Brooks on Books: I Killed: True Stories of the Road from America's Top Comics

I'm the kind of guy who often works on 3 or 4 books at the same time. For example, I might have a large volume I read at home, a more compact paperback I can carry with me, and maybe a "light reading" kind of book I can dip into every now and then.

I often find the "light reading" book, the one I intend to look at sporadically, is so engrossing that I just plow right through it. This is the deal with "I Killed," a fantastic read that I could not set aside for any significant length of time. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in standup comedy.

Authors Ritch Shydner and Mark Schiff, themselves standup comedians, assembled a host of "road" stories from their brethren, then arranged them into bit-sized anecdotes typically no longer than a page or so. The life of the comic is not an easy one, filled with cheap hotels, dive bars, and shady characters, but it sure provides grist for a lot of hilarious stories.

Many of these tales involve sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many involve various forms of illegal behavior. Some are likely exaggerated. Some, especially a few near the end, are actually sweet and touching. Almost all of them are entertaining.

You'll see almost every big name comic of the eighties and nineties represented here, plus some older and newer. The authors don't arrange them in any kind of real order, with the exception of a some sidebars that group really short tales--like a paragraph--that share a theme. I kind of like this approach because you never know who or what will turn up next--though you can bet it will involve heckling.

Despite what Bill Maher says in here about the phenomenon being much rarer than one would think, reading "I Killed" gives you the impression that standup comedy is basically a war between the guy on stage and the inevitable lout in the audience who seeks to disrupt the performance. Whether it's as frequent as the sheer number of stories in this compilation indicates, it sure makes for some humorous war stories.

I'm not sure how much work Shydner and Schiff did in crafting this book after conducting the interviews. Many entries read like simple transcriptions of what the comic said in person or over the phone or whatever. That's not a knock. The (apparent) lack of editing and extraneous material get the comic's voice across and give the book a kind of casual authenticity.

If you're easily offended, you might not be a big fan of many of these performers, anyway, and in that case, you ought to skip this book. Almost everyone who has enjoyed standup comedy on any level, though, will love "I Killed" and hope for a sequel.