Despite stiff prose, an engagingly honest look at the crossroads of comedy and dysfunction.
Memo to aspiring comics: being on Saturday Night Live may help your career, but it sure won’t be enjoyable.
The author—“Jay Moore,” as a New York tabloid spelled it when claiming to have spotted him at a Manhattan strip club one night when he was in LA—today qualifies as a successful SNL alum. A headlining stand-up comedian, he’s had roles in films like Jerry Maguire and Go, hosted an ESPN talk show, and produced his own NBC comic reality show. But as an SNL cast member from 1993 to 1995 (widely considered to be one of the unfunniest periods in the show’s history), he was just another one of the writers and actors clawing to get their material on the air. Mohr’s account backs up what was recently documented in Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live from New York: SNL is an odd, insular circus, at the same time utterly rigid and completely unstructured. Coming into it breathless with excitement but riddled with insecurity, Mohr found the setup less than ideal. The schedule, he notes, “was made back in the Seventies when everyone was on coke”; it’s not long before the author is taking drugs for his panic attacks. Mohr is unafraid to come off as nervous and a little grating: the whole first season he’s just the new guy nobody will look in the eye, whose ideas get shot down, who’s always asking dumb questions and almost never gets on the air. Though tinged with bitterness (after two seasons, Mohr was basically known only for his Christopher Walken impersonation), this account is generous in its praise for people like Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, and Michael McKean. Profiles of other costars—like David Spade, who “was only on the show so he could sleep with models”—are just dishy enough to leave the reader wanting more.
Despite stiff prose, an engagingly honest look at the crossroads of comedy and dysfunction.Pub Date: June 9, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-0006-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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