487. Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Josh Gondelman

Genre:   Memoir, Humor

272 pages, published September 17, 2019

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Nice Try is a memoir of essays by Emmy Award-winning stand-up comic and humor writer Josh Gondelman.   Dubbed one of comedy’s true “nice guys,” Gondelman recounts stories from his childhood, adolescence, college, making in New York as a comic, dating and getting married.

Quotes 

“But if you’ve got a cheerful, friendly demeanor, people act like you don’t know better, like you’ve never heard of poverty or a broken bone. Optimists never get credit for the effort it takes to keep believing things are going to be okay. Here’s a secret: most optimists know the world is full of horrors. They just think it can be improved.”

 

“I tore through The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies in elementary school, my pretween brain vibrating with a mixture of titillation and pretension. Ahh, so many swears. Very grown-up, I would think. And Even on an island, I would know it is bad to murder a little boy with glasses, because I am a little boy with glasses.”

 

My Take

There are a few chuckles in Nice Try and Gondelman seems nice enough, but a week after reading it, there was little worth remembering.  The author also gets very preachy at times which was unnecessary and off-putting.