Having just made my way through the recently released trio of books — I’M DYING UP HERE: HEARTBREAK AND HIGH TIMES IN STANDUP COMEDY’S GOLDEN ERA, DANGEROUSLY FUNNY: THE UNCENSORED HISTORY OF THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR and SEVEN DIRTY WORDS: THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF GEORGE CARLIN — I’ve reinforced a long-held belief that as a group, comedians don’t lend themselves well to biographies (and that publishers really need to get a grip and rein in their freakin’ subtitles).
This is largely because a comedian’s greatest achievements don’t occur in life, but on stage, where they have already been documented on albums and film. If they choose they can harness their gift of humor into an entertaining autobiography, which — more often than not — ends up being less about the totality of their life than a collection of amusing insights made possible via the warped perspective that made them famous in the first place.
A comedian’s biographer, on the other hand, does not have access to his or her subject’s distinctive point of view, and as a result, has no choice but to simply catalogue the straight facts of someone else’s life in an often-tedious chronological fashion. Because of this reading a biography about a comedian often feels like listening to someone tell a much funnier person’s old jokes. They may manage to make you smile out of recognition every now and then, but after a while, you do start to wonder why you’re bothering with them and not just going straight to the original source.
Unfortunately for James Sullivan and David Bianculli, authors of the Carlin and Smothers Brothers bios, they are unable to transcend this problem and have ended up releasing unsatisfying works that do not do their subjects proper justice. Of the three, only William Knoedelseder, working with the far-broader canvas of a place and an era, rather than specific individuals, has succeeded in crafting a book that will not only entertain and educate comedy diehards, but casual readers as well.
Weaving together the tales of future superstars, lifelong journeymen (and women) and a few never-would-bes, Knoedelseder documents the events that led to a group of comedians organizing a strike against Mitzi Shore’s famous Comedy Store nightclub in 1979. Their demand? To earn enough per set to at least be able to pay for the gas needed to get to the club each night. As reasonable as this may sound, the fallout of the strike left scars that linger to this day and led, in the case of a comedian named Steve Lubetkin, to at least one suicide.
I’M DYING UP HERE takes the “Golden Era” found in its subtitle very seriously, but there is surprisingly little nostalgia evident in Knoedelseder’s prose. Every comedian is treated with the same amount of care and respect, no matter the level of their future success, and the author does a wonderful job documenting the camaraderie and competition that both united and drove them in their pursuit of other people’s laughter and attention.
Those looking for entertaining anecdotes about their favorite comics will find plenty to enjoy in this book, but I’M DYING UP HERE is most successful as a moving look at a specific moment in comedy history that many devotees may be aware of, but probably know little about.
I wish I could say the same about DANGEROUSLY FUNNY, which is also about a singular moment in comedy history, but sadly, Bianculli’s look at one of the most important TV shows of the 1960s is told so inertly, even dedicated enthusiasts will find it difficult to reach the end.
This is especially disappointing since its central figure, Tom Smothers, is a truly fascinating figure in the world of comedy, who would likely be considered as “important” as contemporaries like Carlin and Richard Pryor, were it not for the idiot persona he portrays so successfully onstage. If anything, one could argue that Smothers had a greater impact on popular culture than either of those two, if only because the three seasons his show managed to stay on the air allowed him to be watched each week by more people than all of us who’ve listened to CLASS CLOWN and THAT NIGGER’S CRAZY combined.
Now I realize this may sound outrageous to those who only know Smothers as the “Yo-Yo Man” who performs a quaintly anachronistic folk-parody act with his straight-man brother, Dick (who, despite his role as the smart, serious one, has always been more interested in his personal hobbies than politics or his performing career), but between 1967 to 1969, he served as the ringleader of the most progressively subversive (and censored) network comedy program that decade would ever produce.
Almost ludicrously tame by present standards, THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR was nonetheless the most sincerely anti-establishment program of its era and can be legitimately credited as paving the way for SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE in the ’70s, as well as THE DAILY SHOW and THE COLBERT REPORT we enjoy today.
For that reason alone, Tom Smothers deserves to have a biography written about him — I just wish it weren’t this one. Bianculli’s failure isn’t one of omission — all of the relevant and requisite information has been thoughtfully included — but instead one of presentation. At the risk of being Hacky McAsshole, I can honestly say that the problem with DANGEROUSLY FUNNY is that it never feels dangerous and is seldom, if ever, funny.
Blessed as he is with the gift of an anti-authoritarian protagonist whose compulsion to rebel against the dictates of his employers is almost heroically self-destructive, Bianculli never takes advantage of it and we never truly feel or understand the passion Smothers must have had to engage in such behavior. And without that insight, the whole book reads like an overly earnest, overly long magazine article written by someone who’s never actually met the person they’re writing about.
Okay, now remember how a few paragraphs back I wrote that, “one could argue that Smothers had a greater impact on popular culture than [George Carlin]”? Here’s where I admit that “I” wouldn’t be “one” of those people who would argue that, since I’ve pretty much regarded Carlin as a god-like figure since I was a 12 year-old who listened to his albums each night before I went to bed.
And like all idolaters, I am wary of anyone who would dare to shoot down my god from Heaven and reduce him back to the status of mere mortal. So, that’s the first strike James Sullivan had going against him when I started SEVEN DIRTY WORDS. The second was that I was already annoyed by the book’s title before I even got to the introduction.
As a group, Carlin fanatics don’t tend to get together and discuss his material, because that would require us to give a fuck about what other people think, which we don’t. But if we did, I suspect many of us would agree that it’s more than a bit annoying that our hero remains best remembered for what is — in retrospect — one of his less-inspired bits. Then again, I could be wrong about this, but I don’t give a fuck about that, either.
As a comedy routine “Seven Dirty Words” is memorable Carlin, to be sure, but it wouldn’t even make it into my personal Top 20. To Sullivan, however, it was the defining moment of Carlin’s career. Yes, it did cause quite a legal ruckus when it first came out, and freedom of speech and censorship and blah, blah, blah, but compared to Carlin’s autobiographical reminisces of his Catholic childhood from the same album (the aforementioned CLASS CLOWN), it’s all show and no dough.
The problem is that Sullivan invests just as much worth in Carlin’s famous septet of vulgarities as his censors did, but to the opposite degree, which doesn’t make the attention he gives them any less absurd. It ultimately makes just as little sense to praise the seven dirty words as it does to denounce them. As Carlin himself points out, they’re just words and absent of context pose no danger or benefit whatsoever.
Beyond this, SEVEN DIRTY WORDS suffers from the same problem as DANGEROUSLY FUNNY, in that it’s all about the surface details and nothing else. I suppose Sullivan is aiming for objectivity in his portrait of Carlin, but there’s a reason no one watches CNN anymore: Objectivity is fucking boring. Don’t tell us that “some of his friends” thought Carlin’s material became “angrier” after his wife died — it did! Each routine he did for the last 15 years of his life was more nihilistic than the next (the only time I saw him live, he spent half of his hour-long set talking about the glories of suicide). What’s important is whether or not that anger made his work better or worse.
The truth is that anyone who’s heard the words that follow the immortal “I used to be Irish-Catholic, now I’m an American … y’know … you grow …” already knew everything they needed to know about who Carlin was and where he came from. The petty little details he left out are just as nebulous and trivial as the seven dirty words that made him famous: meaningless without the right context, which this biography never properly provides.
Wow, I really went harsh there. Truthfully, I’m not sure I disliked DANGEROUSLY FUNNY and SEVEN DIRTY WORDS as much as the above might suggest. Their worst crime is simply not being as interesting and fun to read as their subjects deserve, but again, it really is a thankless task to write objectively about people whose lives and careers were defined by their subjectivity. That said, I’M DYING UP HERE is a great book and deserves any attention you might be willing to give it. —Allan Mott
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- Hot for Words: Answers to All Your Burning Questions About Words and Their Meanings
- Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America
- The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry
