Steinberg memoir is a roundup of America’s funniest comedians.
“Insecurity combined with arrogance is good DNA for a comedian,” the director and stand-up comic David Steinberg writes at the beginning of “Inside Comedy: The Soul, Wit, and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the Last Five Decades,” and — this is a compliment — he should know. A guy talented enough to appear on “The Tonight Show Starring
Johnny Carson” 140 times and become its youngest-ever guest host has earned the right to brag, as he has achieved a level of fame rare among those who have attempted the hardest feat in show business: making people laugh.
But read enough about a famous comedian or comic actor —
David Steinberg, among his many insights, notes the distinction between the two — and you’ll find more than a trace of anxiety. Like others in his line of work, Steinberg, who started out as a pre-rabbinical student at Hebrew Theological College in Chicago, had struggles with depression, especially before he found his voice as a comic.
His most notorious routines include “sermons” he performed on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” These sermons, such as the one about Moses scorching his feet on the burning bush, drew the ire of CBS censors, who, as they did with much of the Brothers’ decades-ahead-of-its-time political humor, cut them before they could air.
If you’re a comic, and you get front-office types mad at you, you’re probably doing something right. “Inside Comedy” is a tribute to many of the best troublemakers of the past 50 years. Much of the material is drawn from more than 75 interviews Steinberg conducted on the Showtime series of the same name. If, in book form, the material loses some of the rhythm and poetry of the subjects’ speech, this volume is still a welcome addition to any comedy fan’s library.
The book has three distinct parts. The first focuses on Steinberg and his career, from stand-up to the director of such successful comedies as “Seinfeld,” “Mad About You,” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” He writes with affection of his early days, first with the Second City improvisation troupe and then at New York’s Bitter End and on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
In the second, Steinberg writes of great comics of the past, people like Sid Caesar (“the best of all time”), Don Rickles (“allaround insanely funny good guy”), and
Tim Conway, who had so many shows canceled after 13 weeks that he chose 13 WEEKS as his license plate.
The rest of “Inside Comedy” is dedicated to interviews Steinberg conducted on his Showtime series with dozens of comic talents, from Whoopi Goldberg and Ellen DeGeneres to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
Steinberg tends to overpraise. He calls dozens of his mentors and contemporaries geniuses. That may be true, but the repetition wears after a while. One wishes the printed interviews were more than just partial transcripts from the shows. And the writing is often — no pun intended — sketchy. Perhaps he assumed his audience already knows his subjects well, but the lack of specificity about what makes them special makes the book lightweight and cursory.
“Inside Comedy” is at its best when Steinberg shares anecdotes only he can tell, such as the time he stopped by Milton Berle’s dressing room when the comic was appearing on “The David Steinberg Show” and found Berle stark naked with a strategically placed “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging from a part of his body, or when George Burns showed up to play bridge at the Hillcrest Country Club in a wheelchair two days before he died at age 100. Precision combined with uniqueness isn’t just good DNA for comic sermons. It’s good for books, too.
“INSIDE COMEDY: THE SOUL, WIT, AND BITE OF COMEDY AND COMEDIANS OF THE LAST FIVE DECADES”
By David Steinberg Knopf ($30)