Some of my favorite autobiographies are by comedians. Because even though they may have had a rough life they somehow are always able to spin things to have you laugh, for a least part of the story. Todd Glass is a comedian I was first introduced to on Last Comic Standing I don’t even know how many years ago. I don’t remember if I thought he was funny then and I don’t remember much else about his acts but I remembered his name (mostly because it reminded me of George Glass from the Brady Bunch) and decided to give his book a look.
The book tells about his life growing up, how his family moved a lot and he didn’t do well in school. He mastered a thoughtful look so his teachers thought he was paying attention. Eventually they discovered he had dyslexia and he spent his time in separate classes. As he got older, he discovered comedy and at first didn’t realize it was something you could do for a job – but obviously eventually figured that out and pursued it. Todd is also gay. A lot of the book deals with him hiding it and how he dealt with it and tried to keep it secret from everyone, despite having a boyfriend.
Just the right amount of funny mixed with serious and a great read whether you are familiar with Todd and his work or not!
I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.
About the Book
A hilarious, poignant memoir from comedian Todd Glass about his decision at age forty-eight to finally live openly as a gay man—and the reactions and support from his comedy pals, from Louis CK to Sarah Silverman.
Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn’t have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd Glass decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results.
It might have been a lot easier had he chosen a profession other than stand-up comedy. By age eighteen, Todd was opening for big musical acts like George Jones and Patti LaBelle. His career carried him through the Los Angeles comedy heyday in the 1980s, its decline in the 1990s, and its rebirth via the alternative comedy scene and the explosion in podcasting. But the harder he worked at his craft, the more difficult it became to manage his “situation.” There were the years of abstinence and half-hearted attempts to “cure” himself. The fake girlfriends so that he could tell relationship jokes onstage. The staged sexual encounters to burnish his reputation offstage. It took a brush with death to cause him to rethink the way he was living his life; a rash of suicides among gay teens to convince him that it was finally time to come out to the world.
Now, Todd has written an open, honest, and hilarious memoir in an effort to help everyone—young and old, gay and straight—breathe a little more freely. Peppered with anecdotes from his life among comedy’s greatest headliners and tales of the occasionally insane lengths Todd went through to keep a secret that—let’s face it—he probably didn’t have to keep for as long as he did, The Todd Glass Situation is a front-row seat to the last thirty plus years of comedy history and a deeply personal story about one man’s search for acceptance.