You're Lucky You're Funny: How Life Becomes a Sitcom

by Phil Rosenthal Narrated by Phil Rosenthal

Overview

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In 1996, TV scriptwriter Rosenthal created Everybody Loves Raymond by stirring the standup comedy of Ray Romano into his own family memories. With Rosenthal as executive producer and inexperienced actor Romano basically portraying himself, their successful sitcom found an audience of 17 million viewers and ran for nine seasons (1996-2005), receiving over 70 Emmy nominations. Rosenthal offers a comedic chronicle of his own life, weaving wit and humor into every page. After a Bronx boyhood as a "shrimpy little nothing," his high school obsession with TV led to college theater, odd jobs (museum guard, deli manager) and a New York acting career that bottomed out. Arriving in L.A., he discovered it was "suburbia without the urbia," and after five years of grinding out scripts for now-forgotten sitcoms, he lit the Romano rocket. Rosenthal details it all character development, devising dialogue, casting, table reads, run-throughs, doing publicity and dealing with interfering studio executives. Aspiring TV comedy writers and producers will see this as a valuable textbook of insights from an insider, while fans now buying DVD sets will welcome the vast array of amusing anecdotes and background information. Rosenthal also pokes the dark underbelly of "phoney baloney Hollywood," so parts of this book are like listening to a very long and funny standup routine. (Oct. 23) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The creator/executive producer of TV's popular Everybody Loves Raymond tells how he became the guy in command of a winning sitcom. Forget childhood hopes of a career as cowboy, fireman or lion-tamer. Young Rosenthal wanted to be on television-that's where the laughs were. Out of the Bronx and into TV came our hero, if not on-screen, then as show-runner. In the '90s, he moved to California, where he eventually began to thrive in situation comedy. Here, he discusses the Raymond pitch and the pilot, the casting and testing, the crew and suits and table readings, as well as the process of directing, editing and writing. Indeed, this could be an essay on the art of writing comedy for television. Like Raymond, he's a family guy. He loves his wife (actress Monica Horan, who played Amy on the show), his kids and everyone connected with the project that, after nine successful seasons, shut down last year. But remember, there's still life in syndication. Fans seeking deep insight into star Ray Romano won't find it here. A little more is revealed about Rosenthal's fellow writers who, as may be expected, are a bit nuts. Scripts, he says, start with situations derived from their lives. Written with what-a-schmuck-I-am wit, this is passable entertainment, a kind of communiqu‚ from the Writers' Room.

APR/MAY 07 - AudioFile

Some would say it’s impossible to find a warm-hearted, genuine, funny person in what the author calls “phony-baloney Hollywood,” but at least one exists—author and reader Rosenthal. With his thick Bronx accent fully intact, Rosenthal regales listeners with his beginnings in a family full of absurd characters and situations, his teenaged mishaps and misfires, and his ascendancy as producer/writer of the popular sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Something of a manual of television writing, casting, directing, and producing, along with a jokey tell-all, YOU’RE LUCKY is a self-deprecating laugh-fest delivered by someone who was determined to create warmth and camaraderie in a notoriously cold business. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178535080
Publisher:	Phoenix Books, Inc.
Publication date:	11/01/2006
Edition description:	Unabridged

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