I have 40 years of unpublished material, the ones they don't pick, and the reason I don't redraw them or use them again is that I like to use my brain every day and come up with new jokes.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I consider a CD or a comedy collection as a record of what I've been doing, and I try to wrap it up and start new material.
If I get even five per cent of my ideas out and documented before I die, I'll be lucky. I'm not in danger of running out of riffs or ideas anytime soon. They overwhelm me and it's hard to find time to deal with them.
My works are an imitation of my own past and present.
Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.
I usually balance out autobiography with goofy, amusing stuff to help keep the humour in my more serious work.
While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques.
When I was very young, I didn't really write my own material. I just memorized other peoples' jokes. Established comics, like Stanley Myron Handelman and people like that. And then, for every comic, you develop your own style after a while.
Periodically, I return to the classics for inspiration and refreshment.
I often reread books I have written.
I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.