Review: Girl Walks into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle

Girl Walks into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle by Rachel Dratch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed this one.

Rachel Dratch was another of the Saturday Night Live performers of the post-Adam Sandler era, a time when – or so it seems – the show shed its “bro” vibe for a space that slowly allowed a female-centered style to emerge. Sandler, David Spade, and Rob Schneider gave way to Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Dratch. Inspired as the young Sandler could be, I call that an upgrade.

Anyway, this book turns out to be only partially about Dratch’s SNL career. She gets that phase of her life out of the way quickly to set up the rest of this memoir about her experience navigating singlehood and then becoming a mother for the first time at age 44. As she tells us, the only roles she’s being offered after SNL and a brief stint on Fey’s 30 Rock are wacky best friends and lesbian secretaries. She’s still comfortable financially, and she’s working enough to feel involved, but her big-time career is mostly finished. It’s a complaint we hear from a lot of talented female performers and, to her credit, she reports it, owns it, and moves on.

The main thrust of this is, indeed, a memoir rather than an autobiography. We see her as she stumbles through the dating life, as she negotiates a steady but only semi-serious relationship, and as she embraces the accident of discovering she’s going to have a child. It’s a good story, and she tells it with insight and a persistent, mostly gentle humor. I expected a set of show-biz memories; instead, we get a thoughtful account of a woman who’s reinvented herself.

Dratch does reflect some on the nature of her comedy, but for the most part she simply models a more mature form of it. If Fey set the tone for their collective approach – a form I think of as based around slightly exaggerating reality and then wondering at its absurdity – Dratch puts her particular accent on it. There’s something Jewish in her tone, something I’d call an updated kvetchiness, and I like it.

Her most famous role, of course, was as Debbie Downer, the depressive friend who’s always reminding everyone of some unpleasant and often remote possibility. Here, she’s more fully human, more three-dimensionally prepared for the worst. But there’s something plucky to her as well. She knows she’s had more professional good fortune than most people, but she knows as well that she’s mostly burned through that good fortune.

What’s more, she realizes that her work in comedy – the way she immersed herself in the full contact work of improv and TV sketch comedy – has insulated her from experiences others take for granted. She’s funny when she talks about how hard it is for her to read the signs of a man’s interest in her. At one point she wonders whether guys are interested in her or in Lorne Michaels.

I read these comedy biographies to get a sense of the ways different comedians have found to be funny. Dratch isn’t as analytical about that as I might like, but she doesn’t have to be. She’s found a worthwhile story to tell, and she uses it to demonstrate what makes her a welcome and distinct comic voice.


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