Review: GOD, IF YOU’RE NOT UP THERE, I’M F*CKED

GOD, IF YOU’RE NOT UP THERE, I’M F*CKED by Darrell Hammond
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I never found Darrell Hammond all that funny, though, to be fair, I didn’t watch a lot of Saturday Night Live in his era. Still, I’ve found myself reading as many memoirs of cast members as I can because I’m curious about what makes something funny and because I have a son imagining a career in comedy.

Oh, and this was on sale.

If I’d known what I was getting into with this, I doubt I’d have read it. For the most part, there’s not much funny to it. Instead, it’s a harrowing account of Hammond’s emotional illness. He was physically abused as a child, mostly by his mother but also at times by his father. He coped in the cliched way of working to make people laugh, but also in darker ways like substance abuse and cutting himself.

While there are some early chapters about his SNL life and his work as a comedian, the majority of the first two-thirds of this is a straightforward memoir of a deeply pained man. There’s power in his self-discovery, power in the sense that he is working toward healing himself as he tells the story, but he’s only a solid writer, not a great one. If I’d wanted memoir in full, there are a lot of others I’d have turned to first.

There are, eventually, some chapters about his SNL life, but he seems to admit in his afterward that they’re there because his publisher asked for them. He’s surprisingly unhappy in describing his time on the show. He was older than most of the cast, and he was a drinker in a serious and solitary way, so he didn’t connect with his castmates the way so many others of the same era seemed to.

More to the point of what I was hoping for, though, Hammond was never quite a comedian. He was, instead, an impressionist. And, as far as I’m concerned, the best parts of this book come from him discussing what goes into a thoughtful impression. You don’t want to be too exact, he says. Mimicry is more a gimmick than something funny.

Instead, the challenge is to find a quirk and then exaggerate it. He credits Dana Carvey as a mentor and model, and he recalls the power of a sketch the two did together. Carvey as George W. Bush promised he was “Not gonna do it” when it came to raising taxes. Hammond as Al Gore promised to take Social Security and put it in a “lock box.” He nailed the impression so fully and with such mockery that some observers thought it was a factor in that razor-close election.

So it’s interesting to hear him discuss how he listens – studies deeply – the characters he does impressions of. For his Bill Clinton, the most famous of his characters, he developed three different sets of tapes to hear the President in his morning, afternoon and evening voices. He listens for where in the throat the voice comes. Others concentrate on the material, but Hammond lets the writers handle that. He wants to get at a subtler performing quality of someone he “does.”

And, intriguingly, he claims to have a form of synesthesia that makes him hear some voices in color. That gift seems a part of what it takes for him to “get” his subjects.

There’s ultimately less of that analysis than I’d like, though, and that leaves the uncomfortable fact that – absent his striking abilities as an impressionist – he’s simply not that funny a comedian. (In the edition I listened to, the memoir itself is often flat, laughless. In the appended live routine, though, some of the same stories – presented with full-throated impressions – becomes funnier. It’s in the delivery.)

Between the candor of the memoir and the analysis of his art, there are some legitimate elements here. It has some power, but not quite the power I was looking for when I picked it up.


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