My goal, whether writing or performing comedy, is to entertain while sharing whatever knowledge I can. That’s why I wrote God is a Woman: Dating Disasters. To do that best, I thought I would recount my entire journey with God is a Woman to date.
The Great Vision
Last year I was frustrated. I had written two screenplays for hire, had one in development hell, and a bunch of others that were “just not quite right but really, really good.” At the same time, friends had been bugging me for years to write a dating advice book. I finally looked into the genre and became frustrated with the literature. Most of the advice in such books was very poor, advising women to “never return a guy’s call,” “pretend to like sports to catch a man,” and so forth. The advice in guys' books wasn’t much better. The few books for guys really didn’t offer advice; they recalled tales of debauchery with women, offering little insight into how to meet and date women.
I decided to write a dating advice book. Unlike my screenplays, I’d get to see the results of my work much more quickly. (I was spoiled as a comedian; you tell a joke, the crowd laughs, there’s instant gratification.)
Some Lessons from Standup
When I was twenty, I was completely caught off guard by a crowd for the late show at a comedy club. Typically, the late show, beginning at 11pm or later, is full of drunks and young people. Imagine my surprise when the entire crowd consisted of a wedding anniversary party ... celebrating married year number fifty. Yup, the youngest person in the forty-person crowd was eighty and completely sober. My job? To make them laugh for thirty minutes. It was awful. I had nothing for them. They stared at me the entire time, interrupting occasionally to ask me why it was so cold, could I get the heat turned up, and what did I just say, could I speak up, please? I learned then that your material needed to be easily adaptable for appeal to different types of crowds.
I also learned a lot about people as a standup, as I met no less than hundreds of thousands of them in ten years with a couple thousand of shows under my belt. I learned what people wanted and hated in books, movies, dating, and government.
Armed with these two key pieces of knowledge, I thought about how to make the book.
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