Owen Egerton paints life black with humor

By Brad Buchholz
American-Statesman Staff
Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Owen Egerton, one of the funniest guys in Austin, a founding member of the Sinus Show comedy team, has just published his first collection of short fiction — and every single story involves death. Death at a spelling bee. Death denied to a weary lazurus in 21st-century New York City. Death and a Christmas puppy.

What? Not laughing yet?

As it turns out, Egerton's "How Best to Avoid Dying" (Dalton Publishing of Austin) is shaded with a different style of humor, one that tends to come dressed in black. It's a serious book, no question, about matters of faith and love and mortality. Yet Egerton uses tools familiar to a comedy performance artist — imagination, surprise, the spirit of play — to give his stories a wry power.

"I do like to go into darker and deeper thoughts," says Egerton, sipping on a Guinness during a Friday evening happy hour at the Hole in the Wall. "And I think humor is a great way of approaching those thoughts. And for me, it's the most successful way — to kind of laugh my way into those thoughts."

Egerton admits this book probably will surprise most fans of the Sinus Show — whose irreverent, six-year mission has been to lampoon silly films such as "Invasion of the Bee Girls" and "Xanadu" before adoring crowds at the Alamo Drafthouse. But Egerton has always had wide interests: He recently directed Les McGehee's "Plays Well with Others" at Zachary Scott Theatre and composed an essay on fatherhood that aired on KUT-FM during "Morning Edition."

"I take comedy very seriously," says Egerton, 34, riffing on the idea of humor as a complementary element in good writing. "When you define something as 'just' comic, it's the same thing as saying this meal is 'just' salty. Or 'just' spicy. Or 'just' sweet. The salt is there to bring out the other flavors, to complement the other aspects."

So why the fascination with death? What's going on?

This is Egerton's straight answer: At 30, he found out he had Type I diabetes. And in that scary moment of diagnosis, he began to ponder the notion of a life that wasn't going to last as long as advertised.

Egerton had questions, doubts, fears — and as a recent graduate of the Texas State University-San Marcos writers program, he dealt with them through the exercise of writing. He's also been volunteering for a local hospice organization.

Egerton offers a second, more poetic explanation as well. His English parents — both doctors, both writers, both born in Wales — met and fell in love in medical school while working on a cadaver. "My dad was working on an armpit, my mum on a groin," Egerton says with a laugh.

"As doctors, they'd come home and — as we all sat around the dinner table — they'd get into conversations about all the horrific things they'd seen that day," says Egerton, who was born in England and still carries a bit of an accent, even though he grew up in Friendswood. "They were very comparative. One of them would pick up a chicken bone and say, 'Now imagine a crack right here.'

"So a lot of conversations or concepts that might have seemed taboo in other families weren't at all taboo around us. They were also wonderful cynics, and we had a lot of discussions about religion. I'm really grateful for that background."

Ah, religion. As you might guess, it's a major theme in "How Best to Avoid Dying." In one of the most provocative stories,"The Martyrs of Mountain Peak," Egerton imagines an evangelical summer camp for teens, and the tragic death of a counselor who works there.

But when hordes of campers commit their lives to Christ as a tribute to their fallen mentor, the surviving counselors suddenly find themselves competing to see who can win the privilege of dying next, for now their life has purpose, knowing the act is destined to lead to more conversations in each new session. . . .

"Flannery O'Connor talked about our culture as a Christ-haunted culture. And I think my life is a Christ-haunted life," says Egerton, who worked for the Young Life camps for three years after graduating from the University of Texas in 1995. "Jesus keeps popping up in my stories. If I sit down and write, sooner or later, he walks onto the page. It's like: 'You! You're here again.' "

Egerton likes to create in this very loose, borderless way, letting go of the need to manipulate a story and inviting his characters to take control of the outcome. For the most part (with the exception of a little gem called "Waffle," which gets inside the head an aging Waffle House inspector at the end of the road), his fiction isn't especially quiet, or nuanced. It usually relies on the trick of a jolt, or a twist, to propel it into motion. That nothing is taboo in his writing is sometimes liberating, other times just plain shocking.

Yet the joy in reading Egerton is in his delightful story structures, such as when a doomed character named Lish jumps from the pages in mid-story to plead her case with the author and then hijacks her own tale.

Egerton is more interested in imagining stories — and arranging them within the completed volume with an ear to rhythm and syncopation — than he is in resolving them. Egerton listens to jazz when he writes, and his affection for improvisation shows.

"So much of the comedy I've done is made up on the spot. We had a script in the Sinus Show, but we always went away from it," says Egerton. "I think the object is to surprise the audience, and also surprise an audience by surprising myself. And that really plays into the way I write.

"I really want to get to a place in writing where I don't know what's coming next. Where I'm surprised. Where I'm discovering. And then, hopefully, that particular energy, that spirit, will come through in the story."