My Point...And I Do Have One

1995, 1996 Bantam edition
Ellen Degeneres
My Point...And I Do Have One
Original price $6.50, purchase price $3.25
Worn paperback
B-

This was published (ha, you thought I was gonna say "came out") soon after Ellen's sitcom started, and she does refer to it (named after Ellen Barkin), unlike Roseanne in her autobiography.  This is not an autobiography as such, although some facts slip through, like her birthday, but mostly it's Ellen's wry goofy exaggeration.  Sometimes her humor works and sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it works at first and then doesn't, and vice versa.  Unlike Woody Allen's humor collections, which work or don't on the basis of wordplay, I think you need the comic's voice here, although the cartoons by Susan Rose (not credited on the cover, just on the copyright page) are cute and fit the book.

And, no, I don't own either of her later print collections, but I do have her '90s sitcom on DVD and enjoy what I see of her of her talk show on YouTube.