Up Till Now: The Autobiography

why it’s happened. At first I would go into the denial mode, figuring they can’t possibly mean me! What had I done to deserve it? Say a few words on film? I didn’t believe I’d done enough to warrant the affection that I felt—and still feel—when I go out.
    It’s funny how it happened. Seriously. There have been a lot of articles written that claim the public embraced me because I finally learned how to laugh at myself, that I finally showed my sense of humor to the audience. If it’s true, it wasn’t a career decision, it’s because I was offered a job. My career in comedy began when I appeared in Airplane II: The Sequel, playing the role created in the original movie by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The kind of commander who orders a profile on anyone who watched The Sound of Music more than four times. It was in that film that I first began poking fun at my serious image. But here’s the truth about that: I was acting funny. I’m an actor, this was a comedy, my lines were funny, and the audience responded to it. John Lithgow, who like me almost exclusively played serious roles before finding success in comedy, explained accurately, “Once you’re funny people no longer think of you as quite the serious actor they’re used to seeing.”
    A few years later I appeared on Saturday Night Live and, once again, I think the audience was surprised I could be funny at my own expense. I parodied Kirk and Hooker. Well, if I hadn’t been funny it would have been a tragedy—and SNL is a comedy show. When I agreed to host the show I knew I would be poking fun at my somewhat somber image, that’s the foundation of that show. But rather than resisting, I embraced the opportunity to be funny. For me, it is our sense of humor, our ability to laugh even when life can be so bleak, that separates us from all other living things. Have you ever seen a flower laugh? There are no great turtle comedians. Laughing hyenas do not get the joke. But humans laugh at all types of humor: bathroom humor, ironic humor, witty humor, slapstick, silliness, and knock-knock jokes. Name the different types of laughter that are available to us and that’s what life is all about. Looking back on my life and all the things that have happpened, success and failure, marriages and divorces, broke and less broke, it finally had become clear to me that it was all funny.
    Except perhaps The Transformed Man , although there are people who claim my comic career began with that album. So none of this was new to me. I’d learned that the audiences at Star Trek conventions most enjoyed the funny stories we’d tell about working on that series.
    After that SNL appearance I began to get offered more humorous parts. Bill Cosby saw me act, thought I was funny, and asked me to appear on The Cosby Show . And when John Lithgow needed someone to create the role of his boss, the heroic Big Giant Head, on 3rd Rock from the Sun, he immediately thought of me. I mean, let’s behonest, who better to portray the Big Giant Head than myself? And the audience embraced me as the Head man.
    Once I started doing more comedy my career—and my life— seemed to move in a very different direction. And ironically, some of it wasn’t at all funny.

NINE

    The door of the dining room snapped open. A lovely blond android, clad in just about nothing, came stumbling out. There was blood splashed across her face and breasts. She bumped into Jake, caught hold of his arm, crying out, ‘They killed him! They murdered poor Zacky!’
    Shoving the mechanical woman aside, Jake carefully crossed the threshold.
    The large dining room’s interior offered a simulated moonlit terrace with a long formal dining table set up on the mosaic tiles. A large rectangle had been seared out of the far wall with a disintegrator cannon and the real night showed through. A chill wind was blowing into the room, carrying rain with it.
    Another nearly naked female android was still seated at the table. Most of her left side had been sliced away with a lazgun and her inner works were spilled out and dangling.
    A third android, this one in the image of a naked young boy of...
    Let me introduce you to Jake Cardigan, the futuristic detective hero of the TekWar series that I created, which eventually became nine books, twenty-four comic books, four movies, a TV series, sets of trading cards, and a computer game. These few paragraphs are from the third book in the series, TekLab, written with the very talented Ron