Garry Shandling’s Riotous Scrapbook

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/books/review/judd-apatow-gary-shandlings-book.html

Version 0 of 1.

IT’S GARRY SHANDLING’S BOOK Edited by Judd Apatow

A little too scattershot and light on details to qualify as either biography or oral history, “It’s Garry Shandling’s Book” is best characterized as a scrapbook. But what a scrapbook!

Hard-core fans of Garry Shandling — whose wry, dry style influenced a generation of stand-up comedians, and who helped redefine television comedy twice, by shattering the fourth wall on “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” and eviscerating the talk-show business from the inside on “The Larry Sanders Show” — will not need to be told that this cornucopia of Shandlingiana is worth their time. More casual fans, while they may be intimidated by the flood of minutiae, will find it worth the plunge.

“It’s Garry Shandling’s Book” has a little bit of everything: Shandling’s own words, as well as those of friends and associates like Sarah Silverman, Jim Carrey and Alan Zweibel, with whom he created “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”; numerous photographs; newspaper and magazine clippings; script pages from all stages of Shandling’s career, beginning with his days as a writer for “Sanford and Son”; and, most notably, copious excerpts from the journals he kept for decades.

Those journals were at the heart of “The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling,” the remarkable HBO documentary directed by the prolific movie and television hyphenate Judd Apatow, who early in his career was a “Larry Sanders Show” producer, and who is also the editor of (and a frequently heard voice in) this volume.

Seen in snippets on the small screen, the excerpts were fascinating. Presented in greater depth, they are a revelation. (Unfortunately, they are also a bit of a challenge to read. That’s not because of their content; it’s because Shandling had really bad handwriting.)

The journal entries paint a vivid portrait of a talented but troubled man who was both an earnest seeker of enlightenment and a neurotic perfectionist. (“I can be hard to work with,” he wrote in 2001, “because I demand truth.”) They also offer insight into Shandling’s development as a comedian and his growth as a person — and into how the two intersected.

“I will commit myself to becoming a stand-up comic,” he wrote in 1977, at the beginning of his transition from writer to performer. “I will not consider what will happen if I don’t make it, because once I commit myself it is done!” The evolution continued: “More writing and digging deeper — more than just jokes,” he counseled himself in 1982. Later that year, in anticipation of an appearance on “The Tonight Show,” where he would soon become a frequent guest, he wrote succinctly, “Just be Garry.”

“Just be Garry” is a consistent theme of the journals. “You don’t need to be successful,” he wrote in 1999, shortly after “Sanders” had ended its triumphant six-year run. “You don’t need to be funny or a good actor or writer. You don’t need to be anything. You can just be.”

That remains his mantra as he endures a vicious legal battle with his former manager, as his post-“Sanders” dream of an acting career evaporates and, finally, as his health fails him. (He battled various illnesses before dying in 2016 at 66.) Awaiting surgery for pancreatitis in 2014, he writes: “Poker face. Accept. Be.”

That’s pretty heavy stuff. But this is, after all, a book about a comedian, and much of it is also pretty funny.

One of the most interesting artifacts here is a typewritten page from the script Shandling wrote for the first stand-up set he ever did, at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, some of the jokes fall flat. But there are already flashes of the surreally self-deprecating humor that would become his trademark:

“I was born in Chicago, Illinois. Then when I was 2 years old my parents moved to Arizona. I wish they would have told me.”

By the time Shandling had become a big enough star to host the Emmy Awards in 2000, his comedic imagination was in full flight: “In the first episode, Tony Soprano’s mother is literally planning to have him killed. That’s why I admire Italian women. Jewish moms drag it out a whole lifetime.”

Even better than the lines from the Emmys quoted here are the notes he wrote in preparation. I was especially struck by “Talk to dead relatives/Hitler — Larry David — Osama bin Laden.” I have no idea what that means, but it made me laugh.

“It’s Garry Shandling’s Book” has its flaws. For one thing, it doesn’t have an index — a serious problem in a book so filled with names of people, TV shows and movies. For another, it contains some references so obscure that they will puzzle even the most knowledgeable fan. For example, when an actor who was on an early Shandling cable special remarks, “I like the bit with the porno cards, that was pretty funny.” What exactly was “the bit with the porno cards”? You’ll have to look elsewhere for the answer.

And as wonderful as the photographs are, an appalling number of them lack captions. Norman Lear shows up in two group photos with Shandling, Apatow and others, but neither he nor anyone else is identified. I recognized Patton Oswalt, Paul Reubens and a few others, but not everyone — and in any case, why should the reader have to guess?

Even a scrapbook should be more informative than that.