Bob Odenkirk sketches a showbiz life in memoir
“Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama: A Memoir” by Bob Odenkirk (Random House):
Perseverance with a heavy dose of luck has propelled Bob Odenkirk’s ascent from fringe sketch comic (HBO’s “Mr. Show”) to fringe leading man (AMC’s “Better Call Saul”). While that may not seem a long trip, his mainstream pit stops as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” and as an actor in movies like “Little Women” and “The Post” provide sufficiently familiar mileposts for everyone to enjoy his amusing showbiz memoir.
Odenkirk’s journey to semi-stardom seemed to follow the arc of a sketch: Small-town guy in the big city pinballs between minor successes and disappointments, hits high notes with hijinks, then delivers the twist of becoming a serious actor. Along the way, he surveys America’s comedy landscape over the last five decades from the outside in.
Growing up in middling Naperville, Illinois, Odenkirk was the jokester in a large family dominated, then deserted, much to his relief, by his father. Greatly inspired by those supremely silly Brits of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” he left college early to rattle around Chicago working odd jobs, continuously writing sketch and stand-up ideas, attending improv theater groups, and earning a few bucks at dive-bars telling jokes.
He came of age during what he calls “The Stand-Up Boom” in which opportunities abounded but were also constrained. Observational comedy, he says, was “what the mob clamored for, and if you were anything but that exact thing … Get outta town, ya jerk!”
During a decade in “development heck” Odenkirk occasionally worked as a character actor. Ironically, his career bloomed when he was offered the role of shady lawyer Saul Goodman in the gritty drug-drama “Breaking Bad.”
Then came “Nobody” (2021), an ultraviolent revenge flick in which Odenkirk kills scores of bad guys in a choreographed bloodfest. Is it an homage to action films or a parody? True to his best “Mr. Show” instincts, Odenkirk plays it straight to blur the line.
Who says goof-offs can’t be serious, too?