What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us Bitter, Chuck Lorre's new book

New York: Chuck Lorre — whose trio of hits includes Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory and Mike & Molly — isn’t just a towering comedy mogul. He’s also one of the most widely distributed writers in the world. His tart, often darkly funny dispatches reach a weekly audience of more than 30 million. [caption id=“attachment_501510” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Chuck Lorre. AP[/caption] Granted, the number of people who actually read these tiny treatises is another question. Each of Lorre’s posts appears on-screen for a single fleeting second at the end of his shows, in the form of so-called “vanity cards” — a graphic ID for the show’s production company. The Chuck Lorre Productions vanity card has been an outlet for Lorre’s random observations since 1997, when alert viewers of the ABC sitcom Dharma & Greg began noticing fine print on the screen which, by freeze-framing their VCR, they could dwell on long enough to read. Among Lorre’s propositions on Vanity Card No 1, “I believe that the Laws of Karma do not apply to show business, where good things happen to bad people on a fairly regular basis” and “I believe that when ABC reads this, I’m gonna be in biiiig trouble.” As the years passed, Lorre kept issuing a fresh card for every episode of each show with his latest reflections, revelations and rants. On one, he listed “words that confused the CBS censor” (a frequent object of his ire). Among them: kumquat, manhole, cunctation and Dick Butkus. On another, he recalled a long-ago encounter with a 16-year-old guitar prodigy named Pat Metheny. It was a reality check that led to his eventually ditching his music career to “find work in television. Nobody’s a prodigy there.” Now 333 of those musings — including a few that were censored by the network — have been gathered by Lorre in a rather magnificent coffee- table book, What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Bitter (Simon & Schuster; $100), complete with lavish illustrations and even a sewn-in bookmark, a courtesy usually reserved for cookbooks and Bibles. (Proceeds will benefit Lorre’s Dharma-Grace Foundation, which supports the Venice Family Clinic.) In a foreword, Lorre explains that his vanity-card mission has been “to use prime-time television to chronicle an unraveling life and raveling career in subliminal, one-second increments.” And with his output already available on his website, he decided the book should be graphically ambitious “in a desperate attempt to add value to something that was never intended to have any.” Lorre may come across as wryly self-dismissive. But in a recent interview he says he takes his scribblings very seriously. “I started this because it was an opportunity to try and write prose, and I found it very satisfying, and very different than writing a script. This is much more personal. And at times,” he adds with one of his frequent whatta-ya-gonna-do? shrugs, “it’s gotten TOO personal.” You want personal? Just consider Card No 337, first aired on March 31, 2011. “Never forget,” Lorre wrote in part, “that God/The Universe is determined to kill you by whatever means necessary.” That sentiment was vented while erratic, hard-partying Men star Charlie Sheen was clashing bitterly with Lorre and the show’s studio, Warner Bros. Only a few weeks earlier, they had been forced to fire Sheen and cut short the show’s eighth season. While being bashed by Sheen all over the media (“I think I’m fairly immune to name-calling now,” he wrote in Card No 345), Lorre was under the gun to salvage TV’s top-rated comedy and keep his other shows on track. How did he cope? “I threw myself into the work even more,” he says. “The only thing I could do was work harder.” With a wiry frame, a trim beard and a head of tangled curls, Lorre is self-taught as a sitcom scribe. Now 60, the Long Island, NY native got the itch to write for TV in his mid-30s, after a decade or more spent touring the country as a less-than-wildly-successful guitarist-songwriter. AP