Squalling and pink, Michael Gerber was squirted into the world on June 14, 1969. Slightly premature, Mr. Gerber would've been less anxious to emerge had he realized that the Beatles were basically broken up already. Not only that, but he was in the Deep South, a region that has given him the creeps ever since. Though his parents could not do anything about the rift between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, they did move him to St. Louis, Missouri (which is still kinda Southern, but only enough to make you appreciate how it's not). It was here, in this beer and baseball-crazed town of big people, that Mr. Gerber spent the majority of his childhood.

Mr. Gerber quickly realized that he was a small person--a child--and he had better make the big people like him if he wanted to survive. This impulse first manifested itself in impromptu standup routines for his family, and for several years just the sight of the strangely professorial child with dirty glasses saying things like "Nixon blows" was more than enough to keep everyone chuckling. Remember, this was the Seventies, and people smoked a lot of non-medicinal marijuana.

Once Mr. Gerber donned big boy pants, however, he found that his peers were a tougher audience. But they were roughly the same size as he was, so who gave a damn what they thought? The big person in the room was the teacher, and Mr. Gerber instinctively knew that good grades, not Nixon jokes, were the way to a teacher's heart. Comedy went into the closet, and for the next decade, Mr. Gerber was perhaps the grayest, most serious child ever to skulk about the American Midwest. If there had been anti-talent shows, Mr. Gerber would've won them.

But there are some times of life too ridiculous to take seriously, and adolescence is definitely one of these. Inspired by writers like James Thurber and Robert Benchley, Mr. Gerber began filling spiral-bound notebooks full of stories and jokes. Eventually this led to a column in his high school newspaper, and eventually that led to admission to Yale University.

Located in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale would like you to know that it is one of America's most prestigious colleges. For over three hundred years, its students have been exhorted to save the world, and God knows they try, but the world just seems to get more and more screwed up. As a History major, Mr. Gerber learned this immediately. A believer in the Hippocratic Oath--"first, do no harm"-comedy seemed like a career unlikely to make things worse. He wrote a humor column for the student weekly, The Yale Herald, then went on to resurrect the University's ancient Yale Record college humor magazine.

The Record gave Gerber a chance to ignore all the wonderful educational opportunities that Yale has to offer, in favor of scurrying around campus late at night looking for a picture of Hitler to Xerox and paste on to the body of a fat, naked woman. Not content with wasting his own education, Gerber was able to convince several others to waste their time and tuition as well. As a result of their efforts, The Record continues to ruin lives today.

After graduating in 1991, Gerber attempted to start a national college humor magazine. That didn't work. Then he tried to get a job as a magazine editor in New York. That didnít work, either. He moved to Seattle for a year, and that worked, but only because he didn't try to do anything but play gin rummy with his best friend from high school. He temped, and also wrote a not-particularly-loved humor column for Seattle Weekly.

In 1995, Mr. Gerber moved back to New York, for another futile run at the big time. Not content to immolate his own career, he convinced a college friend, Jonathan Schwarz, to share in the failure as his writing partner. The next five years were spent on the edge of starvation, selling humor pieces to The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and many other publications. Mr. Gerber and Mr. Schwarz contributed material to PBS, NPR, and "Saturday Night Live," and created a parody of The Wall Street Journal, which could not be distributed because the newsstand business is all mobbed up. About the best thing that can be said for that time in Mr. Gerberís life is: he got a cat.

In 2000, Mr. Gerber finally said "the hell with it," and moved back to Chicago, where he had gone to high school. After a few more unsuccessful attempts at careers--advertising and children's magazines--Mr. Gerber worked nights writing a book-length parody of Harry Potter. His miserable track record made Mr. Gerber doubt that anyone would publish it, but despite it all, he still enjoyed writing jokes. Even though parody is protected by the U.S. Constitution, many publishers passed on the manuscript, fearing a lawsuit from Warner Bros. About to get married and with nothing to lose except a completely unwarranted optimism, Mr. Gerber self-published Barry Trotter and the Unauthorized Parody in December 2001. This book was published in the UK as Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody, and that one-word change was apparently powerful enough to keep it on the bestseller lists for six months.

Three years--and 700,000 copies--later, Barry Trotter has spawned two sequels (Barry Trotter and the Unnecessary Sequel in 2003, and Barry Trotter and the Dead Horse in 2004). The series has been translated into nearly twenty different languages, proving beyond a doubt that fart jokes are universal. With financial success has come several new pairs of pants, a Rickenbacker guitar, and many, many used books. Not content to leave well enough alone, Mr. Gerber is working on two new parodies and a comic novel, all of which he hopes will appear in the next year or two. He lives with his wife and three cats in Chicago, Illinois.