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    • Billy Van Zandt Releases ‘Because It’s Funny’ Memoir at Brookdale
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    Billy Van Zandt Releases ‘Because It’s Funny’ Memoir at Brookdale

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    It’s fitting that Billy Van Zandt is holding a launch for his new memoir “Because It’s Funny!” TO Brookdale Community College.

    Not only is the Middletown school a proving ground for many of the prolific playwright’s new works, but the book itself was born out of a gathering there.

    “The first book I did (‘Get in the Car, Jane: Adventures in the TV Wasteland’) was about my TV shows and then I went back to Brookdale and did a benefit for them,” said he. “All the unofficial people from our rep company (Van Zandt Milmore Productions) flew in from all over the country to be on it with me. We just started telling stories and all of a sudden we were like, “Oh, look at my next book.”

    Van Zandt, a Middletown native, said his goal was to put all of these stories and more on paper.

    “People have been asking me for years about the origin of the plays and the fact that I had a niche in the style I was playing, very physical comedy, kind of old school but modern at the same time. I also want it to pay tribute to the company of actors I have been working with for almost 50 years,” he said.

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    The book is also a tribute to Van Zandt’s longtime partner Jane Milmore, who died in 2020. Together, the pair wrote “Love, Sex and the IRS,” “You’ve Got Hate Mail,” ” Drop Dead!”. “The Boomer Boys Musical” and over 20 other plays. The pair also worked on dozens of television shows.

    Van Zandt said he didn’t realize it when he was writing his first book, but he was paying homage to it.

    “That painted a nice picture of her. And I ended up doing the same with this book. So if you take the two books and put them together, you get a pretty great picture of Jane and how important she was to the success of it all,” Van Zandt said.

    Always writing

    Van Zandt spent much of her childhood at the Shore writing.

    “I was always writing stories and I did the school play in ninth grade and I directed the children’s play at the Barn Theater in Rumson. I wrote all the children’s play there while I was in high school,” he said.

    But he admits that he began writing plays professionally as a vehicle in which to act.

    “It started out like most actors who write their plays – it’s all about me, me, me. If you read all of our pieces in order, you can kind of see the learning curve of how I learned to write. Once I realized that the story was more important than what I was doing on stage, the plays really grew, basically.”

    Breaking the mold

    Van Zandt, also an actor who has appeared in movies like “Jaws 2” and “Star Trek” as well as television shows, says his goal is simple.

    “I just love to write and I love to play with the audience and that’s what it’s all about for me. I just wanted to make people laugh,” he said.

    He and Milmore broke a lot of rules along the way.

    “Nobody told me I couldn’t do anything I did. I wrote a musical. I had no training in music, in writing a musical, but I did it because nobody told us not to. we can do it. Then we did the silent film because no one said we couldn’t,” he said.

    “I always jumped in feet first and then figured out how to do something later.”

    The pair’s parts are some of the most produced and have been fitted around the world.

    Van Zandt says he likes to see different spins on the pieces.

    “Our show, ‘You’ve Got Hate Mail’ won the Mexican equivalent of a Tony Award, which is phenomenal. To make a very long story short, the play takes place with five actors and five laptops, and the story is. about a divorce told through emails, I get down there, there’s no desks, there’s no computers, there’s a choreographer in the show for some reason, and it was so drastically different from how we did it and it was directed brilliant. he said.

    “I thought ‘wow, I would never have done it that way and I would never have thought of that.’ I like to see things that have a different interpretation, it’s a lot of fun. It also tells me that the writing holds up.

    The Van Zandt Way

    Earlier this year, Middletown held a street naming after Van Zandt and his half-brother, Steven Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and an actor in his own right.

    “It’s so surreal. It’s still very strange to me. But I really love it. I love it. I love it for so many reasons. I’ve always been very proud of the hometown I grew up in and this is such an honor, right? just for me and my brother, but for my whole family, my dad’s name is there, and he was a World War II vet,” Van Zandt said.

    Book launch

    Van Zandt will attend the book launch alongside actor Jeff Babey. It will include a conversation with the pair and a book signing.

    The launch is scheduled for 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM on Saturday, November 16 at Brookdale, 765 Newman Springs Road. The free event is open to the public. RSVP to facebook.com/events/3587172628094677.

    Ilana Keller is an award-winning journalist and lifelong New Jersey resident who loves Broadway and really bad puns. Connect on Twitter: @ilanakeller; [email protected]

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