It’s the same as the other question people ask: `Why don’t you do stand-up?’ The answer is that I

It’s the same as the other question people ask: `Why don’t you do stand-up?’ The answer is that I never had a strong drive to it It’s the writing that keeps me active. I love it.”Sam can state with confidence that writing is his calling because he has tried nearly everything else. When he was 16 he left home in Lubbock, Texas, and took a freight train to California. “I hung out, good timin’, Venice Beach, the Summer of Love, all that Sixties stuff.” Then he got a job fighting fires for the National Forest Service for three years before returning home, going to university and then going back to California, to actor’s school. He played small roles in movies but dedicated most of his energy to writing plays and short stories. In 1980 he returned to Texas and became first an MC then a tour manager for local bands.

He travelled all over the US and Europe before joining a comedy club in Houston in 1983 as MC and stage-manager. Three years later he started the Comedy Gym, making some money on the side lecturing (“Presentations with a punch”, “Success and fun through humour”) and writing jokes for television shows “I don’t make a ton of money,” he says. He readily admits that his wife, who is Dutch and works in video production, is the main breadwinner. This summer they are planning to move to Holland, which he hopes will provide a platform for some sorties to teach comedy in Britain. He barely speaks Dutch, but he hopes to teach in Holland too.

Would he learn Dutch? “Sure, I’ll pick it up.”Sam’s willingness to venture off on yet another adventure, to start afresh aged 48, illustrates perhaps the biggest difference between Americans and Europeans. We Europeans tend to accept that our place in life is for the most part predetermined by circumstances of birth In America, the Dream runs in the blood. Even if, as in the case of Sam and most of his pupils at the Comedy Gym, the pot of gold remains elusive, Americans preserve an unshakeable faith in the notion that just around the corner opportunity beckons. An innocent optimism, more than any other quality, is what defines Americans.

No better example exists, as it turns out, than Tricia Storie and her family.THE Stories live 45 minutes north of Austin, deep in the Texan bush, in a large trailer home, America’s favourite metaphor to describe white poverty. Dogs that look like strays, but actually belonging to the neighbours, hang around the yard, playing with the Stories’ three children Robert Storie, who is 36, is unemployed His wife Kelly, also 36, is heavily pregnant. The family car is an ancient jalopy that doubles up as an alternative travelling home when the family travels off en masse, for weeks at a time, to events like the Texas Renaissance Festival and other state fairs. That is how the Stories make their living: finding part-time work as waiters (in Kelly’s case medieval wenches), or performing gypsies, or participants in “living chess” matches. Tricia, the only member of the family to secure a contract for next year’s Renaissance festival, does “walk-around” there, like the characters who dress up in Mickey Mouse costumes at Disney World; only Tricia dresses and behaves as a French nun called Sister Jezebel. Tricia has two younger sisters who last year contributed to the Renaissance atmosphere by playing the part of street urchins.The Stories, in short, are a family of modern troubadours. In a society where the lowest form of insult is to call someone a “loser”, they stand on the surface of things as an example of failure, as an offence against middle-class family values.Yet look more closely and the conclusion is irresistible that the Stories are a model family, Kelly and Robert model parents.

Robert’s affection for Tricia is fetchingly evident in the absent-minded manner that he stroked her hair at the Comedy Gym. His affection for her two younger sisters, Katy, 11, and Jamaica, 9, is demonstrated by his determination not to present Tricia as the only star of the family; Katy and Jamaica, he says, are better students than Tricia and more avid readers.Conversation moves on to books, and especially Dickens Tricia trots off a few quotes from A Tale of Two Cities. All very genteel; in fact, the atmosphere is beginning to feel curiously dreamy – a Jane Austen drawing- room scene in the Texan bush – until reality strikes with the sudden awareness that it is 6 pm and that in an hour’s time Tricia and Robert will have to drive off to the show at the Capitol City Comedy Club. Even then, however, the only hint of nerves that Tricia displays is to check that she has memorised correctly her “To be or not to be” speech. “Kelly’s the bright one here,” smiles Robert, holding a can of beer. “She’s the one who reads.” Kelly, accepting the compliment without protest, says that she taught the girls to love books, which she succeded in doing partly by rationing their intake of TV “There are some things I don’t want them to watch. The Simpsons, for example, because they’re always so sarcastic.