Adam Carolla vs Sarah Silverman: A Book(s) Review

There's a certain kind of person who finds folks like Adam Carolla and Sarah Silverman funny - they delve into juvenile and/or seemingly objectionable subject matters, offend the easily offended and regularly fail to hide the fact that they are each actually intelligent, warm people. People who like them also probably find Jimmy Kimmel amusing - he's Carolla's best friend and Silverman's ex-boyfriend - as well as Bill Simmons (also known as ESPN's Sports Guy), etc.

Fortunately, I'm one of these people. I was a regular listener to Carolla's "terrestrial radio" program (with Teresa Strasser and, forgettably, Danny Bonaduce), and I am one of the many people who make Carolla's podcast among the top podcasts in existence.

I'm also enough of a fan of Silverman's that I endured her show, which was insanely uneven and often not nearly as clever as it thought it was - but also very often hilarious and unique. In particular, the episode where she not only has sex with God, but God turns out to be clingy and sort of pathetic bordered on the brilliant.

Both of them, it turns out, recently published books - so, you'd think I'd be a perfect candidate to read and compare them. Indeed, that's the point of the very post you are reading - thanks for catching up.

First, let's tackle Carolla's In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks...And Other Complaints From an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy. Yes, that's the title. If you've listened to his podcast, you can already guess at some of the subjects here -- front license plates, crappy music being played more than his favorites, etc. For those who aren't familiar, here's a good indicator - one of his chapters is called, "A Message to the Fat Cats in Washington" -- and it's actually a message to all the politicians who use that phrase, instead of actual elected officials. Mocking folks for big talk and being unoriginal? Prime Carolla territory. He also is outraged that kids have peanut allergies and thinks it's a reflection that we're all wimps. Hey, I share his frustration - I'd love to send my kid to daycare with a peanut butter sandwich - but it's the kind of thing that is fun to complain about unless you have a kid who could actually die from being exposed. And, of course, Carolla's solution? He doesn't really have one - not really the point here.

This is often very funny stuff, but in print (or electronic ink - read this on my Kindle) it's somewhat harder to brush off the fact that Carolla is bitching about things that he has no solutions for, or problems that actually have no solutions at all. If you can work past it, it's a very easy and often amusing read.

Next up was Silverman's The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee. My first suprise? It's actually about being a bedwetter.

Somehow, I'd thought this was a metaphor, or a crude joke (nobody likes a joke about bodily fluids than Silverman) - but no, it turns out she wet the bed well into her teens. I'm fairly sure this shaped her and in some ways she deals with this though (perhaps thankfully) she never says something like, "It was through these trials that I was forced to see the humor in the world" -- so there's that.

She later talks about leaving college to be a stand-up comic, though the attraction to that career somewhat comes out of left field and I really wanted to know more. (In contrast, Carolla talks a lot about how he worked to do standup, take improv courses, even when he was being mocked on construction sites because he knew it was what he wanted to do.) Still, those moments are probably the best in the book as she hands out flyers through the night so she can do standup for free at 2 AM.

Where Carolla's book is more of a treatise on subjects that interest him, Silverman merely recounts her life, from her 'scandalous' appearance on Bill Maher's show to her own program -- all of which she writes from a perspective that makes me think she thinks she's actually more famous than she is. It's interesting - and she often says things in a funny way - but I must say it was kind of boring at times and that's not any kind of good.

Still, as with Carolla's book - if you are already a fan of Silverman, you'll enjoy the book - but just probably not as much as you want to.

We'll call this battle royale a tie.