Adam Carolla - Everything Reminds Me of Something: Advice, Answers...but No Apologies

Also by Adam Carolla

Im Your Emotional Support Animal: Navigating Our All Woke, No Joke Culture

Daddy, Stop Talking! And Other Things My Kids Want but Wont Be Getting

President Me: The America Thats in My Head

Not Taco Bell Material

Rich Man Poor Man

In Fifty Years Well All Be Chicks And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Everything Reminds Me of Something:

Advice, Answersbut No Apologies

2022 by Adam Carolla

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-63758-268-8

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-269-5

Cover design by Danny Klein, DKLEINDESIGN + CREATIVE, LLC

Illustrations by Yoni Limor

Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

All people, locations, events, and situations are portrayed to the best of the authors memory. While all of the events described are true, many names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Contents

W elcome, dear reader, to my sixth book. If you had told me in 2010 when I wrote In Fifty Years Well All Be ChicksAnd Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy that Id crank out five more volumes of said complaints, I wouldnt have believed you. So thanks.

This ones going to be a bit different. Im going back to basics. The great Jimmy Kimmel created an idea for my stage show: having audience members write one word on a ping-pong ball for me to riff on. They would then shoot those ping-pong balls out of their vaginas at me onstage. When Jimmy sobered up, we decided it would be cleaner, literally and figuratively, if we just put those ping-pong balls in a bingo hopper and pulled them out at random for me to pontificate on. The name of the show is Unprepared , and I perform it along with some more prepared stand-up comedy throughout the country.

At my core Im an improvisor. I flamed out of the Groundlings, the famous improv troupe in Los Angeles that gave us greats like Paul Reubens, Kristen Wiig, Lisa Kudrow, and Phil Hartman, but later went on to cofound the ACME comedy theater. More important, I did the lions share of the work on the radio show Loveline for over a decade with Dr. Drew, who can name every bone in the body but doesnt have a funny bone in his. So I thought Id kick it old school in this book and do things a bit more free-form, answering questions and doling out advice.

The audience questions throughout this book are all real; nothing is cooked. We solicited them on my podcast and on Twitter, weeded out the dead wood, and in various hours stuck in miserable L.A. traffic I riffed, ranted, and raged and turned them into the following tome. There are going to be many improvised tangents along the way, thus the title. It was originally going to be called Ask an Asshole: Advice and Answers from the Least Apologetic Man in Comedy . But smarter people than me realized that would be a marketing problem. Even though its true that I am an unrepentant asshole, it would have been hard for Tucker Carlson to say the book title on air when I went to plug it on his show. So we decided to clean up the language a bit for sales. That was actually the biggest complaint from my last book, the language. If you read the Amazon reviews for Im Your Emotional Support Animal , youll see that people generally agreed with the sentiments, but many wished I had expressed them with a few less cuss words. My favorite was this email sent directly to my publisher. Let it be the first I address in this book.

I am writing you today to let you know how disappointed I am with your new Carolla book Im Your Emotional Support Animal. I bought it hoping for some humor in this now humorless society and to support Post Hill Press.

I am truly disgusted by the filthy language in this book. Just a few pages into the book the profanity started. There should be a disclaimer for those of us who are offended by this offensive language. I returned the book at Amazon and will get my money back. I will never buy another of your books, as I find I cant trust them. I just dont know why, when we are such an educated society, we are now resorting to the most vile of language.

Linda, Ohio

As a proud asshole, let me say, fuck your delicate sensibilities. You do the thing I hate the most: say I like humor as much as the next person before you call for censorship and cancelation. You clearly have no sense of humor. Im not going to apologize; shitty times call for shitty language. I wrote that book in 2019 when things sucked and our society was going off a cliff, but even I, with my crystal ball of a brain, couldnt have seen just how bad things would get after the twin viruses of COVID-19 (and the accompanying government ineptitude and overreach) and the postGeorge Floyd infection of antiracism, critical race theory, and police defunding. That book hit the virtual shelf (because no one could go out to an actual bookstore at the time) and sold 11,292 hardcovers in our first week. Yet we did not make the New York Times bestseller list. Hmmm

For June 1420 of 2020, Im Your Emotional Support Animal was the forty-eighth-bestselling book in the country, according to Bookscan, and the twelfth-bestselling nonfiction book on Amazon. It made the bestseller lists of USA Today , the Wall Street Journal , and Publishers Weekly . But more important, it sold more copies than eight books on the Times list, including the following. (Ive included the publishers descriptions from the list to add to the nausea).

Me and White Supremacy (10,994 copies sold): This eye-opening book challenges you to do the essential work of unpacking your biases, and helps white people take action and dismantle the privilege within themselves

Between the World and Me (10,020 copies sold): [A] bold and personal literary exploration of Americas racial history

Hood Feminism (3,672 copies sold): A potent and electrifying critique of todays feminist movement announcing a fresh new voice in Black feminism.

Seeing a trend there?

I bring this up not out of bitterness but out of a need to call bullshit. So, like the great Babe Ruth, Im calling my shot now. There is no way Ill get on the New York Times list again. And I now take that as a badge of honor. I never in my wildest or darkest fantasies would ever think that anything I said onstage or wrote on the page would ever be considered important, but in times such as these, simply speaking your mindas Ill do in the following pages, prompted by your questionsis considered an act of defiance and, potentially, patriotism.

As you likely knowand if not, then youll know by the end of this bookIm into vintage racing. I was at an event at the track at Pebble Beach last year, and people kept coming up to shake my hand and stroke my ego. It used to be that when I was stopped at an airport or an event like Laguna Seca, theyd say, Hey, Man Show ! Where are the Juggies? or I grew up listening to Loveline . In 2021 the same number of people came up to me, but no one brought any of that up. What they said was, Thank you for what youre doing. I tried to stay humble and just reply, Im just talking. Im a comedian just doing my job, but theyd push back: No, its important what youre doing.