'It was one of my darker secrets': Chuck Lorre looks back on Scientology, Roseanne, Charlie Sheen

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Set us as preferred On the ShelfSitcomBy Chuck LorreChuck Lorre: 368 pages, $32If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.In his just-published memoir, “Sitcom,” Chuck Lorre doesn’t turn his life into a joke, exactly, though the voice that fueled series as disparate as “Mike & Molly,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Mom” and “The Kominsky Method” also knows how to land a punch line in autobiographical prose.And for a story that chronicles Lorre’s literal rags-to-riches rise from, as he describes in the opening chapter, “an alcoholic, acid freak, pothead, college dropout, failed musician” with near-fatal colitis, to a career that generated enough hits for him to be anointed the “King of Sitcoms,” the book is remarkably short.

The memoir portion runs just 181 pages, 30 of which are devoted to some of Lorre’s signature “vanity cards” — those brief, humorous and often pointed messages he wrote in the space traditionally reserved at the end of an episode for a creator credit or production company logo.(Don’t worry, the events leading to, and the aftermath of, Charlie Sheen’s firing from “Two and Half Men” get their own chapter, which Lorre, showman that he is, saves until the end.)The memoir’s propulsive energy is not surprising.The 73-year-old (74 as of Sunday) mastered his craft at a time when the tale had to be told in 22 minutes, with the anxious knowledge that should any of those minutes lag, viewers would simply switch channels.“I wanted it to be entertaining,” he said during an interview in the Chuck Lorre Productions office on the Warner Bros.

lot, where the walls are lined with posters from his seemingly endless string of hits.Television CBS could very well be an acronym for Chuck’s...