Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The Southern comic delivers a good-natured memoir of his years in the trenches. “This book is never trying to say anything even close to important,” writes comedian Bargatze, whose following has been blowing up lately thanks to a couple of well-receivedSaturday Night Live appearances—a surprise, perhaps, given his G-rated approach to comedy. Yet Bargatze, a native Tennessean, does dig a little deeper into important territory here, writing, for instance, that his paternal grandparents were alcoholics, the grandmother “basically what these days they’d call abusive,” unforgiving of his father’s speech impediment. Happily for his father, though, a sympathetic teacher got him interested in reading—and in magic, which led to comedy. There aren’t many family dynasties in stand-up, but Bargatze didn’t mind when his father opened for him once and killed, even though “I told him he couldn’t betoo funny.” Bargatze writes affectingly of his beloved younger sister, working theMen in Black franchise deftly into one episode and a lovely little bit of pop culture into another (it would ruin the fun to say much more except that it concerns a dog and a certain all-girl group from way back when). Much of Bargatze’s approach onstage and here is observational, and he has a good eye for the goofy detail, recounting growing up in a town whose police force existed “for one reason, and that was to give people speeding tickets” and professing amazement that, in his adopted home of New York, people cleaned up after their dogs “every single time the dog did its business!” Bargatze is right that “the world of books is in the same place as it was before I entered it,” yet he turns in a pleasingly genial narrative all the same. Bargatze never takes himself too seriously, but there’s plenty of grown-up self-awareness here along with the yucks. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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Comedian Bargatze debuts with a folksy collection of stories, anecdotes, and pet peeves. He acknowledges up front that, coming from him, a book may seem unexpected: “I am very on the record about not liking to read books,” he writes in the introduction, calling this fact “a big part of my act.” Nevertheless, he proceeds, albeit in a lackadaisical manner, through tales of his upbringing in a “tiny little town in Tennessee,” of his childhood friend “P” (so nicknamed because he got hit by a football in “the you-know-what”), and of the surprising aggression of church-league sports. Some stories can be quite sentimental, as when he recounts bonding with his wife-to-be over the Little Mermaid soundtrack. Other chapters function more like stand-up bits: a riff on his neuroses over tipping, a reflection on that time when McDonald’s changed the number of his favorite combo order, a meditation on the perfect sock (“I don’t just need my socks to match. I need my socks to be the right socks, or I will think about nothing else for the rest of the day”). Unfortunately, as an extension of the comedian’s onstage persona—mild-mannered, clean, observational—this doesn’t quite work; his low-stakes humor feels uneasy on the page. The mild chuckles on offer here are unlikely to win Bargatze many new fans. (May)