5 Questions With: Will Cantrell

Posted June 24, 2009, 1:36 pm in Writing


At 60 years old, Will Cantrell is trying to launch a brand new career. No matter what happens -- he'll be laughing. And he hopes you will be too! As a GB member, Will ("JustPlainWill") is blogging about the economy, politics, celebrities and more. He's hoping to catch the eye of someone hoping to make him into a syndicated humor columnist. We wanted to know more about a man who finds humor in topics many of us consider somber. So we asked Will to take part in our 5 Questions With series -- click here for the full archive of articles!


1. You’re 60 years old and starting a new career when a lot of guys would be ready to wind down and enjoy retirement. Why do it?

Heck, I need the work!  Haven't you heard that the retirement age has been pushed back? It used to be 65, then, the government changed it to 67.  Now, because of "the economy," I think the new mandatory retirement age is somewhere around 108. So it looks like I am going to be working for a while yet.    

Of course, one of the reasons that I need the work is because I seem to owe everybody in the Western Hemisphere, as well as a few people in some of the underdeveloped countries. Plus I am still paying off student loans from my college days back in the '60s.  I think that my final student loan installment payment is scheduled for 2042. The student loan people are relentless. There's this woman, Sallie Mae Jones, over in the Collections Department of the Department of Education who assures me that both she and the DOE will not permit me to die until the loan is fully paid off.  I don't know if that's a guarantee that I am going to live for a long time, but she always addresses me in a very terse manner and seems really, really serious about me paying my student loan back in full. So as you can see, I have to work.

On a slightly more serious note, I have, from the time that I was a little kid, always loved to write. Always. When I was writing compositions in Catholic elementary school back in Philadelphia, my serious efforts at trying to write English compositions would almost inevitably deteriorate into a work that was at least slightly off-beat or satirical. I couldn’t help it. As an adult, for a long time, I was employed as a Vice President in the Commercial Real Estate Division at one of the country’s large national banks. Every once in awhile, I would "slide" a couple of comedic comments into business analysis memos that I'd be assigned to write for the Loan Committee.  I couldn't help myself.  It would just kind of happen. It would be almost as if the devil himself would whisper into my ear, "Will, put this line in the memo. It’s funny and should get a laugh or two from who’s ever reading it. It’s also pertinent and to the point."

Senior management didn't always find these memos to be quite as amusing as me and "the devil" did, but I was told by a few members of the committee that I got more than a few laughs. Maybe this er, proclivity for what I call "literary mischief" was one of the reasons that I never became President of the Bank. (Well, that and the fact that I sometimes had a hard time figuring out where to place the decimal point when I was balancing my travel expense account.) The point is that I have always loved to write and this seems to be an ideal time to try to get paid for doing it.

Another reason that I have waited until this age to "get serious" about being a humor writer is that my feeling is that any good writer should be an expert on something -- solving crimes, woodworking, cooking, transmission repair, love, relationships, etc.   Unfortunately, about the only thing that I have ever been an expert on is how to make women mad -- wives, ex-wives, mothers, aunts, daughters, teachers, nuns, etc. (I am quite good at this, by the way, even though it is always quite unintentional. I do it unwittingly. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much demand for a book or even a brochure on "How to Make Women Mad for Dummies," although I did check into this several years ago.) Accordingly, I have had to wait to become knowledgeable enough about some subject that I could write about and not sound (or read) like a complete, blithering idiot. Not a complete idiot, anyway.  So now, I am trying to write about everyday life.

I figure that now that I have now lived long enough to have learned enough to write and comment on "life as we know it" or “life as we suspect it really is." (As an example, as I write about in "A Mother of an Invention," I am pretty sure that my cell phone has legs that its sprouts when no one is looking and then crawls around and hides from me. Yours probably does too, whether you realize it or not. As I write about in "Zombie and the Eighth Deadly Sin," another of my suspicions is that Hell is full of people who were new car dealers while on Earth.) Anyway, my current age seems to be as good a time as any to explore and write about such topics and "life as I suspect it really is."

So in addition to trying to syndicate a weekly humor column, I am also working on two books, the first of which is a childhood memoir entitled "The Mostly True Adventures of JustPlainWill (Batteries Not Included)." It is a seriocomic remembrance of growing up as an only child who also happened to be black, Catholic and who lived mainly in the Deep South in the '50s and who was raised by relatives who were very loving but who were best described as "real characters." The second book is a collection of humorous columns and commentaries and has a working title of "JustPlainWill: Just As I Suspected!" I am writing the books just in case the syndicated humor column "thing" does not work. As you are aware, it seems as if everyday another newspaper goes out of business. (In about six months it seems as if there will be no more newspapers.) 

Around the 4th of July, we will also unveil a new Web site (www.willcantrell.com) which will have humor columns and some other fun things on it. Much of "my stuff" will, hopefully, appeal to other baby boomers. Lastly, my blogs, Notes from the Recession (www.notesfromtherecession.com), The Big Boom Theory (http://bigboomtheory.blogspot.com) , and my blogs at Growing Bolder also house stories and columns written about life as we suspect it to be. The blogs are written under the byline of “JustPlainWill.”

2. What is it about comedy that is so attractive? What is your style of comedy?

The thing about humor is that you kill two birds with one stone (or at least seriously maim one of the birds). If it is well done or is well timed, you (1) elicit laughter and (2) tell the truth. There is almost always a kernel of truth in what the humorist is saying and in general,  you can get almost anyone to let down their guard to consider  your point of view if you can get them to laugh -- or at least chuckle a bit. (This theory does not always work if the other party is brandishing a gun, however.)

Much of "my comedy" is self-deprecating and pokes fun mainly at me. Most of the "stuff" that I write and talk about are mostly true things that have happened to me with a little hyperbole added, of course. The stuff that I write about that is not true, could be. I want to leave a little a the imagination of the reader or listener. Lastly, I like poking fun at the human condition -- the funny things that we humans do although we don’t necessarily see them as funny incidents at the time. We are an especially funny species. All you really have to do is just really look around and quietly observe. (Just don’t get caught staring though. Sometimes the people that you might be staring at get upset.) There’s almost always something funny going on. I just comment on it.

3. If you could look into your crystal ball, what would you see yourself doing in 5 years? 10 years, 15 years?

In trying to answer your questions conscientiously, I actually tried to visit a new psychic on Peachtree Street in Atlanta who had advertised on cable TV that she had a crystal ball. Her name was Madam Phyllis. Once I had gone over there, though,  I found that she had recently gone out of business—another victim of the recession. So unfortunately, I was unable to find out. Although this was disappointing, I figure though that this does prove once and for all that psychics are fake. Otherwise, she would have known that she was going to go out of business.

So, since I have to actually use my own crystal ball to answer the question, I am hoping that I will be a successful humor or comedy writer. By that time, I can foresee having authored several books as well as sold a few movie scripts. I am pretty sure that I have ten or twelve books "in me." And who knows, I may well take a crack at "stand-up."

It would also be nice to have my student loans finally paid off. And maybe I will have even answered some of the key questions of life. Except for figuring out (1) the fact that men and women have brains that are sure as hell wired differently and (2) the fact that the Earth has never been visited by aliens (with the possible exception of Tiger Woods), I STILL haven’t figured some of the fundamental questions of life, even at my age. There are many serious life questions that I hope to have the answers to within the next fifteen years such as (1) has there ever been a teenage boy, going to a high school prom, in a rented tuxedo that fit him properly and (2) has there a movie made in Hollywood after 1975 in which Kevin Bacon been in? Hopefully, in fifteen years, I will have answered important questions such as those.

4. Who are your heroes; the people you look up to? Have they changed through the years?

Most of my heroes are writers and include the likes of Mark Twain, David Halberstam, Richard Russo, E.L. Doctorow, Art Buchwald, Larry Brown, and Stephen L. Carter. At the very top of the list are Dave Barry and Art Buchwald. I also like Mary Roach, who is a great humor writer. (Of course, if I ever met her, I’d probably eventually stumble on to some way of making her mad at me.) Twain, Barry, and Buchwald proved that there was a market for doing satire and comedic writing. Since this is what I do, they are necessarily at the top of the list.

The others on the list were or are just great writers although they are not necessarily humorous or satirical. One of them, Larry Brown had very little formal training as a writer. He was a shoe salesman, an ex-Marine and a firefighter who just taught himself to write. Just by trial, error, and the sheer volume of his work, he taught himself. Unfortunately, he died in 2004 at a fairly young age. I think that he was in his early fifties. A few years ago, Stephen L. Carter wrote one of the best novels that I have ever read. The book was entitled "The Emperor of Ocean Boulevard" and was part mystery novel, part political thriller, part character study.  I’ve read it four times now and have also put Stephen Carter on my list of writer-heroes.

You'll note that Twain, Halberstam, Buchwald, and Brown are all dead. While I have nothing people who are still "walking around on top of the planet," I am kind of partial to dead heroes. They are less risky. Choosing heroes is roughly akin to naming your own, "personal football stadium in honor of someone." It's a real honor to be called someone's hero and when your heroes are still alive there's always a at least a small chance that they are going to do something to embarrass you -- like committing murder or embezzling a pile of money and running off to Argentina with a couple of 18-year-old girls. Then you have to change the name on the stadium. As an example,  I don't think that you are seeing too many stadiums being named after O.J. or too many people putting Bernie Madoff on their list of heroes. Once someone is dead, you pretty much don’t have to worry about them misbehaving -- unless they are really, really "good."

5. When you're gone, what do you hope people say about you and your work?

First of all, let’s not rush it. But hopefully people will say that Will Cantrell was a funny as well as an insightful guy who finally  made it as a writer after trying for decades. He also was a good friend and a good guy. Lastly, hopefully they will say, "You’ve got to hand it to ol’ Cantrell. He finally got those damn student loans paid off before he croaked."

Like what you see? Want to get more of JustPlainWill's humor? Check out his profile page, with links to his latest blogs. And for other articles in the 5 Questions With library, click here!



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