comedy comedy comedy drama a memoir book review

And that’s not just for comedy’s sake, by the way. Sometimes the teacher would make me sit in the front because it would shut me up. That’s where I would sit in any classroom I ever went in. “I still feel like the best place to critique and have fun with life is to do it from the back of the room, to sit behind everybody else and shoot spit wads.

Even his own fantastically silly sketch programme, Mr Show, written with David Cross ( Arrested Development) between 19, was a niche endeavour with a cult fanbase. His 90s comedy credits – Saturday Night Live, The Ben Stiller Show, The Larry Sanders Show – made him a hugely influential figure, albeit a peripheral one. Bob Odenkirk (left) as Jimmy McGill in season 3 of ‘Better Call Saul’ (Photo: Michele K Short/Netflix/Sony) It’s why he called his book Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama: he wanted to remind people that before he was the amoral, irreverent lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad, or Goodman’s well-intentioned but increasingly conflicted true self, Jimmy McGill, in the prequel Better Call Saul, or assassin Hutch Mansell in 2021 action thriller Nobody, he was the sort of comedian that other comedians loved. The best comedy has a little bit of anger in it”.Ĭomedy – especially sketch comedy – is where Odenkirk’s heart truly lies. But there’s no question that my distant relationship with my dad was one of the reasons I pursued comedy, and love a certain type of comedy. “They are saying – screw the adults and their world, the way they run this place is screwy and backwards and wrong and I’m going to make fun of it. “I think anyone making comedy is saying: ‘F**k you, Daddy!’” He laughs. “I think I’d alter that a little,” Odenkirk says. Given his subsequent choice of career – predominantly a writer and performer of absurdist cult comedy, latterly a serious actor in prestige television shows – I tell him that reading it reminded me of a theory Bruce Springsteen recently proffered, that anyone playing rock’n’roll is basically saying: “Look at me, Daddy”. They became estranged his death, when Odenkirk was 22, is dismissed in the book as “a shrugging affair”. When Odenkirk was growing up Naperville, Chicago, his father was drunken and difficult, often absent. In his memoir, Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama, Bob Odenkirk dedicates a short but significant passage to his relationship with his father.

Comedy comedy comedy drama a memoir book review