Molly Shannon’s Memoir Is Filled With Mischief and Pathos

HELLO, MOLLY!
A Memoir
By Molly Shannon with Sean Wilsey
291 pages. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

Some folks break into present enterprise; others burst. Like her well-known character on “Saturday Night time Reside,” the nervous Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher, Molly Shannon was extra of a battering ram, laying siege to the false-fronted constructions of Hollywood with blunt, repetitive pressure. Once you attain the half in her new memoir, “Howdy, Molly!,” the place the fortresses lastly crumble for her, you wish to get out the pom-poms and cheer.

Alongside together with her genius for bodily comedy and deadpan inflection — “don’t get me began,” she’d intone, because the mediocre stand-up Jeannie Darcy — Shannon has an uncanny knack for transgression in pursuit of upper fact.

Early in her profession, she and a pal from drama college got here up with one thing they referred to as the Mamet Rip-off. They pretended to be assistants within the workplace of David Mamet, the notoriously Hollywood-averse playwright: arranging one another appointments with brokers, casting administrators and producers, drawing on their expertise promoting health-club memberships. (“All the time be closing,” as Mamet wrote in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”) They ran this racket with vitality for six months — Shannon getting a small half on “Twin Peaks” out of it — and had been solely busted as soon as, by a expertise supervisor for the Brat Pack.

Later, Shannon and one other pal from an improv group referred to as the Lumber Firm created their very own stage present, hiring musicians with cash Shannon was making as a hostess at Cravings, a restaurant on Sundown Boulevard. They saved the present below an hour, with drinks, to tempt busy business sorts. Shannon additionally invited restaurant diners, homeless folks, her dentist. “There was nothing extra essential than packing the home,” she writes. “Pack it, pack it, pack it, pack it!” In entrance of these crowds, she developed one other sensible character, Sally O’Malley. In her stretchy pink pantsuit, O’Malley is the patron saint of all 50-year-old ladies who refuse to roll over and develop into Norma Desmond however as a substitute wish to “kick, stretch and KICK!” (If you happen to haven’t but made O’Malley’s acquaintance, go watch the “S.N.L.” sketch wherein she tries out for the Rockettes.)