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Author and comedian Michael Ian Black on stupid essays, unexpected Twitter success, and not knowing who he is as a writer.
David Shankbone / Via upload.wikimedia.org
When attempting to describe Michael Ian Black's wide-ranging career, hyphens are helpful. Black is an actor-comedian-host-screenwriter-director-podcaster-spokesman-etc. And in the last few years, he's become an author, penning three -s for adults and four picture books for children. Pretty impressive for a guy who doesn't even self-identify as a writer.
"I don't know how to describe my own occupation," Black says. "So I try to avoid answering that question as much as I can. I definitely write. I wouldn't say that's my primary occupation, although it's certainly the basis for a lot of what I do."
However Black chooses to label himself, the word "author" will forevermore be shoehorned into his biography, as he is responsible for both hilarious and poignant collections of prose. His first book, My Custom Van: And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays that Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face, is a compendium of absurdist essays with titles like "What I Would Be Thinking About If I Were Billy Joel Driving Toward a Holiday Party Where I Knew There Was Going to Be A Piano" — originally published on McSweeney's Internet Tendency — and "A Series of Letters to a Squirrel," which is pretty self-explanatory.
Black, a self-professed liberal, then co-wrote America: You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom with Senator John McCain's daughter, Meghan. The book project, published as alternating journal entries, involved a cross-country road trip, the modestly stated goal being to "change the way politics is discussed in America." The idea, Black says, was hatched one night on Twitter when he suggested a collaboration to McCain, who, somehow, readily agreed.
In 2012, Black released You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations, which featured his most personal work to date, including reflections on the ongoing challenges of marriage and family. Defying any perceived expectations of ironic detachment or snark, he read a heartbreaking piece about the early loss of his father on This American Life — for a Father's Day episode — with very few jokes or asides. It was, quite simply, straightforward and sad.
Black is currently at work on a new book in the mode of his memoir, although he isn't super eager to talk about it, for fear of sabotaging his own efforts and/or momentum. Between raising his kids and participating in non-authorial pursuits, it'll be another year or more before the book is completed, Black says, adding that he intends to make it into another honest account of his collected life experiences.
Black is also a prolific and hilarious Tweeter. While he's claimed that his (nearly) 2 million Twitter followers are a result of the website promoting him in its early days, his current bio — "Noted expert" — is essentially the truth, at least in the realm of 140 characters or less. Black is a consummate wordsmith, skilled at communicating short, funny thoughts in rapid-fire succession.
It's hard to put my finger on when I became aware of Michael Ian Black, whether it was his work in MTV's The State or Comedy Central's Stella or the cult classic movie Wet Hot American Summer or his numerous VH1 commentaries on shows like I Love the 80s. It kind of seems like he's always been bouncing around movies and television, ubiquitous in certain comedy circles. As an actor, Black oftentimes will partner up with his longtime friends/collaborators David Wain and Michael Showalter, but with his books, it's generally a solitary pursuit, working from his home office in Connecticut.
We recently spoke by phone for an hour — and then reconvened for another quick round of questions via email — covering some of the biggies: writing, comedy, truth, memory, expectations, Twitter, and bad Amazon reviews.
You've mentioned that your last book was an attempt to shed the Michael Ian Black persona and get to something that's truer to who you actually are on a day-to-day level. Did you get to the point where you're so known for a specific type of comedy that you want to show a truer version of yourself?
Michael Ian Black: It's more about not feeling boxed in by any one thing and feeling like I have to be a certain way. The extreme of that is somebody like Gilbert Gottfried, who's only employable as a kind of screaming maniac. And he's not like that at all. You know, as comedians or actors, you can wrap this persona so tightly around yourself that it can become suffocating and I didn't want to do that. I was feeling constricted by my own work and felt like I needed to break free of that.
What do your comedian friends think when you write seriously?
MIB: Oh, they don't read anything that I write. They're too wrapped up in their own shit.
Wasn't there talk of publishing your last book under a pseudonym?
MIB: Well, yeah. I didn't want it to be about me in the sense that I am a public person. And I didn't want that tied up with it. I wanted it to be more universal than about a specific — for lack of a better word — "celebrity." This could've been anybody's memoir.
Just letting the book speak for itself without connecting it to the fact that we've seen you in stuff before ...
MIB: Exactly. I didn't want the hook to be, "Oh, here's the guy who was on basic cable once. He wrote a book." I wanted it to be, "Here's a well-written book."
And is that the reason why there was no mention of your comedy career in your last book?
MIB: That was conscious, too. It had nothing to do with my career. And it was conscious in the sense that I just don't give a shit about it and so I had no desire to write about it. I mean, I give a shit about it obviously for me, personally, but it wasn't anything that I wanted to write about. I didn't think it was particularly interesting.
I feel like there's a segment of people who would enjoy reading about that element of your life, though.
MIB: Yeah, but that number is probably more than three and less than seven. You know? I'm not Tina Fey. I'm not somebody who's had a career worth celebrating. I'm happy with it, in the sense that I've been able to have a career at all. But for me to come out with some triumphal memoir about my success in show-business would be absurd. And then the flip-side of that is that I could write a book about my not-so-triumphal career in show-business, which maybe I'll do at some point, but I don't have a desire to do it now.
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