Local Author Feature // Art Bell

A part time Parkite for seventeen years, as of May 2021, author Art Bell and his wife are now full time locals. After retiring from a career as a media executive best known for creating, building, and managing successful cable television channels and prior to moving from Connecticut, Bell wrote a memoir chronicling his experiences at Comedy Central entitled, Constant Comedy: How I Started Comedy Central and Lost my Sense of Humor.

While he didn’t intend for it to be a comprehensive history of the birth of Comedy Central, it does have that element. “It also gives an unvarnished view of what working the television business (or any business, for that matter) is like, and I convey many of the things I learned about startups and management without making it a lecture.“

The experience of writing and publishing his memoir has been a great adventure. “When I first started writing, I took couple of classes in how to write memoir and my teachers were terrific. The big lesson was that writing a memoir requires you to turn yourself inside out, to not hold back on things, and to recognize that your writing has to capture your deepest feelings and emotions. Early on, that was hard for me, because I’m a private person and I don’t wear my emotions on my sleeve. But the writing got better when I put it all out there and I’m proud of that.”

He also enjoyed hearing from people who read and loved the book. “Some were friends, some were people I knew in the TV business, but most were people I didn’t know. I ended up with a bunch of new friends, many of them accomplished writers, and that has been particularly gratifying.”

The audio book version has recently been released. Although authors are cautioned against narrating their own audio books, Bell was up for the challenge. “It was much harder than I thought! Narrating an audio book was somewhere between reading it aloud to yourself and performing it theatrically, and I found it difficult to find the right balance. Anyway, I think it came out well and I’m glad I made that part of my publishing adventure. If anyone reading this ends up listening, I hope they let me know what they think by leaving a review or contacting me through my website (artbellwriter.com).”

Constant Comedy: How I Started Comedy Central and Lost my Sense of Humor, can be found at Park City Library and most of the online booksellers.