The actor who plays crooked lawyer Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad looks back on a long career, recounting the highs and lows of a life in comedy and drama on the big and small screens.
This book is a resolutely unsentimental look at the career, and very occasionally life, of a comedy writer and actor with a chip on his shoulder the size of Manhattan, and enough self-awareness to make this part of his own schtick. Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama is inflected with the cheery patter of an old-timey showbiz memoir, offering intermittent life lessons rendered in italics, and with liberal use of exclamation marks and parenthetical asides to the reader. This mostly proves a winning style, that of the veteran thesp surveying his career, dropping names like hot ash from a cigar the size of a rolling pin ... Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama might test the patience of people hoping to get an insight on Breaking Bad, which makes its first proper appearance in chapter nine and lasts just 12 pages. And it is undeniable that the speed-run through Better Call Saul and his subsequent movie work, which forms the last two chapters, lacks the anger and urgency of his days beating himself over the head in dimly lit writers’ rooms. It is, after all, easier to write of struggle than success. But this is an enlightening and funny trip through a life lived mostly in laughter’s vanguard, and even where it fails to hit the spot, it’s not for want of trying.
Though Odenkirk, 59, has had plenty of successes, Comedy is largely a study in the sad-clown paradox, a story about moody tenacity in the face of either fear of failure or failure itself ... Comedy isn’t exactly intended to be ha-ha funny, though it sometimes is. More often, it seems that Odenkirk wants to fire off some warning flares to comics who might want to follow in his footsteps ... Perhaps inevitably, Comedy gets less interesting as Odenkirk becomes an actor who hears yes more often ... Underneath that placid surface, some sad-clown stuff lurks, despite Odenkirk’s efforts to compartmentalize it ... The dad stuff keeps popping up in the memoir like a jump scare ... Of course, a deep dive into daddy issues isn’t what readers want out of a comedian’s memoir. The sad-clown paradox demands you tamp down the sad part, even when your job is to talk about your inner life.
Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama serves as a readable reminder why so many people last summer rooted for the recovery of its hugely talented author ... he is routinely generous about his collaborators. He writes at one point that 'to me, the best comedy has an anger in it,' and it is perhaps a lack of rage that explains why this memoir tends toward the droll rather than the hilarious. Still, for those seeking a firsthand account of the '90s alternative-comedy scene from one of its prime movers, it's hard to think of a better book upon which to call.
