Sunday 28 March 2021

Book ~ "Is This Anything?" (2020) Jerry Seinfeld

From Goodreads ~ Since his first performance at the legendary New York nightclub “Catch a Rising Star” as a twenty-one-year-old college student in fall of 1975, Jerry Seinfeld has written his own material and saved everything. “Whenever I came up with a funny bit, whether it happened on a stage, in a conversation, or working it out on my preferred canvas, the big yellow legal pad, I kept it in one of those old school accordion folders,” Seinfeld writes. “So I have everything I thought was worth saving from forty-five years of hacking away at this for all I was worth.” 

For this book, Jerry Seinfeld has selected his favorite material, organized decade by decade. In page after hilarious page, one brilliantly crafted observation after another, readers will witness the evolution of one of the great comedians of our time and gain new insights into the thrilling but unforgiving art of writing stand-up comedy.

This is a collection of over 400 of Jerry Seinfeld's bits.  They are organized by decade starting with the 1970s right up to the 2010s.  

Some are quite short (a paragraph) and some are longer (a couple pages).  Some are funny ... some not so much.  Some I recognized from his bits from Seinfeld.  I found his earlier stuff more funny than the later stuff.  

It's not a book that I could read straight through ... I would pick it up and read it when I was looking for something to wind down with or I had a small amount of time to kill and didn't want to get into something else.

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