What do you call a drummer with half a brain? Gifted.

Hey, did you hear about the drummer who finished high school? Me neither.

What does the average drummer get on an IQ test? Drool.

Drummer jokes are legion in music circles, but none of them apply to Stewart Copeland.

The 57-year-old drummer of The Police was one of the most innovative drummers in rock history, but he didn't let that define him. He has gone on to become a Golden Globe-nominated composer of film scores, operas and ballets, as well as a documentary filmmaker whose 2006 film "Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

The unorthodox drummer's life has finally been documented in Copeland's memoir, published Sept. 29, called Strange Things Happen . The aptly worded subtitle is A Life With the Police, Polo and Pygmies.

"This is billed as an autobiography, but it's more about war stories," said Copeland in a telephone interview with The Tribune from a London hotel room. "These are stories told around the dinner table."

The Police were a legendary jazz- and reggae-inflected rock trio with Copeland, guitarist Andy Summers and lead singer and bassist Sting. The band acrimoniously broke up in 1984, only to reunite in 2007 for a world tour that included a stop at Usana Amphtiheatre in West Valley City.

In 2006, Summers wrote One Train Later, an autobiography about his life and The Police's years before the reunion tour. Copeland had been periodically writing autobiographical stories published in magazines, and once the reunion tour started, his friends persuaded him to write about the reunion tour from the inside, as well as tales from his life.

Copeland didn't want to write a typical memoir about where he was born and all that David Copperfield kind of stuff. He didn't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

So the book is non-narrative, shifting frequently between childhood stories and adult stories -- a herky-jerky style that works because the snapshots, taken together, give a good idea of who Copeland was and is.

"I did very little research," Copeland said. "It wasn't about the facts, or data, it was [about] the feeling." He continued whimsically: "What it feels like to be the golden calf, in the middle of everything."

Copeland grew up in Lebanon as the son of a C.I.A. agent, and in the book he remembered the first time he played the drums in public, at the age of 12: "At my tender age I don't have any idea what it means but I can feel the buzz. Michele Savage is here. And Connie Ridgeway and Colleen Bisharat. All of the yearned-for fifteen-year-old women -- so far above my lowly prepubescent but ardent station -- are gyrating to Fats Domino right in front of the gear ... For now though, there is only one thing on the planet, and that is Janet McRoberts dancing in front of me. Her eyes are wide with astonishment. The big girls are moving with seductive intent, and Janet is moving with me. She's being moved by me."

That story, along with anecdotes about filming Pygmies in the deep Congo, playing polo as a "tax-paying, property-owning, investment-holding lotus eater," and the time he told an Argentine film crew that the president of Chile would "qualify as hot" only after four beers, are all in the book. (By the way, the president of Chile was not amused.)

And, of course, there are parts about Sting. "We have discovered that we can be good friends --- as long as no one mentions music," Copeland wrote. In fact, he later writes, the seeds of the reunion tour were planted at the Sundance Film Festival, when the three of men met up in Park City to see Copeland's documentary about them.

Copeland was ambivalent about his first foray into long-form writing. At one point, he said "I like writing these stories," but the next moment he called it a "term paper from hell" and declared, "After 80,000 words, I didn't feel like I needed any more."

After all, he has promises to keep. At the time of the interview, Copeland was completing the score for an updated theatrical presentation of chariot-racing saga "Ben-Hur," that premiered in mid-September at The O2 arena in London. Copeland also provided the English-language narration of the production, which was performed entirely in Latin and Aramaic.

No drummer jokes, please, even if you can tell them in Aramaic.