Book Talk with Richard Walter

Richard Walter '65 is an author of best-selling fiction and nonfiction, celebrated storytelling educator, screenwriter, script consultant, lecturer and retired professor who led the screenwriting program in the film school at UCLA for several decades. His new novel, Deadpan (Heresy Press, 2024), follows the misadventures of a vaguely antisemitic West Virginia car dealer who wakes up one day transformed into the world's most popular Jewish comedian.

Binghamton University Magazine: Where did the idea for Deadpan come from?

Walter: Deadpan was inspired by Franz Kafka's timeless early 20th-century story The Metamorphosis, in which a man awakens one morning to discover he has been transformed into an insect. I wondered: What else besides a bug or a beetle could a man inexplicably become? I decided upon the world's most popular stand-up comedian. And because so many comedians are Jews, I decided to make the man a vaguely antisemitic auto dealer who spends a day in the life of a Jew.

BM: You're from Queens and went to Binghamton before settling in Los Angeles. How was West Virginia chosen as the setting?

RW: My intent was to cast the protagonist as an auto dealer in rural America who covertly blames Jews for the failure of his business. When I first drove out to the West Coast, I was surprised to discover that a narrow outcropping of West Virginia lies between Pennsylvania and Ohio. When I sat down to write Deadpan, it struck me that it was exactly the right place.

BM: What elements of yourself, if any, are present in the main character?

RW: There is no mezuzah over my door. I don't keep kosher. And if I belonged to a synagogue, it would be so reformed as to close for the Jewish holidays. That said, every cell in my body, every thought in my head and every word that I write is informed by my Ashkenazi soul. I am also a trained actor and experienced public speaker who has occasionally performed stand-up. The first time I ever did so was during the 1960s on campus in Binghamton.

BM: What do you want readers to experience?

RW: I want, first of all, for them to laugh. Deadpan is a funny tale about an unfunny subject: hate speech and bigotry in general, and antisemitism in particular. My intention was to posit that while racial and religious prejudice does not require arson, rape and murder, it is the quieter, more widespread, seemingly benign bigotry that enables hatemongers to perpetrate violence. I'm not the least bit happy that the subject has become so wretchedly, dreadfully timely.