Shootin’ the Sh*t with Kevin Smith: The Best of the SModcast

You would be forgiven for assuming that the enduring cult popularity of filmmaker Kevin Smith would have something to do with his skills as a cinematic storyteller, but speaking as someone who has spent the past few days reading his latest book, SHOOTIN’ THE SH*T WITH KEVIN SMITH: THE BEST OF THE SMODCAST, I truly do believe that his success really does come down to the fact that he’s a Fat Guy with a Beard®.

Lemme explain.

I came to this conclusion a few days ago when I took my copy to work, with the hope that I might be able to dip into it during the occasional lull. As I toiled away at my labors, one of my co-workers came up to me and said that she had seen the book sitting where I had left it and immediately thought it was one of the dozen I had written a few years ago in a past professional incarnation. I asked her why she would think that and she said, “Because you totally look like the guy on the cover.”

Now, I can’t say that this surprised me, because it has been my experience that when you are a Fat Guy with a Beard® — such as myself — you do often find yourself compared to other Fat Guys with Beards®, no matter how specious such a comparison actually is. For example, just a month earlier, another co-worker insisted I was a dead ringer for — in her words — “that guy from THE HANGOVER.”

Obviously, upon close inspection, neither Kevin Smith, Zach Galifianakis nor myself resemble each other in any meaningful way, but in this fast-paced, first-impressions world of ours, anyone with a generous abdomen who consistently avoids razor blades might as well be identical cousins, as far as everyone else is concerned.

Of course, Smith’s wealth and fame isn’t the direct result of his fat beardedness. If it were, then I would be as successful as he is, and the sad facts of my life prove that is simply not the case. But, I would argue as someone who knows something about the Fat Guy with a Beard® lifestyle, that the sensibility that informs his films and his theatrical performances came about almost entirely from a history of being both overweight and too lazy to shave.

I say this because the core of Smith’s comedy lies in his nearly pathological candor, which seemingly compels him to share the kind of personal details most people are barely able to tell a psychiatrist or $1,000-an-hour prostitute, much less everyone within earshot. After listening to one of his podcasts or attending one of his Q&As, there is a tendency to know more about him than you probably know about your closest friend. More than anything, it is this sense of intimacy that endears Smith to his audience, who truly look to him as a friend and a confidant, even though they have never actually met him.

But rather than being fueled by a genuine desire to market only in the truth, his candidness is a crutch often employed by Fat Guys with Beards® as a means to disguise the single haunting truth of their existence: They are overweight and implicitly too unattractive to allow their true faces be exposed to the world. The idea behind this simple deception is that if you bombard others with enough embarrassing details of your life, they will ignore the one thing for which you do truly feel ashamed. You can even go so far as to regularly point out how fat and ugly you are, so long as it appears to be a shared joke and not the horrible truth that sometimes keeps you awake at night.

This, however, is not the major revelation of his new book, which is actually a series of transcripts taken from old podcasts Smith regularly records for his website, Quick Stop Entertainment. No, what you truly come away with from reading SHOOTING THE SH*T is how his cult of personality has come largely at the expense of someone who is clearly just as funny as he is, but who is far too happy, handsome and well-adjusted to make the kind of personal confessions that have made Smith a fan favorite.

If you’ll allow me the indulgence of an obscure show-business reference I’m sure many people would be proud not to get, Scott Mosier is the John Houseman to Smith’s Orson Welles: the calm, rational producer burdened with job of grounding a rapacious director whose appetites know no rational bounds. Okay, so maybe that comparison is a bit unfair to Smith, whose only similarities to the director of CITIZEN KANE comes from his flair for self-promotion and generous waist measurement, but to continue it a bit further, reading the conversations recorded in SHOOTING THE SH*T has the same revelatory power of seeing Houseman’s performance in THE PAPER CHASE … or at least I’m assuming, since I’ve never actually seen that movie. (I am, however, very familiar with Houseman’s work as Ricky Schroeder’s grandfather on SILVER SPOONS, which I think amounts to the same thing.)

I say this because while the bulk of the book is driven by the force of Smith’s personality, many of the funniest moments come from Mosier, whose gift for improv is equal to — if not superior to — that of his more-famous colleague. Having already listened to all of these conversations in their original audio form, I was worried that a sublime character like Gordo, the righteously indignant Canadian, wouldn’t translate to the printed page, but funny remains funny, even without the benefit of hearing Mosier’s performances.

And it is the occasional laugh that comes from these pages that rescues the book from the brink of redundancy. It is, after all, a means to get you to pay for words that were free when delivered in their original — and comically superior — format, and your willingness to endorse this enterprise will depend entirely on your feelings toward its participants. And while Smith is a Fat Guy with a Beard® whose willingness to regularly douse himself in the kerosene of his own pain and ignite himself for the amusement of his fans probably shouldn’t be rewarded with even more of your hard-earned cash, his much thinner and only occasionally hirsute partner more than deserves the attention the collection might bring.

That said, if you have a computer and an Internet connection, download the podcasts. They’re very funny and very free. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.