MISFIT

A stand-up comic chronicles his life from childhood through adolescence.

In his famous routine about the way states received their two-letter abbreviations, Gulman quotes zingers from a fictitious, wisecracking pistol of a secretary named Dottie. “How Dottie is this?” he says before citing dialogue that demonstrates his considerable talent for deploying the correct word for maximum comedic effect. Anyone who wondered whether that talent would translate to the page will be happy to know that it has. In this genial memoir, the author takes readers through his formative experiences growing up Jewish in suburban Boston during the 1970s and ’80s. As a framing device, he intersperses quick scenes from the harrowing period he endured in the mid-2010s when, after six blissful months of marriage, “a sinister third wheel had joined: crippling depression and anxiety.” At the time, 46-year-old Gulman left his Manhattan apartment to move back to his Massachusetts boyhood home with his mother. Most of this book, however, focuses on his upbringing as the youngest of three sons of divorced parents. He takes readers from kindergarten, where he claimed to speak French but could only “pronounce certain words with a French accent” after seeing Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther films; through high school, where he “became obsessed with jokes, their components and the components of the components, the words,” and discovered his calling. Some scenes, especially from his teen years, are standard biographical fare—playing football, hoping to get a girlfriend—and his depression starts to feel incidental after a while. Some readers may wish to have learned more about his ordeal. However, he tells his story well, and his knack for creating a well-crafted phrase is very much in evidence, as when he writes of his “Jew in name only” mother: She “couldn’t have named ten commandments if you spotted her nine plus ‘Thou shalt not…’ and fired a pistol.”

A good-natured, hilarious memoir from a gifted comedian.