I Take Life Seriously Enough to Know It Should Never Be Taken Seriously
I’m Allen R Smith, an award-winning humor writer living in Oceanside, California, where I spend an unreasonable amount of time observing perfectly normal life and wondering how it might look wearing clown shoes.
I’ve published thousands of articles in magazines, newspapers, websites, blogs, and social media. Along the way, I became a three-time winner of the America’s Funniest Humor competition. Apparently, somebody official agreed that I was funny, which saved me the trouble of printing my own certificates.
Since 2023, I’ve been exploring a new creative frontier: combining humor writing with artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, digital illustration, and an expanding toolbox of AI technology. I don’t ask AI to replace creativity. I use it to shake creativity upside down, rummage through its pockets, and see what peculiar little ideas fall out onto the floor.
My work begins with real life because reality is already ridiculous. I twist it a few degrees, introduce it to something it has absolutely no business meeting, and wait for the furniture to start flying.
Books, Mischief, and Other Evidence
My first book, Ski Instructors Confidential: The Stories Ski Instructors Swap Back at the Lodge, was published in 2005. Now in its second printing, it continues traveling around the world, presumably without buying a lift ticket.
In 2011, I published Watching Grandma Circle the Drain, a collection about the many ingenious ways human beings complicate their otherwise manageable lives. It continues to receive enthusiastic reviews from readers, booksellers, websites, blogs, and the other people I pay.
I contributed to Chicken Soup for the Soul: Runners in 2010 and The Gigantic Armchair Reader in 2008. In 2014, Monkey in a Pink Canoe paddled into the world and earned the Colorado Independent Publishers Association’s Best Humor Award.
Then ChatGPT Walked into the Room
In 2024, I published five books created with the assistance, imagination, and occasional digital tomfoolery of ChatGPT:
Laughing Bytes: Mastering the Art of Humor Writing with ChatGPT
From Meh? to Marvelous: 12 ChatGPT Lessons to Supercharge Your Humor Writing
Once Upon a Scandal: The Hidden Truths Behind Your Favorite Fairy Tales
Burps, Boogers, and Broken Rules: The Ultimate Guide to Being a Kid
Today, I continue twisting words, images, artificial intelligence, and the stubborn belief that almost anything can be made more interesting by approaching it from the wrong direction.
You can browse all my books on Amazon, read my latest work, and discover what happens when human imagination and artificial intelligence are left alone together without adult supervision.