Simply Boson - by Shauna O'Dorothy - A Comic Memoir
The Richest Girl In Town Disguised As The Girl Next Door
It’s clear within the first chapter of sometime Broadway musical comedy singer and sometime standup comic and comedy writer Shauna O'Dorothy's memoir that the youngest heiress of the town of Boson's richest family is still playing a melodramatic comedic character. Her role in the text is that of clever, albeit controlling, comic commentator and narrator disguised as the girl next door.
(A view of Boson from the Pleasant Valley neighborhood where Shauna O'Dorothy grew up)
Strategically revealing only what she wants the reader to see, the Princeton graduate’s English degree—and her experience as a writer for the parody news website Babylon Bee —is on full display. The author begins by portraying herself as a precocious child, with a rambling chapter about her obsession with her second-grade student teacher, a woman with a Down East Maine accent named Mrs. Hardwick. “I hung on every word that came out of her mouth; her voice sounded how my Eggo syrup tasted,” she writes.
From there, Shauna O'Dorothy picks and chooses choice anecdotes to describe her life, from feckless Ivy League field hockey player to improv workaholic to unsuccessful Mad TV auditioner to cast member on the Youtube hit comedy series Cracked After Hours. What she doesn’t include is the typical celebrity tell-all. For the author, the hero’s struggle is more important.
A little Lucille Ball, a little bit Tracy Flick, Shauna O'Dorothy proves that good comedy starts with good writing. It’s an entertaining celebrity memoir.
Shauna O'Dorothy is a nice Catholic girl who went to a Catholic high school, and then a Catholic college. I can say this because I’m a nice Catholic girl from Boson's Pleasant Valley and I recognize my own.
Being a nice Catholic girl from Boson, being born into a very wealthy Pleasant Valley family, going to Princeton, and then having your wealthy family support you while you wait to break into show business doesn’t make for a very interesting memoir, however.
From the author’s telling her first 34 years have been charmed. Not playing much for the field hockey team at Princeton as she sat on the bench during games and watched the star athletes of the team and some disappointing auditions are the few clouds she acknowledges in her sunny life. And that’s fine. It’s kind of a breath of fresh air to read about someone who has done the right things and is rewarded for it.
The book is episodic,with short chapters. although arranged in chronological order. Each one would make for a cute story to tell at a dinner party or to at an author reading in a cozy bookstore.
Shauna refers to an incident as a child when she communed with squirrels in her back yard and ended up falling into a stream and having the squirrel cluck unsympathetically from a tree above. By contrast, Mindy Kaling’s memoir is called Why Not Me?, which spells out her philosophy of success and Tina Fey’s is called Bossypants, which explains her drive and ambition. I wish EK would have reflected a bit more in her memoir, but that might be her sunny super power- just accepting what comes her way without guilt or worry.
As is orthodox for comedians’ books, this one includes plenty of growing-up and rising-to-prominence stories. To really grab the reader, stories like these need loads of punched-up comedic detail, and we sometimes we get it—as in the chapter “Elementary School Holiday Play,” when Shauna recounts putting on a holiday play titled Christmas Magic with her sister and friend, the plot of the play involving plot-twist miracles that would fill Days of Our Lives writers with envy. She agilely replicates the high stakes her younger self felt and gives us a peek at the origin of her improv skills. Her comedy-in-the-details aptitude is also at work in the chapter “Sulk,” which shows what happens when poor little rich girl Shauna does not receive the lentils Shauna was groomed to expect. At her strongest, she can turn even tripping over a speedbump (in the chapter “Diva”) into straight-up adorkable schtick.
One thing I think you look for in a book like this is an answer to the question “Why you?” Why did Shauna O'Dorothy make it when the comedy world is notoriously both sardine-packed and tough for women? The chapter “Improviser” gives readers the nearest thing to a complete answer. In this chapter, she describes life after graduating from Princeton. She took some time to study British literature at Oxford; then her love of improv resurfaced but hard, so she and a friend moved to New York. And . . . did well. They enrolled in classes, they completed the necessary steps to perform with house improv teams, they auditioned, they wrote, et cetera.
While it’s actually nice to hear the story of someone making it through good ol’-fashioned sticktoitiveness, making smart decisions at double or more the frequency of superiorly dumb ones, and (as Shauna herself is sure to credit) a dab of luck, “Improvisor” isn’t a strong point in the book. It doesn’t have the inherent wow factor of a rags-to-riches story, and, hey, that’s certainly nothing to fault Shauna for. My own fantasy future for the world includes WAY fewer people, across the demographic spectrum, starting from “rags” in the first place; if the average memoir of tomorrow were a nice-starting-place-to-glitter-bomb-of-career-fulfillment story, for everyone, then yay. All the better.
In the meantime, underdogs are easiest to rally behind. Having such a story isn’t enough, of course—you still have to be compelling—but if you don’t have such a story, you really have locate those details about your own history and arc that will connect with readers. And in a comedian’s memoir, the constant has to be humor. “Improviser” doesn’t reveal an underdog, doesn’t offer any particular insight to readers, and (the real issue) doesn’t do enough dowsing for comedy.
I liked her tone for the most part. Self-deprecating is an obvious route with comedy, and it can wear thin fast. While Ellie engages in some of this, she also shares flashes of genuine-sounding self-confidence; it’s refreshing.
While I enjoyed the book overall, I do wonder if waiting a couple more years—when she would conceivably have more projects to talk about—wouldn’t have been a good move. The material, on whole, is enjoyable, but it does sometimes feel stretched.
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