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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThose loud gunshots you just heard coming from the general direction of Los Angeles weren\u2019t your imagination. That was the sound of every aspiring screenwriter in Hollywood shooting themselves after learning that comedy writer Justin Halpern\u2014the man who tweets the ridiculous stuff his 73 year-old father, a retired cancer researcher, spits out on a daily basis\u2014had just gotten a deal to turn his twitter feed shitmydadsays into a sitcom. (And this, after signing to write a book with Harper Collins, due in May 2010.) We called Justin up to figure out how the hell this happened and found him frustratingly un-hateable.\n\nGQ: Just to be clear, you actually are currently living in your old childhood bedroom. \n\nHALPERN: That\u2019s where I\u2019m at. There\u2019s no Cheryl Tiegs poster anymore. But yes, it is the same bedroom.\n\n**\n\n GQ: How did you end up back at home?\n\n **\n\n HALPERN: My girlfriend was down in San Diego, so I gave up my apartment in LA, drove down, and the day I moved in, we broke up. So then I just sort gave the sob story to my dad, and he was cool with it. I started tweeting the crazy shit he said pretty much right away.\n\nGQ: How the hell do you get from there to a sitcom deal?\n\nHALPERN: For like a week I just had no one following me on twitter. Zero. Then one of my friends, who wrote this fake Michael Bay page, mentioned me and then 500 people started following my site. I was like, &amp;quot;Wow, this is crazy! 500 people give a shit what my dad says!&amp;quot; And then it just went nuts. It took like a week to go to 10,000. To go from 10,000 to 100,000, took like three days. And another week to get to 300,000. I couldn\u2019t fucking believe it.\n\n **\n\n GQ: And your Dad had no idea?**\n\nHALPERN: Yeah. I was really nervous about telling him. My brother was worried about it\u2014he told me not to. So I walked around the block, gathered up my courage and said, &amp;quot;Dad, I need to talk to you. You know, there\u2019s this thing called twitter.&amp;quot; He was like, &amp;quot;I know what twitter is you idiot.&amp;quot; When I finally spat it out, it turned out he didn\u2019t care that much. He just thought it was funny. Later my mom came home, and she was like, &amp;quot;How was your day? Did anything happen?&amp;quot; And he said, &amp;quot;Nope.&amp;quot;\n\nGQ: So how does Dad feel about being a character on a major TV show?\n\nHALPERN: He actually had the most amazing response ever--it\u2019s not even believable. I was like, &amp;quot;If everything goes amazing, somebody would play you. You will be a character on TV.&amp;quot; And he, totally in earnest, says, &amp;quot;I want James Earl Jones.&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Dad, we\u2019re white.&amp;quot; [laughs] He didn\u2019t care.\n\nGQ: You know you\u2019re the luckiest guy on the planet right now?\n\nHALPERN: Oh yeah. I\u2019m the luckiest motherfucker on the planet. I absolutely know that. Please tell everyone in on the internet that I know that. I would hate me too."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/the-verge-qa-the-shitmydadsays-guy>