christopher moore
written by Ken Carlson
(Jan/Feb 08)
When discussing the artists that make people laugh the most, novelists almost never come to mind. It could be the nature of the novel, the expectations we have for it, don’t lend itself to the material that makes you laugh out loud while reading on the subway without coming off as sitcomish and making you look crazy.
Christopher Moore’s novels are the exception. His work sits well alongside Douglas Adams’ and has thankfully extended beyond the ever tiring label of ‘cult status’. His lead characters range from vampires to Jesus. His tales contain gore and sex and are very smart.
One of first questions I had for him was how did he utilize humor without hindering the story, making it seem forced? “Basically,” Mr. Moore said, “I don’t think much about humor when I’m constructing the story. In fact, when I have to send in a proposal, which is kind of like an outline I have to turn in before my editors buy a book, they almost always used to ask, ‘Well, is it funny?’ Of course it’s funny — funny is what I do, bu
t the story, or plot, is just frame you hang the comedy on. The frame has to be strong and stand on it’s own, then it can carry the comedy.”
“It’s really just a sense I have. If I think it’s funny, it usually is. I write my stuff with the comic timing sort of built into the punctuation, so there is a sense of ‘delivering’ the line. When I go on book tour, I really do get to perform (more or less) in front of a live audience, and it’s great not to have to wait 18 months for the laugh after you’ve told the joke. Part of the success of my stuff is it doesn’t have to be nearly as dense as the material a stand-up comic does. If I can make people smile once a page and laugh once a chapter, I’m sort of at the top of my field. A stand-up who went that far between laughs wouldn’t even be allowed to serve drinks in a comedy club.”
What about endings? A lot of sketch writers won’t write an ending for a sketch (eg Monty Python, Mr Show) but instead have it flow from one to the next. Is tying up the loose ends particularly challenging for you? “I think beginnings,” said Mr. Moore, “are harder than endings. But writing novels gives you a lot of time to think about how you’ll end it. I usually have a pretty good idea where I’m going long before I get there. Sketches generally go off on one idea, without a structure, really. It’s not exactly story telling. It can be, but I don’t think the audience expects that, necessarily. As with a movie, with a book, if you really blow the ending, then that’s what people remember. You can have three hundred pages that are good, but if the last ten are bad, you’ve written a crappy book. I know, because I tend to kill off the main character in my books, and people get really pissed off about that. (You’d have thought they’d have seen it coming in my Jesus book, too.)”
Over the years, after several books, you tend to notice changes in the style and quality of written works. I asked Christopher how he saw his work in that sense. “They flow more smoothly, I think. I had trouble with time and transition when I first started writing books, so moving between scenes and within a time frame was hard, and sometimes a little jerky, I think. Now I don’t even think about that. Mostly I think it’s just practice. You do get chops in this, like in any skill. Hopefully, the more you do it, the better you’ll get. You just have to remain self-critical. (I don’t mean that in the ‘mom’ way, I mean that in that you have to look at your stuff with an eye toward improving it, not just resting because what you do works.) I guess a fair comparison would be a comedian who really has a ‘schtick’ and does it well, but never pushes him or herself to work outside of that ‘schtick’. After a while you don’t need to see the act any more because you could write it yourself. ‘Oh, it’s the Korean comic. Oh, it’s the Russian comic. Oh, it’s the fat comic. Oh, it’s the depressed single girl comic.’ As a novelist you can do the same thing. You can write the same book over and over again, and make a good living at it. People do like predictability, but as the artist, you’re not going to do your best work if you don’t push yourself. I’m always trying to do something I’m not sure I can pull off. For instance, right now I’m working on a book that draws, really strongly, on Shakespeare. I didn’t know squat about Shakespeare before I started, but I’m going to know a buttload before I finish. And in the meantime, the work is hard, but if I pull it off, well, how cool will that be?”
Most readers know Christopher through Lamb, the story of Jesus’ adolescence alongside his best friend, Biff. However, I consider Dirty Job, a story set in San Francisco dealing with Death Merchants, to be his funniest novel, primarily due to two secondary characters, two old women from different parts of the world, who helped baby sit a small powerful child. How did these characters come about? How did he develop their ethnic differences and bring them out in way that sounded natural? “The ethnic characters,” said Mr. Moore, “came from the neighborhood where the book is set, which is Northbeach in San Francisco, where there is a large Chinese population intersecting with a large Russian population, intersecting with a large Italian population. (Although, admittedly, mostly Chinese there, now.) My ‘old ladies’ sort of tapped into the stereotype of the Russian angst and the Chinese pragmatism, so the rest was sort of playing on those cliches. There’s not a lot of truth to those characters, but they did have funny idiosyncrasies. The Russian woman who compared everything to Bears, and the old Chinese woman who saw everything as a soup ingredient until it proved otherwise. The mopey Goth chick that worked for the main character, his lesbian sister, the guy looking for a Filipino rent-a-bride because his social skills were too lame for American woman — they were based on observation, but there was just funny shit about those personalities that I could use. Big brush strokes really help. That is, sort of having the characters revolve around one or two aspects of their personality allows me to hit that note for humor again and again, like a callback in a comedy routine. The main characters are a little-more three dimensional, so they more often than not, serve as the straight men. The minor characters get to say funny things about them, but they sort of bumble through, being the vehicle for comedy.”
His latest book, You Suck, was very funny right out of the gate. In his other works, it seems that there was more of a build-up before the action occurred. Was that because this book was a direct sequel?
“Yes, the characters’ personalities were all set up in a previous book, so I just started out having them say outrageous shit,” said Mr. Moore. “Thing is, more than half the people who bought that book probably hadn’t read the first one, but they still liked it, which just goes to show, you can come right out of the gate with outrageous shit as long as the title is vaguely obscene. I think that’s what that goes to show you...”
“I was writing for about twelve years before I sold a book, and even after selling the first one for good money to the movies (it’s never been made, by the way) it was another fifteen years before I made the New York Times Bestseller list. So, basically, a thirty-year overnight success. It was work. It was good work — work I like doing, but it was work. I don't’ want to make it sound like it was horrible. In my career, I’d say most of the horrible or humiliating experiences have come from my close brushes with working in Hollywood. I’ve never run across more nitwits who think they’re fucking geniuses in my life, but that’s where the frustrations begin and end, for the most part. People who come to you because what you do is nothing like anything else they’ve ever seen, then try to beat you into a mold so your stuff looks like everything else. I keep forgetting, and about every five years or so a new nitwit calls with another offer and I ask for more money, and more perks, and they give it, and all it comes down to is I get paid more when I finally tell them that they are fucking nitwits and I don’t want to work with them, no matter what the pay. Hmmm, makes me sound sort of hard to get along with, huh? I’m not. But I am really good at what I do, and if you don’t want me to do it, then don’t call me. I never call them.”
His books bring back characters, in leading or brief roles, from other books all the time. Is that a nod to regular readers as an inside joke or callback? “It’s absolutely a nod to my regular readers,” said Mr. Moore. “I love that kind of stuff when I find it, so I put it in the books hoping that my readers will get the same jazz out of it.”
“I pick the topics in several ways, what I’m interested in, what I think will be challenging, and what I can get done in time for deadline. Lamb, a comic retelling of the life of Christ, seemed like an audaciously hard book to do, and if I could pull it off, it could be amazing, so I went to it. (I don’t know if it was amazing, but it certainly was challenging, and people do seem to like it.) Coyote, it was Native Americans, Fluke was an interest in the ocean and marine mammal biology. I got to dive with singing humpback whales — that alone was worth doing the book. I did the vampire books because I thought I could write them fairly quickly and make them really funny. The Shakespeare book is, again, because it seems audacious and marginally insane to even take something like that on. (And so far, yes, it was insane. I don’t know what I was thinking.) I don’t know if I’ll do witches. I’m not particularly interested in them, but it could happen. There are witches in the new book, and it talks a little about persecution, but I don’t know if I’m ready to do a book about that. Floridians want me to do one about the Keys. Waitresses want me to do one about waitresses. Roller Derby Girls want me to do a rollergirl book. Who knows? (Actually, that last one sounds like a lot of fun.)”
In reading his works, you get an idea, particularly in Lamb, how much research he puts into his books. It’s the details, along with characters and dialogue, which add so much color and depth to his works. “In Fluke, which is about marine mammal biologists, I got a lot of anecdotes from scientists in the field about cool or weird stuff that happened to them in the field, and I went out with humpback researchers for two seasons in Maui. Some of the stuff is spot on how the work is done, but other parts are completely off the wall. For instance, humpbacks are identified by the unique markings on their tails, but one day, one of my scientists takes the I.D. photo, and the whale’s tail reads ‘Bite Me’ across it. That sort of starts the ball rolling. There’s a scene in the book where two scientists are in a zodiac, trying to tag a female right whale, and two male right whales who are trying to mate with her start beating the bejeezus out of these PH.Ds with their giant prehensile willies. The best part of that story, is it’s true. Right whale tackle is the biggest on the planet — you’re talking about a penis that’s twelve feet long and can move like a monkey’s tail. The only difference is in my book I had both scientists, women, immediately turn lesbian, figuring that they had seen enough penis to last them a lifetime.”
There’s a good deal of violence in his stories; along with sex and gore and bawdy language; all devices favored by teens and a young audience that seem to be going away from books. Should we be surprised at the amount of success he’s had? “I think that sex is funny,” said Mr. Moore, “so there’s always a lot of awkward and goofy sex in my books. I like when shit gets blown up and sword fighting and stuff, so I put that stuff in my books. I think the right swear word, well placed, can be hilarious, so there’s a lot of cussing in my books. I just throw in stuff that I think works, without much thought of my audience. I’d say my average reader is in her late 30s. (Yes, her.) But I have readers from 13 year old goth kids up to 70 year old grandmothers. I’ve been approached (and hired) to take my stuff to TV (see above rant about nitwits), and I’m currently negotiating with a couple of comic book publishers to do some work for them. It may work, it may not. We’ll see. I like video games, but I don’t see a natural move into that field. When Douglas Adams went that direction it was because he was tired of working by himself all the time. I’m still okay with that. I get out every year or so and tour, and I get the need to talk to other humans out of my system. As for being surprised with my success? Absolutely. I failed advanced composition in high-school and the teacher told me, in front of the whole class, that I didn’t have what it took to be a writer. I never finished college and was a screaming drunk for ten years. The fact that I’m not dead or doing time is a surprise. I guess that’s why I keep trying to do something different. I mean, I’ve so far exceeded everyone’s expectations for me that if I totally fuck the dog on something, I’m still way ahead of where I would have been if I’d stayed in Ohio and worked in a union grocery store like my mom wanted me to because it came with health insurance. Hell, if I get a couple of more books on the NY Times list I just might get some health insurance, you know, just to piss people off.”
For more on Christopher, visit ChrisMoore.com.