Friday, February 10, 2012


Being that I live in a central location and walk pretty much everywhere, I enjoy multi-tasking my precious not-enough-hours-in-the-day and listening to audio books on the ole' mp3 player. I especially like listening to autobiographical works from comedians. Not so surprisingly, I find that comedians excel at story-telling, and are very comfortable in the audio-book format. In recent memory I've listened to quite a few books under such a classification, and have particularly enjoyed stuff from the likes of Jon Stewart, Lewis Black, Steve Martin and Tina Fey.

Today I finished listening to a book from Tina's 30 Rock co-worker, Tracy Morgan. I expected humorous tales from Tracy, besides for worshiping 30 Rock, I'm familiar with his laid back insanity filled had to follow yet hilarious appearances on various late night talk shows that I enjoy. A couple times, while he was appearing on Dave or The Daily Show, he hit the status of being so funny that I almost died while watching, laughter getting in the way of breathing. Tracy's book was funny indeed, it was also a great story, and surprisingly inspiring. Comedy and tragedy are closely intertwined, and his life definitely had a very bumpy road before setting into TV star status. I know from various behind-the-scenes stuff, that he's notorious for not giving a damn about the scripted word and improving his way through pretty much everything he does. If you see him to 8 different takes fir a scene, each take will be completely different, not just in tone or speed, but in verily different very off topic topics. And this style worked very well for audio book land. I'm pretty sure I got a lot more info than the book as he seemed to go off the page quite a few times.

So, if you're too busy to read (shameful!) or you're tired of listening to that playlist for the 857th time, try out a handy non-paper book!