Comics Between Covers

Vanity Fair discusses what makes a good comedian memoir, and what doesn't.

From the story...

One of the democratically liberating things about stand-up comedy is that it gives unzipped voice to America’s invisible majority, the Average Loser. It converts the pop-therapy ethos of Oprah that hangs like an incense cloud over the culture into acid rain and snarly self-deprecation, unmasking the gamesmanship and bad faith of trying to get others to feel sorry for us with our weepy stories and bared scars. Unsparing of himself, Norton reprints a poem that he composed in rehab after “a halfhearted, insincere suicide attempt,” interspersing italicized commentary from his adult self between couplets, annotating what a lachrymose, sympathy-soliciting dork he was:

I hid my pain down deep inside, I tucked it all away

Apparently I thought slicing my wrists and calling the FBI at 3:00 a.m. were exercises in subtlety. Not only did I not keep the pain inside or tucked away, but I wore it on my sleeve and irritated people until they acknowledged it.

Although Norton hobnobs with A-listers—invited by Louis C.K. to join him for dinner with Chris Rock, he’s aglow with girlish excitement (“I met them at Nobu, which is a very fancy sushi restaurant I’d never been to. It’s co-owned by Robert DeNiro, and on any given night you can see a bevy of celebrities ranging from Gary Coleman to the Hillside Strangler”)—he feels most at home with fellow blue-streak comics, inflatable porn stars, former boxing greats, burnt-out rock stars, and other kindred perverts. These are His People. Where the grouchy, bah-humbug Black ends Black Christmas with an inspirational chapter about entertaining the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan on a U.S.O. Christmas tour with Robin Williams, Kid Rock, and Lance Armstrong, the big finale in Happy Endings is an unbleeped account of a comedy roast of Kiss tongue flicker Gene Simmons, where Norton slayed the crowd. In this gladiator pit of personal invective, Norton got as good as he gave: “I got slammed by a few people, but hands down my favorite line of the night was when Lisa Lampanelli smashed me. ‘You know it’s an ugly dais when Jim Norton is hired as eye candy.’” (If Norton is the bard of the bad blow job, Lampanelli is the burlesque queen of the plus-size insult, retailing her hippo appetite for black men and dark candy in Chocolate, Please: My Adventures in Food, Fat, and Freaks [It Books], a book that reads as if it were written in fudge.)