Fans of Seinfeld will eat this up, and aspiring comics will want to study how he shapes his seemingly effortless humor.
“All comedians are slightly amazed when anything works.” So writes Seinfeld in this pleasing collection of sketches from across his four-decade career.
Known for his wry, observational humor, Seinfeld has largely avoided profanity and dirty jokes and has kept politics out of the equation. Like other schooled jokesters, perhaps most famously Bob Hope, he keeps a huge library of gags stockpiled, ever fearful of that day when the jokes will run out or the emcee will call you back for another set. “For the most part, it was the people who killed themselves to keep coming up with great new material who were able to keep rising through the many levels,” he recounts of his initiation into the New York stand-up scene. Not all his early material played well. The first piece in this collection, laid out sentence by sentence as if for a teleprompter, is a bit about being left-handed, which comes with negative baggage: “Two left feet. / Left-handed compliment. / Bad ideas are always ‘out of left field.’ / What are we having for dinner? / Leftovers.” He gets better, and quickly, as when he muses on the tininess of airplane bathrooms: “And a little slot for used razor blades. Who is shaving on the plane? And shaving so much, they’re using up razor blades. Is the Wolfman flying in there?” For the most part, the author’s style is built on absurdities: “Why does water ruin leather? / Aren’t cows outside a lot of the time?” It’s also affable, with rare exceptions, as when, taking on a mob boss persona, he threatens a child with breaking the youngster’s Play-Doh creations: “Nothing wrong with sending your child a little Sicilian message once in a while.” One wishes there were more craft notes among the gags, but the ones that are there are both inspiring and gnomic: “Stand-up is about a brief, fleeting moment of human connection.”
Fans of Seinfeld will eat this up, and aspiring comics will want to study how he shapes his seemingly effortless humor.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982112-69-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A fun if overly flamboyant appreciation of a TV giant.
A biography of American late-night television’s biggest star.
Zehme, author of biographies of Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner, had a lifelong love of Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. In 1973, at age 15, Zehme was “already a full-blown Carson fanboy.” As a reporter for Rolling Stone, he tried unsuccessfully to secure an interview to coincide with Carson’s 1992 retirement after a 30-year run. In 2002, Zehme, now with Esquire, “gets extended face time” with the star for a piece to mark 10 years since Carson’s departure. Shortly after Carson’s death in 2005, Zehme began work on a biography. The task was overwhelming—“there was always more to be gleaned”—even before Zehme’s 2013 diagnosis of stage 4 colorectal cancer. He died in 2023, having finished only the first three-quarters of this biography. Thomas, a longtime Chicago arts reporter, has completed the book in time for Carson’s 2025 centenary. The result is an admiring work that nonetheless acknowledges the lows as well as the highs of Carson’s life—he had three divorces—and career, from his ill-fated 1955 variety program The Johnny Carson Show, to his 1957-62 stint as host of the ABC game show Who Do You Trust?, to his taking over The Tonight Show from Jack Paar in 1962. It’s easy to tell where Zehme left off and Thomas took over. The tone changes dramatically, from Zehme’s florid style to Thomas’s drier approach. Those florid passages, which make up most of the book, are baroque in the extreme, with lines like, “And so, like sun and moon and oxygen and ionosphere, Johnny Carson was always there, reliable and steadfast.” Despite the purple prose, the result is an entertaining look at not only a unique figure in 20th-century popular culture but also a bygone era in American television.
A fun if overly flamboyant appreciation of a TV giant.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781451645279
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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