A. Whitney Brown is the man who said, "I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants." A. Whitney Brown is the man who said, "The saving grace of doing humor is that if you fail, no one is laughing at you." A. Whitney Brown is the man who said, "A group of white South Africans recently killed a black lawyer because he was black. That was wrong. They should have killed him because he was a lawyer." A. Whitney Brown is the man who said, "The past is what actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down."
A. Whitney Brown is the man who said, "There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you."
A. Whitney Brown was a writer and occasional cast member on Saturday Night Live during what are still my favorite years of that uneven show. He often did the smartest material on the program some weeks, the smartest material on all of television. But a few years ago, he seemed to completely drop off the map and disappear. Every time I glanced at the shelf with my copy of his book, The Big Picture, I wondered what had become of him and whether we'd ever see him again.
Well, I'm happy to say…he's back. Now, if he'll just come in this direction…