Why Denis Leary's New Book 'Suck on This Year' is Good For Your Colon

Denis Leary’s hair was shorter than usual this morning because he cut it for his role in the new "Spiderman" movie. He didn’t mind the change, he told Imus, because “I just want to get up in the morning, and just literally take a towel and rub it across the top of my head.”
 
Too much information? “Where I come from, that’s not rude. That’s morning conversation,” said Leary, whose new book is Suck on This Year, a collection of his tweets.
 
“It’s a total scam!” he quickly admitted about the book, which takes about 12 minutes to read and probably took Leary even less time to write. The idea to publish “the wiseass remarks that come out of my head,” as he put it, came last summer while Leary was doing a comedy tour with some of his costars from FX’s “Rescue Me.”
 
“To fill up the time for the audience, we’d put up the tweets on a big screen, and I could hear people laughing,” he said. “So I said, ‘Hey this is a scam! I can make money for my charity!”
 
Leary’s portion of the profits from Suck on This Year goes to The Leary Firefighters Foundation, and he emphasized the book’s multiple functionalities. “If you get this on Christmas morning, you go to the bathroom with this book,” he said. “When you come out of the bathroom, you’re done reading it.”
 
Leary described the tweets as the stuff he says to his kids while reading the newspaper each morning. Though his kids are no longer amused by pops—“They’re at that age where, literally, I’m a total embarrassment”—he hopes lots of other people will be.
 
Coincidentally, Imus went to see Leary’s close friend Colin Quinn on Broadway last night in “Long Story Short,” and Leary agreed with Imus that Quinn is a genius. “I love Colin like a brother,” he said. A brother who sleeps on your couch in his underwear, as Quinn did in Leary’s Boston apartment when they were trying to break into comedy.
 
Though he’s starring in the forthcoming Spiderman movie, Leary has yet to see the Broadway musical, which has garnered attention lately for mishaps during performances. “I’m really interested in seeing it for one reason, and one reason only,” Leary said. “I’d pay 500 bucks to sit in the theatre knowing a guy dressed up like Spiderman, or Batman, is going to fly over my head and crash into somebody sitting near me.”
 
On second thought, he’d pay $600 for a guarantee that the flying person would crash on somebody near him; $1,000 if it happens while the guy is singing; and $2,000 if the flying, singing guy is portrayed by Nathan Lane.
 
Imus agreed with Leary’s theory, but for karmic purposes the two made clear that they don’t want anybody to get hurt. “I like to see people fall, I really do,” Leary said. “It’s like Steven Segal: I want him to get fatter, but I still want him to do the same moves, because it’s more fun for me. And I want more fake hair on him.”
 
And while he was on the subject of fake things, Leary concluded his riff on a plastic surgery note. “Heidi Montag: I want ten more in one day,” he said. “I just want to see what it looks like. You’re already halfway there.”
 
-Julie Kanfer