The Todd Glass Situation: A Bunch of Lies about My Personal Life and a Bunch of True Stories about My 30-Year Career in Stand-Up Comedy
A “triumphant” (The New York Times) memoir from beloved comedian Todd Glass about his decision at age forty-eight to finally live openly as a gay man, and the support from his illustrious collection of comedy pals.

As Todd Glass tells it, growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn’t have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results.

It might have been a lot easier had he chosen a profession other than stand-up comedy. By age eighteen, Todd was opening for big musical acts like George Jones and Patti LaBelle. His career carried him through the Los Angeles comedy heyday in the 1980s, its decline in the 1990s, and its rebirth via the alternative comedy scene and the explosion in podcasting. But the harder he worked at his craft, the more difficult it became to manage his “situation.” There were the years of abstinence and half-hearted attempts to “cure” himself. The fake girlfriends so that he could tell relationship jokes onstage. The staged sexual encounters to burnish his reputation offstage. It took a brush with death to cause him to rethink the way he was living his life; a rash of suicides among gay teens to convinced him that it was finally time to come out to the world.

Welcome to The Todd Glass Situation, your front-row seat to more than thirty years of comedy history and a deeply personal story about one man’s search for acceptance. This is “a humorous, lively, and humane memoir” (Kirkus Reviews).
1117313640
The Todd Glass Situation: A Bunch of Lies about My Personal Life and a Bunch of True Stories about My 30-Year Career in Stand-Up Comedy
A “triumphant” (The New York Times) memoir from beloved comedian Todd Glass about his decision at age forty-eight to finally live openly as a gay man, and the support from his illustrious collection of comedy pals.

As Todd Glass tells it, growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn’t have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results.

It might have been a lot easier had he chosen a profession other than stand-up comedy. By age eighteen, Todd was opening for big musical acts like George Jones and Patti LaBelle. His career carried him through the Los Angeles comedy heyday in the 1980s, its decline in the 1990s, and its rebirth via the alternative comedy scene and the explosion in podcasting. But the harder he worked at his craft, the more difficult it became to manage his “situation.” There were the years of abstinence and half-hearted attempts to “cure” himself. The fake girlfriends so that he could tell relationship jokes onstage. The staged sexual encounters to burnish his reputation offstage. It took a brush with death to cause him to rethink the way he was living his life; a rash of suicides among gay teens to convinced him that it was finally time to come out to the world.

Welcome to The Todd Glass Situation, your front-row seat to more than thirty years of comedy history and a deeply personal story about one man’s search for acceptance. This is “a humorous, lively, and humane memoir” (Kirkus Reviews).
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The Todd Glass Situation: A Bunch of Lies about My Personal Life and a Bunch of True Stories about My 30-Year Career in Stand-Up Comedy

The Todd Glass Situation: A Bunch of Lies about My Personal Life and a Bunch of True Stories about My 30-Year Career in Stand-Up Comedy

The Todd Glass Situation: A Bunch of Lies about My Personal Life and a Bunch of True Stories about My 30-Year Career in Stand-Up Comedy

The Todd Glass Situation: A Bunch of Lies about My Personal Life and a Bunch of True Stories about My 30-Year Career in Stand-Up Comedy

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Overview

A “triumphant” (The New York Times) memoir from beloved comedian Todd Glass about his decision at age forty-eight to finally live openly as a gay man, and the support from his illustrious collection of comedy pals.

As Todd Glass tells it, growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn’t have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results.

It might have been a lot easier had he chosen a profession other than stand-up comedy. By age eighteen, Todd was opening for big musical acts like George Jones and Patti LaBelle. His career carried him through the Los Angeles comedy heyday in the 1980s, its decline in the 1990s, and its rebirth via the alternative comedy scene and the explosion in podcasting. But the harder he worked at his craft, the more difficult it became to manage his “situation.” There were the years of abstinence and half-hearted attempts to “cure” himself. The fake girlfriends so that he could tell relationship jokes onstage. The staged sexual encounters to burnish his reputation offstage. It took a brush with death to cause him to rethink the way he was living his life; a rash of suicides among gay teens to convinced him that it was finally time to come out to the world.

Welcome to The Todd Glass Situation, your front-row seat to more than thirty years of comedy history and a deeply personal story about one man’s search for acceptance. This is “a humorous, lively, and humane memoir” (Kirkus Reviews).

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781476714509
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 06/03/2014
Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format: eBook
Pages: 256
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Todd Glass is a Philadelphia native who has been performing standup comedy since he was sixteen. In addition to specials on Comedy Central and Netflix, Todd has appeared on numerous TV shows, including The Daily Show, Last Comic Standing, The Sarah Silverman Program, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Chelsea Lately, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and The Jimmy Kimmel Show. He’s also the host of The Todd Glass Show, a popular podcast on the Nerdist Network. The Todd Glass Situation is his first book.
Todd Glass is a Philadelphia native who has been performing standup comedy since he was sixteen. In addition to specials on Comedy Central and Netflix, Todd has appeared on numerous TV shows, including The Daily ShowLast Comic StandingThe Sarah Silverman ProgramLate Night with Conan O’BrienChelsea LatelyLate Night with Jimmy Fallon, and The Jimmy Kimmel Show. He’s also the host of The Todd Glass Show, a popular podcast on the Nerdist Network. The Todd Glass Situation is his first book.

Read an Excerpt

Todd Glass Situation


  • It’s funny how many of the memories that stick with you—the ones that shape you and make you who you are as an adult—are things that you never thought were important at the time.

    Once in a while, when I was little, my mom would fix up a bowl of icing. She placed it on the kitchen table with five spoons: one for her, each of my three brothers, and for me. Obviously, we loved this little family tradition, but we didn’t understand why we were so lucky.

    “When I was a little girl,” Mom explained, “I used to love to lick the icing off the beaters. But wouldn’t a whole bowl of icing be better? And I thought, when I grow up, I’m going to give my kids bowls of icing.”

    Children make promises all the time about the things they’re going to do when they grow up, but how many of them really follow through as adults? My mom did. Even if it was just a bowl of icing.

    It was 1970. We lived in a row house on Kilburn Road in Northeast Philadelphia. My parents were social people who loved to have friends over at night. Once in a while, when my brothers and I were tucked in bed upstairs, listening to everyone laughing down below, one of the adults would come upstairs to “check on us.” Occasionally this involved jumping up and down on the bed or playing some silly game with us. I remember being five years old and making a promise to myself, just like my mother did: When I get old, I’m going to act silly, too.

    By the way, we should establish two things. First, that for me, “old” meant my parents’ age, which at the time was twenty-six. Way old, right? I remember an early bit I used to do with my older brother Michael, when I was maybe eight, pretending that we were talking on the phone in the future. “Hey, Michael, I’m fifty today.”

    “What are you going to do today, Todd, for your fiftieth birthday?”

    “Well, I guess I’ll just stay in the house and shit in my pants and yell at people to get off my lawn. I mean, I’m fifty, what else would I do?”

    The second thing, this being the 1970s, is that it wasn’t uncommon for a joint to get passed around at these gatherings. One morning I asked my parents why they’d been laughing so hard the night before. My mom tried to explain what was so funny, obviously without mentioning the fact that they were high.

    “Your father asked me, ‘How come they have an extra-large and an extra-small, but there isn’t an extra-medium?’ ” I thought it was a pretty funny joke, even if I didn’t understand that their laughter had been enhanced. Years later I would put the line into my act, where it would stay for a very long time.

    There were a lot of things I didn’t understand as a kid that make sense to me now. Like when my dad would come into the room in the morning and say, “Hey, do you want to go to work with me?” Adding, if I showed even the slightest hesitation, “Come on! I’ll let you sit in the backseat of the station wagon with the window open, just how you like. And we can get French fries at that place where you eat them with a wooden fork.”

    Later, I found out that these incredible acts of generosity from my dad were actually meant for my mom, who needed a time-out from listening to me. Because I liked to talk.

    And talk.

    I talked and I talked and I talked.

    When I say I talked a lot, I mean I never shut the fuck up. My parents, to their credit, never told me to shut the fuck up. “Why don’t you take a commercial break?” they would ask, in what even today feels like the gentlest and most creative way to tell me to shut up without ever once hurting my feelings.

    My childhood had more commercial breaks than the Super Bowl, but they never kept my mom’s mischievous streak from shining through. Sometimes when I got home from school, she would jump out of the coat closet as I opened the door, scaring the shit out of me. Years later, I asked her how she knew when I was going to walk into the house. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “At first I would run into the closet when I saw your school bus coming up the street. But when you got off, you’d stop and talk to every adult you passed on the way home.”

    She was right. The second I got off the bus, I was like a politician doing a meet and greet. I’d stop and make conversation with every neighbor who crossed my path.

    “Did you guys paint the garage? Who painted it? Why’d you choose that color? How many cars are in the garage? Are they new? Which one is new? What do you mean, ‘pre-owned’? How is that different from used? So if it’s used, why not just say ‘used’?”

    Looking back at it now, I can’t help but feel bad for my mom, sitting there in the dark, waiting for me to get home. Talk about committing to a bit!

  • Table of Contents

    Preface Marc Maron xi

    The Coronet (Part One) 1

    Todd's act develops an unexpected wrinkle.

    1 Life Is Just a Bowl of Icing 9

    Where Todd promises himself he'll grow up into a silly adult.

    2 Schooled 13

    Todd's educational journey gets off to a rough start.

    3 The Resource Boom 16

    Todd learns that he's different from all the other kids. (No, not like that!)

    4 Lumpy Mashed Potatoes 22

    Todd learns a few valuable lessons.

    5 Jews in Churchville 27

    Todd learns that some adults really are delusional.

    6 OCD in Bloom 30

    Todd finds his dream house.

    7 The Stomachache 36

    Fake vomit and false stereotypes.

    8 Gay Like Me 41

    Just when it couldn't get any worse…

    9 The Power of Funny 44

    A comedian is born.

    10 Dim Prospects 49

    School is coming to an end.

    11 Comedy Works 53

    "Mr. and Mrs. Schleinheffer, please call your babysitter immediately. She wants to know where you keep the tire extinguisher."

    12 Opening Act 57

    Todd gets a weekend.

    13 Spruce Street 61

    Where Todd encounters swarming gays.

    14 Bottled Up 64

    Todd makes a friend.

    15 No-Show George 71

    Theater in the round.

    16 The Perfect Room 75

    Todd goes to Broadway.

    17 Smokey Joe's 81

    Todd discovers a friendly bar.

    18 Faking It 84

    Todd finds a soul mate. (Almost.)

    19 Two Pieces of Advice 90

    Todd gets some wisdom from a comedian he looks up to.

    20 Leaving Philadelphia 92

    Some funny (and not so funny) things happen on the way to Los Angeles.

    21 The Comedy Store 97

    Los Angeles!

    22 The Improv 101

    Todd finds a new comedy home.

    23 Working the Road 104

    Life in the middle.

    24 Todd Goes to College 111

    Because children are the future.

    25 Two Notebooks 117

    Comedy's gay marriage (between stand-up and sketch).

    26 Finally 124

    Todd meets somebody.

    27 Todd's Coma 128

    New relationship, new friends, and new professional opportunities.

    28 Todd's Situation 135

    Thank God for Andrea.

    29 First Relationship 142

    Where Todd learns that men are from Mars, but also from Venus.

    30 Last Comic Standing 147

    Did you get my fax?

    31 The Coronet (Part Two) 156

    A brush with death causes Todd to rethink his life (for a few days, anyway).

    32 The Blind Spot 163

    Todd comes to terms with his reasons for not coming out.

    33 September 2010 166

    Todd finally finds his motivation.

    34 I'm Not Fucking Gay! (But I Am.) 169

    WTF?

    35 Everybody's a Comedian 177

    The comedic community responds to Todd's announcement.

    36 The Aftermath 180

    Todd embarks on his first year of living openly.

    37 How's Life Been? 186

    Where Todd keeps working on his act.

    38 Final Thoughts 191

    Because Todd's not quite done talking yet.

    39 A Letter to Mom and Dad 214

    Acknowledgments 219

    Where Are They Now? 235

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