The hard work behind har-de-har-hars

AND HERE'S THE KICKER

Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft

By Mike Sacks

Writer's Digest Books.

337 pp. Paperback, $17.99

When Al Gore was vice president and saw on his schedule that he would have to speak at an event that required humor, he would announce, with mock solemnity, that it was time to assemble the humor cabinet. This proclamation might well have been delivered by shofar, given that in practice it served as a call for most of the Jews on the staff. Perhaps the circumstances of my birth did qualify me to write jokes, although I think the vice president was more taken with the fact that my dad's family had actually run a hotel in the Catskills -- the real, live Borscht Belt.

Either way, I ended up writing jokes for the vice president and others. I've found myself in the awkward situation of telling a former senator that the word "feces" is funnier than any of the synonyms he's considering. Or that a roomful of male septuagenarians will get the punch line "If it lasts longer than four hours, consult a physician."

But when asked why, I always wished I had a better answer than "Because it's funny." Someone, I thought, should assemble a compendium of insights and techniques from actual humor writers.

That's exactly what Mike Sacks did in putting together "And Here's The Kicker." Even if you weren't looking for a comedy desk reference, it's worth picking up the book just to find out which "Deep Thought" Jack Handey is most proud of writing.

But "And Here's the Kicker" qualifies as a book only because the interviews have been put on paper and bound between two covers. What the reader experiences is a series of interviews conducted by a sort of hybrid between James Lipton and Dick Cavett: The questions are so hyper-informed that they're fawning, but they're just loose enough to be funny.

Sacks, a humor writer himself, begins each chapter with a short biography of the interview subject, followed by an edited transcript of their conversation.

The last question in these interviews is often about advice the humorist might have for aspiring writers. Aspiring writers, I'm guessing, will find this advice pretty depressing, given that it runs the gamut from "There are already too many comedy writers" (Marshall Brickman, co-writer, "Annie Hall") to "When you're 'in the zone,' a joke will just land on you like a butterfly" (George Meyer, writer and executive producer, "The Simpsons") to "Take a few beatings in the hallways of your high school or go through some sort of childhood trauma" (Judd Apatow, writer, director, producer of 95 percent of the movies made in the past five years).