Take These Books, Please

By Richard Zoglin

Have you looked at the best-seller list lately? I mean, it's like browsing through the Sunday TV listings. Couplehood, by Mad About You co-star Paul Reiser, has been in the Top 10 for the past eight weeks. Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man, by Home Improvement's Tim Allen, just landed at No. 1. Jerry Seinfeld's SeinLanguage spent five weeks in the top spot last fall and is about to come out in paperback. Dennis Miller, Garry Shandling and Ellen DeGeneres (star of ABC's Ellen) have books in the works too.

The thing about these books -- they're not really books. They're comedy routines on paper. For people with attention spans geared to television. Short chapters. Short paragraphs. Short sentences. They have the rhythms of stand-up monologues. Lots of conversational asides, jokey hyperbole and the sort of slangy sentence structure you don't usually see in print. So what did you think, you were getting Middlemarch?

Real books start on page 1; Reiser starts his on page 145. "This way," he goes, "you can read the book for two minutes, and if anybody asks you how far along you are you can say, 'I'm on 151 -- and it's really flying."' Like we really need help getting through these books. "Hey, this chapter on Wittgenstein's phenomenology is a real stumper. Hand me the dictionary!"

Bill Cosby started the trend in 1986 with Fatherhood. A bunch of his stand- up material collected in 178 easy-to-read pages. Sold 2.5 million copies in hardback and spent 55 weeks on the best-seller list. Then last year came SeinLanguage, which has sold 1.2 million so far. Like people aren't getting enough of this guy on Thursday nights.

Seinfeld's book is pretty funny, if you can keep his stand-up delivery in your head. Here he is on magicians: "What is the point of the magician? He comes on, he fools you, you feel stupid, show's over ... It's like, 'Here's a quarter. Now it's gone. You're a jerk."' And on people picking up dog poop: "If aliens are watching this through telescopes, they're going to think the dogs are the leaders of the planet. If you see two life forms, one of them's making a poop, the other one's carrying it for him, who would you assume is in charge?"

Reiser is sort of a more evolved Seinfeld. This guy is married, see, and so he talks about the little problems, compromises, joys and frustrations of married life. The trouble is, his insights aren't all that original or funny. Like: "You become a little team ... Your partner becomes the one person in the world you can go over to and say, 'Do I have anything in my nose?"' Actually, Reiser is funnier with stuff like how dumb fish are. "They don't see that whole pattern. Worm/death. Worm/death. I would catch on."

Okay, Tim Allen's book does get a little heavier. It even gets into his imprisonment for drug dealing. Great anecdote: He's with 10 guys in a holding cell, and the toilet is in the middle of the cell. He's petrified to use it, but finally he has to. All the guys move menacingly toward him -- then turn their backs and form a horseshoe around him so he has privacy.

The thing about Allen -- his macho-guy persona gets old real fast. All that talk about power drills and Lava soap and walking around the house "looking for things to rewire." Just how universal is this? If anything in my house needs rewiring, I'm on the phone to Rescue 911.

At least the comics themselves aren't pretending to be literary giants or anything. Allen says, "Publishers will do a book with anyone they think is hot." Reiser talks about "the consumer mentality -- we like something, what other flavor does it come in? We like that TV show, does it come in a book form? Does it come in a capsule? How about a soup?"

But the publishers say a hit comedy show doesn't necessarily translate into a hit book. It needs a theme. Erwyn Applebaum, publisher of Bantam Books, which put Seinfeld and Reiser into print, says, "Now comedians who have never been known to read a book are thinking that they can write one." Robert Miller, publisher of Hyperion, claims his company wanted Allen to do a book well before Home Improvement became a hit: "This guy had made his reputation and (stand-up) act out of getting way deep into the complexities of male- female differences. That seemed like a very good subject for us."

Right, and what if Home Improvement had bombed? Then people are in the bookstore going, "Hey, here's a book by that guy whose show was canceled last season after eight weeks. Let's go pick up a copy of Middlemarch."

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles