Dr. ‘Feel Good’

Leary on ‘Why We Suck,’ and why Oprah is not one of the reasons

PROFILE. In the first chapter of his new book, “Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid,” Denis Leary discusses the modern notion that there is no such thing is bad publicity. So when Jenny McCarthy publicly slammed the comedian last month about an excerpt where he takes to task parents who are too quick to diagnose their children as autistic, you’d think it was all according to Leary’s grand plan.

“I was actually pissed off,” he says. “The things that I wrote are things I think are funny, but when my words get twisted, it’s hard to get people to take look at something like that, once they’ve got a certain thing in their mind and look at it from an honest point of view, but honestly what I was doing was trying to point a finger at a real issue within the autism community.”

At his stand-up performance this past Saturday for The Cam Neely Foundation for Cancer Care, Leary spent a good deal of his first set clarifying what he meant, which seemed like an unnecessary effort to save face for a man who once so proudly proclaimed in song, “I’m an asshole!”

But this is part of the complex persona that is Dr. Denis Leary (see sidebar for an explanation of the title). Leary’s comic personality has always been abrasively sincere, but within is a surprising sensitivity. “Why We Suck” is the exact same way. Sure, he has controversial opinions on child-rearing, rehab, religion, household pets, Starbucks, and well, just about everything short of Oprah (more on her later), but what drives his opinions are heartfelt memoir-like anecdotes from his own life and touching clips of conversation between he and his mother.

“I think that sort of happened in spite of what I was trying to write,” says Leary, “which was using my mother as a touchstone for common sense and American values and all that stuff, and yeah, it ended up sort of taking a central part of the book. … I think that’s the part of the book I really hadn’t planned on.”

Another part he hadn’t planned on was his opinion of the most influential talk show host in history. He set out to write a tirade about how Oprah Winfrey is one of the reasons why terrorists want to kill Americans, but ended up thinking she was one of the few things that was right about this country. He was so struck by the way she combines information and entertainment so honestly that he has even been trying to convince his friend Jon Stewart to remodel his approach.

“We don’t have a male Oprah, and I think Jon Stewart could be the male Oprah. You could get all the information about how not to piss of your wife or your girlfriend, how to keep your penis from breaking and here’s the news and my comedy take on it and the scores and it would all be on one show and you wouldn’t have to watch anything else. Forget Sports Center, it’s all there.”

Denis Leary
Nov. 24
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