Creator / Jean Shepherd

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Jean Parker Shepherd Jr. (July 26, 1921 – October 16, 1999) was an American humorist who had a long career working in various media.

Shepherd specialized in irreverently humorous monologues about growing up in a working-class family in Hammond, Indiana during The Great Depression, along with accounts from his young adulthood (including his time in the US Army Signal Corps during World War II), which mixed broad comedy with sophisticated reflections.

The website Flick Lives👁 Image
offers an exhaustive collection of info about Shepherd and his extensive, extremely eclectic career.

While radio broadcasting took up the bulk of his career, he also adapted (and fictionalized) his monologues into other mediums, particularly books and television, which collectively became the Parker Family Saga. Shepherd's most famous work is the 1983 film A Christmas Story, which is based on anecdotes primarily from his book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. He also provided the voice of the nostalgic narrator in that film and had a brief cameo appearance in it.

He once played a prank in which he asked listeners of his late-night radio program to go to their local bookstore and request a nonexistent book by a nonexistent author: I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing, a social satire set in 18th century England about a rakish socialite named Lance Courtenay. The prank was so successful that the book ended up on the New York Times bestseller list (which was then compiled based on feedback from bookstores) despite not actually existing, and in the process exposed a large number of literary critics as frauds after they began writing phony reviews to cash in on the novel's supposed popularity. After the truth came out, publisher Ian Ballantine approached Shepherd about actually writing the novel, with noted science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon being brought on as a co-author with Shepherd. As one might expect, the real I, Libertine then went on to become an actual bestseller thanks to the notoriety of the prank.

Not to be confused with Country Music singer Jean Shepard (who he called "The girl who sings through her nose" as opposed to his being "The guy who talks through his nose.")

Jean Shepherd's works include:

"Keep your knees loose, and your tropes well-oiled!":

• Author Avatar: While Shepherd presented his radio monologues as personal recollections, for the print and screen versions he invented the character of Ralph Parker as a fictionalized stand-in.
• Catchphrase: He had a bunch on his radio show, but the standouts were "Excelsior, you fathead!" (his all-purpose salutation) and "I'm this kid, see..." (generally how he started out his stories about his youth). His Signing-Off Catchphrase was "Remember, kiddies: keep your knees loose and your glove well-oiled."
• Creator Couple: Shepherd and his wife Leigh Brown, who acted as producer of his radio show and later co-wrote the screenplay of A Christmas Story with him.
• Deadpan Snarker: Exemplified the Midwestern wise guy version of this.
• Dissuading the Property Buyer: In In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, a humorous, semi-autobiographical fictional memoir from the perspective of Ralph Parker, includes a chapter about property tax assessors in Depression-era Indiana who would inspect people's homes and possessions. Having your property (not just your home, but your possessions) valued too highly could result in you receiving taxes beyond your means, such that you could lose your property by defaulting as many had to, so it was the practice of the Parkers and many others to deliberately point out the problems and shoddiness in their possessions and homes to avoid this fate.
• Embarrassing First Name: Got teased for having a girl's name as a kid. His friend Shel Silverstein allegedly based "A Boy Named Sue" partly on Shepherd.
• 👁 This example contains a YMMV entry. It should be moved to the YMMV tab.
  Fan Nickname: Shep.
• Framing Device: In pretty much every case. In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash has a frame narrative with an adult Ralph Parker visiting his old hometown. A Christmas Story and It Runs in the Family are unusual in that they have a disembodied narrator.
• He Also Did: Featured in Walt Disney World's Carousel of Progress.
• Joisey: He considered New Jersey an acceptable target, even though he lived there at several points in his life.
  New Jersey–the most American of all states. It has everything from the wilderness to The Mafia. All the great things and all the worst, for example Route 22.
• Lemony Narrator: His standard approach to storytelling.
• Life Embellished: Exactly how truthful his stories are is an eternal debate among Shep fans. Shepherd himself freely admitted that he took liberties with the truth in order to make things more entertaining, but most of the people and places he mentioned in his stories👁 Image
  were real. But he also very blatantly messed with the actual facts of his life. One example is that Shepherd was really in his late teens in the period when A Christmas Story took place.
• No Communities Were Harmed: Hohman, Indiana became the fictional version of Hammond, his hometown.
• Nostalgic Narrator: Did voiceovers for all his films acting as this, but the main running theme in his work is that the Nostalgia Filter is very deceptive. The past was just as crazy and tacky as the present, it's just that we were too young to notice or care at the time.
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: In the adaptations Randy Parker is always the same age, even though Ralph will go from being a kid to being just out of high school.
• Real Song Theme Tune: His radio shows used a Boston Pops Orchestra recording of the short, jaunty 1869 Eduard Strauss Classical Music composition Bahn Frei!, Polka-schnell, Op. 45 as their theme song. Its use as an opening song is especially appropriate, since "bahn frei!" is German for "clear track" and was the yell that train conductors would give to signal that the track was open and the train could start moving.
• "Sesame Street" Cred: Wrote and voiced the classic "Cowboy X" cartoon.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Loved to drop arcane words like "bacchanalia" into otherwise down-to-earth prose.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Could easily toggle between a highbrow and lowbrow tone.
• Spoken Word in Music: He provided narration for the title track on The Clown, a jazz album by Charles Mingus.