The book on Greg Fitzsimmons

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CAHIR O'DOHERTY,

Irish Voice Reporter

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Four-time Emmy Award winning comedian Greg Fitzsimmons has just written one of most hilarious and unexpectedly moving Irish American memoirs in years. He talks to CAHIR O’DOHERTY about his career, his success and lifelong his unstoppable urge to behave badly.
 
If stand-up comedy is the bottom rung in the entertainment ladder, then memoirs must be the lowest rung of the publishing world.  But that’s just fine for comedian Greg Fitzsimmons, 44, the four-time Emmy Award winner.

“Memoirs have become the lowest form of writing, which is exactly why I was drawn to the genre,” Fitzsimmons told the Irish Voice during a recent interview.

Lifelong shame and guilt (and pointless attempts to impose them on him) drive his raucous and unspeakably funny new book, Dear Mrs. Fitzsimmons: Tales of Redemption from an Irish Mailbox (Simon & Schuster).

Constructed around a series of increasingly angry (and unintentionally hilarious) letters from his outraged teachers, Fitzsimmons’ book is a classic Irish American coming of age tale about a bright kid who keeps asking increasingly awkward questions of his shocked elders, and then has the charm and smarts to elude the consequences (usually).

But underneath the brittle surface there’s a lot of heartache and darkness in this story too.

Fitzsimmons’ disciplinary reports were called Irish Merit Badges in family, and his parents would often howl with laughter at their contents.

“Dear Mrs. Fitzsimmons,” one begins, “Greg was loitering in the hallway when I walked by on my way home. Greg began openly mocking me by making fun of my last name (i.e. ‘The grass looked very Dewey this morning,’ ‘Dewey have any homework?’ and ‘Are we going to learn the Dewey Decimal System?’) It is disrespectful to address a teacher in such a manner, and I think its best to bring this to his parents’ attention.”

With material like this to draw from, is it any wonder he’s a comedian?

“The way my parents reacted to school letters that were supposed to cause shame and bringing down the hammer was unusual, because to them it was a badge of honor. It meant their kid was independent and free-thinking and he fought back,” Fitzsimmons says.

By laughing at these letters -- even though there were times when they’d get mad -- his parents taught him valuable lessons about conformity.

“Don’t do it so much that you fail in life, but to succeed in life and not do it is not success. There has to be some element of you didn’t play by all the rules and you still managed to be successful,” he says.

Fitzsimmons grew up in Tarrytown in Westchester County, New York, the area where Don Draper of TV’s Mad Men commutes from each episode.  He won his four Emmys as a producer/writer for The Ellen DeGeneres Show at the start of the decade. Fitzsimmons also has his own radio show on Howard 101, the Sirius satellite radio channel programmed by his friend Howard Stern, who also wrote the foreword for his book.

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