Book clubs are a complicated lot. On the plus side, you get a necessary peer-pressure push to read. On the negative, you have to go places and your “friends” probably don’t want to read all your comedy nerd books. I’m like you and so I decided to start The Splitsider Comedy Book Club (not to be confused with the Splitsider Book Club Comedy Club, in which we teach you to book comedy clubs). The goal is present you, our readers, a space to virtually gather and discuss a book, knowing that others will also gather and discuss said book. We’ll pick a book and then a month or so later, depending on the page count, we’ll have a post that looks at the book and provides topic for discussion (maybe we’ll even interview the author).
The first matter at hand is figuring out what book to pick and that is completely up to you. Is there anything you’ve really wanted to read, maybe you even own it already, but just haven’t had the motivation to crack it open? Based on the comments below, we will choose the first book.
Here are some suggestions but really you can request anything having to do with comedy:
-William Knoedelseder’s I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy’s Golden Era
-Sarah Silverman’s The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee
-Bill Carter’s The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night
-Darrell Hammond’s God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem
-Chris Gethard’s A Bad Idea I’m About to Do: True Tales of Seriously Poor Judgment and Stunningly Awkward Adventure
-Mel Watkin’s On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy
I look forward to hearing from/reading with you (catch phrase?).