Comedy writer Mike Sacks lets his Maryland freak flag fly

All those places are gone — Shakey’s, Putt-Putt, Tower Records — and Randy’s gone, too. Or, to be more precise, he never existed. He’s a fictitious character sprung from the mind of Mike Sacks, a writer whose Yoknapatawpha County is Montgomery County, whose Middle-earth is Cabin John Mall, whose Hogwarts is Churchill High School.

“I was just a comedy nerd and a music nerd,” said Sacks, Churchill Class of 1986. “I’d hang around fellow comedy and music nerds.”

He’d read Mad magazine, rent comedies from Potomac Video and dream of breaking into comedy. This did not seem possible for the son of an endodontist.

But here is Sacks with “Randy! The Full and Complete Unedited Biography and Memoir of the Amazing Life and Times of Randy S.” (Archway Editions).

It’s the latest book from Sacks, who’s written for such outlets as the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and McSweeney’s, and who has parodied 1970s trucker movies (“Stinker Lets Loose”), 1980s John Hughes films (“Passable in Pink”) and lame MAGA comedians (“Passing on the Right”).

Sacks’s first book wasn’t comedy, but about comedy.

“I wanted to put out a book about comedy in the writers’ words, not funneled through me,” he said. The result was 2009’s “And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers.” Sacks interviewed such people as Buck Henry, Bob Odenkirk, Jack Handey, Ricky Gervais and Irving Brecher, who wrote for Groucho Marx.

“I just wanted to know how they did it,” he said.

And did they recommend drawing a 10-mile circle on an ADC map with White Flint Mall at the southern edge and RIO Washingtonian Center at the northern edge? After all, “Randy!” features a character boasting that he bought coleslaw “at the fancy Giant on Rockville Pike,” a line that probably resonates with no more than 40 people.

Not exactly, but sort of.

“What they were saying was no matter where you’re from or who you are, you can write comedy,” Sacks said. “You don’t have to be on the Harvard Lampoon or have grown up in Manhattan. That was a very important lesson for me. I’d never met a comedy writer out of D.C.”

Said Sacks: “The lesson I wanted to show younger writers was anyone can do it, if you have the talent and the drive. You can write about anything. Even a suburban life can be written about.”

Even a suburban life as weird and transgressive as Randy’s.

The conceit of “Randy!” is that it is a manuscript commissioned by the title character and found by Sacks at a Poolesville yard sale. Randy is in his 30s, kind of a dirtball, made wealthy after his grandmother leaves him the family farm near I-270 and he plants it with townhouses.

Like a feudal lord, Randy lives in the finest townhouse and fancies himself a patron of the arts. Unlike a feudal lord, he films a porno movie in the party room of a Baskin-Robbins, then screens it at the Bethesda Writer’s Center.

“He’s stupid in a lot of ways — and I think he’s not as smart as he thinks he is — but I’ve always had fun with people like that,” Sacks said.

Sacks says he could have been one himself. After college at Tulane, he worked retail throughout D.C., mainly at Kemp Mill Records. (“Patton Oswalt worked at Waxie Maxie’s,” Sacks said. “I tease him about the competition.”)

Sacks worked with people like Randy, partied with them. They drank together, played softball together, took spur-of-the-moment trips to Ocean City together. They were — they are — part of a Washington that isn’t lobbyists and lawyers.

Said Sacks: “They were just my friends. Randy would be my friend if I was back in Maryland.”

Nowadays Sacks lives in the very un-Randylike environs of Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, but he insists you can’t take the Maryland out of this boy.

How does he feel about Old Bay?

“I love it,” he said. “I’m obsessed with it. I bought my wife Old Bay earrings. She’s from Maine.”

She’s never worn them, Sacks said, but she does sprinkle Old Bay on her eggs.

Randy would be pleased.