Bob Odenkirk - Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama : A Memoir

In writing this ink guzzler, the biggest shock to me was to discover just how single-minded I was. For decades, I pursued my love of sketch comedy like a cartoon horse chasing a carrot. And what dya know? I actually got a couple bites out of it! After enjoying that sketch-comedy carrot, I went looking for other carrots. Clop-clop-clop went my dumb ol hooves until one day, out of nowhere, dramatic acting opportunities came along. Drama turned out to be a weird carrot that I sort of like and that sort of likes me. This carrot analogy is now over, and I am not sad to see it goit was a burden for both of us.

So, now I find myself in drama, of all thingscomedys enemy. In the past decade or so, I have been called upon not to mock but to empathize with humanity, to discover dignity in every character, even when the characters most notable quality is his lack of dignity. Its a new kind of challenge, approaching humanitys foibles from a sympathetic stance, my work is turned inside out. For the first thirty years of my career, I did nothing but compromise my characters dignitykissing elephants asses (see Mr. ShowPrenatal Pageant), turning Charles Manson into Lassie (The Ben Stiller ShowManson), and scripting the brief heartbreaking tale of a motivational speaker who lives in a van down by the river (you know that one). So, from laughable indignity to tear-jerking dignity (maybe not tear-jerkinghow about tear-welling) toa touch of ultraviolence. This, then, is the strange trajectory that my journey has taken, and Ill try to make some sense out of it in these pages and give crazy luck its due.

Hey Bob, sorry to interrupt, but why are you writing a book about yourself?! Youre not dying, are you?

Some people might think its a bit premature of me to be writing a memoir. I hope it is. Heres what happened

Ben Greenberg, a big-time New York editor (he made me put that in!), called me out of the clear blue. It was an afternoon in L.A. and I was sitting on my porch, gazing at the barbecue, thinking, I should probably clean that thing sometime this decade, and he planted the seed: Why dont you write a memoir? Id recently read a showbiz memoir by an actor I respected. It was chock-full of stories about Broadway shows, movies, and classic television shows. I enjoyed it, but also it made me feel kinda bad. I knew my kids, then in their late teens, wouldnt know a bit of what he was talking about. Not a single project, even though some of them were true classics. Culture moves incredibly fast these days. I figured that if I wanted anyone in the general public to have even a passing knowledge of the projects that would fill my harangue, Id better get to gettin. Look, most of the greatest stuff Ive done is classified under cult hits, and that is using the word hit brazenly. So I had to write this thing now, before my reference points got smothered under the stream of fresher cultural gloop that cascades upon us all, day and night, from our devices.

But also

Just two days before that fated phone call, Id had a conversation with an actress who told me about auditioning for an improv team at a hotshot L.A. theater school (this was before coronavirus temporarily shut the doors on live theater). She was in line with more than one thousand hungry-for-stage-time performers. One THOUSAND?! I asked, alarmed and daunted. Thats too many people lining up to make stuff up. I thought about when I was starting out, about how mysterious showbiz was to me then, how far away and impossibleif Id been asked to get in a thousand-person line just to improvise, forget it. I would never have stood in that line. But the conversation brought me back to just how unknowable a career in showbiz was to a kid from Naperville, Illinois. It was just a completely ungraspable pursuit.