Authors

I know nothing

A Retrospective by Ben Karlin

The most frequent question I was asked when Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me came out was, “So, what have you learned from women who dumped you?” It’s an insanely logical question and you would think after a year and half working on the book and another three months publicizing it, I would have come up with a decent answer. But I never did. I think I know why.

Turns out, I really haven’t learned much – or rather, just about everything I have learned has opened doors to an even vaster amount of territory about which I know nothing. This is not modesty, or even false modesty, which is a specialty of mine. No, this is the truth. The more you learn, the less you know. That’s like, Philosophy 101, right? (I got a D in Philosophy 101, which is why I am asking the question, rather than asserting it with conviction.)

In fact, nothing along the way of making this book went like I thought it would. For example, I started out thinking the book would be full of essays by people of grand status; former presidents, corporate titans and perhaps a Hall of Fame athlete or two. How interesting would it be to compile a humor anthology on the subject of failed relationships and fill it with the biggest names in the world? In fact, here is a partial list of names I put together, before I even took the idea to the publisher.

  • Ted Turner
  • Barack Obama
  • David Beckham
  • Richard Branson
  • Bill Clinton
  • Graydon Carter
  • Sebastian Junger
  • Justin Timberlake
  • Robert Redford
  • Mick Jagger
  • Bruce Springsteen
  • Bill O'Reilly
  • Al Gore
  • John Edwards
  • Derek Jeter
  • Pat Riley
  • Andre Agassi
  • Tim McGraw
  • And of course,
  • Dr. Henry Kissinger

An astute observer might notice that not a single one of these people appears in Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me. Why? Well, I remembered something Bob Odenkirk, a longtime writer at Saturday Night Live, told me when I asked him why SNL was so maddeningly inconsistent. He responded: “Have you ever tried to make Wayne Gretzky funny?”

Good point – and I mean no disrespect to The Great One -- but if I wanted a funny book, the number one ingredient was funny people. Otherwise, I’d have to work much, much harder, and that simply wouldn’t do.

So instead, I reached out to the funniest, most interesting people I could think of and it turns out almost all of them had a story about getting dumped and, more importantly, were literate.

Now, it is a year later, the paperback is out and I will inevitably face another round of questions about what I have learned. This time, however, I am confident in the knowledge that I don’t have.