Book Review: Tracy Morgan's "I Am The New Black"

WHAT: Collection of stories in book form, very of-the-moment
GOOD IF YOU LIKED: Tracy Morgan's career thus far
WHERE TO FIND IT: Throw a rock, you'll find it
PUBLISHER: Spiegel & Grau, 224 pages
BY: Tracy Morgan with Anthony Bozza

I Am The New Black is, in effect, less an autobiography and more of an ongoing talk show transcript. Covering the comic's personal life and vast career, which includes SNL and 30 Rock, you get a really strong feeling of what Morgan's life is like. Basically, the story of his life is this: Come from nothing. Become something. Succeed wildly. Fail. Repeat.

The book's writing is very much in the voice of Morgan, with allusions to robots and other craziness, which really does prove that the writers on 30 Rock aren't kidding when they say they follow Tracy around for a day to come up with episode ideas. The man's a factory of strangeness, and is clearly some sort of manic genius.

At a very breezy 200+ pages with pictures and illustrations, the book goes by in a flash. It feels like it could almost have been posted via Twitter, in that there are a number of brief anecdotes that all go by quite quickly. Also like Twitter, this book is very now-- there are references to real-world events, which season of 30 Rock just finished, and so on, making this book already feel a little dated. You can pinpoint when certain sections were drafted, which is really all the more reason to read it now if you're going to at all.

There's not a lot here that feels like some amazing revelation-- if anything, it shows that his affable, eccentric persona on TV is pretty much spot-on. Stories about his days in sports, his upbringing, and why you need to move out of a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night after achieving success ring true, as do the many stories of his early TV gigs. Particularly engaging are the tales of his first attempts on the stage, succeeding one week and then bombing the next because he trotted out new, untested material that the audience didn't seem to go for.

Like many books about the business, there's a clear journey here, although it seems each chapter is pretty scattered. It starts off being about one thing, than jumps into his personal life or a friend or something else entirely. With the numerous references to his drinking and partying, plus the health-related danger of an alcohol monitoring bracelet, you're likely to learn some interesting trivia if nothing else. Assuming, of course, you don't have to wear one of the bracelets yourself.

If you need something to read on the plane, this is a great and fast read. Just be sure to read it sooner than later, as the narrative was clearly meant to be read during 2009. In 2010 it's going to feel like it came from a time capsule.

Saturday Night Live: Michael Phelps & Lil Wayne

Originally aired September 13, 2008. Written prior to the airing of the second episode of the season.

Since the early seasons of the show, critics frequently invoked the phrase "Saturday Night Dead" to describe what they perceived as an increasingly weakened show. If art can imitate life, it seems art can imitate criticism as well. The season opener from last weekend managed to bring back last season's cast mostly unchanged, save for a new fat guy who is being widely described as the love child of Horatio Sanz and John Belushi. So as you may have guessed, the Season 34 opener managed to skillfully pick a wide variety of comedic low-hanging fruit.

During an election year, SNL frequently acts as yet another place for the TV news media to turn to when filling the hours of dead air-- and as a result, you can bet a lot of these sketches are becoming increasingly sound byte-friendly and the show itself is generally going for a broader audience. There's nothing really wrong with making sure people get your jokes, but the Tina Fey cameo as Sarah Palin was almost insultingly obvious. After Sarah Palin was introduced on the world stage, people said two things. One, "VPILF." Two, "Golly, she looks like Tina Fey." Casting someone as their doppelganger isn't particularly innovative. Now, if you brought in Cookie Monster in a brown wig and glasses to play the part? That'd be something.

Michael Phelps himself managed to do what most stunt hosts do best-- play themselves, read the cue cards, and play themselves yet again. Michael Phelps got to play Michael Phelps at least twice, lending to the show in authenticity what he couldn't deliver in hilarity. As a pop culture victory lap, SNL has allowed a number of sports personalities, politicians, and musicians who may not be comedians by trade get a shot at making America laugh. As an added bit of toothless satire, Amy Poehler played Phelps' mom during the monologue-- and his actual mother was two seats over from her. Oh, the sneaker upper. Always a favorite, that.

Throughout the show fans were treated to the usual mix of music and comedy which makes America thank their creator(s) that TiVo exists. One sketch had Phelps and Poehler as a couple eating dinner with a waiter that kept coming by to talk about pepper or other things that someone thought was funny that really wasn't worth the snicker. On the other hand, Andy Samberg came through with a digital short on the Space Olympics that was delightfully amusing, and Will Forte played a (and I'm simplifying here) dancing swim coach on an equally amusing bit. (Actually, that's a lie, Forte was funnier.)

We're not going to make it a point to post reviews of SNL here regularly, but it is tempting to write up some sort of report card. Like always, some of it works, some of it doesn't, and a lot of it seems like it would have been more at home being dropped after the early rehearsals. Cranking out 90 minutes of comedy (well, maybe 40 minus Weekend Update, music, and ads) is a difficult job, perhaps a reduced running time could help amp up the funny-- after all, shows like Human Giant and Whitest Kids U Know managed to do well with 30 minutes.

...and speaking of 30 minutes, Saturday Night Live will be airing a few 30-minute Thursday night episodes in October. It's likely they're aiming for that sweet, sweet Daily Show with Jon Stewart buzz but interviews indicate that they're going to do some sketches as well. Here's hoping we can't see them coming a mile away.

Dana Carvey 2008 (or 2003, it's hard to tell)

Telling jokes isn't easy. Getting in front of a crowd of thousands of people with elevated expectations and a desire for an evening of mirth is difficult, mostly because you won't know what's going to play with these people. Can you tell genuinely insightful jokes about politics? How about religion? These subjects can be touchy, and Dana Carvey has decided that they don't have to be. In his 2008 HBO special Squatting Monkeys Tell No Lies, the title alone pretty much tells you everything you need to know-- this is a comic who has managed to find out which words people find amusing, and he isn't afraid to use them even if they don't belong there.

In a one-hour set which feels less like an edgy HBO comedy special and more like an audition tape for corporate gigs, Carvey gets to trot out a number of impressions which should be recognized by the bulk of people in the English speaking world. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Gore, John Travolta, they're all here. Putting one's heart and soul into a routine is what a lot of funny people aspire to do today, laying out one's peccadilloes and phobias for the world to see as the comedian pretty much disembowels him or herself in front of a live audience. The other option is to play it safe, which few do well, but with this special we have a guy who has mastered it. George W. Bush gags? Oh yes, they're here, and these funny voices are what pass for political satire in this special-- and oh, the applause! It's really amazing, but it does show that there aren't just two Americas in terms of economy, but also in humor. There's a joke about John Kerry looking like Herman Munster. The early 1990s were a time where stand up comedy was available on television-- cable or network-- constantly, and it was not particularly common to see people making Mondale or Dukakis jokes after the election season was over. People moved on, and found new material. Perhaps it had to do with the changing political administrations, or perhaps DuPont developed a new technology which allows you to keep jokes fresh in some new plastic container only available to comedians that play venues of 1,000 people or more.

For a set jam-packed with so many jokes, it's really quite stunning how safe Dana Carvey plays it. The political aspects celebrate the mundane, allowing the comic to engage the audience by letting them all feel like they're in on the joke by trotting out voices they're sure to recognize. The bulk of the references seem to be designed to be understandable by anyone presently in their 50s, and due to the kind of things you might know if you're 50, odds are most younger viewers will get the references but unless English is your second or third language, they probably won't appreciate numerous callbacks to the wacky political voices. OK, we got it. Thanks. Carvey infuses his political humor with all the subtlety and with you might expect from Elmo's dissertation on the letter "Q".

Much like the recently released Mike Meyers vehicle The Love Guru, this special seems to be aiming to capture the audience who was aware of SNL back in the 1990s, and may have even enjoyed a few bits, but isn't one of the people who would nitpick the show. In short, if you're the kind of person who might actually find this blog and read it, Squatting Monkeys Tell No Lies is the kind of special you probably won't enjoy all that much. If you're the kind of person who records a program just to check it out as you're a curious fellow, your attention span and immune system may well compell you to watch something else in the first 5 minutes.

Seeing the massive selection of what HBO has offered comedy fans over the years, this is on par with what you can expect. Some things appeal to a broad audience, which seems to be the opposite of where their niche programming seems to go. Robert Schimmel, David Cross, Robert Klein, and others have turned in specials which may not be things anybody could sit down and enjoy, but at the very least you can walk away knowing that someone (me) loved them. I don't think I can say the same thing about Pistachio Disguisey here. The comic earned a tremendous amount of good vibes from comedy fans during his stint in the trenches of sketch comedy, and it's hard to dislike the man. Hopefully he's making good money in corporate gigs, as the special makes a person yearn for something just a little bit better.

Additional Comments:
- There are comics who serve a specific niche. The Blue Collar crew, love them or hate them, has discovered their audience and plays to them. Dana Carvey is your man if you're 45-60 and generally unfamiliar with the material used for Tonight Show monologues over the past decade.
- Dana loves saying "Barack Hussein Obama," giving it a verbal emphasis I've only seen during the local news coverage of the West Virginia primaries. Mr. Obama is also the most timely of the references in the act-- and they're very brief.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger remains the goose that lays the golden eggs. "Hans & Franz", now "the Governator," proving once again that if you're looking to mine comic gold, look to bootleg shirts sold during a long-since-passed election.
- "Gay Al Gore" = "Lock box" plus a lisp. For an amusing joke of that nature, nothing can surpass the passing "Gaybraham Lincoln" gag on 30 Rock, which pretty much starts and stops with the mention of the name.
- Dick Cheney shot someone in the face? No shit! I must take this piece of information back to myself in the DeLorean so that I may capitalize on it before Dana Carvey, as surely no one else has come up with any material on this event.
- On Clinton: "Comedians will still be making fun of your horniness in the year 2008." Yes, but those who do tend to use current events, you see.
- Classic rock jokes. Let's throw the baby boomers a bone here, as nobody old enough to remember the music of the 1970s when it's new would be comfortable with a reference that takes place after the Carter administration.

What's Next:
Mr. Carvey will be performing live in San Diego on July 30, and has shows in Livermore, CA and Saratoga, CA on August 20 and 21, respectively. Tickets start at $65.