Not sure what procedure he and Viking followed. But typically, when celebrities write books, they are matched up by their agents or editors with professional ghostwriters. And ghostwriting requires different skills than does writing a stand-up routine. So I wondered if all the bad lines resulted from a mismatch between the star and literary hired sun.

Jaded: I haven’t seen the “No Cure for Cancer” routine, so your comment about it was enlightening. “We We Suck” has many sound-effects lines that fall flat — so much so that you wonder, “What was he thinking?”

Your answer suggests that that maybe he was thinking: This worked for me in the past. All the more so because “Why We Suck” has a patchy quality that often leaves you wondering if a ghostwriter sat down with a stack of his old scripts and stitched them together.

Thanks for both of your comments.
Jan
Jan

The humor of comedians translates to varying degrees to the page. Woody Allen’s carries over brilliantly, so that he’s always as funny in print as on the screen. With Bill Cosby’s humor it’s varied with the book. And so on.

So my way of trying to be fair to their books is to say: OK, would this be funny if the author delivered it as a comedy routine? That is, if the comedian brought something to it that’s not on the page? Sometimes the answers is yes, and you can take that into account in a review.

But Leary’s two shortlisted lines aren’t funny on the page, and I can’t see any way they’d be funny in a comedy routine, either. And the whole book is like that.