You're Better Than Me

Comedian Bonnie McFarlane delivers her memoir with the same droll tone found in her writing as she talks about topics such as growing up poor on a farm in northern Canada, the early days of her career, and drinking a lot of tequila shots. McFarlane frames the beginning of her memoir around characteristics she shares with serial killers, delivering jokes about her family not having TV in the exact same tone she uses to recount being date raped as a teenager--straightforward, a little tired, and occasionally exasperated. While this isn't for the easily offended, many listeners will appreciate McFarlane's honesty and lack of ego and will relish her stories about a life devoted to comedy. A.F. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

November 16, 2015
Comedian McFarlane’s memoir follows her development from Canadian farm girl to mature comic trying to make it in Los Angeles in the late 1990s and early aughts. She describes the thrill of her first stand-up set as a “hit of crack,” followed by a less successful second time in which her boyfriend threw a beer bottle at a heckler. She bombs her first television appearance, getting rebuffed by her idol, Janeane Garofalo, in the process. After signing with the William Morris Agency, McFarlane is cast in a doomed sitcom and subsequently fired by the agency. She declares wryly, “There was nowhere to go but up,” before allowing that “technically, you could stay at the bottom forever.” McFarlane eventually lands an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, followed by a spot on Last Comic Standing, and then an HBO special. Her romantic misfortunes include flings with a Rollerblading barista, an antisocial comic with a mat of back hair resembling “a hundred caterpillars... trying to get up over a wall of mashed potatoes,” and a Tom Cruise–obsessed nonworking actor with erectile dysfunction. Finally she meets fellow comedian Rich Vos, who later becomes her husband. McFarlane has guts, heart, jokes, and plenty of wise words in this hilarious journey through the dark heart of the entertainment industry.

December 15, 2015
Comedian McFarlane's long, strange trip to the middle. The author, a comedian probably best known for her stint on the reality show competition Last Comic Standing, recounts her bumpy path to qualified professional success and personal happiness. The first section of the memoir details McFarlane's childhood spent in rural poverty on a remote Canadian farm; it's the book's most arresting material, as the author writes lovingly and wittily about befriending animals only to later eat them, negotiating her eccentric family, and developing a creative urge and darkly sardonic worldview born of isolated tedium. There follows a litany of minor and less-minor humiliations as McFarlane struggles to make her way as a professional comic, forever slipping two steps back for every step forward due to bad luck, the vagaries of Canadian and American show business (involving cultural irrelevance and sexism, respectively), and her own challenges, which included a manic-depressive disorder and a tendency to wind up with the wrong men (McFarlane is now happily married to comedian Rich Vos). The book is consistently funny--the author is a compulsive quipster, and her hit ratio is high--but as the narrative moves away from her unusual upbringing, her anecdotes and observations begin to take on the familiar rhythms of the show business biography. More engaging are her practical tips for those attempting to break into the comedy business ("if you are forced to engage with a heckler, always repeat what he or she says so that you can have a little extra time to think of a clever rejoinder"), which contain some surprises, such as her disastrous attempt to be more "herself" on stage and focus on more personal autobiographical material. She acquits herself well on that score, and while her story is commonplace, McFarlane's is a voice worth hearing. A breezy and entertaining, if ultimately inessential, look at life in comedy.

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December 15, 2015
McFarlane's difficult, work-filled Canadian farmland youth made her determined to vamoose as soon as she could. Fortunately, she landed as hostess for a Vancouver comedy club, where she found her people. She also found her metier: the weaknesses she'd felt growing up (being deemed weird, writing books late at night, telling funny stories in her head) would become her strengths as she became a stand-up comic, at first opening for C-list comics in D-list rooms. But moving onward, and detailed in such chapters as All This Venereal Disease and No One to Share It With and Nowhere to Go but Up Yours, McFarlane secured work as a host on Comedy Central's Make Me Laugh, wrote for television, made films, anddespite using the c-word on Last Comic Standingappeared on Letterman and The Tonight Show, among others. McFarlane tells all in a frank, naughty, and very funny voice. Anyone wanting to follow such a path will find one version of the nitty-gritty life of a comic limned here, from getting stage time to perfecting timing, and from bombing to killing them. And McFarlane's memoir kills.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)