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Jim Parry
Top Ten Lists: Real Facts, Dark Humor
Writer, blogger and apocalyptic comedian letting us know what the end of the world has in store for us.
Jim Parry misspent his years at Harvard by helping start the Gargoyle, a humor magazine to compete with the Lampoon, and starting and captaining the undefeated national championship tiddlywinks team.
He and Ron Barrett (co-creator and illustrator of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) met when they were at the same ad agency and were neighbors in Brooklyn. As a copywriter, he is very proud of writing this headline for Kwell which treats head lice: “If your dandruff is moving, maybe it’s not dandruff.” For Northeast Airlines: “If you get a bad meal on a plane, you can’t walk out.” And for Hertz, this headline that ran in the basketball program of a midwestern college: “We rent back seats.”
Jim is the father of four children, to all of whom he read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. He has co-written comic screenplays sold to Columbia and Universal and has blogged on Huffington Post as Ranting Political Poet. His taste for the apocalyptic was nurtured by O.D.-ing on sci-fi from around age 10 to 14. Voted Class Cynic of his high school graduating class and maintaining a darkly comic view of humankind’s prospects, Jim is the founder of the Center for Impending Doom.
Read our review of his book The Top 10 as We Hit Bottom here.
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BOOKS:
The Top Ten As We Hit Bottom (2020)
The Discovery (1978) a thriller about the discovery and theft of the cure for cancer
YOUR BIGGEST LITERARY INFLUENCES:
For this book, the greatest influence has been (for dark humor) Joseph Heller for his Catch-22 and (for dark humor/apocalyptic) Terry Southern who wrote the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove.
LAST BOOK READ:
Big Bang by David Bowman
THE BOOK THAT CHANGED YOUR LIFE:
Not sure if it changed my life but I’ve been affected by V. by Thomas Pynchon (and, no, I haven’t been able to get through Gravity’s Rainbow).
YOUR FAVORITE LITERARY CHARACTER:
Ahab, for going up against the universe, for his monomania, for his sanity and madness, for his Promethean defiance, for his anguish (all he lacks is a sense of humor about this).
CURRENTLY WORKING ON:
Four things: A graphic novel. An alternate-reality door stopper like Lord of the Rings. A screenplay (with the partner with whom I wrote comic screenplays sold to Columbia and Universal). A rock musical.
WORDS TO LIVE BY:
“Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” – Wordsworth
“Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.” – Joseph Stalin
ADVICE FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS:
Keep writing, keep submitting. Damon Runyon said “All life is 6 to 5 against” and he was wildly optimistic. But keep writing and keep submitting.
