The Guy Under the Sheets by Chris Elliott
Reviewed by Steven
Chris Elliott has been making me vaguely uncomfortable for as long as I can remember. As a little dude, I would restlessly crawl around on my dad’s lap, interrupting David Letterman with anguished pleas for attention. As my father patiently ignored my pratfalls, a goofy, bearded gentleman would occasionally pop up on the TV, apparently performing the same function for the harried host of Late Night as I was for my beleaguered parents. I had no way of comprehending that the blatant lack of humor in Elliott’s bits was itself a form of ironic performance art, made all the funnier by the fact that the crowd was being tricked into laughing at non-jokes. I was four. I just liked how silly the guy was. Not long thereafter, Chris Elliott found himself on Saturday Night Live for a year, coinciding precisely with the year that my weird relatives made me watch SNL every week. After that, the surreal comic masterpiece (or disaster?) Cabin Boy enjoyed constant rotation at my house for several months, again not due to any erudition on my part – it just had jokes AND monsters. Then I largely forgot about Chris Elliott. It wasn’t until I watched Get A Life on overdubbed VHS tapes in high school that the switch was thrown, and I realized that I liked him, and I understood his winking meta-humor. Now I will shamelessly watch or read anything that he creates, confident in the fact that, if a joke seems too dumb to be funny, I’m just not sophisticated enough to understand it.
Chris Elliott’s new send up of the unauthorized biography genre, The Guy Under the Sheets, weaves a mostly fictionalized web of scandal, corruption, sex, drugs, and Hollywood vendettas around his life in fringe comedy. We are given a peak behind (or under) the curtain into the fake life of a privileged New England child who was raised by a female impersonator posing as Sam Elliott, blinded by Bette Davis, kidnapped by Marlon Brando, attacked by Andy Kaufman, and murdered by Dr. Ruth. In this unauthorized autobiography, no ignominy is too trivial to be invented by the author, no rumor is too unbelievable to be perpetuated, and no skeleton is too campy and fake-looking to be let out of the closet. Let Chris Elliott grasp your disbelieving hand and take you on a guided tour of the life that you can’t prove he didn’t live. Just don’t look too closely at the real guy under the sheets.
Copies of The Guy Under the Sheets are available on our shelves and via bookpeople.com.
BookPeople 