I had a high school theater teacher once who told a story about a student delivering an oral report to the class on David Mamet. Throughout the presentation, the student kept pronouncing the playwright’s name David Mamay. The teacher had to sit through David Mamay this and David Mamay that for ten or fifteen minutes. When it was finally over, the teacher offered his comments. The report was very good and quite comprehensive, he said, but the writer’s name is actually pronounced Mam-et.

“Oh no,” the student replied in a tone of total assurance, “it’s Mamay.”

The ability to bluster confidently through one’s own manifest wrongness is in itself a Mametian skill. And judging from this highly entertaining profile of him in the Financial Times, it applies as much to the author as to his characters. You may have seen some notices about Mamet’s recent late-in-life conversion to Tea Party conservatism. Here you can learn all about it: