Adam Carolla

Yes, genius! Not Einsteinian genius for sure, but genius nonetheless. Adam's a dying breed – a celebrity with common sense, insightful wit, and working-class wisdom. He's got that rare ability to take any situation, break it down, then sum it right back up again into some clever and irrefutable blue-collar soliloquy that anyone with half a brain can understand. Corolla is a master storyteller! He's written several books, but this one covers his well below-par childhood during the 1970s and 80s in North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley (an LA suburb – not wonderful then, terrible now), his hippie, uptight, white-guilt-ridden mom, her boyfriends, his friends, his many different "homes", jobs, and all kinds of cash strapped, pre-Internet, pre-social media, and pre-cell phone juvenile nuttiness. Read, and often tangentially digressed, by Adam himself, as only he can do. If you don’t laugh out loud there’s something wrong with you!… (más)

I read this as a palate-cleanser after Stephen King’s It. I needed something short and current and I used to love Adam Carolla–Loveline, The Man Show, The Adam Carolla Morning Show. Then he got older and jaded and more conservative and not so funny. I got especially worried when I saw the blurbs in the front — Tucker Carlson, Dennis Prager, Donald Trump Jr. Is this his audience now? Is this who he’s marketing to? But then there were also blurbs from Jimmy Kimmel and Patton Oswalt, so I waded in cautiously.

Again, these are rants about the “wussification” of America, talking about emotional support animals, helicopter parents. They’re just cute versions of what real pundits are trying to tell you (stuff that usually has titles like “The War on Our Values”, “The Fight from the Right”, “How Our Reason and Morals are Declining”, etc.) but it’s not satire. The theme is that people are too sensitive and not tough enough. It’s essentially “old man yells at cloud”. I mean he’s not necessarily wrong about these things, but none of it takes a single moment to experience empathy, only selfishness.

This is the same guy who said “women aren’t funny” and apparently never heard of Molly Shannon, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, Ali Wong, Jenny Slate, Chelsea Peretti, Vanessa Bayer, Fortune Feimster, Taylor Tomlinson, Jennifer Coolidge, Amy Pohler, Ellie Kemper, Jane Krakowski, Carol Kane, Aubrey Plaza, Kate McKinnon, Jenny Slate, Cristela Alonzo, Tina Friml, Fran Drescher, Melissa Villaseñor and that’s just my personal favorites.

But that’s fine, if Adam Carolla just wants to shout into the wind. But he should be careful about the company he keeps lest he end up on the wrong side of history.… (más)