David Mamet was born and raised in Chicago. "We have some strange local mythology. No Chicagoan makes gangster jokes or thinks of the City as particularly violent (which it isn't). (Al Capone did say, 'You get a lot farther with a kind word and a gun than you do with a kind word,' but this must be classed with philosophy rather than humor.) We do make Police jokes and take pride in considering the Chicago Police Force haimishly corrupt (which it isn't), and we take great pride in our excellent Fire Department."¹

"... I came from a very bourgeois background--my father was a lawyer, ... but in Chicago I was always exposed to a wider variety of lives. Summer jobs, the steel mills, factories, that kind of thing.... "²

"... In the days prior to television, we liked to wile away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our...