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 show more 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! show less

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 show more 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. show less

This is the memoir of Adam Carolla up to 2012. Each chapter is framed (see what I did there) around the house he grew up in at the time. And they're mostly stories from his childhood. A lot of them you've heard on Loveline before, but here they are all collected and it gives me nostalgia for those times. I just love anecdotes and this book's full of them.

It's the story of a blue-collar guy and what it was like to grow up in the eighties in southern California. I always wondered about those show more people doing construction on my house--where they came from, why did they end up in that job, what they want to do with their lives, what kind of adventures they have when they're off the clock. You will marvel at the amount of abuse the human body can take, how much physical discomfort it can endure and poison it can ingest and still get up for work on Monday. show less

Carolla, Adam
Not Taco Bell Material

Nonfiction
Adam's story is reminiscent of that legendary species of crab that can be collected in a bucket and left unattended, for when one of them attempts to escape the others pull him/her back in. Only a real comedian could sidestep maudlin bitterness and make a childhood characterized by apathy, poverty, malaise, and contempt, both sympathetic and hilarious. In spite of bad DNA (his claim, not my judgment), Adam successfully climbs out of the bucket. show more He's no longer a crab. He's evolved into a caring husband and father—who still likes fart jokes.
Recommended October 2012 show less