I Like It Better When You're Funny: Working in Television and Other Precarious Adventures
About this book
Bestselling author, 60 Minutes II commentator, and world-champion raconteur Charles Grodin is back and better than ever in this revealing, opinionated, and delightful memoir about life, America, and cable TV.In a thirty-five-year acting career that ranged from studying at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg to appearing in a box-office smash with a dog named Beethoven, Charles Grodin achieved the American dream. But at the peak of his career in the early 1990s, with a son entering first grade, he decided to give it all up so he could stay close to home. Years earlier, Johnny Carson had put him under exclusive contract as a guest on The Tonight Show. Now, he began a career in television with his own daily talk show on the cable channel CNBC. In I Like It Better When You’re Funny, we join him on a behind-the-scenes journey through the television industry. What he discovers there is more challenging, more startling, and funnier than he ever could have imagined.In this wide-ranging memoir, Charles Grodin describes the life of a talk show host; his favorite and least favorite guests; the unspoken rules of working in television; and how this wild experience affected his views on America’s culture, government, and media. Along the way, he shares memorable stories and unfettered opinions about some of the industry’s renowned figures—Johnny Carson, Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Carol Burnett, Bill O’Reilly, and Don Imus, to name a few.With candor and liberating humor, Charles Grodin proves once again that he is one of America’s most entertaining and insightful storytellers.