Photo: Alasdair McLellan; Amy Sussman/Getty
“You know, the truth is, Lisa and I, for at least the first year, we never even discussed it,” Janetti, 53, tells PEOPLE of Rinna’s go-to comment. “It just kind of came organically when she started commenting. I think she uses my name in different ways to show different emotions. Either she’s faux-shocked, or she’s chiding me, or she’s, you know, being a little coquettish about it, or she’s being faux-outraged.”
Do You Mind If I Cancel? (Things That Still Annoy Me).Flatiron Books
“I just happened to see them online, and I thought [Prince George] was so expressive; the pictures themselves made me laugh because of how expressive he was,” recalls Janetti. “And I thought, ‘Oh, he’d be fun to write a caption for.’ And I did. And that was the start of it. Then it just kept evolving from there.”
ThoughPrince Georgeis only 6 now, Janetti is optimistic that the future king of England will someday look at the posts through a comedic lens.
“I would hope that he would find it super funny, and have a sense of humor about it, and obviously see that everything is meant … it’s ridiculous, and it’s all meant with affection, you know?” he says. “And I would hope he would have a sense of humor about it and think it was funny.”
“After that one, I was like, ‘How do I top this?’ ” Janetti says of theSuccessionparody. “That is my favorite one.”
Gary Janetti.John Lamparski/Getty
With the addition of now-1-year-oldPrince Louis, Janetti has evenmore options to craft sarcastic captionsfor the latest royals sightings.
“Louis has entered the fray. Louis is now a character in the world. He is much more angry than George,” says Janetti, joking aboutLouis’ adorable photos. “He’s definitely a different kind of royal that we haven’t seen before. He gives so much, because he was so expressive, that I couldn’t not start writing him. So, he’s in the universe too, speaking.”
In his bookDo You Mind If I Cancel?, Janetti turns the focus to his own youth, exploring his formative years as he struggled to find his life’s purpose as a gay man in New York.
“It’s autobiographical comic essays from my childhood and young adulthood — that period in my life before I had anything figured out and was trying to figure out how somebody figures out things,” he tells PEOPLE.
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From his desperation to seePatti LuPonein the flesh (“I don’t have a child,” writes Janetti, “but I can’t imagine the excitement on the day of its birth could come anything near to what I feel” heading to seeEvitaon Broadway) to his love of technology (“I wish there were a way to slash at least another 50 percent of all human interaction”),Do You Mind If I Cancel?is a 159-page rollercoaster ride through the mind of the writer behind quotable characters like Stewie Griffin and Jack McFarland.
Of particular hilarity is his chapter “Letter to My Younger Self,” in which Janetti tells the Janetti of yore, “Go up to people. Ask their name. Go home with them. Don’t call them the next day. YOU be the jerk.”
Brad Goreski and Gary Janetti.
After Janetti finished the book with his editor, his husband Brad Goreski, the celebrity stylist and formerFashion Policehost, gave it a read while they were on vacation over the summer.
“He was finding things out about me that perhaps he hadn’t known previously, and I think that that was kind of neat after we’ve been together for 18 years,” says Janetti. “There are things that I had written about that I hadn’t necessarily talked about with him. Or anybody!”
Ever the jokester, Janetti adds, “That’s my advice after you’ve been together almost 20 years: Write a book about your life, and that’s how you’ll learn new things about each other.”
source: people.com
