What do you think?
Rate this book
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind #1
Confesiones de una Mente Peligrosa
Suspense, excess, danger and exuberant fun come together in Chuck Barris' unlikely autobiography -- the tale of a wildly flamboyant 1970s television producer, better known as the infamous host of The Gong Show. What most people don't know is that Barris allegedly spent close to two decades as a decorated covert assassin for the CIA.
Barris, who achieved tremendous success as the creator and producer of hit TV game shows such as The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game, claims to have joined the CIA as an agent in the early 1960s, infiltrated the Civil Rights movement, met with militant Muslims in Harlem, and traveled abroad in order to kill enemies of the United States.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is now a movie directed by and starring George Clooney, with Sam Rockwell as the author, but the original story is wild and gripping, spiced with intrigue, sex, bad behavior and plenty of great one-liners. It is destined to become a classic.
386 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
About the author
Chuck Barris
15 books21 followersCharles Hirsch "Chuck" Barris was an American game show creator, producer, and host. He is best known for hosting The Gong Show and creating The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game. He is also a songwriter, who wrote the hit "Palisades Park", and the author of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a story about himself that became a film directed by George Clooney.
Barris was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended Drexel Institute of Technology where he was a columnist for the student newspaper, The Triangle. He graduated in 1953.
Barris got his start in television as a page and later staffer at NBC in New York City, and eventually worked backstage at the TV music show American Bandstand, originally as a standards-and-practices person for ABC. Barris soon became a music industry figure. He produced pop music on records and TV, but his most successful venture was writing "Palisades Park". Barris also wrote or co-wrote some of the music that appeared on his game shows.
Barris was promoted to the daytime programming division at ABC in Los Angeles and was put in charge of deciding which game shows ABC would air. Barris told his bosses that the pitches of game show concepts were worse than Barris' own ideas. They suggested that he quit his ABC programming job and become a producer.
Barris formed his production company Chuck Barris Productions on June 14, 1965. Barris first became successful during 1965 with his first game show creation, The Dating Game, on ABC. The show would air for eleven of the next fifteen years and be revived twice in the 1980s and 1990s.
The next year Barris began The Newlywed Game, originally created by Nick Nicholson and E. Roger Muir, also for ABC. The combination of the newlywed couples' humorous candor and host Bob Eubanks's sly questioning made the show another hit for Barris. The show is the longest lasting of any developed by his company, running for a total of 19 full years on 'first run' TV, network and syndicated.
Barris created several other short-lived game shows for ABC in the 1960s and for syndication in the 1970s, all of which revolved around a common theme. Barris also made several attempts through the years at non-game formats, such as ABC's Operation Entertainment; a CBS revival of Your Hit Parade; and The Bobby Vinton Show. The latter was his most successful program other than a game show.
Barris became a public figure in 1976 when he produced and served as the host of the talent contest spoof The Gong Show. The show's cult status far outstripped the two years it spent on NBC (1976–78) and the four years it ran in syndication (1976–80).
Barris continued strongly until the mid-1970s, when ABC cancelled the Dating and Newlywed games. This left Barris with only one show, his weekly syndicated effort The New Treasure Hunt. But the success of The Gong Show in 1976 encouraged him to revive the Dating and Newlywed games, as well as adding the $1.98 Beauty Show to his syndication empire. He also hosted a short lived primetime variety hour for NBC from February to April 1978, called The Chuck Barris Rah-Rah Show, essentially a noncompetitive knock-off of Gong.
In Barris's biography, he claims to have worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an assassin in the 1960s and the 1970s. A 2002 feature film version, directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell, depicts Barris as killing 33 people. Barris wrote a sequel, Bad Grass Never Dies, in 2004.
Barris published Della: A Memoir of My Daughter in 2010 about the death of his only child, who died in 1998 after a long struggle with drug addiction.
Barris was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended Drexel Institute of Technology where he was a columnist for the student newspaper, The Triangle. He graduated in 1953.
Barris got his start in television as a page and later staffer at NBC in New York City, and eventually worked backstage at the TV music show American Bandstand, originally as a standards-and-practices person for ABC. Barris soon became a music industry figure. He produced pop music on records and TV, but his most successful venture was writing "Palisades Park". Barris also wrote or co-wrote some of the music that appeared on his game shows.
Barris was promoted to the daytime programming division at ABC in Los Angeles and was put in charge of deciding which game shows ABC would air. Barris told his bosses that the pitches of game show concepts were worse than Barris' own ideas. They suggested that he quit his ABC programming job and become a producer.
Barris formed his production company Chuck Barris Productions on June 14, 1965. Barris first became successful during 1965 with his first game show creation, The Dating Game, on ABC. The show would air for eleven of the next fifteen years and be revived twice in the 1980s and 1990s.
The next year Barris began The Newlywed Game, originally created by Nick Nicholson and E. Roger Muir, also for ABC. The combination of the newlywed couples' humorous candor and host Bob Eubanks's sly questioning made the show another hit for Barris. The show is the longest lasting of any developed by his company, running for a total of 19 full years on 'first run' TV, network and syndicated.
Barris created several other short-lived game shows for ABC in the 1960s and for syndication in the 1970s, all of which revolved around a common theme. Barris also made several attempts through the years at non-game formats, such as ABC's Operation Entertainment; a CBS revival of Your Hit Parade; and The Bobby Vinton Show. The latter was his most successful program other than a game show.
Barris became a public figure in 1976 when he produced and served as the host of the talent contest spoof The Gong Show. The show's cult status far outstripped the two years it spent on NBC (1976–78) and the four years it ran in syndication (1976–80).
Barris continued strongly until the mid-1970s, when ABC cancelled the Dating and Newlywed games. This left Barris with only one show, his weekly syndicated effort The New Treasure Hunt. But the success of The Gong Show in 1976 encouraged him to revive the Dating and Newlywed games, as well as adding the $1.98 Beauty Show to his syndication empire. He also hosted a short lived primetime variety hour for NBC from February to April 1978, called The Chuck Barris Rah-Rah Show, essentially a noncompetitive knock-off of Gong.
In Barris's biography, he claims to have worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an assassin in the 1960s and the 1970s. A 2002 feature film version, directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell, depicts Barris as killing 33 people. Barris wrote a sequel, Bad Grass Never Dies, in 2004.
Barris published Della: A Memoir of My Daughter in 2010 about the death of his only child, who died in 1998 after a long struggle with drug addiction.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 164 reviews
June 14, 2013
A complete fraud! Or is it? Yes, it has to be! Doesn't it?
Who's to say if the super tall tales Barris lays down in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind are real? Like him or not, the man was a real entertainer. He knew what the people wanted and he gave it to them. But one wonders if while sitting around bored at his ABC Studios security guard gig cooking up ideas that would eventually turn into hit television shows like The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and the Gong Show, perhaps Barris was also cooking up an alter ego, a James Bond daydream persona that could lift him out of his humdrum existence. When ambitious nobodies get a notion the wings of their imagination can fly it to incredible heights.
Real or not, Barris' spy stories, while made-for-the-big-screen in tone and content, are fun to read. And I will also say this for the book, it's a quick read! Not just page-wise brevity, but rather the pacing. Just like in his Gong Show days, ol' Chucky baby knows how to keep the show moving. Was it worth reading? Well, I don't know if I'd recommend it. Personally, I read it because I felt I owed him one. When I was a wee lad, Chuck Barris' tv shows entertained the heck out of me. Watching adults make fools out of themselves on the Gong Show cracked me up to no end! So even though I knew it wasn't going to be a great piece of literature, I had to read it...just to see what the old entertainer still had up his sleeves.
Who's to say if the super tall tales Barris lays down in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind are real? Like him or not, the man was a real entertainer. He knew what the people wanted and he gave it to them. But one wonders if while sitting around bored at his ABC Studios security guard gig cooking up ideas that would eventually turn into hit television shows like The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and the Gong Show, perhaps Barris was also cooking up an alter ego, a James Bond daydream persona that could lift him out of his humdrum existence. When ambitious nobodies get a notion the wings of their imagination can fly it to incredible heights.
Real or not, Barris' spy stories, while made-for-the-big-screen in tone and content, are fun to read. And I will also say this for the book, it's a quick read! Not just page-wise brevity, but rather the pacing. Just like in his Gong Show days, ol' Chucky baby knows how to keep the show moving. Was it worth reading? Well, I don't know if I'd recommend it. Personally, I read it because I felt I owed him one. When I was a wee lad, Chuck Barris' tv shows entertained the heck out of me. Watching adults make fools out of themselves on the Gong Show cracked me up to no end! So even though I knew it wasn't going to be a great piece of literature, I had to read it...just to see what the old entertainer still had up his sleeves.
February 19, 2019
It's hard to review this because it was enjoyable even if I am fairly positive Barris was never a hit-man for the CIA. Those parts were neverthless entertaining because it served as a vehicle for him to mock WASP culture. As a Jewish kid from Philadelphia, I can understand why he reviled the whole "preppie" thing, and hated people who "speak with exclamation points." However, I can't figure out if anything in this book is actually true. For instance, he says he went to U. Penn, when I know he went to Drexel. And did he really join the march to Selma?
Needless to say, I would have preferred a more straight forward narrative of his life because it would have been even funnier. For a guy who was widely reviled as the "King of Schlock," he seems to be able to trot out a lot of highbrow literary references. It's clear that he had some sort of Dadaist vision for the Gong Show which is why he had to host it himself. The original host that he hired refused to understand that this was not a serious hunt for talent. The idea was to let dregs of Hollywood do their acts on national television in order to provoke some sort of reaction from "straight" society. It turned out to be a huge hit.
I will have to really make a point to see the movie now because there is a lot of material here for the kind of satire that is long gone. However, it will not pass muster with the #MeToo movement. It is what it is...ie. Hollywood in the 1960s/70s.
Needless to say, I would have preferred a more straight forward narrative of his life because it would have been even funnier. For a guy who was widely reviled as the "King of Schlock," he seems to be able to trot out a lot of highbrow literary references. It's clear that he had some sort of Dadaist vision for the Gong Show which is why he had to host it himself. The original host that he hired refused to understand that this was not a serious hunt for talent. The idea was to let dregs of Hollywood do their acts on national television in order to provoke some sort of reaction from "straight" society. It turned out to be a huge hit.
I will have to really make a point to see the movie now because there is a lot of material here for the kind of satire that is long gone. However, it will not pass muster with the #MeToo movement. It is what it is...ie. Hollywood in the 1960s/70s.
August 14, 2010
Was Chuck Barris, creator of The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show actually a hit man for the CIA? Stranger things have occurred. After all, Julia Childs was a CIA agent but she never killed anyone...I think. I wonder if Valerie Plame ever offed someone?
I think it is safe to say Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is purely fiction or, at the most, a figment of Barris' manically creative mind. The surprising thing is that it is a very funny book with the type of humor you would expect from someone like Woody Allen. If Chuck Barris actually wrote this book, which is a huge IF when it comes to celebrity books, he displays a wry wit about not only his fictitious CIA capers but also his more factual experiences as TV's most successful, and hated, producer. His exploits are both boastful and self-deprecating as he describes his success after two years in TV as achieving "My first prime-time special,my second automobile...and my tenth pregnant girl-friend". The author clearly had a lot of fun with this but I think he was also trying to "out" his own conflictual existence in the dog-eat-dog television industry by disguising it as a fantasy espionage thriller. And if nothing else, he did bring The Popsicle Twins to prime-time TV.
I think it is safe to say Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is purely fiction or, at the most, a figment of Barris' manically creative mind. The surprising thing is that it is a very funny book with the type of humor you would expect from someone like Woody Allen. If Chuck Barris actually wrote this book, which is a huge IF when it comes to celebrity books, he displays a wry wit about not only his fictitious CIA capers but also his more factual experiences as TV's most successful, and hated, producer. His exploits are both boastful and self-deprecating as he describes his success after two years in TV as achieving "My first prime-time special,my second automobile...and my tenth pregnant girl-friend". The author clearly had a lot of fun with this but I think he was also trying to "out" his own conflictual existence in the dog-eat-dog television industry by disguising it as a fantasy espionage thriller. And if nothing else, he did bring The Popsicle Twins to prime-time TV.
April 13, 2012
A week ago, I happene to catch a little-known movie called "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" -- George Clooney's directoral debut. The movie also had Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore in it, and although I'm not a movie-goer, I was surprised I had never heard of it. Then I realized that it was based on the "autobiography" of Chuck Barris, creator of "The Dating Game", "The Newlywed Game," and "The Gong Show" among others. Being a child of the 1970s, I remembered those games fondly, and watched the movie, which was so entertaining, and fun, and thought-provoking. I found the book that the movie was based on in the library, and read the whole thing in one evening. All I can say is WOW. This book is a wild romp through the life, real or imagined, of one of the most famous television producers in the 1960s and 1970s, and is not just Hollywood or LA, but tells about Barris's "secret double life" -- as a hired assassin for the Central Intelligence Agency. Yes, THAT CIA. Part Hollywood tell-all, part spy thriller, but wholly entertaining and quickly read. Is is true? Who cares?! It is so much fun!
(Rated R for sex and language and violence)
(Rated R for sex and language and violence)
August 19, 2026
A fourth star just for how weird it is
My brain. I don’t know why it makes me read stuff like this. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is Chuck Barris’ unauthorized autobiography. It’s been out of print for about 25 years and so hard to find in local libraries, I had to enact an interlibrary loan to borrow it from a library almost 100 miles away.
Chuck Barris was a bizarre B-list entertainment personality from the 1970s and 80s. He was best known for creating and hosting The Gong Show and creating other hit game shows like The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game. While those shows were super popular, Barris himself was seen more like this eccentric, almost cult-like, figure rather than a celebrity. His on-camera persona was highly quirky, chaotic, and not-at-all polished in any way. Although I personally watched his three big game show hits, he also had a large repertoire of game shows I never even heard of: The Family Game, The Game Game, Dream Girl of 1968, Operation Entertainment, How’s Your Mother-in-law?, The Rah-Rah Show, Treasure Hunt, Leave It to the Women, and The Dollar-Ninety-Eight Beauty Show. The names alone speak volumes.
This is perhaps the weirdest autobiography ever written. It’s a surreal mashup of self-mythology, nostalgia, kitsch, vulgarity, chauvinism, satire, and performance art. And at any given moment, it’s hard to register exactly what’s fact and what’s fiction. It’s filled with crude humor from cover to cover, but laugh out loud funny sometimes. A solid 50% of this book has regaling tales of Chuckie Baby’s side-gig as an international CIA assassin interwoven with his stories about building the TV network game shows he’s best known for. The CIA part is written with such detail and brilliantly dovetailed with so many facts about his life as a gameshow creator, it comes across as totally believable until you realize, “No, we’re talking about Chuck Barris. There’s no way that goofball host from The Gong Show ever did any of this stuff.”
I’d recommend this book to anyone who ever has a 1970s nostalgia itch that needs to be scratched.
My brain. I don’t know why it makes me read stuff like this. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is Chuck Barris’ unauthorized autobiography. It’s been out of print for about 25 years and so hard to find in local libraries, I had to enact an interlibrary loan to borrow it from a library almost 100 miles away.
Chuck Barris was a bizarre B-list entertainment personality from the 1970s and 80s. He was best known for creating and hosting The Gong Show and creating other hit game shows like The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game. While those shows were super popular, Barris himself was seen more like this eccentric, almost cult-like, figure rather than a celebrity. His on-camera persona was highly quirky, chaotic, and not-at-all polished in any way. Although I personally watched his three big game show hits, he also had a large repertoire of game shows I never even heard of: The Family Game, The Game Game, Dream Girl of 1968, Operation Entertainment, How’s Your Mother-in-law?, The Rah-Rah Show, Treasure Hunt, Leave It to the Women, and The Dollar-Ninety-Eight Beauty Show. The names alone speak volumes.
This is perhaps the weirdest autobiography ever written. It’s a surreal mashup of self-mythology, nostalgia, kitsch, vulgarity, chauvinism, satire, and performance art. And at any given moment, it’s hard to register exactly what’s fact and what’s fiction. It’s filled with crude humor from cover to cover, but laugh out loud funny sometimes. A solid 50% of this book has regaling tales of Chuckie Baby’s side-gig as an international CIA assassin interwoven with his stories about building the TV network game shows he’s best known for. The CIA part is written with such detail and brilliantly dovetailed with so many facts about his life as a gameshow creator, it comes across as totally believable until you realize, “No, we’re talking about Chuck Barris. There’s no way that goofball host from The Gong Show ever did any of this stuff.”
I’d recommend this book to anyone who ever has a 1970s nostalgia itch that needs to be scratched.
“You've given us Chuck Barris, for Christ's sake! That's what you've given us. No pithy drama; no interesting innovations in comedy; very little ballet, theater, or controversial documentaries. Just Chuck Barris and his trash. As far as I'm concerned, Chuck Barris symbolizes everything that's wrong with television. His shows are drivel and he's an embarrassment. If giving valuable air time and exposure to the Chuck Barrises of the world is the best you can do, then you've all failed, and failed miserably.”
- A critic of the arts to executives at the 3 big TV networks
September 1, 2018
chuck barris
fuck you!
fuck you!
February 21, 2009
Ladies and gentlemen...I'd like to introduce to you Mr. Chuck Barris, ladies and gentlemen: pop-song one-hit wonder writer, lothario, creator of numerous hit TV game shows, host of the skewed variety show The Gong Show, wearer of many goofy hats, living national joke, and...according to this debatable tell-all from the 70's, also a government hit-man.
Written so conversationally, constructed so flawlessly - at the time it was first published this fantastical yarn couldn't be proven nor dis-proven, albeit it's incredible implausability. It just had to be taken for the wonderful mystery it was.
Even though now we can pretty much rule out the whole hit-man thing (a later memoir didn't really bring it up), this book still stands as a wildly amusing perfectly metaphorical memoir where Barris took his persecution frustration from the people who said he was responsible for the dumbing down of our wonderful nation via network television and confessed to things they'd really be disgusted at - actually killing some of the American and International public, not just dumbing them down.
Angry, searching, thoughtful, silly, and always amusing.
I love this book and Chuck Barris and silly hats with all of my heart of hearts.
Written so conversationally, constructed so flawlessly - at the time it was first published this fantastical yarn couldn't be proven nor dis-proven, albeit it's incredible implausability. It just had to be taken for the wonderful mystery it was.
Even though now we can pretty much rule out the whole hit-man thing (a later memoir didn't really bring it up), this book still stands as a wildly amusing perfectly metaphorical memoir where Barris took his persecution frustration from the people who said he was responsible for the dumbing down of our wonderful nation via network television and confessed to things they'd really be disgusted at - actually killing some of the American and International public, not just dumbing them down.
Angry, searching, thoughtful, silly, and always amusing.
I love this book and Chuck Barris and silly hats with all of my heart of hearts.
December 6, 2009
I finished the book this morning and then watched the movie, (made from a Charlie Kaufman screenplay adaptation) tonight after the Super Bowl. I can tell you that the film was a lot more edgy, dark and less fun than the book. Although both representations are meritorious. I've come to idolize Chuck Barris since I read You and Me, Babe years ago. The whole thing is an interesting read what with the whole fantasy about Chuckie Baby doubling as a CIA assassin. But, Barris' real life stuff is what fascinates me most. "Palisades Park" then crazy television success into his current status as a writer. At the end of the film, the camera intimates on the then septuagenarian Barris' face while Sam Rockwell's voice over tells of an edifying new game show Barris has thought up. That stays with you in a way the book does not. From the film you are left wishing that Chuck Barris could just appreciate what he did and what a spectacular life he's led and that, critics be damned, he did make worthwhile hilarity on tv, he did buck the system and he seemed to have more laughs than anyone else. Reading the book, you get a sense that maybe he did know some of those things.
March 28, 2017
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is actually two mediocre books, one non-fiction book in which Chuck Barris recounts his life as a game show producer and the other, a bad spy novel. If Barris had focused on the first book, it could have been great—a fun read. The only really interesting and engaging parts of this book are those sections that deal with the game shows, the rest doesn't even pass as believable fiction. What little fact checking on his personal life and his supposed work for the CIA I did turn up nothing to verify what he'd written. Even the accounts of his personal life were fictionalized and bore little resemblance to his real life.
March 14, 2022
The autobiography of probably the most prolific game show host and creator. Not only did he excel at game shows, but wrote a hit song and was an operative for the CIA. If you've seen the movie, the book is close to it with a few differences. A very good and quick read if you enjoy biographies. Without giving away everything, it was very fascinating to read about such an extraordinary life.
July 12, 2018
I’m not even sure how to describe this sort-of autobiography by The Gong Show’s Chuck Barris. It seems it is more of an imagined, if I had joined the CIA...what would my life have been like, book. That being said, this is a misogynistic, sexist, derogatory rant from an insecure, self-involved, misunderstood sleazeball with a soft heart. It had parts that were truly funny. I did laugh out loud. I also wanted to punch him a lot.
June 18, 2023
I saw a show a few weeks ago that had a lengthy segment about the Gong Show which I really enjoyed so I thought I would read this book. The Gong Show parts were decent otherwise ugh. While reading it I realized adding it to Goodreads was admitting I had read it publicly which slightly embarrassed me. Oh well, nobody's perfect. Of course now I've finished and I won't ever have to think about it again. No recommendation.
August 24, 2018
While this book had an okay story I can't take any of it seriously.
UPDATE:
Watched the movie....didn't make the story any better. I seriously think Mr. Barris was suffering from some real mental health issues.
UPDATE:
Watched the movie....didn't make the story any better. I seriously think Mr. Barris was suffering from some real mental health issues.
January 30, 2021
Audiobook
Abridged but not abridged enough this cliched tale of a repugnant mans life was devoid of spirit and good humour. I found it tasteless, and hard to believe.
Abridged but not abridged enough this cliched tale of a repugnant mans life was devoid of spirit and good humour. I found it tasteless, and hard to believe.
November 7, 2020
This isn't the most well written book I've ever read, but I enjoyed it anyway. It is supposed to be an autobiography and reads more like fiction. As you might expect from the creator of TV shows The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show it was kind of crude in many places, but still funny. The CIA has denied the claim that Barris was a CIA hitman, but he shares enough about producing those TV shows that it makes you wonder if he might be telling some truth about his secret life too.
June 11, 2010
I want to begin by saying that I sincerely hope every word of Confessions of a Dangerous mind is true. I hope Chuck Barris really did work for the CIA, I hope he really did kill every single person he said he did, and I especially hope he did so while working on the Dating Game.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind can be loosely described as a "memoir". Despite the fact that I write mostly in nonfiction, I really don't like memoirs. To begin with, I don't think everyone deserves a memoir. I don't think every C-list celebrity, failed politician, pill-popping suburban housewife and mother-of-sextuplets train wreck deserves a memoir. You DO deserve a memoir if you're a good writer. Chuck Barris is a damn good writer.
We've all seen a Barris show at some point or another. I'm too young to really have seen, or been interested in, The Dating Game or The Newlywed Game (although we all know the famous "in the ass" punchline) but I did see--sigh--The Gong Show. Or, as I knew it, the trippiest damn thing I'd ever seen in my life. It turns out the mind behind those shows, remembered as innocuous and daft, is a brilliant writer. Barris is sharp, cynical, hilarious and shockingly sensitive.
It is his narrative and writer's voice that carries Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which begins with either a monumental confession or a gigantic lie, depending on your point of view: Chuck Barris worked for the CIA. Not just "worked for" but KILLED for. "Call it patriotism," he writes, I can imagine with a sly half-smile. In a scattered but ultimately coherent narrative, Barris details his entrance into the CIA and his rise in television.
The parallel stories are fun, often funny, and genuinely tense. He treats his CIA work with the same detail as he does his television shows, which is perhaps the single pity of the book. I was more interested in the politics of the networks, in the constant havoc and Barris' persistent fears about success (all sides and consequences thereof) that it was sometimes reluctantly that I returned to the assassinations. I found myself caring more about the success of The Dating Game than the murder of a Russian secret agent.
The most fascinating parts of the book were the sections about negative criticism. "Negative criticism" might be putting it too lightly-- "seething hatred" might be a better term for the way critics reacted to Barris' shows. He absorbed every piece of this criticism, memorized it, and allowed it to affect him to the point of sickness ("Reading the article, I felt a surge of nausea. I began rereading until I got to the part that turned my stomach. 'Psychotic hatred of women. Systemic assassination of women. Victims skipping to the executioner's block.' I ran to the airliner's toilet."-- p. 180) I got the feeling that Confessions may have been a sort of catharsis for Barris from this criticism of his shows more so than any murder he may have ever committed or wanted to commit. 'You want to hate me,' Barris seems to say, 'fine, hate me. But hate me for something else, for being a killer. Don't hate me for trying to entertain you.'
Barris' romantic exploits make up the remainder of the book, and nothing is glamorized. Barris freely admits women slept with him for his fame, and he was willing to indulge them. "Penny" is the love of his life, a kooky and sweet girl who pursues Barris for decades. Other lovers, CIA agents, cocktail waitresses, childhood friends-of-friends, come and go between the pages.
The most remarkable thing about the book is that it was written. Marked for years as 'the King of Schlock' (there's an immensely uncomfortable scene in the book surrounding this phrase), Barris, by virtue of being a phenomenal writer, has taken back his legacy. With this book (and I remember distinctly when it was released), Barris has rewritten his history. No matter what has been written about you, no matter what has been said about you, no matter your successes or failures, if you're a good writer, you can control your legacy. That's a beautiful lesson, expertly illustrated, and is the ultimate message from Chuck Barris-- author first, TV host second.
"The taping of The Gong Show was temporarily halted. I was standing on my mark in the center of the studio floor. As I stood there, I saw everything more distinctly than I have ever seen anything before: the lights, the people, the scenery, the floor, the band's instruments-- as if everything had been Windexed, I turned my body very slowly in a circle. I saw the stagehands behind me joking and laughing on the stage, their laughter almost deafening. I saw the three celebrity judges sitting behind their console, wisecracking and cavorting. I turned some more and saw the audience in front of me, yelling at me: "Chuckie baby! Chuckie baby!" I continued turning and saw the band on the far side of the stage, ribbing each other. Their shouts sounded like shrieks. I turned once again and found myself back where I started. I had come full circle. Everyone was having a good time-- everyone except me. My heart beat furiously. I was suffocating. "Chuckie baby! Chuckie baby!" The din grew louder and louder and louder, and my breath grew shorter and shorter.
And then, suddenly, it was quiet." -- Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, p. 169
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind can be loosely described as a "memoir". Despite the fact that I write mostly in nonfiction, I really don't like memoirs. To begin with, I don't think everyone deserves a memoir. I don't think every C-list celebrity, failed politician, pill-popping suburban housewife and mother-of-sextuplets train wreck deserves a memoir. You DO deserve a memoir if you're a good writer. Chuck Barris is a damn good writer.
We've all seen a Barris show at some point or another. I'm too young to really have seen, or been interested in, The Dating Game or The Newlywed Game (although we all know the famous "in the ass" punchline) but I did see--sigh--The Gong Show. Or, as I knew it, the trippiest damn thing I'd ever seen in my life. It turns out the mind behind those shows, remembered as innocuous and daft, is a brilliant writer. Barris is sharp, cynical, hilarious and shockingly sensitive.
It is his narrative and writer's voice that carries Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which begins with either a monumental confession or a gigantic lie, depending on your point of view: Chuck Barris worked for the CIA. Not just "worked for" but KILLED for. "Call it patriotism," he writes, I can imagine with a sly half-smile. In a scattered but ultimately coherent narrative, Barris details his entrance into the CIA and his rise in television.
The parallel stories are fun, often funny, and genuinely tense. He treats his CIA work with the same detail as he does his television shows, which is perhaps the single pity of the book. I was more interested in the politics of the networks, in the constant havoc and Barris' persistent fears about success (all sides and consequences thereof) that it was sometimes reluctantly that I returned to the assassinations. I found myself caring more about the success of The Dating Game than the murder of a Russian secret agent.
The most fascinating parts of the book were the sections about negative criticism. "Negative criticism" might be putting it too lightly-- "seething hatred" might be a better term for the way critics reacted to Barris' shows. He absorbed every piece of this criticism, memorized it, and allowed it to affect him to the point of sickness ("Reading the article, I felt a surge of nausea. I began rereading until I got to the part that turned my stomach. 'Psychotic hatred of women. Systemic assassination of women. Victims skipping to the executioner's block.' I ran to the airliner's toilet."-- p. 180) I got the feeling that Confessions may have been a sort of catharsis for Barris from this criticism of his shows more so than any murder he may have ever committed or wanted to commit. 'You want to hate me,' Barris seems to say, 'fine, hate me. But hate me for something else, for being a killer. Don't hate me for trying to entertain you.'
Barris' romantic exploits make up the remainder of the book, and nothing is glamorized. Barris freely admits women slept with him for his fame, and he was willing to indulge them. "Penny" is the love of his life, a kooky and sweet girl who pursues Barris for decades. Other lovers, CIA agents, cocktail waitresses, childhood friends-of-friends, come and go between the pages.
The most remarkable thing about the book is that it was written. Marked for years as 'the King of Schlock' (there's an immensely uncomfortable scene in the book surrounding this phrase), Barris, by virtue of being a phenomenal writer, has taken back his legacy. With this book (and I remember distinctly when it was released), Barris has rewritten his history. No matter what has been written about you, no matter what has been said about you, no matter your successes or failures, if you're a good writer, you can control your legacy. That's a beautiful lesson, expertly illustrated, and is the ultimate message from Chuck Barris-- author first, TV host second.
"The taping of The Gong Show was temporarily halted. I was standing on my mark in the center of the studio floor. As I stood there, I saw everything more distinctly than I have ever seen anything before: the lights, the people, the scenery, the floor, the band's instruments-- as if everything had been Windexed, I turned my body very slowly in a circle. I saw the stagehands behind me joking and laughing on the stage, their laughter almost deafening. I saw the three celebrity judges sitting behind their console, wisecracking and cavorting. I turned some more and saw the audience in front of me, yelling at me: "Chuckie baby! Chuckie baby!" I continued turning and saw the band on the far side of the stage, ribbing each other. Their shouts sounded like shrieks. I turned once again and found myself back where I started. I had come full circle. Everyone was having a good time-- everyone except me. My heart beat furiously. I was suffocating. "Chuckie baby! Chuckie baby!" The din grew louder and louder and louder, and my breath grew shorter and shorter.
And then, suddenly, it was quiet." -- Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, p. 169
February 6, 2019
I very much enjoyed the parts about Chuck Barris creating game shows such as the Dating Game and the Gong Show. The parts about him being a CIA assassin were less enjoyable.
Read
May 7, 2012This may be the most bizarre book I've ever read. A well-respected writer friend gave it to me as a present, so I muddled through the beginning. By the middle of the book, I was rubberneck reading--the book was such a catastrophe I couldn't look away. Where to begin with everything that's wrong with this memoir? Well, we can begin with the biggest, most-obvious flaw: an utter lack of true self-awareness, half-masked by an awareness of the lack of self-awareness. Reading the words of someone who is aware they don't know themselves but is too lazy to dig deeper is one of the saddest experiences you can have as a memoir-reader. I feel awkward for Barris. It's like he's on his own Gong Show, and he thinks it's ironic, but actually everyone is laughing at his sub-par performance as a writer.
And that's what this book is: sub par. It's neither a good memoir nor a good CIA thriller nor a historical overview of television culture (although it aspires to be the first two things and doesn't really attempt the third). Chuck Barris clearly has had an interesting life, and could have easily written a celebrity memoir. He decides (I'm guessing) that most celebrity memoirs are boring (that's correct), but he assumes (I'm guessing) that celebrity memoirs are boring because they don't have enough shoot-em-up action (that's wrong - just read the memoirs of Julia Child or Patti Smith). Celebrity memoirs are boring because celebrities aren't writers, and even writer-writers struggle with memoir. Memoir is f***ing hard. It takes years. It takes self-knowledge. It takes a poet's mastery of the language to do well. Making up bogus stuff won't help the plot in memoir the way it will in fiction - in fact it will blow up in your face and make you look deranged.
Barris seems like a smart guy (and he's certainly a hard worker) so it's strange that he took the easy way out with this. The dilemma of achieving success only to be hated for it is a real human dilemma that everyone can relate to, not just celebrities. But instead of realizing this, Barris goes for gimmicks: The CIA crap (which I can't tell would be worse if it's true or false - if true, he has serious unresolved issues, if false he has serious unresolved issues), the misogyny, the racism. At one point he actually makes fun of a female game-show-contestant for being raped. Yikes! Barris occasionally drops in telling lines from his critics, who accuse him of being a woman-hater. He indicates that these critiques bother him so much they give him diarrhea (poop joke! bad-dum-bum!), then does a narrative shrug, and barrels right back into his misogynist autobiography. It's so....weird! Weird, weird, weird.
I will say this: Given our current obsession with truth in memoir, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a resurgence of interest in this memoir. But I find it to raise that question in the most pedestrian way possible, almost as a trick, a big f-u to his readers. Maybe the next Chuck Barris-like memoirist will just put a squirt gun within the covers of his book, so when you open it you get blasted in the face. That's about the level this is on.
And that's what this book is: sub par. It's neither a good memoir nor a good CIA thriller nor a historical overview of television culture (although it aspires to be the first two things and doesn't really attempt the third). Chuck Barris clearly has had an interesting life, and could have easily written a celebrity memoir. He decides (I'm guessing) that most celebrity memoirs are boring (that's correct), but he assumes (I'm guessing) that celebrity memoirs are boring because they don't have enough shoot-em-up action (that's wrong - just read the memoirs of Julia Child or Patti Smith). Celebrity memoirs are boring because celebrities aren't writers, and even writer-writers struggle with memoir. Memoir is f***ing hard. It takes years. It takes self-knowledge. It takes a poet's mastery of the language to do well. Making up bogus stuff won't help the plot in memoir the way it will in fiction - in fact it will blow up in your face and make you look deranged.
Barris seems like a smart guy (and he's certainly a hard worker) so it's strange that he took the easy way out with this. The dilemma of achieving success only to be hated for it is a real human dilemma that everyone can relate to, not just celebrities. But instead of realizing this, Barris goes for gimmicks: The CIA crap (which I can't tell would be worse if it's true or false - if true, he has serious unresolved issues, if false he has serious unresolved issues), the misogyny, the racism. At one point he actually makes fun of a female game-show-contestant for being raped. Yikes! Barris occasionally drops in telling lines from his critics, who accuse him of being a woman-hater. He indicates that these critiques bother him so much they give him diarrhea (poop joke! bad-dum-bum!), then does a narrative shrug, and barrels right back into his misogynist autobiography. It's so....weird! Weird, weird, weird.
I will say this: Given our current obsession with truth in memoir, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a resurgence of interest in this memoir. But I find it to raise that question in the most pedestrian way possible, almost as a trick, a big f-u to his readers. Maybe the next Chuck Barris-like memoirist will just put a squirt gun within the covers of his book, so when you open it you get blasted in the face. That's about the level this is on.
May 18, 2025
If you were around in the 1970s, you might remember a television program called The Gong Show. Maybe you remember it even if you don’t want to. It was a variety show and a talent contest for people with no talent and often no taste either. They had a celebrity panel of three judges who had to endure an entire performance. If the people on stage were intolerably bad, one of the judges would bang a gong to end it. The performers were immediately disqualified. There were very few contestants who ever made it through a whole set. But it was all in tne name of fun and it WAS fun at least for certain people. In my eight year old brain it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. My mother didn’t agree, but then again she never liked The Three Stooges either. That made it all the more exciting. The producer and host of the show was an awkward little guy who wore a hat with its brim pulled down over his eyes. His name was Chuck Barris and after The Gong Show got canceled after three years, he wrote an autobiography in which he claimed to secretly be a hitman for the CIA. It was called Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography. Yes, that’s right, this autobiography is unauthorized. You’ve heard of an unauthorized biography, but an unauthorized autobiography? That title itself should be a recognizable indication that something is a little off about this book.
In the opening chapter, Barris is going off on an assignment to rub someone out in New York City. He puts on a fake beard and moustache to hide his identity. As he sits in a coffee shop eating breakfast, a woman recognizes him as a celebrity and strikes up a conversation. She easily sees through his disguise and offers him a blowjob, free of charge no less. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the story and I’m not talking about the blowjob part. Barris, as an author, intends to deceive his audience, but he also sets the audience up to see through his deception the same way the fan in the restaurant does.
And there is deception all the way through the book. If you’re prone to playing drinking games I have one to propose. Read this book and every time Barris gets himself out of a tight fix through deception or outright lies, take a shot of your favorite venom. You probably won’t make it through 20 or 30 pages before the room is spinning like a tilt-a-whirl amusement park ride or you are lying on the bathroom floor because it’s convenient to be next to the toilet so you don’t have to stumble too far the next time you hurl your hamburger dinner. Next time you’ll remember to go easy on the hot sauce. A case in point is where Barris has a problem with guests on a game show using less than acceptable language during live filming. He hires an actor to pretend he’s a government agent from the FCC and to lecture the guests before each show about the legal consequences of broadcasting obscenity on TV. Problem solved. The contestants clean up their act and almost everything else goes right. Well, maybe not everything.
Chuck Barris says very little about his childhood as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia, an interesting omission for an autobiography. He does write about how he failed with the female students he chased after during college If he’s luckless in love, he’s luckier in his career. He doesn’t have a smooth ride there either, but eventually he pitches the idea for a game show to a television producer and things begin to fall into place. Some people might remember The Dating Game, where a single woman would interview three male contestants hidden from her view and then choose the one who best suits her desire for a date. Barris would go on to produce another hit game show called The Newlywed Game in which newly married couples would be quizzed on how well they knew their partners. Of course it was the 70s so a lot of the questions were loaded with sexual innuendos. More importantly, the contestants often had IQ’s that were lower than the average yearly temperature of Boston. It is lowbrow entertainment in its finest form. These shows were popular because Barris had his finger on the pulse of American pop culture in the 1970s. And that wasn’t such a good thing.
But no matter how successful Barris’s career as a TV producer is, something always goes wrong. For example, on an early set of The Dating Game, he tries to change up the show’s formula by having three chimpanzees sitting in the chairs reserved for the bachelor contestants. Off stage actors would answer the questions asked by the bachelorette with the joke being the expected shock on her face when she gets introduced to the three representatives of the hominid taxonomic family. The filming is a bit of a disaster because one of the apes plays with his genitals while the one next to him begins dismantling the chair he is sitting in and throwing its pieces into the audience. The passages about Barris’s TV shows are full of hilarious anecdotes like this.
Another side of his autobiography is the perpetual flux of his failing love life. There is no shortage of groupies, but none of them are appealing as people. When he meets women he is attracted to, the relationships always fail. There are two women who float in and out of the narrative. One is Penny Pacino, a redhead who spends a lot of her life pursuing him as a husband. The other is Patricia Watson, a commanding officer in the CIA.
Barris gets tapped to work undercover as an assassin by the world’s most notorious intelligence agency. He gets assigned to work under Jim Byrd, his senior officer, mentor, and friend. Together they spend time drinking, talking about life in the agency, planning assassinations, and carrying them out. Barris goes on assignment in Mexico City, London, Paris, and New York all for the purpose of permanently ending the careers of rival spies. Later he gets tracked down for a revenge killing by a KGB agent and the whole story climaxes when they learn there is a mole in the upper ranks of the CIA, one who is responsible for the death of Jim Byrd. An interesting piece of foreshadowing occurs when Barris accidentally tells someone where Jim Byrd will be during a sabbatical. Loose lips sink ships as the World War II navy propaganda posters used to say, warning sailors not to give details to friendly strangers while on shore leave. What Barris says about Jim Byrd has deadly consequences.
So how should you interpret this unauthorized autobiography? Start by accepting that almost everything in it is fiction. While Barris’s career as a businessman and game show producer are verifiable, most of the rest of it isn’t. There are obvious clues that his employment in the CIA is fake. He does things that an effective intelligence agency would never allow like having meetings with other operatives in bars and restaurants where company planning is discussed openly or assassinating people in crowded public areas like the plaza in front of a museum in Mexico City or a busy shopping street in Paris. The idea of sending a recognizable public figure on these missions is absurd as well. Other clues are more subtle, like how he meets with the man who assassinated Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende by gunshot. Only, in reality, Allende died after falling out a window. Was he pushed or was it an accident? It doesn’t matter here. What matters is that he didn’t die of a bullet wound. When it comes to the CIA story, Barris is just spinning a yarn to see what he can get away with. He seems to be dropping hints, winking at you, and elbowing you in the ribs throughout the whole book to see if you are in on the joke. Like the fake facial hair he wears in the opening chapter, he expects you to be perceptive enough to see through his disguise. If you don’t, that’s your problem.
A quick biographical check on Chuck Barris reveals something else. During the two decades this book takes place, spanning 1960 to 1980, he was married twice, something which is never mentioned in this autobiography. He did marry a redhead but her name wasn’t Penny Pacino, as stated in the story, and he didn’t marry her until ten years after this book was published. So the story of his frustrated love life and eventual marriage to Penny can’t be taken any more seriously than the CIA story.
Despite all his trickery, Barris does confront us with an ironic truth that can be found in his personality. Throughout the book, he privately struggles with depression, issues of self-worth, and a low self esteem. Despite his success in television, he is haunted by a dark shadow since nothing ever goes as planned even when things are working out for the best. The entertainment establishment isn’t accepting of him either, thinking of him as a troublemaker and an annoyance. His game shows work on the premise that people are happy to make fools of themselves in public if it means they get a chance to be on TV. Barris has an enormous contempt for his game show contestants and for a lot of his audience as well. The Gong Show, in all its trashiness, can be seen as a middle finger in the face of the industry that tolerated him as long as he made money for them, but scathingly put him down behind his back. This book reveals Barris as being pummeled into depression by the negativity that goes with fame and being hailed as the King of Schlock. He is like a successful CEO who looks in the mirror and sees Charlie Brown staring back. In the midst of all the fiction, Barris reveals a candid portrayal of the most sensitive parts of his mind, an irony that goes far in making this project work on a literary level. You get a sense of how a man riddled with anxiety reacts to others by being cranky, condescending, and snarky. The story about being a CIA assassin can thereby be read as a compensation fantasy where he gets lauded by the agency for being successful and in control of his assignments. Besides, the other agents are suave, courageous, intelligent, and urbane. They aren’t like the nitwits Barris has to work with in television or the fans of his game shows, the kinds of people who laugh at jokes about people farting while 69ing. While he wanted to be proud of his life, he had some misgivings. After all, his legacy is that he initiated a long string of TV shows where ordinary people act like idiots for entertainment stretching from The Morton Downey Show, Geraldo, The Jerry Springer Show, and Fear Factor onwards into the abysmal slime pit of reality shows that amount to little more than junk food for the mind.
When read as a straight up work of fiction, Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind is worth your time. It’s a combination of autobiographical realism and a traditional spy thriller complete with plot hooks, plot twists, and a surprise ending. Then it’s held together with the psychological insights of a quality character study with Chuck Barris playing the protagonist’s role as Chuck Barris. And if you’re not convinced that it’s all fiction, keep in mind that in 1982, the year of publication, the author is on record saying that this book is fiction when he appeared on TV talk shows to promote it. Some people believe that Barris really was a CIA assassin. Some have accused him of being mentally ill and delusional. Still others have claimed this book is a hoax. I think they are all wrong. This book is more like a prank and it’s a pretty enjoyable one if you approach it from the right angle.
In the opening chapter, Barris is going off on an assignment to rub someone out in New York City. He puts on a fake beard and moustache to hide his identity. As he sits in a coffee shop eating breakfast, a woman recognizes him as a celebrity and strikes up a conversation. She easily sees through his disguise and offers him a blowjob, free of charge no less. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the story and I’m not talking about the blowjob part. Barris, as an author, intends to deceive his audience, but he also sets the audience up to see through his deception the same way the fan in the restaurant does.
And there is deception all the way through the book. If you’re prone to playing drinking games I have one to propose. Read this book and every time Barris gets himself out of a tight fix through deception or outright lies, take a shot of your favorite venom. You probably won’t make it through 20 or 30 pages before the room is spinning like a tilt-a-whirl amusement park ride or you are lying on the bathroom floor because it’s convenient to be next to the toilet so you don’t have to stumble too far the next time you hurl your hamburger dinner. Next time you’ll remember to go easy on the hot sauce. A case in point is where Barris has a problem with guests on a game show using less than acceptable language during live filming. He hires an actor to pretend he’s a government agent from the FCC and to lecture the guests before each show about the legal consequences of broadcasting obscenity on TV. Problem solved. The contestants clean up their act and almost everything else goes right. Well, maybe not everything.
Chuck Barris says very little about his childhood as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia, an interesting omission for an autobiography. He does write about how he failed with the female students he chased after during college If he’s luckless in love, he’s luckier in his career. He doesn’t have a smooth ride there either, but eventually he pitches the idea for a game show to a television producer and things begin to fall into place. Some people might remember The Dating Game, where a single woman would interview three male contestants hidden from her view and then choose the one who best suits her desire for a date. Barris would go on to produce another hit game show called The Newlywed Game in which newly married couples would be quizzed on how well they knew their partners. Of course it was the 70s so a lot of the questions were loaded with sexual innuendos. More importantly, the contestants often had IQ’s that were lower than the average yearly temperature of Boston. It is lowbrow entertainment in its finest form. These shows were popular because Barris had his finger on the pulse of American pop culture in the 1970s. And that wasn’t such a good thing.
But no matter how successful Barris’s career as a TV producer is, something always goes wrong. For example, on an early set of The Dating Game, he tries to change up the show’s formula by having three chimpanzees sitting in the chairs reserved for the bachelor contestants. Off stage actors would answer the questions asked by the bachelorette with the joke being the expected shock on her face when she gets introduced to the three representatives of the hominid taxonomic family. The filming is a bit of a disaster because one of the apes plays with his genitals while the one next to him begins dismantling the chair he is sitting in and throwing its pieces into the audience. The passages about Barris’s TV shows are full of hilarious anecdotes like this.
Another side of his autobiography is the perpetual flux of his failing love life. There is no shortage of groupies, but none of them are appealing as people. When he meets women he is attracted to, the relationships always fail. There are two women who float in and out of the narrative. One is Penny Pacino, a redhead who spends a lot of her life pursuing him as a husband. The other is Patricia Watson, a commanding officer in the CIA.
Barris gets tapped to work undercover as an assassin by the world’s most notorious intelligence agency. He gets assigned to work under Jim Byrd, his senior officer, mentor, and friend. Together they spend time drinking, talking about life in the agency, planning assassinations, and carrying them out. Barris goes on assignment in Mexico City, London, Paris, and New York all for the purpose of permanently ending the careers of rival spies. Later he gets tracked down for a revenge killing by a KGB agent and the whole story climaxes when they learn there is a mole in the upper ranks of the CIA, one who is responsible for the death of Jim Byrd. An interesting piece of foreshadowing occurs when Barris accidentally tells someone where Jim Byrd will be during a sabbatical. Loose lips sink ships as the World War II navy propaganda posters used to say, warning sailors not to give details to friendly strangers while on shore leave. What Barris says about Jim Byrd has deadly consequences.
So how should you interpret this unauthorized autobiography? Start by accepting that almost everything in it is fiction. While Barris’s career as a businessman and game show producer are verifiable, most of the rest of it isn’t. There are obvious clues that his employment in the CIA is fake. He does things that an effective intelligence agency would never allow like having meetings with other operatives in bars and restaurants where company planning is discussed openly or assassinating people in crowded public areas like the plaza in front of a museum in Mexico City or a busy shopping street in Paris. The idea of sending a recognizable public figure on these missions is absurd as well. Other clues are more subtle, like how he meets with the man who assassinated Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende by gunshot. Only, in reality, Allende died after falling out a window. Was he pushed or was it an accident? It doesn’t matter here. What matters is that he didn’t die of a bullet wound. When it comes to the CIA story, Barris is just spinning a yarn to see what he can get away with. He seems to be dropping hints, winking at you, and elbowing you in the ribs throughout the whole book to see if you are in on the joke. Like the fake facial hair he wears in the opening chapter, he expects you to be perceptive enough to see through his disguise. If you don’t, that’s your problem.
A quick biographical check on Chuck Barris reveals something else. During the two decades this book takes place, spanning 1960 to 1980, he was married twice, something which is never mentioned in this autobiography. He did marry a redhead but her name wasn’t Penny Pacino, as stated in the story, and he didn’t marry her until ten years after this book was published. So the story of his frustrated love life and eventual marriage to Penny can’t be taken any more seriously than the CIA story.
Despite all his trickery, Barris does confront us with an ironic truth that can be found in his personality. Throughout the book, he privately struggles with depression, issues of self-worth, and a low self esteem. Despite his success in television, he is haunted by a dark shadow since nothing ever goes as planned even when things are working out for the best. The entertainment establishment isn’t accepting of him either, thinking of him as a troublemaker and an annoyance. His game shows work on the premise that people are happy to make fools of themselves in public if it means they get a chance to be on TV. Barris has an enormous contempt for his game show contestants and for a lot of his audience as well. The Gong Show, in all its trashiness, can be seen as a middle finger in the face of the industry that tolerated him as long as he made money for them, but scathingly put him down behind his back. This book reveals Barris as being pummeled into depression by the negativity that goes with fame and being hailed as the King of Schlock. He is like a successful CEO who looks in the mirror and sees Charlie Brown staring back. In the midst of all the fiction, Barris reveals a candid portrayal of the most sensitive parts of his mind, an irony that goes far in making this project work on a literary level. You get a sense of how a man riddled with anxiety reacts to others by being cranky, condescending, and snarky. The story about being a CIA assassin can thereby be read as a compensation fantasy where he gets lauded by the agency for being successful and in control of his assignments. Besides, the other agents are suave, courageous, intelligent, and urbane. They aren’t like the nitwits Barris has to work with in television or the fans of his game shows, the kinds of people who laugh at jokes about people farting while 69ing. While he wanted to be proud of his life, he had some misgivings. After all, his legacy is that he initiated a long string of TV shows where ordinary people act like idiots for entertainment stretching from The Morton Downey Show, Geraldo, The Jerry Springer Show, and Fear Factor onwards into the abysmal slime pit of reality shows that amount to little more than junk food for the mind.
When read as a straight up work of fiction, Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind is worth your time. It’s a combination of autobiographical realism and a traditional spy thriller complete with plot hooks, plot twists, and a surprise ending. Then it’s held together with the psychological insights of a quality character study with Chuck Barris playing the protagonist’s role as Chuck Barris. And if you’re not convinced that it’s all fiction, keep in mind that in 1982, the year of publication, the author is on record saying that this book is fiction when he appeared on TV talk shows to promote it. Some people believe that Barris really was a CIA assassin. Some have accused him of being mentally ill and delusional. Still others have claimed this book is a hoax. I think they are all wrong. This book is more like a prank and it’s a pretty enjoyable one if you approach it from the right angle.
January 2, 2013
So unbelievable I totally believe it! I LOVED THIS BOOK! It goes down as one of my all time favorites, in part because it so zany and so hard to believe. The premise is that Chuck Barris, the creator of such cheesy game shows, like The Gong Show, was actually a CIA hitman and the whole time his TV show personae was a front. I know, if you're like me right now your saying "what the hell?" I know I still am as well. The book reads as a memoir and a Mea Culpa as Barris confesses to murdering dozens of people in the name of his country. He explains how by sheer luck he met a CIA handler who recruited him as an asset. Its discovered that Barris had a natural affinity for this type of thing and as time goes on he becomes a spy and contract killer.
Barris' first love was always television and entertaining. While is contracting with the CIA he also is trying to get a TV idea picked up and he does! So now he is on TV and assassination people! He goes on to explain that the reason one of his shows, the dating game, began sending people overseas for winning is because he was doing clandestine missions in Berlin.
The crazy thing when asked to deny his involvement with the CIA, the CIA said nothing! Now I don't know how much I believe, but this is America we are the land of unbelievable!
Barris' first love was always television and entertaining. While is contracting with the CIA he also is trying to get a TV idea picked up and he does! So now he is on TV and assassination people! He goes on to explain that the reason one of his shows, the dating game, began sending people overseas for winning is because he was doing clandestine missions in Berlin.
The crazy thing when asked to deny his involvement with the CIA, the CIA said nothing! Now I don't know how much I believe, but this is America we are the land of unbelievable!
November 7, 2014
At the risk of making you think I am batshit insane, please allow me to tell you a story from my youth. At times, I would imagine that I was on a TV show, complete with an audience who would laugh, clap and go "ohhhhhhhhhhhhh" when I did something bad. But the "ohhhhhhhhh" was one of those, "Oh no she dinnit! That Patti girl is so cray-cray!" kind of things that you say while laughing at the protagonist, while simultaneously shaking your head at their craziness.
So I would do stupid shit, imagining that the audience was finding me absolutely adorable and saying, "Isn't she funny?" all the while. Eventually though, I got over this and curtailed my stupid shit. Chuck Barris, OTOH, must never have lost his invisible audience going "ohhhhhhhhhhhhh"; I mean, he practically brags about paying for dozens of abortions, leaving his dog to starve to death, and generally being a prick to the nth degree.
Why on earth would someone put this in his autobiography? I mean, seriously? Other than that he thinks we are going to shake our heads and go, "Oh no he dinnit! That Chuck just so CRAY!"
And seriously? This guy was an assassin? He's still high from drugs from the 50s...I wouldn't give him a gun if it was World War 3.
So I would do stupid shit, imagining that the audience was finding me absolutely adorable and saying, "Isn't she funny?" all the while. Eventually though, I got over this and curtailed my stupid shit. Chuck Barris, OTOH, must never have lost his invisible audience going "ohhhhhhhhhhhhh"; I mean, he practically brags about paying for dozens of abortions, leaving his dog to starve to death, and generally being a prick to the nth degree.
Why on earth would someone put this in his autobiography? I mean, seriously? Other than that he thinks we are going to shake our heads and go, "Oh no he dinnit! That Chuck just so CRAY!"
And seriously? This guy was an assassin? He's still high from drugs from the 50s...I wouldn't give him a gun if it was World War 3.
July 27, 2008
Could the zany doofus who cavorted with the Unknown Comic, Gene-Gene the Dancing Machine and the parade of mid-70s "personalities" on the panel merely be an alter-ego for a trained CIA killer? Chuckie Baby says yes!
I have actually never seen the movie, although it has been on my list for years. Many people here comment that the movie is better than the book. (And we all know how bibliophiles hate to cop to that.) I'll have to bump the movie up a few notches on my list of things to do.
I have no complaints with the book, not having seen the film. Although the premise stretches credibility to the breaking point, I'm the sort of reader who will suspend my disbelief and say stranger things have happened.
Hilarious or creepy, depending on how you want to look at it.
I have actually never seen the movie, although it has been on my list for years. Many people here comment that the movie is better than the book. (And we all know how bibliophiles hate to cop to that.) I'll have to bump the movie up a few notches on my list of things to do.
I have no complaints with the book, not having seen the film. Although the premise stretches credibility to the breaking point, I'm the sort of reader who will suspend my disbelief and say stranger things have happened.
Hilarious or creepy, depending on how you want to look at it.
June 14, 2014
I doubt Barris' story. His account of the recruitment process sounds way too random, and he comes off as unstable. The circumstances of the hits sound unlikely, and almost everybody he mentions who might be able to corroborate or debunk his stories are dead.
Besides, one of the surest signs somebody does NOT work for the CIA is when they claim they do.
Barris comes across as a pretty unpleasant human. To his credit he doesn't rationalize or blame others.
He has a picture in the book of one of the CIA guys he says he worked with. If he's willing to burn a guy for no particular reason, he's either a world-class @hole or a nut.
Now I want to figure out whether Barris might be credible or or if he's delusional. My bet is the latter, but what do I know?
Besides, one of the surest signs somebody does NOT work for the CIA is when they claim they do.
Barris comes across as a pretty unpleasant human. To his credit he doesn't rationalize or blame others.
He has a picture in the book of one of the CIA guys he says he worked with. If he's willing to burn a guy for no particular reason, he's either a world-class @hole or a nut.
Now I want to figure out whether Barris might be credible or or if he's delusional. My bet is the latter, but what do I know?
September 17, 2025
Use to watch all the Chuck Barris TV shows. Had heard this crazy rumor for years that he was in the CIA as a hitman. Have never seen the George Clooney film of this book. But this is a short audio read of about 5 hours, narrated by Barris himself. The man has been dead about 8 years now so we won't ever know for certain. He claimed it was true, but his spouses state otherwise. I tend to believe it is a made up story because if you read about him, He was married several times and had a daughter. None ever mentioned and I believe this is an alter ego of his. Fun and fast read, if you have some time do it, especially if you know who he is.
December 29, 2025
If you’ve seen the wonderful George Clooney movie based on this book, you know the general outline of the story. Chuck Barris, the creator of The Bong Show & the Newlywed Game wrote this book after long being out of the public eye.
He claims that while he was hosting the gong show, he was also a CIA assassin.
The joy of this book is that Barris, a fabulous storyteller, never breaks character. It’s never clear whether this is meant to be a true story, an elaborate put on, or something else. Loved every moment of it!
He claims that while he was hosting the gong show, he was also a CIA assassin.
The joy of this book is that Barris, a fabulous storyteller, never breaks character. It’s never clear whether this is meant to be a true story, an elaborate put on, or something else. Loved every moment of it!
September 28, 2007
I am LOVING this so far. Chuck Barris may be entirely full of it, but he can spin a damned good yarn.
9/30 This was worth every star. I was amused, delighted, entertained, and kept in suspense with Barris's half-truths and outright B.S. Now pardon me while I go search out old clips of "The Gong Show".
9/30 This was worth every star. I was amused, delighted, entertained, and kept in suspense with Barris's half-truths and outright B.S. Now pardon me while I go search out old clips of "The Gong Show".
November 12, 2007
The idea of the host of The Gong Show actually being a secret agent and Barris actually playing it completely straight the whole time sounds a lot more intriguing than it actually ends up being on paper. Given how outrageous a claim he's making, I expected the story to be more, well, outrageous.
August 11, 2010
If all true, it is an incredible story and a CIA/game show creating bad ass. The shit you see about assassins and moles in the movies is for real. And once again the cliche about the book being better than the movie is true, but watch the movie anyway. I'm amazed Barris was never taken out.
November 3, 2024
So ridiculous you can’t put it down everytime you think it’s gonna be normal it suddenly isn’t . I like to think he did do this . The CIA did try to kill Castro with lobsters n stuff this isn’t a stretch at all.
Want to Read
October 28, 2009Loved the movie!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 164 reviews