Why Not?: Lessons on Comedy, Courage, and Chutzpah - Tapa dura

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Mark Schiff is a stand-up comedian who has headlined at comedy clubs nationwide, including all the major casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and toured worldwide with Jerry Seinfeld for fifteen years. Mark has specials on HBO and Showtime, has appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and Late Night with David Letterman, is featured in Seinfeld’s Netflix special Jerry Before Seinfeld and Live from the Laugh Factory with Dom Irrera, and has been the featured act at the Montreal Just for Laughs Comedy Festival. He coedited I Killed: True Stories of the Road from America’s Top Comics with Ritch Shydner, is the playwright of Married People, cowritten with Steve Shaffer, which played to sold-out audiences in Los Angeles in 2019, and The Comic, which ran in Los Angeles for ten months as well as at the Aspen Comedy Festival, a regular contributor to LA’s Jewish Journal, and the host of the podcast You Don’t Know Schiff. Mark lives in Los Angeles with his first wife, his fifth dog, and photos of his three sons who have all moved out and have good jobs, yet still manage to call and ask for money.

Jerry Seinfeld is an actor and comedian best-known as the creator of the TV show Seinfeld. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Is This Anything? and SeinLanguage, which reached #1 on the list. He lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

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Thank you for purchasing (I hope) a copy of my new book, Why Not?: Lessons on Comedy, Courage, and Chutzpah. Please do not let the title fool you. This book is not just for Jews or for that matter, the courageous. This book is for everyone who wants to laugh, wants to cry and wants to lose weight and not gain it back.

How this book came about was one day many years ago, I received a call from the editor of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. The Jewish Journal is a major weekly newspaper that is filled with one article after another by Jews complaining about everything from war to tiddlywinks. The editor asked me if I would write an article for the paper. I had never written one before, but I said, “why not?”  Why not?

Those two words “Why not?” is why you are holding this book right now. I am sure right before you bought it, you probably thought “Why not?” It is not uncommon that two words can change a person’s life. When I got married, I said, “I do.” Those two words changed my life, my bank account and what I thought was a necessity for sex. I bet if you tried you could also locate two words that changed your life.

I had so much fun writing that first article. For me, it was a whole new creative experience. Plus, the people who read it seemed to really like it. So, I decided to write another and another and now I have a book’s worth. After just a few articles, I started hearing from the readers things like, “When I open the paper, the first thing I do is look to see if you wrote an article this week.”  “You’re my favorite writer in the paper.” Whether or not any of that is true, it is a good feeling to know that people have enjoyed my work.

After a life time of writing jokes, traveling the world, and taking my jokes to strangers in a few hundred small and big towns across the globe, it’s nice to have something that I don’t have to get on a plane and deliver to you while standing under a row of hot lights. I hope you enjoy the book and maybe one day someone might ask you to do something that you have never done before.  Don’t forget the two words that might also change your life: why not?