Dr. Katz: The Audiobook
By: Jonathan Katz, Laura Silverman, H. Jon Benjamin / Narrated By: Full Cast
Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
First hour? Funny. But then there’s a second, and a third, and oy jeez! by HOUR FIVE I WAS SCREAMING… and still an hour and a half to go…
I think it all goes waaaay back to my early days as an Audible subscriber when I thought I had but a credit to use for a book to tide me over for an entiiiiiiire month. Why, audiobook chosen MUST be 22+ hours long: Longer Is Better. So when I saw the many many offerings in the Dr. Katz (It’s Comedy, what’s not to love?) line, you bet I picked the longer 6+ hours audiobook!
OY! Did I regret that and I mean SOON!!!
It starts off well enough with Kevin Nealon (Who was nice enough on SNL but never struck me as all that funny) being, well, funny. I chuckled, I chortled, and I basically enjoyed his bit. Follow that up with a few gems by the likes of, say, THE Bob Saget (The FUNNIEST rendition of the joke in “The Aristocrats”!!!), Colin Quinn and his riff on how animals have NOT earned the respect they’re given, and even Greg Proops whom I vaaaaguely remember from, I think, a Dating? Show from TV, and I did indeed smile quite a bit.
But then I started becoming increasingly annoyed as I began to realize that it was actually but polite tittering that I was emitting, a stray strained smile here and there, an urge to thrash out blindly when I heard, YET AGAIN, “Oh, there’s the music; you know what that means: Time’s up.”… And OY, the draggy bluesy music that began each bit, ended each bit, was used as suuuuuch looooong segues in between increasingly DULL bits.
Odd that some o’ my fave comedians like Wanda Sykes, Gilbert Gottfried, and Seth Green should be sooo UN-Funny whenst it came to doing their schticks, as these informal sessions were just Dr. Katz leading with a question that had nothing to do with anything so that each patient might just ramble ramble ramble, mild outrage inserted every now and again. >yaaaaawn<
But yaaaaawning turned into aggravation by the time Hour 3 got started, and dude! by the time we hit the last 2 1/2 hours that are Live from LA and Live from San Francisco complete with guests who were Once-Funny but now Are Not? SCREEEEEAMING. An amusing concept as a performance piece goes only so far before tedium morphs into wondering Why I’ve Not Yet Shot M’self. Add to that the occasional embarrassment as someone, not a comic but known for their humor, as in: Jon Hamm? desperately tries to save a piece that is withering into a dismal dud? Or p’raps someone who was Funny In Their Day is given waaaay too much time to ramble aimlessly and it all withers, hits the audience with a reSOUNding >thud<, falls and dies, as in: Fred Willard (Who is, for some reason a producer’s Grand Idea for a Strong Ending… >crickets<)?
I don’t Want My Hours Back cuz it really is an amusing concept, but dude! the 6 1/2 hour concept audiobook is a BAAAAAAD Concept! Stick to the free snippets that make for a chucklesome 12 mins. here 18 mins. there. One reviewer said the 1+ hour compilation was a good way to blow an hour and some change, so there’s that.
Now if you’ll excuse me, time to gather what’s left of my sanity and I shall head over into a different audiobook, a different review, shall I? I can see that I’ve vented enough…
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