Word: rooney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...when I decided to review Rooney's new book, A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney, I got myself all geared up to rag on it--to just lay in to the guy with every sarcastic thing I could think of. But when I sat down at the typewriter, I just didn't have the heart. I looked down at the book jacket and saw that doughty, frumpy Mr. Rooney, surrounded by that cluttered old office of his, looking back up at me with a quizzical half-smile that seemed to say "Hello, friend, let's talk about paper clips...
...that, a guy who makes your grandmother smile? It's all a gimmick, of course, the absent-minded-professor-type-who's-messy-and-never-on-time thing. But there's nothing so bad about that. Just about everyone on television has some kind of gimmick, so why not Rooney? And even if his weekly spots aren't always stimulating and funny, they do provide a somewhat refreshing change of pace to the aggressively serious tone which dominates the rest of "60 Minutes." Andy Rooney is the sprig of parsley, the after dinner mint to cap off a heavy meal...
...HONEST THOUGH, his book isn't very good. The pieces are taken almost verbatim from his television scripts and they don't survive the translation from speech to print. Without Rooney himself delivering the lines, and without the clever visual displays he usually presents on the show, the essays seem thin, silly, and childish. A written essay inevitably comes under closer scrutiny than a spoken one, and thus must carry more substance. Where the spoken word is fleeting, the written word must bear the pressure of close reading. Rooney makes this very point in his preface to the book...
...book is divided into three sections, entitled "Belongings," "Surroundings" and "Ourselves." The individual essays are similarly titled, usually with single word labels. "Soap," "Jeans," "Advertising," "Hotels," "Fences," "D-Day," and so on Rooney role of the Average Joe, some kind of twentieth-century Every man, pointing out all the little things we never notice about ourselves. His humor relies on his audience saying "Hee, Hee, why didn't I think of that?" All too often, though, the answer to that question is "I didn't think about that because it's a pretty stupid things to think about...
...want to know that? I doubt it. Much of the rest of the book follows suit. Andy Rooney fans would do best to restrict their Few Minutes with him to weekly television...