this will not happen. Big corporations that hire you decide what will shock and offend them. Their hearts and brains are located in their piggy banks. If they already wanted Daniel Tosh to be gone, they could use this as an excuse. I know of what I speak.

Let’s jump back a few years, shall we?

A few days after September 11, 2001, I was doing a Friars’ Roast of Hugh Hefner in New York City. Outside, smoke was still in the air. People seemed very reserved and were not totally laughing at any of the comics that night. I wanted to be the first one to slap them out of it. I said, “I have to leave early tonight. I’m flying to L.A. I couldn’t get a direct flight. We have to make a stop at the Empire State Building.”

No one in the history of comedy ever lost an audience more completely. You could hear chairs move back and murmuring throughout the crowd. Gasping, groaning.

One guy yelled, “too soon,” which I thought meant I didn’t take a long enough pause between the set-up and punch line. I figured there was no lower I could go, so I went into doing The Aristocrats jokes. These are very blue. The crowd soon exploded with laughs and cheers. So: Terrorism is shocking and in bad taste, but a joke about incest and bestiality is totally fine.

Jump ahead a few years. Over that period in between, I’ve done several very poor-taste jokes. Then the tsunami in Japan happened, and it’s all over the news, with newscasters pretending it hits them personally. Newscasters really should get acting awards.

Anyway, I figured I’d treat a natural disaster the same way I treated terrorism … with comedy. So, I proceeded to tweet jokes about the tsunami. Most of them were actually quite silly. If there were anything to be outraged about, it would have been about how dumb the jokes actually were.

I have always felt comedy and tragedy are roommates. If you look up comedy and tragedy, you will find a very old picture of two masks. One mask is tragedy. It looks like it’s crying. The other mask is comedy. It looks like it’s laughing. Nowadays, we would say, “How tasteless and insensitive. A comedy mask is laughing at a tragedy mask.”

I’m returning from a job out of town. My agent says, “You’re not going to print anymore tsunami jokes, are you?” I look on the Internet and on every news site, it says, “Aflac fires Gilbert Gottfried.”

Of course, as is procedure, when you make a joke nowadays, you must immediately make a public apology. So, much as Tosh did with his rape jokes, I did with my tsunami jokes.

People on the Internet were screaming for my death. The news media jumped in, but of course their job is to make a mouse fart sound like it’s a nuclear explosion. They reported on it and repeated my jokes, which seems odd: If what I said is so shocking and inexcusable, why are they repeating it? Well, it’s to get asses in the seats.

They referred to my jokes as “comments” and “remarks,” not “jokes” because if they did, any rational person would have said, “So, a comic made jokes. What’s the story here?”

I’ve been telling jokes like this for a very long time, so the reaction surprised me.

It’s like eating Corn Flakes every day for years, and then one day you eat Corn Flakes and all hell breaks loose. Aflac thought I was such an evil person and what I did so heinous that there was only one way to deal with this: Hire a new guy to imitate Gilbert Gottfried, pay him less, save a trainload of cash on commercials, thus bringing closure to this horrible tragedy.

My favorite tweet that a fan sent me was, “Aflac fires Gilbert Gottfried after discovering he’s a comedian.” I got this tweet after the nut jobs on the Internet were through and common sense prevailed.

I had an overwhelming response from people saying the same thing, “**** ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

George Carlin once said, “It’s the duty of a comedian to find out where the line is drawn and then step over it.”

I don’t want to compare myself to George Carlin because when I first heard his quote, I laughed and said, “He said dooty.” I guess he was more intellectual than me.

In conclusion, I wish to inform every comedian, the new motto is: “Guns don’t kill people. Jokes kill people.”