Deeply funny musings and adventures elevate Paul Rudnick to the highest level of American comedy writing.
She looked down again and I was stymied. I sat. Oh, this was enough to make me love her, because I was right with her, understanding every second and longing to step in. I didn’t even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on life’s happiest days.
Mirabelle is not sparkling tonight, because she works only in gears, and tonight she is in the wrong gear. Third gear is her scholarly, perspicacious, witty self; second gear is her happy, giddy, childish self; and first gear is her complaining, helpless, unmotivated self. Tonight she is somewhere midshift, between helpless and childish.
In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.
The dawn breaks everything, including the mood from the night before.
7 hour sleep diet worked great. Will power held beautifully.
Doing comedy alone onstage is the ego’s last stand.
When I moved out of the house at eighteen, I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn’t know I was supposed to.
Life exists so the Universe can experience itself.
Enjoyment while performing was rare – enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. After the shows, however, I experienced long hours of elation or misery depending on how the show went, because doing comedy alone onstage is the ego’s last stand.
Now that I had assigned myself an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing.
I might not seem like the type who could sit at an outdoor cafe drinking a latte, but I am. Why? No motion required. It’s just sitting. Sitting and sipping. I can’t imagine a neurosis that would prevent one from raising one’s arm to one’s mouth while holding a cup, though given time, I’m sure I could come up with one.
Sure, I’ve gotten some disbelieving stares when I’ve tried to explain this little habit of mine to, say, a bus seatmate. I’ve watched a guy adjust his posture, or get up and move back several rows, even if it meant he now sat next to someone else who was clearly on the verge of some other kind of insanity.
As we get older we either become our worst selves or our best selves.
Everything was dragging me toward the arts; even the study of modern philosophy suggested that philosophy was nonsense.
A luxury item is a thing you have that annoys other people that you have it.
It’s late. Need place to rehearse Dead Guy. I lie at bottom of stairs. Wife comes home. Do I break character? Never. She dials shrink.
Carl Reiner. He had an entrenched sense of glee; he used humor as a gentle way of speaking difficult truths;.
I didn’t even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on life’s happiest days.
This does not mean you are “losing it” or are “not playing with a full deck” or are “not all there” or that you’re “eating with the dirigibles” or “shellacking the waxed egg” or “looking inside your own mind and finding nothing there,” or any of the other demeaning epithets that are said about people who are peeling an empty banana.
In psychoanalysis, you try to retain a discovery; in art, once the thing is made, you let it go.