J. Kent Preyer
AUTHOR

J. Kent Preyer

Comedy & Humour
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If you’re like me you think life and people are funny. I love to write (and read) about these people and the crazy situations they find themselves in. I’m referring to people (characters) who are not trying to be funny. Or loving, or charming, or beautiful. They just are these things because they exist. Well, they exist in a writer’s mind anyway. (Later an actor might embody a character on the silver screen, TV or stage, of course, but the source came from the imagination of the writer first. Let’s try to not forget that.) I love writers who see life in this amusingly skewed way too. One of the most brilliant - Fannie Flagg. In her famous novel (and later screenplay) she took something deeply horrific and transformed it into a profound, beautiful, (and funny) finishing touch to a major plot of her story; all in her classic endearing style: Big George smiled and said, “Thank you, suh, I’d havto say the secret’s in the sauce.” If you don’t know this line (and the delightfully macabre business it is referring to), then stop reading this dumb bio and go buy Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe right now. One more example from a fellow Missourian (born in St. Louis anyway) and his wife: William and Tania Rose. They were the comedy screenwriting team who wrote It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. You likely don’t know them. William Rose was the Academy Award winning screenwriter of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Don’t feel guilty. No one ever remembers the screenwriters. William and Tania wrote the scene (in IAMMMMW) where Jimmy Durante was killed in a terrible car crash. That doesn’t sound very funny, does it? In their hands (typing fingers to be specific) it became one of the best comic scenes ever written for film (or stage, or a book in my opinion, which we have established is skewed for this kind of thing). Jimmy Durante was surrounded by Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett and Milton Berle (motorists who had stopped to help the character who was, we must assume, dying from broken bones and painful internal injuries). The character Mr. Durante was playing gave up his dying secret, took his last breath, and then literally kicked a metal bucket down the side of the cliff. Dying from a car crash should not be funny. It really shouldn’t. Yet if writers have the ability - the special magical gift - to translate their twisted view of life in an organized written form; a novel, screenplay, etc. (and the work ethic to get it all written down in the proper format), then it most certainly one day will be shared with others, and it will be very funny. In this case, it will be classic. Writers often are depressed people. I’m no different. But I know a cure. Find the book, or the movie, or the stage production that was imagined and typed out by a kindred soul - a writer; one who has observed this life of in all of its sorrows, pains and boringness, and has then turned it, and twisted it, into the blissfully funny. And if you laugh, and feel a little better, then thank the writer. We quite often don’t get the credit.
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