In his memoir, Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama, Bob Odenkirk dedicates a short but significant passage to his relationship with his father. When Odenkirk was growing up Naperville, Chicago, his father was drunken and difficult, often absent. They became estranged; his death, when Odenkirk was 22, is dismissed in the book as “a shrugging affair”.
Given his subsequent choice of career – predominantly a writer and performer of absurdist cult comedy, latterly a serious actor in prestige television shows – I tell him that reading it reminded me of a theory Bruce Springsteen recently proffered, that anyone playing rock’n’roll is basically saying: “Look at me, Daddy”.
“I think I’d alter that a little,” Odenkirk says. “I think anyone making comedy is saying: ‘F**k you, Daddy!’” He laughs. “They are saying – screw the adults and their world, the way they run this place is screwy and backwards and wrong and I’m going to make fun of it. But there’s no question that my distant relationship with my dad was one of the reasons I pursued comedy, and love a certain type of comedy. The best comedy has a little bit of anger in it”.
Comedy – especially sketch comedy – is where Odenkirk’s heart truly lies. It’s why he called his book Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama: he wanted to remind people that before he was the amoral, irreverent lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad, or Goodman’s well-intentioned but increasingly conflicted true self, Jimmy McGill, in the prequel Better Call Saul, or assassin Hutch Mansell in 2021 action thriller Nobody, he was the sort of comedian that other comedians loved.
His 90s comedy credits – Saturday Night Live, The Ben Stiller Show, The Larry Sanders Show – made him a hugely influential figure, albeit a peripheral one. Even his own fantastically silly sketch programme, Mr Show, written with David Cross (Arrested Development) between 1995 and 1998, was a niche endeavour with a cult fanbase. Yet being on the margins suits him.
“I still feel like the best place to critique and have fun with life is to do it from the back of the room, to sit behind everybody else and shoot spit wads. That’s where I would sit in any classroom I ever went in. Sometimes the teacher would make me sit in the front because it would shut me up. And that’s not just for comedy’s sake, by the way. I think that goes for anything. You don’t want to become the focus.”
And yet, since moving into drama in 2009 with Breaking Bad and then Better Call Saul, the 59-year-old has become many people’s focus. “I still think I’m very much a fringe celebrity,” he insists. “The degree of fame that I have will go away in the next two or three years. And it’ll be great”.
The book is like Odenkirk himself: likeable, funny and frank. “It’s a Chicago Midwestern sort of view that lends itself to comedy, which is trying to cut to the quick.” One of seven siblings, Odenkirk fell in love with comedy after becoming obsessed with Monty Python. He studied with renowned improv teacher Del Close, before cutting his teeth at legendary Chicago venue The Second City.
What is striking in the book is his dedication and (often blind) faith in making a career of it. He talks about his numerous failures and near misses as much as his successes: he recalls the 10 years after the end of Mr Show in 1998, when work was scarce as “creative rope-a-dope”. At one stage, he went bankrupt. “Almost anyone outside of Tom Cruise has periods you’re toiling off screen and oftentimes aren’t getting paid.”
In truth, Odenkirk was never in it for the money. His pure conviction and anti-authoritarian streak – again, a result of his relationship with his father – has sometimes been to his detriment. When he won a plum job as a writer on Saturday Night Live, he hated that he was a small cog in a big wheel, unable to bend this TV behemoth to his own world view. He makes the point that he’s better suited to “struggling institutions”.
Did he not therefore feel uncomfortable when Breaking Bad blew up? “Only a little. I enjoyed it. I didn’t perceive the acclaim of Breaking Bad as being for me quite so much. It’s the biggest thing I’ll ever do, but I always felt myself as being an extra character in that world.”
When he agreed to be in Breaking Bad, he had never even seen an episode, nor done any dramatic acting – writers Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould cast him because they were fans of Mr Show. Nonetheless, he says “I always had an instinct that I could do drama”, pointing out that he always thought he had worked with funnier people – he names Cross and old sidekick Chris Farley – so why not better actors?
And anyway, he says there’s a commonality between his comedy characters and those he portrays dramatically. “I would say the thread is a person who may or may not be self-serving or duplicitous. You can’t really tell. There’s a wonderful mix to that.”
His casting proved inspired. Even if he initially found the rapid dialogue daunting, Saul Goodman’s quick-witted slipperiness and gaudy dress sense was an instant hit: Odenkirk says that after shooting his first scene, a member of the crew was so impressed he shouted out: “Can I get a job on the sequel?”
When Breaking Bad finished, Gilligan and Gould had the same idea. But Odenkirk needed convincing. “The main problem was trying to make the character likeable. I don’t like Saul Goodman. He’s the kind of person I would avoid, with his situational ethics. I don’t particularly like that point of view on things.”
Better Call Saul’s masterstroke was to shift from Goodman’s comic relief to his multilayered persona as McGill, a man trying – and often failing – to do the right thing as he slowly descends into the moral black hole. “I like him a lot. I’ll miss that character. I don’t think there’s a better written character on TV, anywhere.” Odenkirk gushes about the forthcoming finale: “A difficult job wonderfully done.”
But the past 14 years have come at a cost. Odenkirk suffered a heart attack on the set in New Mexico while filming the upcoming final season in 2021 (he’s now fully recovered). He’d finished his memoir before the incident: he had already written that the show had “beat me up and left me by the side of the road, gasping for breath”. I ask him if he has paid a heavy emotional and physical toll. He takes a long pause.
“Yes,” he says eventually. “And I struggled to say that because I can remember what it was like to read interviews with actors who said they struggled or had distress and thinking: ‘Wow, really? I don’t think so. That’s not a stressful or difficult job’. But it can be when it’s challenging. It can take you to difficult places inside yourself.”
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Still, at least he had done some important work – or so you might think. One part of the book that surprised me was Odenkirk’s sporadic insistence that his life’s work doesn’t matter (“we’re not curing cancer” he writes, “we’re just a distraction”). I think much of his work is worthy of being called art – does he not agree?
“It’s definitely not. It’s not even worthy of you talking to me,” he says, which makes me laugh. “Don’t for a second think it’s pertinent or important or necessary.” Not even Breaking Bad?
“Not even Breaking Bad. You could take anything that you’ve ever enjoyed in music or television or movies and you could erase it from everyone’s mind, and nothing would be lost.”
So why does he do it then? “Oh, it’s great!” he says, bursting out laughing.
‘Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama’ is published by Hodder Studio, £20
