Wet Hot American Author: Michael Showalter Makes a Book Out of Twigs and Bits of Yarn!

Michael Showalter's middle name is English, which is also, uncannily, the language in which he chose to write his first book, Mr. Funny Pants, released last week. It is also the language he speaks most fluently, which just goes to show how much a name can influence a person.

But enough with semantics. Showalter, 40, has been making us laugh since the early 90s, when his sketch comedy troupe The State—formed at Brown University—landed a half-hour show on MTV. He went on to co-write and star in the campy camp comedy Wet Hot American Summer, making his directorial debut with 2005's The Baxter, which he also wrote and acted in opposite Michelle Williams and Elizabeth Banks. Showalter has co-written and starred in two Comedy Central series, Stella and Michael and Michael Have Issues, both of which featured former members of The State, and hosted his own show on Collegehumor.com, cheekily titled The Michael Showalter Showalter.

Mr. Funny Pants officially makes Showalter a sextuple threat (septuple if you count "chart-maker," as many helpful visual aids appear within the book's 288 pages). Part memoir, part real-time procrastination, part choose-your-own-adventure grab bag full of drinking games, questionable history lessons, comedy tutorials, screenwriting tips, and the dissection of some truly cringe-worthy teenage poetry, reading Mr. Funny Pants is like spending a drug-fueled afternoon bouncing around inside Showalter's brain. Showalter declined to let The Observer actually enter his brain for this interview, but he did call us to chat about his Jim Carroll aspirations, Kevin Kline hero worship, and the dangers of trying to write like Aaron Sorkin.

The Observer: First of all, I love the book. Is it crazy for you that people are finally reading it?

Michael Showalter: It's crazier than people actually saying that they like it, to be perfectly honest.

It's getting great reviews.

Yeah. I pulled a fast one on everybody.

Has anyone actually ever called you "Mr. Funny Pants?"

What honestly happened was that I was proposing all these different titles to them and genuinely sarcastically I said, "How 'bout 'Mr. Funny Pants?'" because to me that sort of seemed like the lowest common denominator title for a comedy book. And, just my luck, they loved it.

I loved "Everybody Poops Genius Pieces" [an alternate title Showalter suggested to his editor, culled from works by Dave Eggers, James Frey, and Taro Gomi].

That actually would've been a pretty good name. My only fear about that was, would people think that it was a parody? I mean, I do like "Mr. Funny Pants," actually. I think it's a happy title. It's a title that doesn't take itself too seriously. I wanted to have a title that says those things right off the bat, that this book is silly and funny.

Mr. Funny Pants is unlike anything currently in what you might call the comedian memoir genre. There's obviously a memoir element but a huge portion of it really seems to capture your stream-of-consciousness thoughts, from puzzles and jokes to essays about sandwiches. Did you plan that structure from the beginning, or did it just come out that way?

No. That's kind of where it went. It started out that I very earnestly had this, you know, this thing that I was going to write The Basketball Diaries or something. And then as I started writing more stream-of-consciousness, or when I started just free writing it a little more, the book that I started thinking of as a template was less The Basketball Diaries and more this book that I had read as a kid called Tomfoolery. It was the kind of book that you could flip to any page. So I started thinking, that's actually the kind of book that I would enjoy reading—a book that you could return to and find something new every time.