RMP Book Review: Gasping For Airtime

I recently finished reading this memoir in which Jay Mohr recounts his two years as a featured player on Saturday Night Live. My first thought when reading this book was, "How in the fuck can 22 of the allegedly best comedy writers and 15 of the allegedly best comedy performers working today only produce about one and a half funny sketches a week?" The huge popularity of Saturday Night Live has always baffled me. I assumed it's only been allowed to stay on the air all these years because it's riding on the past success of the older episodes, but I rented a few DVDs from the first two seasons, and I'm now 100% sure that the show has never been funny at any point in its existence.

But that's beside the point. This book isn't very funny, but it is entertaining in a sense that it's interesting to learn about the politics of the show and how it's put together every week, and it's always fun to hear a guy dish about celebrity hosts and musical guests as well as cast members. In one section Mohr reveals that one of his fellow cast members was completely bald and still secretly wears a toupee to this day, and while he claims to be a gentleman who won't reveal who it is, he leaves enough obvious clues to make it clear to the reader that it's fucking Mike Myers.

I enjoyed hearing about how the show is made and liked hearing him talk shit about celebrities, but my big problem with the book is that most of it is devoted to Mohr trying to garner our sympathy by telling us about how often the intense pressure to come up with good ideas and get a decent amount of airtime gave him horrible panic attacks.

Here we have a guy who scored a dream job in the field of comedy that literally thousands of people audition for every year, earning a six-figure income, trying to make us feel sorry for him that he couldn't hack it and had panic attacks as a result. Speaking as a person who has a long and storied history of panic attacks, I couldn't give less of a shit about his plight. Here is a list of just a few of the things that give me panic attacks:

-Having my throat touched or even lightly grazed by human hands or any sort of foreign object
-Driving my car on a highway
-Feeling any sort of pain in my chest (Here I'm convinced I'm having a heart attack)
-The pain in my chest ending (Here I'm convinced my heart has stopped beating)
-Trying to fall asleep
-Performing comedy in front of any group larger than 10
-Smoking pot
-Drinking a somewhat above average amount of coffee
-Attending virtually any college class that lasted over an hour
-Being the passenger in a car that's going over 80 miles an hour
-Being the passenger or driver in a car that's going over a bridge over a river
-Going to a loud concert
-Finding out that a celebrity I like has just died
-Watching an extremely loud movie at the theater
-Having a hard time taking a deep breath because my stomach is too full of food and milk

-Being inside a church for any reason
-Finding any mark on my body that looks like it could potentially be a staph infection
-Riding on the exercise bike too long only to find that my penis and balls are completely numb

So yeah, suck a cock, Jay Mohr. The only pressure in my life is bills that are easily paid by my dead-end job that is frighteningly easy to perform, and I still manage to find ways to spend 85% of my waking hours in complete and total psychosomatic white-knuckle terror. I would kill to have my insane tendencies be the result of professional sucecss. Your book, which is intended to be a horror story in which you make six-figures and are seen by 8 million viewers most Saturday nights at the expense of drowning in psychological hell, seems like a fucking dream to me.