...But Not Few Enough

IT HAS BECOME FASHIONABLE to make fun of Andy Rooney. It was only a matter of time, really, before the Saturday Night Lives and Second City Televisions started honing in on him. That carefully cluttered desk and contrived homespun drawl make him an almost irresistably easy target for parody. And the subjects he covers on his weekly blurb at the end of the CBS news show "60 Minutes" range from the obvious and dull to the obtuse and dull. People who think Andy Rooney is really funny are the kind of people who read Erma Bombeck, people who subscribe to Good Housekeeping, who still laugh at jokes about the Ayatollah Khomeini and the high price of gasoline.

So 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. And what about pencil erasers? Mine always rip the paper. Do yours?"

How can you be mean to a guy like 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. There is room on television for an Andy Rooney.

TO BE 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, and it seems clear that he worried about whether his essays would stand up to print. In fact, the preface amounts mostly to an apology-in-advance for the rest of the book. He writes: "Words written for television are meant to be heard by the ear, not seen by the eye. People don't talk the way they write and they don't write the way they talk, so you may have to make some adjustments." And in a self-serving yet telling piece of false modesty, Rooney writes: I hope it's a good book. Publishers these days are often more interested in whether something will sell than whether it's any good. A book by anyone on a popular television broadcast will probably sell whether it's any good or not and that makes me nervous.

And wealthy.

The 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." In his essay "Soap", for example, Rooney complains that "A lot of (soaps) are different colors, too. They're green and brown. Soap should be white... When a person takes a shower and looks down, he doesn't want to see a lot of colors running off him." Did you ever worry about that? Probably not. That joke might have been saved on television, with Rooney standing in a shower stall with a funny bathing cap or something.

And in his essay Jeans:

To hear women talk--often upside down--in television commercials, you'd think all they want in the whole world is a new pair of pants.

I don't care what pants look like upside down. What I want to know is: How do they look after they've been in a heap on the floor all night?

Do you 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.

And in his essay Jeans:

To hear women talk--often upside down--in television commercials, you'd think all they want in the whole world is a new pair of pants.

I don't care what pants look like upside down. What I want to know is: How do they look after they've been in a heap on the floor all night?

Do you 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.