Owen Phillips > Recent Status Updates

Slow start, growing on me

Terrible ending. Misplaced focus in the back half of the book. From start to middle, the 1910s through the 1960s takes up about eighty percent of this book. Half of the people on the cover are never named. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David feature prominently in the back half, but Seinfeld and Curb are never once mentioned, nor is Friends or Veep or pretty much any tv outside of variety shows. Very telling about Kliph

Oh Christ Jesus Lord please save me from an entire chapter about 9/11

Over three hundred pages of a half decent book and he’s done a poor job of describing the ascent of anyone other than the white guys the worst twenty year old you know worships. He’s giving a half decent crack to Black performers but women, gay people, anybody currently under forty? Zip. The section on Joan Rivers couldn’t fill a post it, and she’s on the damn cover! He didn’t mention Phyllis Diller at all!

So cruel to mention it but not show us a picture

Why are so many of these psychos carrying revolvers in leather satchels

This messy queen dragging Lorne Michaels good for you Kliph

Riddled with typos

Truly cannot help but point out that these ten extras all seem to have been the less conventional more “modern” liberal counterpoints to a genre that is by and large an extension of conservative imagination

These aren’t as compelling. Cutting down the page count even further for people who frankly made less of an impact seems needless. Give them their own book if they deserve it.

You know, it’s easy to talk about Republicanism and misogyny and conservatism as they change and as they affect people, but it’s so rare that we allow ourselves the truly stark examples. We’ve come such a long way that it’s gone into shadows and games, systems set up to hide the rigging, but for some of them, for Audrey Totter, it was second nature, assumed, moral.

I like this section quite more than the first. It’s more focused more directed, you don’t feel so much the loss of what you’re missing. A good pulling back of the Hollywood veneer. Here is the principal wood. Here is the sunshine on someone who survived

Okay, let’s get depressing

Don’t care for the characterization of women in comedy at all. Also, we’re not spending nearly enough time talking about them. Phyllis Diller is on the cover and I’m two hundred pages in and not a word

I would kill for a nightclub to open. A jazz lounge are you kidding id be the number one patron

I hate when books like this aren’t a tell all. The least you could do is imply Johnny Carson was gay

Here’s exactly my point! Nineteen stations in twelve cities! Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Detroit! Half of the pioneering servicers of television were born from the Midwest! Ohio at the heart of it all!

Long chapter for a heavy grift, but one of the things that I’m thinking reading the beginning of this age of comedians is how now it’s so uncommon to have cultural clout in lesser American cities. It’s NYC, LA, Chicago, and it was back then too, but it was also Miami, and Cleveland, and Austin and apparently the fucking Catskills. Why do we abide by this narrowing of the cultural geography?

It’s actually a little wild to read about the problems with comedic radio in today’s climate. Podcasts, Quibi comes to mind, the Netflix/HBO/Skydance business. Nothing has ever changed

Totally disorganized. Could cut the page count by half if someone who cared would edit it. Tsk tsk

This guy is wokin up my FBI!

And then everyone stood up and cheered and they gave you the key to the city and Bernadette peters ran in and frenched you right? Right? Because you’re the big tough guy hero in the back of the room that everyone underestimated? Right?

Girl if you don’t pour that nasty dressing and serve bob

Like if she had weeded out Perseus and Hercules like half the book wouldn’t just be repeats

Why am I getting emotional