Q&A WITH AUTHOR
Bill Berger
WHAT LED YOU TO CREATE WHAT TO DO WITH A DEAD LAWYER?
Lawyers have a bad rap. They’re blamed for everything. As a lawyer and former judge, I took this personally. I was determined to prove lawyers are just like everyone else. So I decided to create a book about lawyers to show they can laugh at themselves. Not with the usual “lawyers and shark” jokes, either. After much thought, I decided the best way was a book satirizing lawyers in cartoons of physically horrible things done to them, depending on the nature of their law practice. I’m still waiting for the American Bar Association to call to thank me.
What motivated you to take on Boomers in What to do with a Dead Boomer?
Because they’re there--all 80,000,000 of them. And to write the definitive parody of the Baby Boomer Generation.
Describe Baby Boomers.
Call them irresponsible. Call them conceited. Call them smug, pretentious, ostentatious, pompous, superficial, sanctimonious, egotistical, greedy, vain, shallow and narcissistic. But how can you not love ‘em? Baby Boomers have that forever young attitude and look that says with a vengeance, “I’m better off than you.”
“I was sidetracked by the lure of law school and the practice of law as an attorney and judge. And that opened up even greater vistas into human foibles and the raw material for parody.”
To what do you attribute your dark, slightly sarcastic sense of humor?
Growing up under the spell of Alfred E. Newman and Rod Serling.
I was born in Philadelphia in 1949. We moved to Miami Beach the next year. I grew up on Bagel Beach, now known as South Beach. While on a bus with my mother in the 1950’s, I answered another passenger’s question, “Are you a native?” with “No, I’m Jewish”.
Our apartment building on Ocean Drive is now an upscale restaurant. When the waiter asked me if I had been there before, I said, “I use to live here.”
I was disillusioned after coming in second in the best sense of humor contest of the 1967 class at Miami Beach High. So in 1969 in college, I turned to the study of philosophy and immersed myself in metaphysics, empiricism, logical positivism, ontology, phenomenology, existentialism, and how to be part of the human chain forming the first “U” in “F**K YOU” in the street outside the administrative building at the University of Florida.
With a degree in philosophy (1972), I set my sights on returning to Miami Beach to open a philosophy shop on Lincoln Road where I would advise people whether they existed or not. But I was sidetracked by the lure of law school and the practice of law as an attorney and judge. And that opened up even greater vistas into human foibles and the raw material for parody.
Do you think Millennials will get the humor in the book?
Millennials will learn why they are the way they are, so they should. And it’s the perfect gift for the Boomer in their lives.
Who created the art for the books?
Three very skilled artists: Ricardo Martinez, who is now editorial cartoonist for El Mundo in Madrid, did the covers for both books and the cartoons in Dead Lawyer. Most of the cartoons in Dead Boomer are by Jake Fuller, a political cartoonist in Gainesville, Florida. Brandon Yowell, a free-lance graphic artist in Raleigh, North Carolina, did the layout and additional illustrations for Dead Boomer.
What are your plans for the hereafter?
I’m waiting to hear back from someone there to give me a better idea what to expect. I don’t want to be disappointed in my expectations. Then I’ll let you know.