Gasping for Airtime, by Jay Mohr
The author had a lousy time being on Saturday Night Live for two seasons; I had a lousy time reading his book about it.
(Review posted 2 Aug 2004 01:41:14)

(I listened to this as an abridged audiobook. I suspect the abridgement of being somewhat inept, but I also suspect that I wouldn't have liked the book much more if I'd read the complete thing.)

Jay Mohr was a minor player (a "featured performer", which is apparently somewhere down the totem pole from "cast member") for two seasons of Saturday Night Live sometime in the 90's. Judging from the vast bulk of his story about it here, he pretty much hated the whole thing. He had panic atttacks, he obsessed constantly about whether or not the sketches he wrote would get on the air and whether or not he would get on the air (hence the title), he didn't like many of the people he was working with, he drank, he goofed off, he even stole material from a standup comic and submitted it to the show as his own (the show, he says, was eventually sued over it; neither he nor I know why he wasn't fired for it).

So this is basically a depressing whiny book about someone being comparatively unsuccessful at something, and complaining about it at great length. The book itself isn't funny, and it gives us no evidence that the author is funny. The audiobook is narrated by the author, and when he reads passages where he's quoting someone, he sometimes "does" their voices; they aren't funny. He mentions a few (a very few, really) of the sketches that he wrote for SNL; as far as I can tell those aren't particularly funny either. We do get some glimpses of how SNL works behind the scenes, but they're pretty uniformly negative glimpses of chaos and arbitrary decisions, and I can't help but suspect they're too colored by the writer's negative attitude to be especially true.

Why do people do comedy? Is it about the connection to the audience, or about the windows it gives on the absurdity of the world, or the political or human or otherwise truth hidden behind the laughs? This book doesn't tell us anything about that, except to suggest that the reason the author does comedy is a strong desire to be on television. And it gives us no reason to care about that.