How to Succeed in Business without Really Crying:
Lessons from a Life in Comedy
by Carol Leifer
Quirk Books. 224 pages, $19.95
EVEN IF her name doesn’t ring a bell, you are familiar with Carol Leifer’s work. She’s a stand-up comedy crony of Paul Reiser and Jerry Seinfeld, wrote for Seinfeld, SNL, and The Larry Sanders Show, headlined her own sitcom for a year, and opened for Sinatra in Vegas. In How to Succeed in Business Without Really Crying, Leifer shares stories from life at home and on the road, shaping them into a useful (and funny) collection of tips for up-and-comers in any field.
I’ve been a fan of Leifer’s humor for ages and fondly recall waiting through hours of Comedy Central clips for a glimpse of her work. On stage, her sharp wit and focused writing contrast with a wide-eyed approach to storytelling that gives the impression she’s far less in control of her material than she really is. After taking the stage at an open mike in college, she was drawn to comedy performance, eventually dropping out in order to devote more time to writing. Comedy is a hard hustle, and one of the lessons shared here is the need to be absolutely relentless when pursuing that dream. This can mean being nice to jerks (like heckling frat boys at a Beach Boys gig) or using strategy to make a situation favorable. Leifer’s fears about opening for Frank Sinatra abated when a fellow comic pointed out that the crowd would assume he’d hand-picked her. She worked a line to that effect into her opening, and pretty soon the Chairman himself was playing along. Leifer’s writing is straightforward and chatty. She puts many of her humorous asides in parentheses: “As a child growing up in East Williston on Long Island, New York, comedy was a natural interest for me. (As finding a husband would have been, except that it held no appeal to me for the same reason there’s no Mrs. Anderson Cooper.)” Leifer mentions her partner of seventeen years, Lori, with whom she’s raising a young son, a few times here. The full story of how they met is one of the funniest parts of her previous book, When You Lie about Your Age, the Terrorists Win. Leifer is frank about her sexuality but doesn’t politicize it; her passions lean more toward animal rescue (which many of us recognize as a gateway drug to full-on Sapphism). And she separates work and home concerns carefully, using her show biz peers as sounding boards for professional concerns. While the book is liberally peppered with one-liners, the story of how Leifer came to write for Larry Sanders may be particularly useful to new job seekers in any field. After a meeting with the producers that everyone present raved about, she got no response, then learned that someone else was hired. She was crushed, but moved on. Not long after, she was hired to write for the Emmys. Running into Garry Shandling backstage, she mentioned that losing that job had been a disappointment, but kept things very light. Shandling asked if she’d like to be reconsidered if there was an opening, and not long after that she found herself happily ensconced in the writers room. It would have been easy to complain or snub the show execs, but keeping a stiff upper lip while tending to other job possibilities carried the day and ultimately earned her the job. As happens every year, a new crop of graduates will soon be unleashed upon the populace to seek work or move home and destroy their parents’ tranquility. A copy of How to Succeed… would be a great gift for any of them. The advice here will certainly give a leg up to show biz hopefuls, but could offer an edge to anyone in need of encouragement. ________________________________________________________ Heather Seggel is a full-time freelance writer based in inland Mendocino County, CA.
Lori Wolf.
