I Can FEEL Your Anger! It Gives You Focus! Makes You Stronger!
You know what? As a writer, often I really try to get into the heads of my characters. And sometimes, I take it too far. For example…
Oh, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s a couple of announcements (and THEN, as usual, I’ll tell you an embarrassing anecdote from my writing career).
- MAD Magazine: I wrote a humor piece called “The Bad Roommate,” which was illustrated by David DeGrand. It appears in MAD #7, on sale now!
[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”8″ display=”basic_thumbnail” show_slideshow_link=”0″]
- Last month my Avengers Little Golden Book The Threat of Thanos (illustrated by Shane Clester) appeared in a Barnes & Noble ad in celebration of the film Avengers: Endgame! (Click on the thumbnail to see the whole ad)
- Hungry Shark: The Official Shark-Tastic Guide, written by yours truly, comes out on June 25th, 2019 from Scholastic. Barnes & Noble included the book on their list of “Guides & Novels for Your Gamer.” (Seriously, what’s with Barnes & Noble hyping all of my books lately? Not that I’m complaining…)
- Star Wars Adventures: Recently I wrote a Tales from Wild Space comic book story called “Majordomo, Major Problems,” which was illustrated by Drew Moss. “Majordomo” is an 8-page backup tale in Star Wars Adventures #23, which comes out on June 26th, 2019 from IDW Publishing.
Now that that’s out of the way, I believe you’re owed a humiliating anecdote about my writing career. And you shall have it:
As a writer, often I really try to get into the heads of my characters. For example, when I was a staff writer on the television series TruTV Presents: World’s Dumbest, I found that in order to write jokes for Gilbert Gottfried (who was one of the cast members), you had to yell the jokes out loud AS Gilbert Gottfried. In other words, you had to do an impression of Gilbert Gottfried, to figure out how he would say a particular joke.
And that’s something I’ve done quite a few times in my career. When I was writing the scripts for the House M.D. video game, I did an impression of Hugh Laurie, in his “Gregory House” voice. As “Hugh Laurie,” I acted out each scene, talking into a digital recorder. Then I played it back in order to see if it sounded like something the character would actually say.
When I used to write Bart Simpson comic book stories for Bongo Comics, whenever Krusty the Clown was in a story, I found that it was really helpful to brainstorm one-liners for Krusty by doing a terrible Krusty impression and ad-lib some jokes while talking into the digital recorder. More recently, when I wrote my LEGO Star Wars books for Scholastic, I liked to put a few Emperor Palpatine jokes in each book. And sometimes the jokes were written IN Palpatine’s voice, especially if Palpatine was narrating a section of the book. That meant doing a really terrible, over-the-top Ian McDiarmid impression, and it really helped make the Palpatine jokes and Palpatine narration even funnier.
But what I’m really getting at is that – as I type this – there’s a digital recorder right next to my laptop. On that digital recorder’s files there’s hours and hours of audio of me doing the absolute WORST Hugh Laurie, Krusty the Clown, and Ian McDiarmid impressions. And when I was writing the House scripts, I was also doing impressions of the OTHER House cast members. So there’s audio of me doing awful Omar Epps impressions, awful Lisa Edelstein impressions, awful Robert Sean Leonard impressions. Oh, you have no idea. And you WILL CONTINUE TO have no idea. Because nobody will ever hear those audio files. I guess this isn’t really a humiliating anecdote as much as it’s a POTENTIALLY humiliating anecdote.
But if you ever need something to blackmail me with, just steal the digital recorder, okay?
Dress For the Job You Want. Or Don’t. It’s Entirely Up To You.
Happy Two-Days-After-April-Fool’s-Day! Welcome to my latest blog post, where I generously share news and announcements about my recent projects, followed by a 
humiliating personal anecdote. So, without further delay, here are some announcements:
This weekend (April 5-7), I’ll be the Scholar-In-Residence at Congregation Or Hadash, in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. I’m going to be giving lectures and teaching workshops on a variety of pop culture-related topics.
Also, three of my children’s books will be coming out later this year:
1. The first book is called Hungry Shark: The Official Shark-Tastic Guide. It will be published by Scholastic in June 2019 (just in time for Shark Week!), and it’s a guide to all of the characters in the Hungry Shark video game franchise. I had a ton of fun writing this book, which is stuffed to the gills with exclusive info about fearsome fish like Tiger Shark and Great White, as well as goofballs like Mako Shark and Porbeagle.
2. I co-wrote the new edition of The LEGO Ninjago Visual Dictionary, which comes out in September 2019 from DK. My co-author on the book was Hannah Dolan. I did quite a bit of research while working on this book, and I think it shows! The book looks pretty fantastic, and I’m very proud of my work on it. 
3. And I wrote The Despicable Me Little Golden Book, which will also come out in September of this year, from Penguin Random House. It’s an adaptation (Little Golden Book-style) of the first Despicable Me movie, and it was illustrated by Elsa Chang. While working on this book, I really started to empathize with Gru. Like me, Gru’s just an ordinary dad. He just so happens to also be a supervillain. Is that so wrong? (Yes. Yes, it is.)
But that’s not why you’re here! You’re here to read another embarrassing anecdote about my writing career. 
Well, here it is:
For the past several years, I’ve been a writer for MAD Magazine. But before I was a MAD writer, I was a MAD intern. Before I was even an intern, when I was first getting ready to go over to the MAD offices to interview for the internship position, I wasn’t sure what I should wear. I dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, which is the standard “Arie Kaplan uniform.” That was true then, and it’s true now. However, just in case the MAD folks wanted me to dress formally, I had my finest suit dry-cleaned. Then I folded it ever-so-neatly, kept it on its wire hanger, and put it in my backpack. And then I went to the interview, which was conducted by Joe Raiola, who was at that time both the Associate Editor of MAD and the magazine’s internship coordinator. After talking to Joe for a while, I realized that the interview seemed to be going well. So I said, “By the way, I didn’t know what to wear to this meeting, so I brought a suit.” Joe looked at me and said, “No you didn’t! I don’t know how to tell you this, but what you’re wearing is NOT a suit.” And I unzipped my backpack and pulled out the suit. And Joe started laughing and yelled out, “He brought a SUIT in his backpack…and it’s STILL ON THE HANGER! He even had it 
dry-cleaned!” He called in the other editors to look at the hallmark of ridiculousness that was my carefully folded, dry-cleaned suit, still on the hanger. And everyone had a good laugh. I don’t know why I thought I might have to wear a suit. It was MAD Magazine, after all! But in my defense, I WAS eighteen years old. And eighteen-year-olds are pretty much incapable of making good decisions. Ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamen (aka “King Tut”) made so many bad decisions that he DIED at age eighteen.
To any eighteen-year-olds who might be reading this: stop it. Just stop it. Whatever “it” is that you’re doing, stop it. You look ridiculous. That is all.