COMEDY SAMURAI

A warts-and-all memoir from the gonzo writer-director behind Seinfeld, Borat, and more.

The title of Charles’ sometimes dishy, sometimes introspective autobiography is double-edged. For him, being a “samurai” means being a reliable mercenary who’s called in as needed, as he demonstrated as a writer or director on TV shows like Mad About You and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But it also means he’s just as easily dumped or forgotten as the winds change—he recalls being slowly iced out of the writers’ room for The Arsenio Hall Show as the late-night program moved away from Charles’ brand of topical humor. Small wonder that he’s often mercurial on the page, at times warmly embracing longtime collaborators like Curb creator Larry David or lamenting the collapse of his creative partnership with Sacha Baron Cohen, which thrived on Borat but disintegrated on the follow-ups. Charles is often just as hard on himself; as his marriage and projects sour, he admits to infidelities, hotheaded moments on set, and lingering resentments. This is sometimes to the book’s detriment: Early chapters on his drug-fueled stint on the Saturday Night Live knockoff Fridays and his Seinfeld work are pockmarked with efforts to settle old scores around writing credits, which makes for curiously unfunny reading about TV comedy. But the book takes flight whenever he has a successful collaboration to dive into, like his madcap film collaboration with Bob Dylan, Masked and Anonymous, or on Borat, where he helped push Cohen’s faux-Kazakh character into ever-riskier territory. “Was I some sort of rebel doing subversive radical work or was I just a high-level high-paid hack?” he asks. To his credit, he doesn’t attempt to answer the question definitively, though he does settle on a certain confidence being a button pusher, be it via Bill Maher’s satirical documentary Religulous or Curb’s cringe comedy. If he comes off as unlikable at times, so be it.

An emotionally and tonally messy memoir, salvaged by its candor.