Bob was 22, by which point the two were fully
estranged — with remarkable coolness: ‘‘Saying
goodbye to him was a shrugging aff air.’’ When I
asked if the wound had really cauterized so neat-
ly, Odenkirk said: ‘‘I’ve often felt like I must be
hiding something, or not acknowledging some-
thing, or can’t see something. There’s no ques-
tion I wish I had a father fi gure in life, especially
as a kid, especially a good one. Wouldn’t that
have been nice? There are defi nitely things I’ve
had to deal with there, because I had nothing,
an emptiness.’’
Odenkirk says that the ‘‘tension and trauma’’
his father generated is ‘‘one reason my broth-
ers and sisters and I are so close.’’ His younger
brother Bill earned a Ph.D. in chemistry before
Bob assisted him in achieving his own dream
of becoming a comedy writer, on shows like
‘‘The Simpsons’’ and ‘‘Mr. Show.’’ Their older
brother, Steve, is a banker in Tucson, Ariz.
Other siblings have pursued various careers:
water-table tester, retail worker, funeral direc-
tor and real estate agent. ‘‘Bob was born with a
really independent streak,’’ Bill Odenkirk told
me, ‘‘more so than anyone in our family. He’d
probably argue that he’s had to discover who
he is, but I feel he was born with a very strong
sense of what he didn’t want to do and what
he did want to do, which was performing and
being out there doing something other than a
conventional job.’’ Which, Bill added, ‘‘wasn’t
the thinking at our house.’’
Bob’s role at home was the resident ham,
putting on shows in the kitchen for his mom
and siblings. By adolescence, the negative infl u-
ence of his father and the positive infl uence of
‘‘Monty Python,’’ which began airing on PBS in
the 1970s, instilled in him a mocking disrespect
toward authority: ‘‘With any authority fi gure, I
had so much resentment, and of course that
was all unfair and unhelpful — except, maybe,
in my comedy.’’ His abiding conviction, in aparaphrase he attributes to Eric Idle of ‘‘Monty
Python,’’ is that ‘‘the best comedy has anger in it.’’ODENKIRK’S BELIEF THAT truly great jokes carry
some irreducible amount of anger — and that this
anger’s noblest function is to torpedo pieties and
hypocrisies — helps explain his lifelong commit-
ment to sketch comedy. Sketch can be irreverent
verging on assaultive, not merely in terms of con-
tent, but on the level of form itself. An audience
goes into a sketch ready for all manner of rapid-
fi re experimentation, a wildly porous fourth wall
and extreme narrative deconstruction. There
are internal laws of physics governing a good
sketch, keeping everything on the right side of
total nonsense, but these laws tend to be mutable,
ephemeral and contradictable to a degree sel-
dom seen in, say, sitcoms or feature fi lms. For a
few minutes, everyone agrees to inhabit a world
radically untethered by the kinds of rules they
teach in screenwritingPhoto illustration by Zachary Scott for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 31
(Continued on Page 40)Imagining what comes next in his career, Odenkirk says, “I want to stay under the rad a r.”