LIANE HANSEN, host:
Comedian Chris Elliott has just published his first novel. Not his first book; that was a Father's Day parody of "Mommie Dearest" called "Daddy's Boy." He wrote it with his father, famous straight man Bob Elliott. No, Chris Elliott's first novel is a mystery-history-tragicomedy-time-traveling real book. There's plot and characters and themes and 358 hardbound pages. Chris Elliott is in our New York bureau.
Welcome to the program, Chris.
Mr. CHRIS ELLIOTT (Author, "The Shroud of the Thwacker"): Thanks, Liane. Thanks for having me.
HANSEN: It's a real pleasure. Can we cut to the cheese, please?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. ELLIOTT: You don't know how often I hear that. Exactly.
HANSEN: I'd love you to read the beginning of it. It's chapter the first of your book, "The Shroud of the Thwacker."
Mr. ELLIOTT: (Reading) `August 25th, 1882, 9 PM. It had been a particularly sweltering summer in New York City, the hottest summer on record, and not coincidentally, the first summer on record. By all accounts, this evening promised to be yet another in the long progression of dog days that oozed like a piece of soft runny Brie served with a hunk of moldy French bread and washed down with a mug of room-temperature Clamato, each day melting into the next with an excruciatingly, sluggishly slow, excruciating monotony. The Santa Ana wind hissed as it blew through the narrow, roughhew, cobblestone, gas-lit, historically accurate streets, and then it giggled down Fifth Avenue baking the leaves on the mango and banana trees lining the fashionable boulevard into crisp, brittle parchment. Indeed, the summer of 1882 is nearly as tedious as my first paragraph has been, and I thank you for your patience.'
HANSEN: Fabulous. What on earth gave you the idea that you could be a novelist? I mean, not in...
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. ELLIOTT: Well, I had tried everything, Liane.
HANSEN: Yeah.
Mr. ELLIOTT: You know, pretty much screwed up every other aspect of my career, so I figured I might as well go into writing. I--you know, I had an idea, and before I had the idea for the book, I guess I--or who I should pitch it to--I had this idea of actually doing an in-depth history of New York City without doing any research at all. But at the same time, I was reading "The Da Vinci Code," I had read "The Alienist," which I was a fan of and I'm, of course, a fan of any, you know, Jack the Ripper book that ever comes out, so I decided to kind of combine all those ideas and that's how the Thwacker was born.
HANSEN: Give us a brief rundown of some of the main characters. I mean, you do have Teddy Roosevelt.
Mr. ELLIOTT: Teddy Roosevelt. It's a book that investigates--reinvestigates a murder spree the was never solved in 1882, but attributed to Jack the Jolly Thwacker. And back then, the chief of the NCNYPD--which actually stands for Nineteenth-Century New York Police Department--was Caleb Spencer. His girlfriend also helped out. She was Evening Post columnist Liz Smith. And then Teddy Roosevelt, who was the mayor of New York City at the time.
HANSEN: And just like the books that we see by Caleb Carr, "The Alienist" and so forth, and the Patricia Cornwell, you know, Jack the Ripper...
Mr. ELLIOTT: Right.
HANSEN: ...stuff...
Mr. ELLIOTT: Right.
HANSEN: ...you're getting into footing this kind of--without any research, I'll remind people--historical fiction. What was the genesis of the idea for the book? I mean, you just said, `I just want to write a history of New York.'
Mr. ELLIOTT: Well, like you said, I had written that book with my dad many years ago and I enjoyed the experience. But that was, more or less, a series of unrelated false incidences from my childhood that we just compiled, and the idea there was that I had nothing to complain about as a kid so I had to make everything up, and my dad got every other chapter to rebut what I was saying. But this, like you said, I, you know, had a story to it and I really was looking forward to that process and I did enjoy it, of just sitting down at my desk and just letting whatever happened happens.
HANSEN: You've written gags, though, and screenplays, television scripts. When you sat down to actually write this as a front-to-back book, you have to write dialogue and you have to write narrative.
Mr. ELLIOTT: Right.
HANSEN: Are there things that work when you're writing for the page that, you know, don't work when you're actually writing for stand-up or to be spoken?
Mr. ELLIOTT: Well, it's interesting because I've been going and doing these readings at various independent bookstores and so forth, and the book actually gets laughs out loud, which I'm surprised at because--and I think I must have just sort of written in a pattern that I'm used to writing for in terms of sitcoms and that sort of thing--because I didn't write it for that purpose. I wrote it, you know, to cause a smile while you're reading to yourself, but not necessarily to make you laugh out loud. But apparently, there's some jokes in here, so--and you know the thing that I'm sort of surprised at is it's joke heavy, actually. I just assumed that the bad jokes would be weeded out in the editing process. But apparently, everything that I put down got into the book, so it's all there, good or bad and ugly.
HANSEN: It's almost as if you really can't help yourself. I can imagine you writing a page and all of a sudden, `Nah, I'm going to go for the laugh here and maybe I'll get back--come back and rewrite it.'
Mr. ELLIOTT: You're absolutely right, and that was my process. But there was no going back and rewriting.
HANSEN: Ah.
(Soundbite of laughter)
HANSEN: Well, even in the introduction--I mean, you know--you write about there's this kind of this alter-ego Chris Elliott that appears as a character in the book, and it has to do with time travel and...
Mr. ELLIOTT: Right. Well--and he's in there because I, you know--I got halfway through the book and I realized, `What if it's a movie? I'd kind of like to be in it.' So I just put myself in.
HANSEN: Well, you put yourself in, and you said--as you begin this character, Chris Elliott goes--about to see if he can solve the unsolved mystery of the Jolly Thwacker. You write, `Sure, I had no investigative skills, but that didn't matter. I have no performing skills and I've managed to carve out a career in show business.' But you don't stop. You start about, you know, `I'm going to get experts. Actually, there was only one person still alive from 1882, radio shock jock Don Imus.' I mean, you can't help yourself.
Mr. ELLIOTT: No, I can't help myself. And, you know, you write a joke and then you suddenly think of another tail to that joke, you know, another ending, and you add to it and you keep adding to it and, you know, eventually you have to stop and go on to another subject. But you know, I--for a number of jokes, I just kept going because things just kept occurring to me.
HANSEN: How much do you think of your own timing and your sense of humor did you get from your dad? How much of it did you think he passed on to you?
Mr. ELLIOTT: I think he passed everything on to me. And my dad is part of--Bob of Bob & Ray, and we're very close. And I think it's all--it was all through osmosis, though, because we never sat down and, you know, talked about comedy or how you're supposed to deliver a line or anything like that. And, you know, my dad's sense of humor, Bob & Ray, there's that sort of buttoned-down, Bob Newhart world of very dry humor, and that was the way our household was, so--actually, it was a very dry household, and my household now I guess I would describe as damp.
HANSEN: Damp. You know, but your dad was a great straight man and...
Mr. ELLIOTT: Yeah, he was a great straight man, but what--that's what people think of a lot when they think of my dad and Ray. But actually, my dad was, I think, even the goofier of the two of them, maybe more off camera than on. But he did a lot of the sort of odd characters on the radio and on camera, also--you know, the Slow Talker(ph) was--that guy was his character, and the Komodo dragon expert and so on.
HANSEN: You had gone with him and watched him do the radio show, and you had written--there was an interview with you in The Onion and you talked about how, you know, they'd do the radio show and there wasn't an audience, and then going to see your dad perform live and, you know, hearing the laughs. I mean, it was some...
Mr. ELLIOTT: Yeah, that was a turning point, I think, for me because, you know, up until then, I would just, you know, sit in the studio and watch him and Ray try to make each other laugh, which is basically what I was doing with my friends in school. So I didn't see what was unusual about that until they did their Broadway show and then I heard actual, you know, crowds laughing and appreciating what they did. So, yeah, that--I think that's probably when I decided that, yeah, I want that same adoration.
HANSEN: You're getting some adoration for stuff that you did a long time ago that at the time were considered kind of failures, "Cabin Boy"...
Mr. ELLIOTT: Right.
HANSEN: ...and "Get a Life." Now they've kind of now developed this cult of personality pretty much.
Mr. ELLIOTT: I, you know--well, "Get a Life"--we had no idea that that show had a following when it was on. And we actually thought nobody was watching and the few people that were watching we thought just hated it. And I--in fact, I remember--and this is absolutely true--when we were shooting the first season, getting out of my car--we were renting out in LA--with my wife and my daughter, and we were standing on Santa Monica Boulevard and I see this woman who's about to recognize me and I think, `Oh, this will be cool,' and she walks by and I heard her say, `Oh, there's that guy from that show we hate.'
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. ELLIOTT: And I remember just kind of hustling my wife and daughter along and, `Oh, she's got me mixed up with someone, honey.' But so--but it has. It's grown in popularity I think now and, you know, people that were fans of it, you know, back then are being more vocal about it now, which is nice to hear.
HANSEN: So now are you going to all these lovely, dry, witty dinner parties, that you're now an accepted member of the literati with a novel under your belt?
Mr. ELLIOTT: Yeah. Believe it or not, you would think "The Shroud of the Thwacker" would make me an accepted member of the literati, but I'm still pretty much an outcast.
HANSEN: Well, maybe there's another novel in you.
Mr. ELLIOTT: You know, in all seriousness, people have asked me what it's like to write a novel, and I still don't think I've written a novel here. This is a silly, funny book, and it's a parody of a novel more than anything else. But you know, one day, I guess maybe, you know, my memoirs, if I can make up enough crap.
HANSEN: Chris Elliott's new mystery-thriller parody of a novel is called "The Shroud of the Thwacker." It's published by Miramax Books, and he joined us from our studio in New York City.
Thanks a lot, Chris. Good luck.
Mr. ELLIOTT: Thanks, Liane, as usual. Thanks a lot.
HANSEN: You can read an excerpt from Chris Elliott's historically incorrect book on our Web site, npr.org.
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Liane Hansen.
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