\u201cThis book is never trying to say anything even close to important,\u201d writes comedian Bargatze, whose following has been blowing up lately thanks to a couple of well-received Saturday Night Live appearances\u2014a surprise, perhaps, given his G-rated approach to comedy. Yet Bargatze, a native Tennessean, does dig a little deeper into important territory here, writing, for instance, that his paternal grandparents were alcoholics, the grandmother \u201cbasically what these days they\u2019d call abusive,\u201d unforgiving of his father\u2019s speech impediment. Happily for his father, though, a sympathetic teacher got him interested in reading\u2014and in magic, which led to comedy. There aren\u2019t many family dynasties in stand-up, but Bargatze didn\u2019t mind when his father opened for him once and killed, even though \u201cI told him he couldn\u2019t be too funny.\u201d Bargatze writes affectingly of his beloved younger sister, working the Men in Black franchise deftly into one episode and a lovely little bit of pop culture into another (it would ruin the fun to say much more except that it concerns a dog and a certain all-girl group from way back when). Much of Bargatze\u2019s approach onstage and here is observational, and he has a good eye for the goofy detail, recounting growing up in a town whose police force existed \u201cfor one reason, and that was to give people speeding tickets\u201d and professing amazement that, in his adopted home of New York, people cleaned up after their dogs \u201cevery single time the dog did its business!\u201d Bargatze is right that \u201cthe world of books is in the same place as it was before I entered it,\u201d yet he turns in a pleasingly genial narrative all the same.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThis book is never trying to say anything even close to important,\u201d writes comedian Bargatze, whose following has been blowing up lately thanks to a couple of well-received Saturday Night Live appearances\u2014a surprise, perhaps, given his G-rated approach to comedy. Yet Bargatze, a native Tennessean, does dig a little deeper into important territory here, writing, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}