LAUGH LINES

A memoir from an award-winning comedy writer whose collaborators and projects have often garnered a higher profile than him.

Zweibel—who has won multiple Emmy and Writers Guild of America awards, along with a Thurber Prize for his novel, The Other Shulman—has plenty of material to dish about, but his memoir is refreshingly light on dirt and scandal. As his lifelong friend Billy Crystal writes in the foreword, “If life were a forties movie, Alan would be called ‘a big lug.’ He is a large man with a sensitive persona and a heart of gold.” This is an amiable, big-lug, heart-of-gold sort of book, whether Zweibel is recounting the formative years of Saturday Night Live, where he seemingly got along with everyone; or detailing his bitter split with Garry Shandling, with whom he’d partnered on It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and with whom he later reconciled. The author’s writing partner at SNL was Gilda Radner, and his book about their relationship gave him his highest-profile publishing success. The deaths of Radner and Shandling bring the narrative into emotional depths that contrast with the rest of the breezy account. Zweibel chronicles how he got his start by selling jokes to the Catskills generation of comedians, at a price that “had soared to ten dollars a joke.” But the 1960s and ’70s experienced a generational sea change, and the author wanted to write and tell the jokes that these older comedians couldn’t. So he took to the stage himself, mainly to advance his writing career, where the man who would introduce him to Lorne Michaels and change his life told him he “was one of the worst comics he’d ever seen.” The career that followed ranges from early exposure to Larry David and Andy Kaufman to recent Broadway collaborations with Crystal and Martin Short.

A pleasant, amusing tale of a life in jokes, suitable for budding comedians and students of the form.