So Far, So Funny: My Life in Show Business

Rating:
Summary: This is a remarkable book
Review: "SO FAR, SO FUNNY (My Life In Show Business)" by Hal Kanter Published by McFarland & Co. (320 pp. $35 library binding; photos, index) Reviewed by Page Turner ========================================================================

Every generation or so, a new comic voice is enlisted in a pantheon of American humorists that include Mark Twain, Will Rogers and Fred Allen. Now comes a laugh-a-paragraph memoir from veteran comedy writer Hal Kanter, who says modestly that he has often been compared unfavorably with these giants. But his fresh, impudent memoir of growing up in the Deep South and fleeing from the Shallow North will alter that comparison. For Kanter has helped keep the world laughing for at least 60 years through radio, movies, TV and speaking out loud in public. SO FAR, SO FUNNY covers Kanter's life from his birth in Savannah, Georgia, through his first work as an adolescent cartoonist in New York to a second career as a journalist before arriving, at the age of 18, on the doorstep of his ultimate profession as a multiple Emmy Award winning and big-screen writer, director and producer. In unadorned prose, peppered with droll observations and wit, he writes of the celebrated people he has worked with. One gets the feeling that while journalist Kanter missed nothing, gentleman Kanter reports only part of what amused him, leaving us wanting more. The book is populated with people of prominence in both the lively arts and deadly politics: Elvis and Madonna; Hope and Crosby, Olsen and Johnson, Martin and Lewis; Wendell Willkie, Adlai Stevenson and Walter Mondale, Groucho and Tallulah, Gable and Gobel, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Carl Sandburg. Al Jolson, Ed Wynn; Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock and George Cukor; Diahann Carroll, Peggy Lee, Barbra Streisand and many others listed in an 18-page index. The reader accompanies Kanter backstage to several of the 28 Oscar shows to which he contributed more than his scripts. Having served as the warm-up speaker on a dozen Academy Awards, he gives us insider moments that bring more laughs than some of the shows themselves. Even when the author faces a life-threatening medical problem, he finds ways to amuse his doctors and keep his family's spirits high. SO FAR, SO FUNNY will keep yours up, too. It's a memorable read. ======

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and Irreverent
Review: So Far, So Funny is a fascinating and irreverent look at show business over the last 60 years. Author Hal Kanter's experience spans radio, TV and movies during the Golden Age of each medium. Kanter's dry wit never turns brittle as he guides the reader anecdotally through his career as comedy writer, director and producer. Never at a loss for words, most of them funny, Kanter drops more Hollywood names than Elia Kazan. Among my favorites is his anecdote of the dapper character actor Adolph Menjou whose arrogance apparently was matched by his abilities. Kanter sums up his own life (and his book) in his comment about his friend and colleague George Gobel: "He spent 60 years, man and boy, exercising his gift to amuse- or at the least, to keep us from getting sullen". No one can read So Far, So Funny and remain sullen.

Ellen Fremadon