The hard life behind the jokes
Why You Crying?
My Long Hard Look at Life, Love, and Laughter
George Lopez
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster: 194 pp., $22.95
*
The life of comedian George Lopez has been an open book for years. The painful and painfully funny details of his crazy-quilt upbringing in the San Fernando Valley’s Mission Hills district served him well through countless nights on the comedy-club circuit before catapulting him into films and his successful sitcom on ABC.
But Lopez’s life journey has been far more tumultuous than one might have gleaned from the streamlined version generally served up for public consumption, and that’s both a strength and a weakness as he writes his story in “Why You Crying?: My Long Hard Look at Life, Love, and Laughter.” While the added depth of the narrative and Lopez’s blistering honesty give greater insight into what makes him tick, the long series of career and emotional epiphanies along the way begins to lose effect after a while.
When edited for the stage and screen, Lopez’s life is an improbable yet slickly familiar tale of an underdog coming out on top, filtered through a Latino prism. Born 43 years ago in East Los Angeles to a hard-living 20-year-old woman named Frieda and her migrant-worker husband, Anatasio, the Lopezes weren’t a family for long. Dad skipped out after a couple of months; and Mom and son spent the next decade living with her parents.
It was not a good time for young George.
“Hard as I try, I can’t conjure up a single happy memory of my mom,” writes Lopez. “No smell of wildflowers in her hair or the sun streaming through the kitchen window while she baked cookies, dressed in a colorful apron. If I was talking to one of those police sketch artists and asked to describe the drive-by female in my life, she would look something like this: five feet six, dark hair, jumpy, uptight, along the lines of the Lily Tomlin character Ernestine. I can still smell her body odor.” His mother split the scene when he was 10, and when his grandfather died shortly thereafter, he was left under the steely watch of grandmother Benita, a familiar figure to fans of his TV show. Her character’s chilly, wise-cracking demeanor is played for laughs, but Lopez wasn’t doing much smiling around her in those years, or since, for that matter.
He tells of inviting her to a taping of his TV show, and after the studio audience rewarded him and the cast with a standing ovation, he asked what she thought of the evening. “If I had known it was going to last this long,” she muttered, “I wouldn’t have come.”
Lopez and co-writer Armen Keteyian split the book into chapters that advance the story and others, culled from his stand-up act, that serve as comic interludes. Even the “straight” chapters are shot through with Lopez’s specialty: biting humor tinged with sadness.
But the so-called pivotal moments of this life, which begin with a teenage George finding the emotional connection he needs after seeing Latino comedian Freddie Prinze break though in the early 1970s, stack up a bit too high to resonate. He is reborn after losing his stand-up mojo, again after his marriage, after swearing off drinking and carousing, after the birth of his daughter and after Chris Rock’s manager advises him to lose the generic ethnic-comedian approach and mine his own experiences.
Robbed of the neat, direct trajectory used in his nightclub act and on his TV show, the book’s detailing of Lopez’s real-life peaks and valleys robs the narrative flow of focus and energy.
An interminable chapter on his golfing trip to Pebble Beach stops it dead in its tracks.
Yet warts and all, the story of this self-described “blade of grass growing out of the cement” is ultimately uplifting, and with his TV show producer Sandra Bullock and others offering commentary, stepping inside Lopez’s life for a while is often downright hilarious.