Ask Mr. Smartypants

What Mr. Smartypants can do for you

Not that much, really. I can speak to groups, read from my works, sign books, sell books and scarf up all the expensive smoked salmon you bought for the real guests.Really fast. I mean you won't even see me do it, which I guess qualifies it as a magic trick.

So I also do magic tricks.

  • Ask Mr. Smartypants

    "Ask Mr. Smartypants" is a collection of  50 columns published in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal over the last three years. The book is culled from about 150 pieces written over that period, which means purchasers are getting the creme de la creme, or depending on how you look at it, quite a bit less dreck. 

 Awesome testimonials from people who I most certainly do not have, embarassing, even felonious pictures of.

I do not know Lane Filler the fat and happy, gainfully employed, doting father and loving husband. The Lane Filler I know is a terrifying boy who lurks by the playground fence. His whole body is built from pipe cleaners -- not just thin, but strong. His glasses are much, much too thick for someone so young. It's like he scalded his eyes reading forbidden books and Playboys (which he probably did). He knows the meaning of every curse word two years before anyone else and he will make you feel like crawling into a hole and dying if you cough while trying to French inhale one of the Kools you snagged from your Mom's purse. And my God, is he funny.


I am happy to report, after reading this incisive, surprisingly touching, and very, very funny collection that the Lane Filler I know is alive and well and writing in Spartanburg. Don't let the good manners fool you; once a wiseass, always a wiseass.

Josh Lieb
Co-Executive Producer
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Great book! It is packed with laughs, I tell you. In fact, I'll tell anyone who reads the back cover.
Lane Filler is so funny, he could write a column about the history of stucco walls and pack it with eight solid laughs. Even better for us, he writes about universal subjects like marriage, religion, email and the evils of houseplants (well, that last one may not be quite universal. But you know what I’m saying).
One time, when a reader called in with a tip, Lane writes “I smelled a Pulitzer. Or Camembert. I smelled something.” You know what I smell? Comedy. The sweet fragrance of comedic insights into life. I encourage you to breathe deep some Lane Filler. Lane once wrote that he knows “slightly less about cars than a duck-billed platypus of middling intellect knows about early 20th- century dance crazes.” Which may be true. But he does know a lot about writing an entertaining book. 
AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically