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book review

Bruce McCulloch as author is self-consciously writerly, but succeeds despite himself.Ameen Belbahri

When a memoir written by – who else? – a writer, opens with "I'm a writer," the instinct is to lob that memoir into the nearest fireplace/open sewer/yawning chasm.

Because there are few qualities as obnoxious as being "writerly," of giving the impression that you're nine-to-five grappling with your muses, that you are basically a lilted beret that got covered in radioactive sludge, sprouted arms and legs and came to life, that you for sure own an old-school typewriter, all the better to hear yourself going clickity-clack, clickity-clack as you write away the days and well into the night, Mr. Writerman.

So when Bruce McCulloch – best known as the scrunched, severely sarcastic one from cult sketch show The Kids in the Hall; the one who played the Flying Pig and Cabbage Head and countless greaseball philanderers; the one who's always smirking like he knows something you don't – follows his nervy "I'm a writer" opening gambit with the words, "A simple man pushing and pulling words around," the effect is totally daunting. Here we go. A writer writing about their writing.

McCulloch's book comes, not inconspicuously, at the crest of the latest wave of voguish comedian memoirs. Flashbacks to those wild mid-nineties heydays where every respectable bathroom bookshelf was stocked with dog-eared paperback editions of Paul Reiser's Couplehood, Jerry Seinfeld's SeinLanguage and, for the gruffing intellectual of the house, Tim Allen's quantum physics riff I'm Not Really Here. This fall season alone sees comic bios penned by such modern heavies as Amy Poehler, Neil Patrick Harris and Lena Dunham.

In this tell-all herd, McCulloch's the odd man out. Though recent Kids in the Hall reunion tours have proved the troupe as popular as ever among their ever-replenishing fanbase, suffice it to say, McCulloch's no Lena Dunham.

Still, among the Kids in the Hall, McCulloch's always seemed the most, well, writerly: known for monologues about small things like a guy stealing his bike wheel ("Did you think I'd drive home and not notice it was stolen?") or big things, like America ("that great lumbering beast that journeys tirelessly and stops only to eat a clubhouse sandwich, pick its teeth with a matchbook cover, and fall asleep with the TV on"). McCulloch's comic gift lies in this inversion of altitudes: in making the lofty seem trivial, in investing the quotidian with mock-heroic consequence. Who else would dedicate a book to "all the furniture at the side of the road"?

In plenty of places, Let's Start A Riot reaches these comic heights. Like plenty of Canadian snarksters of hearty, boozy, Scotch-Irish stock, McCulloch developed a sense of humour to combat stifling, small-town suburban banality. He runs through his youth in snowy Edmonton, where he fell in love with rock music and daydreamed about beating up his surly, alcoholic dad ("taking on your old man is practically a rite of passage").

It's here that McCulloch's sensibility – irreverent, punkish, uniquely attuned to the absurd – takes root. And it's from these adolescent years that McCulloch mines his best anecdotes. Jean Jacket Love, about an early girlfriend who got away, is archetypal teenage melancholy stuff. But it's made distinctly Canadian by the repeated mentions of denim clenched by clammy, impassioned fists and laced with the sort of minutiae (like remembering the brand of shampoo she used) that smack faithfully of adolescence – that age where every detail is bathed in the dull glow of consequence. "I craved everything about her," McCulloch writes. "Her handwriting – I could have made love to her handwriting."

In Let's Start A Riot, the author wrestles with how he evolved from this lovelorn, denim-clad Albertan punk to a pyjama-clad husband and father living in the Hollywood Hills. In this latter act, McCulloch reveals his unsentimental, unpleasant egoism. It's like he's flaunting even his modest (by Hollywood standards, anyway) success, making repeated references to his paid help – or unpaid help, like his kids fetching him wine. He also refers to his spouse exclusively as "Pretty Wife," which at the very least qualifies as some kind of projected narcissism, if it's not just out-and-out sexist. Just another trophy on the mantel for the guy who directed Stealing Harvard, I guess.

It's when McCulloch puts aside all show off-y, faux-humble, "Wow look at me, I'm a writer! My adult life is so incongruous with my youth!" stuff that Let's Start A Riot feels most like the work of that funny/sad/weird guy from The Kids in the Hall. McCulloch's at top form when he's most candid, as when he confesses that he "wasn't even one bit sad" when his father died. Then there's the moments when Mr. Writerman gets over himself, and gets down to the nitty-gritty of being legitimately writerly and, more importantly, funny.

Here he is on making peace with his own turn to fatherhood: "In your nightmares, as the plane lumbers silently down from the heavens to crash into a mountain or perhaps less poetically, into a Canadian Tire parking lot – in that painful fantasy, you don't long for yourself. You don't mourn the rest of the life you didn't have. You only think of your kids who will wander around lost and angry after they blow the insurance money."

Funny, sad, and weird, all winding toward a punch-line coming at the expense of his own death – even amid the doldrums, bragging, and embarrassing free-verse interludes, McCulloch's sensibility's as irrepressible as that know-it-all smirk.

John Semley is a Toronto writer.

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