By Dennis Perrin - Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue (1998-07-16) [Hardcover]

by Dennis Perrin

Excellent Book

Genres: Biography, Comedy, Humor, Nonfiction, Canon, Satire

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael O'Donoghue was perhaps the most inspired genius of bleak, black humor since the Marquis de Sade. In The Aristocrats, he's credited with being the most perverse teller of that joke, a version that clocked in at 90 disgusting minutes. His favorite book was a wonderfully ghastly one, The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau. He died when his brain exploded. Back when trolls wandered the earth, he was the guy who gave National Lampoon magazine and early Saturday Night Live their bizarre edge, sometimes as "Mr. Mike" with his "least-loved bedtime stories." People like this are always fun to read about and Dennis Perrin is a great story-teller. If you laugh at sick shit that no one else does, let O'Donoghue show you his kung fu. He is the master.

[J. Niimi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not sure if I'm ever going to finish this, so I'll put down a few notes now. Fascinating subject, obviously; torture to read. The author's prose is repetitive and one-dimensional -- yes, I get that O'Donoghue had a morbid worldview, already. Not that I'm looking for more armchair psychoanalysis, but I'd like to know more about what made the man tick besides the fact that he hated his mother and spent most of his childhood sick and holed up in his bedroom reading while the other kids were out playing and laughing. Way too many pages spent analyzing M.O'D's college papers and excruciatingly pretentious avant-garde plays from the early '60s. I'll keep plodding on as long as I can.

[Chuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael O’Donoghue is one of those unsung heroes of American comedy. He was one of the primal forces behind the National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. He was known for his dark and twisted humor constantly pushing the boundaries of good taste and counter-culture comedy. If you are interested in comedy then this book is a must read. The book delves into O’Donoghue’s life and his work. At time the books seems to drag a bit, but I think it is insightful to a part of comedy that we don’t see much now in our modern politically correct world. Let me know if you pick it up.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would love to give this five stars, because the subject is so gripping. However, for all his good intentions, Perrin kind of soft-balls the subject, lets him off the hook too often, and really just plays Flava Flav to O'Donoghue's Chuck D. As Christgau said of that duo, "Why should I like the great man's fan better than I like the great man?"

[Steven Spector · Rating 4 out of 5]

As is often the case with a very bright guy, not always the nicest of fellows. But I digress. An excellent highly detailed of O'Donoghue's early life of rebellion to his National Lampoon years and finally to his angst (boy do I hate that word) filled SNL years. Another bio of this subject will never be needed as Perrin tells us all we want and need to know.

[Cindy Marabito]

Love Mr. Mike. The book's great!

[Stephen Hero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever since my guardian angel strongly suggested that I start smoking American Spirit -brand cigarettes, I have been living my best life. "Three cheers for guardian angels," said sister Malloy once the whiskey truly took effect.

This strong suggestion by my guardian angel was not without a semblance of what I would call "earned solicitation," however. Perched over my shoulder one fine early morning, my guardian angel demanded a sallow yet pithy written piece aligning itself with the traditional claim/support narrative.

(A brief aside:) Description of the shoulder my guardian angel was perched over: Slumped, tired, expressing a sort of ambivalence and most importantly, engrained with true apathy.

It was my guardian angel that began: "The pleasures of flesh are to be brightly ignored. And rightly ignored. Anyway, our story should probably begin with John Lennon and his hit song 'Working Class Hero.' Other than the terrible swear word, the song could best be articulated as an adequate dirge that scrapes the left side of hierocracy and the bottom pit of hypocrisy."

"Now you take it from there."

"You sanctimonious winged fucker," I intoned. And then I thought and thought and thought. And then my plan surfaced.

After seven pints of rapid-fire Guinness, I wrote the following, completing the piece and nailing, as the kids say, my angelic requirements.

"Meanwhile, during his last interview, Lennon reflected upon his extensive body of work: ‘I consider that my work won't be finished until I'm dead and buried and I hope that's a long, long time.’ Sadly, Lennon would die later that very same day."

"Wow. Darker than the Guinness you are embarrassingly pouring down your gullet," said my guardian angel. "But I guess a win is a win. And you won.

Soon after my guardian angel recommended the American Spirit -brand cigarettes, I hit her over the head with a shovel and enjoyed the remainder of my day immeasurably.

[Lee Battersby · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining, but on reflection superficial, examination of an author who was a major influence in the establishment of both National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. There were obviously worms underneath the psyche of O'Donoghue, but as portrayed by Perrin, he comes across as a massively talented adolescent with the emotional control of an angry toddler. There's a frustrating lack of depth or analysis. The acknowledgements page betrays a possible reason-- despite O'Donoghue's life touching a cast of thousands across both the Lampoon and SNL, as well as the rest of his varied career, only O'Donoghue's wife Cheryl Hardwicke stands out, as well as Tony Hendra, Matty Simmons and Lorne Michaels for glimpses of their own works about the man. While the likes of Chevy Chase and Anne Beats discuss him in passing, the opportunity to really dig through the memories of those who knew him best seems to be shied away from.

The book is an entertaining read, and it skims across the major points of a complex and driven artistic soul, but it's hard not to feel that the opportunity for a major examination of O'Donoghue's influence on his contemporaries and industry has been missed, here. In all probability, this was the only chance, and it's now been missed. Try as he might, Perrin never gets beyond the image of O'Donoghue as a tortured enfant terrible, leaving us with only glimpses of what might exist beyond that role.

It's a book to treasure for those of us who were, and remain, fans, but it's a bittersweet fandom: we never really get to know the man, just the image.

[Downward · Rating 3 out of 5]

michael o'donoghue is probably a more fascinating figure than he is a /funny/ one. this book is interestingly more a biography of his work than him as a man (which is kind of appreciated, and is a unique take on an artist tbh) and it shows everything from his avant garde plays to his comic strips for evergreen to his articles in national lampoon and the more popular things that you've seen on tv through the very many unpublished things that never made it (and maybe rightfully so!). in doing so it shows you two sides of a guy, one of which is deeply moral and confronting hypocrisy and the violence of the world on its own terms, showing the world itself through art that hopefully as they cringe at the violence of the art get some residual disgust at the violence that takes place in the real world. the second side of him is clearly a guy that likes to cause discomfort and pain and is using the the art and the moralism as an excuse to do so. and you see that a whole lot in the world. if anything, my beefs here is that the art he does create, the COMEDY that he creates very often scratches that crusading 'let's stick it to the rubes' itch but it does seem to be rarely funny. and so anyway.

[Craig Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

As detailed and thorough a biography of Michael O'Donoghue, legendary writer of National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, as one could hope for. In fact, the book is so dense it verges on the point of overwritten, but once you get to O'Donoghue's tenure at NL and SNL, you'll be thankful for Perrin's extremely well researched attention to detail. While Perrin makes no bones about harboring a bias towards O'Donoghue that verges on the worshipful, he still manages to present a fairly balanced look at both the man's virtues and flaws. This is a great read for anyone interested in the history of National Lampoon or Saturday Night Live.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deep dive into the life and work (mostly the work) of an influential comedy writer/performer. It was fascinating and unexpected to learn that early "SNL" was, through O'Donoghue, so greatly influenced by avant-garde French writer Octave Mirbeau and his pitch-black comic perspective.

As a biography, this wasn't very insightful. At least it didn't succumb to using any pop psychology to "explain" its subject. Anyway, I will definitely look at early "SNL" episodes in a much different way now. It's too bad today's "SNL" is so lame and is little more than a marketing platform.

[Bevan Houston · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm a little amazed that this book received the favorable reviews that it has. I've read a lot of books this year, getting through this mess of a biography was the worst slog of 2019. The author's inconsistent weighing of biographical detail and and incessant "pithy" commentary are made all the more painful by a book length that is way out of scale for a minor (but important) figure in American comedy history.

[Billy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should've read this book four years ago when I first heard RADIO HOUR, but I'm organic if everything.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

As you may be able to glean from the title, this is a book about the life and times of Michael O'Donoghue, a comedy writer that wrote for both "Saturday Night Live" and the "National Lampoon" magazine in their heydays. I thought the book was mostly going to concentrate on "SNL", but the author, who obviously loves and deeply admires his subject, begins with O'Donoghue's childhood. He combs through a ton of the writer's early work - school papers, plays and the like - and draws lines to the writer's later, oftentimes controversial TV and print work. This is an exhaustive biography, and you get the feeling that Perrin could have gone on for another 400 pages. At the beginning, I was annoyed because I didn't get what I expected ("SNL" only stuff). But this is a complete portrait of an artist, or at least it attempts to be.

Anyway, by the time I reached the end, Perrin had really made me believer that O'Donoghue was one of the most important voices in American comedy. He also must have been an insane dude to know. Very hot and cold - just brutal to people. And his type of comedy, in your face, death-obsessed, shock stuff, doesn't usually interest me all that much. I gravitate more towards the silly and harmless. But the book, and the intelligence in O'Donoghue's work, makes the case for his style over and over. It certainly had me rethinking my small attempts at comedy. The guy certainly could be straight up funny, but he wasn't much interested in the release laughter affords people. He wanted to hollow people out.

Perrin glosses over the final decade of O'Donoghue's life, and it's the book's weakest trait. But, O'Donoghue's once prolific approach had stalled. And since the conclusions about the man are mostly drawn from O'Donoghue's writing, it's fitting that the book, like the subject, slows down and then simply stops.

I'll tell you what, this book made me fascinated by what he and his collaborators accomplished with the "National Lampoon." I guess "The Onion" is a grandchild in a way, but I'm not sure we have anything like it at the moment. And it certainly seems to have shaped all the funny stuff I love right now. The book also made me want to learn more about Terry Southern (whose body of work and comedic reach is hard to fathom) and Doug Kenney (of The National Lampoon + co-writer of both "Animal House" and "Caddyshack"!) - the one contemporary that O'Donoghue thought was on his level. And, of course, it made me want to watch the first season of "SNL" (then called just "Saturday Night") again.

[Mike McPadden · Rating 1 out of 5]

Michael O'Donoghue's life cries out for a proper biography as thought it had 18-inch needles inserted directly into its eyeballs.

A (long) decade-and-a-half since MR. MIKE, it still does.

With this exhausting, but hardly exhaustive, effort, Dennis Perrin, to invoke an O'Donoghue line delivered by Chevy Chase regarding 1980 SNL producer Jean Doumanian, does "a worse job than any other English-speaking person possibly could."

Early tip off: the author describes his subject as "a personal god to me." Good luck, then, expecting a clear-eyed or, for that matter, well-written documentation and assessment of facts.

Lowest injection of Perrin's Faux'Donoghue "bad boy" wit: he begins a sentence describing New York's Soho neighborhood by writing, "Before it was a shopping mall for Euro-swill...."

How he must have tee-hee-hee'd himself moist over combing "Euro" and "swill" (one of O'Donoghue's pet terms). AND while declaring himself superior by way of implied NYC street cred (please).

(One more stinking standout: a story about someone at O'Donoghue's memorial service being offended by one of the poems being read—and how non-offended Perrin is by it all—is entirely made up. It never happened. I guarantee it. I'll pay for the author's polygraph.)

Thus goes the rest of MR. MIKE.

The poor actual construction and word choices and narrative approaches aside, the many, many years of O'Donoghue's professional inertia after SCROOGED go unremarked upon.

Perrin does not mention O'Donoghue's 1993 SOCKS GOES TO WASHINGTON (about the White House cat), which was the last work, aside from a handful of dismal SPIN columns, that O'Donoghue published.

Such an omission is either careless reporting or intentional elimination in order to fit the author's agenda.

MR. MIKE is all that—and nothing more.

[furious · Rating 4 out of 5]

i loved this book, even though it is not a great one. that tends to happen with biographies of cultish kinds of figures. the only people who want to write the book, and who are passionate enough to get someone to publish it, are superfans. not always the best writers. i recently read a Shaun Ryder bio; absolute rubbish. but still, it was great in it's own ugly way. this piece on Michael O'Donoghue is nowhere near as bad as that, though it can get tedious at times. overall, it did a commendable job of taking a detailed look at the man & the work, both of which are every bit as fascinating as they are obscure.

[Will Hines · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like that it focused much more on his work than his life.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you for recommending this Steve Aydt! Now I have to re-read my old National Lampoon magazines, and re-watch the first several seasons of SNL to look for his influence.

[Dennis Lorence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only the good die young.

Brilliant!

[Mark Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would've loved this book to have been 100 pages shorter. That said, all the SNL stuff is gold.

[Matt Springer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know how well Mr. Mike's grand guignol comedy would stand up for me, but as a younger man, he was a fascinating figure of bravery and wit.

[Lyle Deixler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great look at a fascinating, brilliant and bizarre man. His skits were always some of my favorites on the original Saturday Night Live.

[Aimee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the relationships with the elephant, Hannah!

[Joe Faust · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well done biography of NatLamp and SNL’s master of macabre humor.

[Carissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

So tedious to read. Two stars only for the chapters about SNL's early years.

[Dan Doherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had some good and some bad. The negatives: the book, much like the subject, had a tendency to take itself and it's subject a little too seriously, and it should have been shortened to tighten up the book's structure.

The good: you will learn just about everything there is to know about a tragically little-remembered but tremendously important figure in Saturday Night Live's history and in the history of American Comedy since 1970