The Todd Glass situation
Subtitle: a bunch of lies about my personal life and a bunch of true stories about my 30-year career in stand-up comedy
By: Todd Glass with Jonathan Grotenstein
Contributors: Grotenstein, Jonathan, 1970-
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 235
ISBN-13: 9781476714417; 9781476714462; 9781476714509
Subjects: HUMOR; Comedians; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY; Biography; Entertainment & Performing Arts; General
Description: "A hilarious, poignant memoir from comedian Todd Glass about his decision at age forty-eight to finally live openly as a gay man--and the reactions and support from his comedy pals, from Louis CK to Sarah Silverman. Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn't have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd Glass decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results. It might have been a lot easier had he chosen a profession other than stand-up comedy. By age eighteen, Todd was opening for big musical acts like George Jones and Patti LaBelle. His career carried him through the Los Angeles comedy heyday in the 1980s, its decline in the 1990s, and its rebirth via the alternative comedy scene and the explosion in podcasting. But the harder he worked at his craft, the more difficult it became to manage his "situation." There were the years of abstinence and half-hearted attempts to "cure" himself. The fake girlfriends so that he could tell relationship jokes onstage. The staged sexual encounters to burnish his reputation offstage. It took a brush with death to cause him to rethink the way he was living his life; a rash of suicides among gay teens to convince him that it was finally time to come out to the world. Now, Todd has written an open, honest, and hilarious memoir in an effort to help everyone--young and old, gay and straight--breathe a little more freely. Peppered with anecdotes from his life among comedy's greatest headliners and tales of the occasionally insane lengths Todd went through to keep a secret that--let's face it--he probably didn't have to keep for as long as he did, The Todd Glass Situation is a front-row seat to the last thirty plus years of comedy history and a deeply personal story about one man's search for acceptance"--
Table of contents: title: 1; title: Life Is Just a Bowl of Icing -- 9 -- 2; title: Schooled -- 13 -- 3; title: Resource Boom -- 16 -- 4; title: Lumpy Mashed Potatoes -- 22 -- 5; title: Jews in Churchville -- 27 -- 6; title: OCD in Bloom -- 30 -- 7; title: Stomachache -- 36 -- 8; title: Gay Like Me -- 41 -- 9; title: Power of Funny -- 44 -- 10; title: Dim Prospects -- 49 -- 11; title: Comedy Works -- 53 -- 12; title: Opening Act -- 57 -- 13; title: Spruce Street -- 61 -- 14; title: Bottled Up -- 64 -- 15; title: No-Show George -- 71 -- 16; title: Perfect Room -- 75 -- 17; title: Smokey Joe's -- 81 -- 18; title: Faking It -- 84 -- 19; title: Two Pieces of Advice -- 90 -- 20; title: Leaving Philadelphia -- 92 -- 21; title: Comedy Store -- 97 -- 22; title: Improv -- 101 -- 23; title: Working the Road -- 104 -- 24; title: Todd Goes to College -- 111 -- 25; title: Two Notebooks -- 117 -- 26; title: Finally -- 124 -- 27; title: Todd's Coma -- 128 -- 28; title: Todd's Situation -- 135 -- 29; title: First Relationship -- 142 -- 30; title: Last Comic Standing -- 147 -- 31; title: Coronet (Part Two) -- 156 -- 32; title: Blind Spot -- 163 -- 33; title: September 2010 -- 166 -- 34; title: I'm Not Fucking Gay! (But I Am.) -- 169 -- 35; title: Everybody's a Comedian -- 177 -- 36; title: Aftermath -- 180 -- 37; title: How's Life Been? -- 186 -- 38; title: Final Thoughts -- 191 -- 39; title: A Letter to Mom and Dad-- 214.