Larry Wilmore from the Daily Show was at Elliott Bay Books yesterday evening. He is on a book tour for his new book I’d Rather We Got Casinos, and Other Black Thoughts. The book is a collection of fake interviews, essays, radio shows that he wrote over the last year. He was inspired to write by Woody Allen’s early books, which Wilmore thinks are funny. It is an interesting influence and one I might not have guessed, I suppose because Allen is so unfunny now, but Take the Money and Run and Love and Death are quite funny.

Since Wilmore is a comedian the evening was very funny. You never know how an author who doesn’t primarily work through books will address a crowd in a bookstore. The last writer I saw like that was Johan Bruneel, the author of a book on bike racing, but usually I see novelists. Wilmore gave a short run down of his history as a writer and comedian, which most people probably don’t know, but is extensive and makes for some good stories. He then talked about his book and read through the table of contents finding titles he liked and explaining what the bit was about. I’ve never seen an author do that and if he wasn’t funny it would have painful. Eventually he read (and like a good reader, used voices for each character) and answered questions.

It was refreshing to see someone break the conventions of the reading a bit and do something a little different, even if it wouldn’t work for anyone else.