Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue

Fascinating book about a key writer for the National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. Unfortunately, you have to sit through the telling of his early years when he was a would be avant garde playwright. Perrin shares excerpts from this stuff and it’s terrible. At that point, O'Donahue is just a a pretentious, upstate obnoxious dweeb. Really awful stuff. But he plugs into a Grand Guignol sensibility, and never looks back. An unflinching committment to rubbing audiences faces in death and carnage for laughs, is his one trick pony ticket for the rest of his career. The irony is, that was a time when that approach worked perfecity. Some of the stufff is still funny today. In general, it sounds like he was a repugnant, horrible guy show more -possibly bi-polar, that you would count yourself lucky for not knowing unless you had to. But he was in the right place at the right time, and his venom unleashed, created key moments in the era of sick comedy. He is primarily responsible for the production of the National Lampoon Radio Hour, and that is something that had a real impact on me as a teen -apart from the magazine. Almost as much as Monty Python did.
This is actually my first read on the background stories of National Lampoon and SNL so I found it compelling, and would recommend the book if that’s your focus. Perrin does a perfectly fine job in telling the key aspects of those stories as they pertain to O’Donohue, and then some. show less

I'm a little amazed that this book received the favorable reviews that it has. I've read a lot of books this year, getting through this mess of a biography was the worst slog of 2019. The author's inconsistent weighing of biographical detail and and incessant "pithy" commentary are made all the more painful by a book length that is way out of scale for a minor (but important) figure in American comedy history.