Quick Take
- Narration: David Spade reads his own memoir with the dry, deflecting wit his fans will recognize instantly, the comedic voice is consistent throughout, though the tonal register stays narrow by design.
- Themes: SNL in its golden era, the comedy club grind, fame and its strange paranoia
- Mood: Drily funny and self-deprecating, with a structural wobble in the final third
- Verdict: For fans of Spade’s particular brand of put-upon sarcasm, this is an entertaining listen that earns its best moments in the SNL years, just be prepared for it to run out of narrative energy before it runs out of runtime.
I have a specific affection for comedian memoirs that refuse to be inspirational. The ones where nobody learns a lesson, where success arrives through a combination of stubbornness and luck, and where the author seems mildly annoyed by the whole proceedings. David Spade’s Almost Interesting belongs to that tradition. I listened to a stretch of it on a Sunday morning when I wanted something that would not ask anything of me emotionally, and Spade delivered exactly that, right up until the point where the book simply stops rather than ends.
Spade is best known for his Hollywood Minute sketches on SNL, his films with Chris Farley, and his years as Dennis Finch on Just Shoot Me. He reads his own memoir with the flat, nasal, sideways delivery that is his entire comedic persona, and for the first two-thirds of the book, that voice serves the material very well. The early chapters covering his Arizona childhood as the youngest, least-cool brother and his excruciating road tour through the comedy club circuit are genuinely funny in the way that suffering becomes funny with enough distance and the right delivery system.
The SNL Years That Earn the Most Time
The central section of Almost Interesting covers Spade’s years on Saturday Night Live during the Rock-Sandler-Farley period, and this is where the audiobook finds its best material. Spade was one of the stranger presences in that particular cast, neither the heart, the charisma, nor the everyman relatability of his castmates, but a kind of acidic garnish that made everything around it more interesting by contrast.
The material on his friendship with Chris Farley is handled with more care than you might expect from a comedian who defaults to deflection. One reviewer who can recite Tommy Boy line-by-line describes the SNL sections as the reason to pick up the book, and that tracks. Farley’s death is present in the text mostly through its absence, which is either emotionally honest or another form of deflection, but it lands with unexpected weight given Spade’s otherwise breezy register. The famous fear-of-being-fired that ran through the Lorne Michaels era is rendered with genuine specificity.
Where the Narrative Runs Out of Road
One reviewer puts it plainly: the book abandons its narrative without finishing it. The first two-thirds build a coherent arc from Arizona kid to SNL writer to cast member to cult film presence. The final third shifts into a looser collection of anecdotes about celebrity encounters, romantic mishaps, and the general absurdity of post-SNL fame, without gathering those into anything that feels like a conclusion.
The incident with the crazy ex-assistant, the Eddie Murphy street encounter, the endless parade of what Spade calls hot chicks, these are funny as individual stories, but they do not add up to a third act. The book ends less like a memoir arriving somewhere and more like a comedian who ran out of material and signaled for the lights to come up. That is not catastrophic if you are listening for laughs rather than insight, but it is worth knowing in advance.
Self-Narration as Total Commitment
Spade narrating his own memoir is not a creative choice so much as the only logical option. His comedy has always been fundamentally about voice and delivery, about the specific flatness and the perfect timing of the undercut. A hired narrator doing a Spade impression would have been awful. The actual Spade, reading material he clearly wrote without a ghostwriter, sounds exactly like what one reviewer describes: the sense of hearing his voice throughout, as though the book is being told to you directly.
He also has a self-awareness about his demographic that one reviewer found endearing, the moments where he addresses a younger audience while acknowledging his actual listeners are probably in their thirties at the youngest are funnier than they might look on the page, because Spade’s timing makes them work.
Who Should Listen / Who Should Skip
Listen if you are an SNL devotee of the early-to-mid nineties, if Spade’s dry comedy already speaks to you, or if you enjoy celebrity memoirs that prioritize entertainment over reflection. The first two-thirds provide genuine value as comedy history told from an unusual angle.
Skip if you need a memoir to have structural integrity from start to finish, or if Spade’s particular brand of humor, specific, self-deprecating, and willfully shallow about everything it could profitably examine, tends to wear thin over time. At six and a half hours, it does not overstay its welcome, but it arrives without much to say on the way out.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much of Almost Interesting covers David Spade’s friendship with Chris Farley?
A meaningful portion of the SNL chapters deals with their working relationship and friendship. Spade handles Farley’s death with relative understatement, but the material has more emotional weight than his default comic register suggests.
Is prior knowledge of SNL from the nineties necessary to enjoy this memoir?
It helps considerably. The SNL sections are the most developed and entertaining parts of the book, and cultural familiarity with that era, the cast dynamic, Lorne Michaels’s management style, the Hollywood Minute sketches, enriches the context significantly.
Does Spade’s narration sustain the 6.5-hour runtime without becoming fatiguing?
For listeners already attuned to his comedic register, yes. For others, the narrowness of the tonal range, dry, deflecting, self-deprecating throughout with very little variation, can feel monotonous by the final third, which is also where the book’s structural problem lives.
The title suggests self-deprecation, is this a genuinely modest memoir or false modesty?
A bit of both, which is very Spade. The honest acknowledgment that he was never quite the biggest star in any room he occupied is sincere, but it sits alongside enough name-dropping and perk-listing to make clear he is aware the false modesty is its own kind of performance.
