Odenkirk’s very strange trip to the top
How an edgy, uncompromising weirdo of a comedian became a beloved American star
When Bob Odenkirk suffered a heart attack last summer on the set of “Better Call Saul,” the outpouring of protective and loving support on social media felt unprecedented — especially in a snarky, polarizing celebrity culture defined as much by haters as by stans.
A tweet by the actor’s son, Nate, stating simply “he’s going to be okay,” went viral within seconds; the sound heard at that moment was a million “Mr. Show” fans — OK, probably less than a million — sighing with relief. A meme with footage of Odenkirk’s cameo in “Little Women,” but overlaying audio of a crowd cheering from “The Avengers,” made the rounds, celebrating a juxtaposition that had turned the actor into a kind of hipster superhero.
Over his career, Odenkirk has excelled at playing sleaze-covered characters: schemers and hard-sell artists like, most famously, Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill, the unscrupulous lawyer who went from a bit part on “Breaking Bad” to the role of a lifetime, a millennial Willy Loman. And yet, somewhere in the unlikely arc from semi-obscure sketch-comic hero to Emmy-nominated actor, Odenkirk became something more than respected or even liked — he became beloved.
Odenkirk’s new memoir, “Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama,” completed before his heart attack, offers up a rollicking chronicle of this trajectory from adventures in the vanguard of American alternative comedy to the serious acting turn that led to “Breaking Bad,” “Better Caul Saul” and the unexpected action-movie hit “Nobody.” The book is written as a combination tell-all and how-to manual about how an edgy, judgmental comedy nerd eventually made it. It’s animated equally with winning self-deprecation and a toughminded realism about the relationship between failure and success — those two sides of the same showbiz coin.
In the opening chapter, Odenkirk describes meeting the legendary Chicago improviser Del Close, whose ramshackle appearance was evidence of his commitment to some larger bit: the ravages of trying to do everything, including being funny, on his own terms.
“He didn’t encourage me based on his successes,” Odenkirk said of Close, via telephone. “His failures sounded like a lot of fun. Things that never made it out of the experimental stage. That’s what inspired me to take a run at things. I wanted to share that same spirit in this book and share the ups and downs. It’s important to write about failure.”
One of the running themes of “Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama” is craftsmanship: Odenkirk prides himself on being a rigorous sculptor of comic ideas and he describes the careful shaping behind moments that feel explosively spontaneous once they’re in front of an audience. That skilfully orchestrated spontaneity was the genius of “Mr. Show,” which paired the former “Saturday Night Live” writer with the voluble standup comic David Cross.
Working in thrall to the absurdist exploits of “Monty Python” — and in chipped-shoulder opposition to the stale, formulaic gags of mid-’90s “SNL” — the pair inhabited a seemingly endless series of weirdos, misanthropes, sociopaths and corporate stooges. Their sketches toggled dexterously between satire, slapstick and surrealism, skewering taboos with reckless abandon (sample skit: a soft-focus PR campaign for NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a pedophilia and pederasty advocacy organization).
Over four glorious seasons, Odenkirk and Cross cultivated a loyal, similarly off-kilter following; their work’s unpredictability made them genuine punk outliers in a corporatized American TV comedy landscape.
“I think we could have done one more year,” Odenkirk insisted when it was suggested that the greatness of “Mr Show” has something to do with its relative brevity — the very punk idea that it’s better to burn out than to fade away. “We got moved to a terrible time slot. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have just been a cult show. But we missed the train at the very end. It was really disappointing. But we were thankful that we got to do it at all. It was exactly what we wanted it to be and who gets to do that?”
‘‘ What was troubling to me was part and parcel of what (Saturday Night Live) is. It works well without me.
BOB ODENKIRK ACTOR
The refusal to compromise is another running theme in “Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama,” especially in the sections about “Saturday Night Live,” which Odenkirk said he believes are fair to himself as well as the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, without sugar-coating their mutual frustrations with one another.
“What was troubling to me was part and parcel of what the show is,” he said. “It works well without me. I had a vision of (the show) as something else, something more malleable that could be reinvented every so often by a new group of people. That’s not the purpose of (“SNL”) and that’s not what Lorne was after. He was after longevity and making the show bigger than any group of people.”
Still, Odenkirk casts a long shadow: When he appeared last year in a sketch on Netflix’s critically acclaimed — and deeply bizarre — sketch series “I Think You Should Leave,” it felt symbolic, as if a torch were being passed from one weirdo icon to another. “Tim Robinson has a distinctive voice,” Odenkirk said of that show’s star and creator, “and what’s great is that he lets himself go deep into his own craziness.”
The manic chaos of “Mr. Show” notwithstanding, Odenkirk never indulged in excess like some of his peers, including the late Chris Farley (who gets a lovely tribute in the book). He worried that his evenkeeled lifestyle might result in a flatlined memoir.
“I couldn’t find the right voice,” he said. “There’s no great tragedy in my life … no trips to rehab or divorces or anything like that. I lead a pretty quiet and ordered life. How do you make drama out of trying to make television shows and failing at it sometimes?”
Eventually, he found inspiration in Robert Evans’s 1994 tell-all “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” a behindthe-scenes showbiz picaresque written as a series of swaggering cliffhangers. “I stole some of what (Evans) did, where he asks these dramatic questions about what’s going to happen next and then gives the answers. It gave me an idea about how to tell a good story about things that were fairly inconsequential.”
The connection makes sense. Evans, the producer of “Chinatown,” was the visual inspiration for one of the funniest sketches on “Mr. Show,” in which God — played by Odenkirk as a bescarfed, sunglasses-clad Hollywooder — records a book-on-tape version of his own autobiography. “Truth be told, I only have one commandment,” purrs Bob-as-Robert-as-God. “Sundays are my day.”
If Odenkirk has demons, he’s kept them safely at bay; the most he’ll admit to in “Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama” is being a bit prickly to work with, and one doesn’t get the sense he’s holding anything back. He writes honestly (and humorously) about the formative influence of his late, domineering father — whose tendency to fly into sputtering rages informed a lot of his short-fused “Mr. Show” characters — and movingly about the career advice offered by his children, including his teenage daughter who convinced him to do “Better Call Saul” after he turned it down on the grounds of wanting to spend more time with his family.
“I’ve always talked to my kids about my career because it has resonance in their lives, too,” he said. “My son once came up to me and he seemed kind of depressed. He said ‘Dad, you’re in ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Mr Show’ and ‘Tim & Eric.’ You’re in all my favourite shows.’ But he didn’t seem happy about it.
“I was proud, but then I thought about it. Like, what’s the one thing that could wreck your favourite show? Your dad’s face showing up in it.”