Sanders’ Tell-All Is a Gleeful Ode to His Own Decadence

Without trying to sound too melodramatic, historians of comedy television may someday look upon May 1998 as the month the laughter died.

First “Seinfeld” signs off, then two weeks later Garry Shandling’s “The Larry Sanders Show” does the same. Talk about a good time to send in the proverbial clowns.

Ah, forget it, a million clowns could never take the place of either show. (Except maybe if you crammed them into one of those tiny circus cars and all 1 million stepped out. That’d be pretty funny.)

But for those looking to recapture the mirth and the magic of that golden time seven months ago, a good place to start is with “Confessions of a Late Night Talk Show Host: The Autobiography of Larry Sanders” (Simon & Schuster, 237 pages, $22, by Shandling and David Rensin).

In tone and temperament, the book is just like “The Larry Sanders Show,” which ran for six seasons on HBO. Like the show, which skewered Hollywood shallowness on- and offstage, the title mocks in similar fashion the recent deluge of maudlin tell-all books hailing from the entertainment world.

It’s a very fast read with about 80 pages of photos of Larry (a.k.a. Shandling) with guests from his show. The captions accompanying the photos contain some of the biggest laughs in the book.

The book reveals a few “shocking details” that the series didn’t dare reveal.

For instance, Larry painfully remembers that he was a fat kid, rejected by family, classmates and everyone else except “a very nice old man who gave him candy through the school fence” and then would flash him. Also, it turns out his mother slept with Jerry Lewis and his brother is Tito Jackson.

Then there’s Larry’s sex-capades--the megalomaniac Larry lists more than 50 names of Hollywood celebrities he’s conquered in bed. That list includes Cindy Crawford, Noah Wyle’s girlfriend and both Indigo Girls.

Sadly, there is precious little mention of the two other stars of the show--producer Artie and sidekick Hank Kingsley. About all we learn that we didn’t already know was that Artie was a former bouncer at a New York strip club, and that Hank once tried to rip a life jacket off a kid during an emergency drill at sea.

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This Sunday: Adam Bresnick looks at seven new “Star Wars” books, and considers the birth of the entertainment-industrial complex.