Lines such as “Keep in mind, NO ONE wanted a sketch show! Sketch shows are full of ideas! Yech! People don’t watch television for the ideas they watch for the commercials” may be sneering, even a little obnoxious. His experiences trying to jostle for attention in a packed field, of writing with and for ascendant stars such as Chris Farley, Conan O’Brien, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Tenacious D and Tim & Eric are riveting, and in Farley’s case, truly emotional.Įven with that caveat, it’s clear Odenkirk believes his comedy during that part of his career was just better than almost everyone else’s at the time, which can raise a few eyebrows here and there, but provides the book with all its most strident and illuminating passages. As it happens, I’m a big fan of most of these people, which made the book’s “up and coming” sections a particular delight.įrom total obscurity in Chicago theatre (which Odenkirk loved but left him broke) to writing for SNL (which he hated but got him paid), to working with long-term partner David Cross on their magisterial HBO sketch series Mr Show with Bob & David, these chapters chart a lineage of ’90s comedy of which Odenkirk was a central part. Until we reach the book’s climactic chapters and meet Bryan Cranston and Steven Spielberg, the names we’re left to pick up are those of people many readers will not have heard of, though bright stars within the firmament of ’80s and ’90s alternative comedy they may be. This mostly proves a winning style, that of the veteran thesp surveying his career, dropping names like hot ash from a cigar the size of a rolling pin.
Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama is inflected with the cheery patter of an old-timey showbiz memoir, offering intermittent life lessons rendered in italics, and with liberal use of exclamation marks and parenthetical asides to the reader. This book is a resolutely unsentimental look at the career, and very occasionally life, of a comedy writer and actor with a chip on his shoulder the size of Manhattan, and enough self-awareness to make this part of his own schtick. “I tried just as hard at the stuff that didn’t work as the stuff that worked,” he says, in a statement both proud and weary, and one that sets the tone for his memoir’s paean to stubborn, dogged persistence, however likely the chance of failure. Early on in Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, Bob Odenkirk offers a chilling lesson to the reader.
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