Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama: A Memoir

Bonhomie in a celebrity memoir can get awfully tiresome, said Seamas O’Reilly in The Irish Times. “Give me a misanthrope any day,” because we readers then have a better chance at learning something.

Bob Odenkirk, the former comedy sketch artist who with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul has become one of television’s most acclaimed and beloved dramatic actors, wants to talk about comedy in his new memoir, and when he does. he’s riveting. Discussing the sketch work he did in the 1990s on the HBO series Mr. Show and elsewhere, “he openly admits to being a cranky purist.” He also makes clear that he believes he was doing work as good or better than anybody else. But he also tells us something chilling: “I tried just as hard at the stuff that didn’t work as the stuff that worked.”

Failure, believe it or not, plays a big part in Odenkirk’s story, said Mark Athitakis in The Washington Post. A kid from the Chicago suburbs, he connected with the city’s improv scene and landed a writing job with Saturday Night Live in his mid-20s. Mostly, he didn’t click at SNL, though, and after piling up credits and cocreating the hugely influential Mr. Show, he floundered for a full decade before he lucked into the role of Saul Goodman, the sleazy lawyer on Breaking Bad. His memoir, as he recounts the slack periods, “isn’t exactly intended to be ha-ha funny, though it sometimes is.” More often, Odenkirk seems intent on warning comics about the struggle. His advice: Just keep creating, even when all you get is rejection.

“The challenge facing Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama is telling a compelling story about telling jokes when the biggest laughs are in the work,” said Douglass Daniel in the Associated Press. At 59, Odenkirk isn’t an angry young man anymore, yet he still believes that anger is a key component of the best comedy. Still, his “chummy” tone here “succeeds in bringing us into his showbiz dream,” that of being part of a gang of funny people who, despite ups and downs, manage to make a living out of goofing around.

by Bob Odenkirk (Random House, $28)